Culpably Blind

The hour is very late. If nothing else, the past nearly six years since Jorge Mario Bergoglio walked out on the Basilica of Saint Peter on Wednesday, March 13, 2013 and refused to wear the papal mozaretta while asking the people in the crowd gathered in Piazza di San Pietro below  to pray for him rather than his imparting a blessing upon them have provided more than ample proof that the religious sect that emerged into public view at the “Second” Vatican Council is the antithesis of Catholicism. “Pope Francis” is simply bringing to perfection the inherent degeneracy of the whole conciliar enterprise that had its immediate beginnings with the schemes of Angelo Roncalli, who began the current line of antipopes on October 28, 1958, the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude, to “update” the Catholic Faith and to open the doors of the Church to the world. Yet it is that the following passage from Sacred Scripture describes many well-meaning “conservative” and traditionally-minded Catholics within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism who continue to have fits of apoplexy over this or that “latest outrage” perpetrated by the Argentine Apostate and his hand-picked band of Jacobin/Bolshevik Modernist revolutionaries:

 18] Nevertheless in those days, saith the Lord, I will not bring you to utter destruction. [19] And if you shall say: why hath the Lord our God done all these things to us? Thou shalt say to them: As you have forsaken me, and served a strange god in your own land, so shall you serve strangers in a land that is not your own. [20] Declare ye this to the house of Jacob, and publish it in Juda, saying:

[21] Hear, O foolish people, and without understanding: who have eyes, and see not: and ears, and hear not. (Jeremias 5: 18-21.)

As time is at a premium, I want to present a few salient points to demonstrate that the agita in recent weeks over such matters as Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s joint statement with a Mohammedan imam, his using a video message to reiterate his belief that the imposition of the death penalty upon heinous malefactors is opposed to the inviolability of all human life and the ruminations of a lay Jesuit revolutionary that it would be permissible to use a bread-like substance made from the Yucca plant in the Amazon for Eucharistic matter is misplaced. These recent phenomena are nothing other than an emboldened apostate’s lifelong “dream,” if you will, of bringing the conciliar revolution to its logical conclusions. Although it should be patently clear by now that none of this can issue forth from Holy Mother Church—she who is the spotless, mystical bride of her Invisible Head, Divine Founder and Mystical Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, many keep acting—and reacting—in states of total bewilderment about what is very plain to see: a false religious sect that claims to represent the Catholic Church is seeking to destroy the little of what remains of recognizable Catholicism from its heretical ranks.

A False Religion with False Doctrines, False Worship and False Teachings on Morality

Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII issued the call for the “Second” Vatican Council on January 25, 1959, the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle, knowing full well that he was going to use a shadow council of bishops and theologians to implement a revolutionary schema that would supplant the schema that had been prepared by his formal appointees to do the preparatory work prior to council’s beginning on October 11, 1962, the Feast of the Divine Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The real engineer of the rupture presented by the “Second” Vatican Council was none other Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, who got votes in the 1958 conclave that resulted in the usurped “election” of Angelo Roncalli even though he, Montini, was not even a member of the College of Cardinals. Montini worked closely with Roncalli and others, including a thirty-two year-old German priest, Father Joseph Ratzinger, to develop a secret schema for the “Second” Vatican Council that was designed to scuttle the one that many cardinals had devised precisely as the means to “canonize” Modernist principles in order to present them as authentic teachings of the Catholic Church.

Franco Bellegrandi made this point in Nikita Roncalli:

That he had been conscious as to the how and whys the Conclave had placed the Pontifical Triregno (Tiara) on his head, it may be inferred from the fact that he more than hinted to everyone that his successor should be Giovanni Battista Montini, that same Montini who, as we have seen, not by chance, as Roncalli is elected Pope, rushes to accompany to Rome the brothers of the new Pontiff. He noted it in his diary. And he could not wait to tell him in person, when, as a newly made Pope, he met the bishops of the Italian Episcopal Conference. “On that occasion,”

recalls monsignor Arrigo Pintonello, at the time Military Ordinary for Italy, “we bishops were lined up along the walls of the vast hall. John XXIII stood before each one of us, exchanging a greeting, a word. When he was before me, he came to attention, and, saluting militarily, he introduced himself as Sergeant Angelo Roncalli.” I still remember my embarrassment and that of the bishops present, in seeing the Pope play around like that. Then, as he stood before Montini, he stared at him for a time, smiling, held his hands, and cried, “It was you that should have been elected, not I. I’ve been elected by mistake!” Indeed, Montini will be the favorite of John XXIII. Topping the list of the new cardinals created in 1958, Montini works at the draft of Roncalli’s most important addresses, and during the first session of the Council he is hosted in special apartments, in the Vatican, that the Pope had had personally appointed for him. As, on the one hand, John XXIII pursued point after point his progressive policy, dismissing the advice and suggestions of the College of Cardinals and of the episcopate, on the other his diplomatic ability and his subtle knowledge of man suggested to him that nothing should be changed, of the Vatican’s exterior, that could alarm the public opinion, poorly or badly informed on secret things. Thus, for example, the Court and Court-life remained the same. (Nikita Roncalli.)

A Protestant “observer” at the “Second” Vatican Council, Douglas Horton, took note of the fact that a certain German theologian, Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger, was working with Roncalli and Montini on implementing the revolutionary schema that they had devised while the bishops and their theologians worked on the original schema schema that was scuttled before the robber council began because it was too “rigid” and “scholastic”:

Lectures by Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and other progressives have been scheduled in a hall not far from St. Peters for the month of November. The Secretary General this morning said that he had asked whether these lectures were to be regarded as official or at least as authorized. He answered with a good, round unequivocal NO. Middle-of-the-road men such as he do not yet feel at home with the trailblazers. (Douglas Horton, Vatican Diary: 1965: A Protestant Observes the Fourth Session of Vatican Council II. Philadelphia and Boston: United Church Press, 1966, p. 144.) 

Ah, yes, the trailblazers. Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger were joined at the hip during the "Second" Vatican Council, seeking indeed to blaze a trail for others to follow, a trail that Ratzinger blazed as Benedict XVI and that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, unfettered by any shackles of Modernist obfuscation, has been expediting as he tears down every remaining bastion of recognizable Catholicism imaginable.

The seeds of what Bergoglio is doing, however, were planted before and then during the “Second” Vatican Council. The aforementioned Protestant Douglas Horton had written the following the role of the "periti," in whose ranks was counted one Father Joseph Ratzinger, in changing the schema of the "Second" Vatican Council in its first session:

One fear that had crept into my mind was scotched by this morning's discussion. I had thought that possibly the bishops were such busy men that they would not have kept up with modern scholarship and that in consequence they might adopt the proposed schema without thinking much about it. The expert consultants, many of them from divinity schools of the world, are of course familiar enough with the problem, but they have no votes. I had heard one of the bishops call the gallery in which these periti (or experts) sit, "the rebels' roost"--and I feared that we might not find many rebels among the bishops themselves. My apprehensions were proved groundless. (Douglas Horton, Vatican Diary: 1962: A Protestant Observes the First Session of Vatican Council II. Philadelphia and Boston: United Church Press, 1964, p. 114.) 

Consider also the Protestant Mr. Horton's "observation" concerning the "council's" rejection of "traditio:"

So the day is over. As I look back upon it, I see it as one of the great moments of the council. Consider that one hundred years ago in the eightieth article of the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, the Roman church declared, "If anyone says that the Pope can and should be reconciled and make terms with progress, with liberalism and modernist civilization, let him be anathema." Today that same church, through this council, has opened the way for a declaration which begins, "In this present age there is an increasing awareness among men of the dignity of the human person. This dignity demands that man in his activity may enjoy his own judgment and freedom, so that he is impelled not by coercion but by consciousness of his own duties. this demand for freedom in human society should be applied most particularly to religious matters. The church, attentively considering these human longings, intends to show how much they are in agreement with truth and justice."

The giant called Rome, who has so long been asleep in the arms of the lady Traditio, is beginning to open his eyes. ((Douglas Horton, Vatican Diary: 1965: A Protestant Observes the Fourth Session of Vatican Council II. Philadelphia and Boston: United Church Press, 1966, p. 44.)

Even before the hijacking of the original Vatican II schema by Roncalli’s Jacobin/Bolshevik team of revolutionaries, the gluttonous supporter of The Sillon even after it had been condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, and whose sympathies for Modernist had been noted in the Vatican as early as 1912 had tampered with the Roman liturgy to make it more conformable with his Jansenist principles that had been condemned by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1794:

At last we come to "the liturgy of John XXIII," more properly called that of "middle Bugnini." The following changes were instituted in the Mass, the Divine Office and the Calendar:

1. The lives of the saints at Matins were reduced to brief summaries.

2. The lessons from the Fathers of the Church were reduced to the briefest possible passages, with the somewhat naive wish that the clergy would continue to nourish their souls with patristic writings on their own.

3. The solitary recitation of the Divine Office was no longer held to be public prayer, and thus the sacred greeting Dominus vobiscum was suppressed.

4. The Last Gospel was suppressed on more occasions.

5. The proper conclusion of the Office Hymns was suppressed.

6. Many feast days are abolished, as being redundant or not "historical, for example: (a) The Finding of the Holy Cross. (b) St. John Before the Latin Gate. (c) The Apparition of St. Michael. (d) St. Peter's Chair at Antioch. (e) St. Peter's Chains, etc.

7. During the Council, the principle of the unchanging Canon of the Mass was destroyed with the addition of the name of St. Joseph.

8. The Confiteor before Communion was suppressed.

It is to be noted that the "Liturgy of John XXIII” was in vigor for all of three years, until it came to its logical conclusion with the promulgation of the Conciliar Decree on the Liturgy — also the work of Bugnini. (See His Excellency Bishop Daniel L. Dolan, Pre-Vatican II Liturgical Changes: Road to the New Mass and The Pius X and John XXIII Missals Compared.) 

Father Francisco Ricossa described what he called the "anti-liturgical heresies" extant in Roncalli/John XXIII's liturgical changes:

Pius XII succeeded by John XXIII. Angelo Roncalli. Throughout his ecclesiastical career, Roncalli was involved in affairs that place his orthodoxy under a cloud. Here are a few facts:

As professor at the seminary of Bergamo, Roncalli was investigated for following the theories of Msgr. Duchesne, which were forbidden under Saint Pius X in all Italian seminaries. Msgr Duchesne's work, Histoire Ancienne de l'Eglise, ended up on the Index.

While papal nuncio to Paris, Roncalli revealed his adhesion to the teachings of Sillon, a movement condemned by St. Pius X. In a letter to the widow of Marc Sagnier, the founder of the condemned movement, he wrote: The powerful fascination of his [Sagnier's] words, his spirit, had enchanted me; and from my early years as a priest, I maintained a vivid memory of his personality, his political and social activity."

Named as Patriarch of Venice, Msgr.Roncalli gave a public blessing to the socialists meeting there for their party convention. As John XXIII, he made Msgr. Montini a cardinal and called the Second Vatican Council. He also wrote the Encyclical Pacem in Terris. The Encyclical uses a deliberately ambiguous phrase, which foreshadows the same false religious liberty the Council would later proclaim.

The Revolution Advances

John XXIII's attitude in matters liturgical, then, comes as no surprise. Dom Lambert Beauduin, quasi-founder of the modernist Liturgical Movement, was a friend of Roncalli from 1924 onwards. At the death of Pius XII, Beauduin remarked: "If they elect Roncalli, everything will be saved; he would be capable of calling a council and consecrating ecumenism..."'

On July 25, 1960, John XXIII published the Motu Proprio Rubricarum Instructum. He had already decided to call Vatican II and to proceed with changing Canon Law. John XXIII incorporates the rubrical innovations of 1955–1956 into this Motu Proprio and makes them still worse. "We have reached the decision," he writes, "that the fundamental principles concerning the liturgical reform must be presented to the Fathers of the future Council, but that the reform of the rubrics of the Breviary and Roman Missal must not be delayed any longer."

In this framework, so far from being orthodox, with such dubious authors, in a climate which was already "Conciliar," the Breviary and Missal of John XXIII were born. They formed a "Liturgy of transition" destined to last — as it in fact did last — for three or four years. It is a transition between the Catholic liturgy consecrated at the Council of Trent and that heterodox liturgy begun at Vatican II. 

The "Antiliturgical Heresy" in the John XXIII Reform

We have already seen how the great Dom Guéranger defined as "liturgical heresy" the collection of false liturgical principles of the 18th century inspired by Illuminism and Jansenism. I should like to demonstrate in this section the resemblance between these innovations and those of John XXIII.

Since John XXIII's innovations touched the Breviary as well as the Missal, I will provide some information on his changes in the Breviary also. Lay readers may be unfamiliar with some of the terms concerning the Breviary, but I have included as much as possible to provide the "flavor" and scope of the innovations.

1.   Reduction of Matins to three lessons. Archbishop Vintimille of Paris, a Jansenist sympathizer, in his reform of the Breviary in 1736, "reduced the Office for most days to three lessons, to make it shorter." In 1960 John XXIII also reduced the Office of Matins to only three lessons on most days. This meant the suppression of a third of Holy Scripture, two-thirds of the lives of the saints, and the whole of the commentaries of the Church Fathers on Holy Scripture. Matins, of course, forms a considerable part of the Breviary.

2.   Replacing ecclesiastical formulas style with Scripture. "The second principle of the anti-liturgical sect," said Dom Guéranger, "is to replace the formulae in ecclesiastical style with readings from Holy Scripture." While the Breviary of St. Pius X had the commentaries on Holy Scripture by the Fathers of the Church, John XXIII's Breviary suppressed most commentaries written by the Fathers of the Church. On Sundays, only five or six lines from the Fathers remains.

3.   Removal of saints' feasts from Sunday. Dom Gueranger gives the Jansenists' position: "It is their [the Jansenists'] great principle of the sanctity of Sunday which will not permit this day to be 'degraded' by consecrating it to the veneration of a saint, not even the Blessed Virgin Mary. A fortiori, the feasts with a rank of double or double major which make such an agreeable change for the faithful from the monotony of the Sundays, reminding them of the friends of God, their virtues and their protection — shouldn't they be deferred always to weekdays, when their feasts would pass by silently and unnoticed?"

John XXIII, going well beyond the well-balanced reform of St. Pius X, fulfills almost to the letter the ideal of the Janenist heretics: only nine feasts of the saints can take precedence over the Sunday (two feasts of St. Joseph, three feasts of Our Lady, St. John the Baptist, Saints Peter and Paul, St. Michael, and All Saints). By contrast, the calendar of St. Pius X included 32 feasts which took precedence, many of which were former holy days of obligation. What is worse, John XXIII abolished even the commemoration of the saints on Sunday.

4.   Preferring the ferial office over the saint’s feast. Dom Guéranger goes on to describe the moves of the Jansenists as follows: "The calendar would then be purged, and the aim, acknowledged by Grancolas (1727) and his accomplices, would be to make the clergy prefer the ferial office to that of the saints. What a pitiful spectacle! To see the putrid principles of Calvinism, so vulgarly opposed to those of the Holy See, which for two centuries has not ceased fortifying the Church's calendar with the inclusion' of new protectors, penetrate into our churches!"

John XXIII totally suppressed ten feasts from the calendar (eleven in Italy with the feast of Our Lady of Loreto), reduced 29 feasts of simple rank and nine of more elevated rank to mere commemorations, thus causing the ferial office to take precedence. He suppressed almost all the octaves and vigils, and replaced another 24 saints' days with the ferial office. Finally, with the new rules for Lent, the feasts of another nine saints, officially in the calendar, are never celebrated. In sum, the reform of John XXIII purged about 81 or 82 feasts of saints, sacrificing them to "Calvinist principles."

Dom Gueranger also notes that the Jansenists suppressed the feasts of the saints in Lent. John XXIII did the same, keeping only the feasts of first and second class. Since they always fall during Lent, the feasts of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great. St. Benedict, St. Patrick, and St. Gabriel the Archangel would never be celebrated. (Liturgical Revolution)

Although the subject of many previous commentaries on this site, the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service would complete Roncalli’s work of destruction that had been presaged by the changes, none of them heretical in se, that Fathers Bugnini and Antonelli convinced Pope Pius XII to implement in 1951, 1955 and 1958 (see the series on this matter written by the sedeplentist Dr. Carol A. Byrne; for one of these articles, please see The Start of The New Liturgical Movement and then follow the “Continued” links at the end of this article—and each subsequent one, numbering forty-five in total, to read the entire series, which is well worth reading). Roncalli meant to start a Modernist revolution and to supplant the Catholic Faith with principles condemned by Pope Pius IX in Qui Pluribus, November 9, 1846, Quanta Cura and The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1964, by Pope Pius IX and the Fathers the [First] Vatican Council, by Pope Saint Pius X in Lamentabili Sane, July 1, 1907, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907, Praestantia Scripturae, November 18, 1907, and Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, and by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.

Here is a just a summary of the revolutionary handiwork that started with Roncalli, continued at the “Second” Vatican Council and has evolved over the course of the past fifty-three years, three months since then under the anti-pontificates of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI, Albino Luciani/John Paul I, who believed that one had to look for the “good” in error and heresy, Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis:

1. The conciliar “popes” have made war upon the very the nature of dogmatic truth, cleaving to the philosophically absurd notion that dogmatic truth can never be expressed adequately at any one point in time, that each expression of dogma is necessarily "conditioned" by the historical circumstances in which it was pronounced. Condemned by the [First] Vatican Council, Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907, and The Oath Against Modernism, and by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.
2. The “Second” Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium, November 21, 1964, the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, instituted the false ecclesiology of "full" and "partial" communion that flies in the face of the teaching of the Catholic Church, a teaching documented by Bishop Donald Sanborn in The New Ecclesiology: An Overview and The New Ecclesiology: Documentation and Communion: Ratzinger's Ecumenical One-World Church). This “new ecclesiology,” of course, was the handiwork of none other than Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger, who was acting upon a recommendation by a German Lutheran "observer" at the "Second" Vatican Council, suggested should be placed into the text of Lumen Gentium, November 21, 1964, in order to give formal recognition to the "elements" of "sanctification" that exist the "ecclesial" (Protestant) "communities" and in the Orthodox churches. In other words, the man who is considered the “great dogmatist” helped to attack the Sacred Deposit of Faith at the "Second" Vatican Council to help to give birth to the heresy that is the “new ecclesiolgy, whose principal contention was refuted prophetically by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943:
3. Actually 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. "For in one spirit" says the Apostle, "were we all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free." As therefore in the true Christian community there is only one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one Baptism, so there can be only one faith. And therefore, if a man refuse to hear the Church, let him be considered - so the Lord commands - as a heathen and a publican. It follows that those who are divided in faith or government cannot be living in the unity of such a Body, nor can they be living the life of its one Divine Spirit. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)
4. Jorge Mario Bergoglio has taken the “new ecclesiology” to mean that all “believers,” including those who deny the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, are saved as long as they “do good.”
5. The conciliar popes, of course, reject what Ratzinger/Benedict called disparagingly the “ecumenism of the return,” and Jorge Mario Bergoglio has gone so far as to issue endless apologies to Protestants and the Waldensians for the manner in which they had been “persecuted” by Catholics in the past, thereby making a mockery of the exhortations of one true pope after another for such a return of non-Catholics to the true Church.
6. The “Second” Vatican Council proclaimed the heresy of “religious liberty and the conciliar “popes” have consistently praised nonexistent ability of false religions to "contribute" to the "betterment" of nations and the world. Condemned by Pope Pius VI in Brief Quod aliquantum, March 10, 1791, Religious Liberty, a “Monstrous Right Pope Pius VII in Post Tam Diuturnas, April 29, 1814, Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, and by Pope Pius IX in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)
7. Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and Jorge Mario Bergoglio have endorsed and even praised the Protestantism’s and Judeo-Masonry’s concept of the "separation of Church and State," a thesis called absolutely false by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906, and have have rejected outright the obligation of the civil state to recognize the Catholic Church as its official religion and to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, an obligation reiterated by pope after pope following the rise of the religiously indifferentist civil state of Modernity.
8. The conciliar “popes,” therefore, are social modernists of the sort described by Ratzinger/Benedict, therefore, falls into the category of a social modernist described by Pope Pius XI in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.
9. Wojtyla/John Paul II became the first conciliar “pope” to enter into a Mohammedan mosque, doing so on May 7, 2001, in Damascus, Syria, paving the way for Ratzinger/Benedict and Bergoglio to do the same, thus engaging in acts of apostasy and blasphemy as they, who have believed themselves to be Successors of Saint Peter, have permitted themselves treated as inferiors while treating treated places of false worship that are hideous to God as worthy of respect, thereby scandalizing Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s little ones no end.
10. Ratzinger/Benedict termed Mount Hiei in Japan, where the adherents of the Tendei sect of Buddhism, worship their devils, as "sacred," a term he used to describe the mosque of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem on May 12, 2009, and Bergoglio is constantly praising the temples of false religions as sacred places that give honor and glory to God.
11. The conciliar “popes” have rejected the clarity and certainty of the Scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in favor of the condemned precepts of the so-called “New Theology” and they have held a view on the Doctrine of Justification that, in essence, hinges on the belief that the Fathers of the Council of Trent, who met under the influence and protection of God the Holy Ghost, were wrong (as is explained in Attempting to Coerce Perjury.)

The counterfeit church of conciliarism has inverted the ends proper to the Sacrament of Matrimony and endorsed what is, in essence, a Catholic form of “natural” contraception, and enshrined this inversion in their corrupted 1983 Code of Canon Law.

All that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has done is to the put the “finishing touches,” if you will, on all that has gone before him. The Argentine Apostate has used his daily screeds at the Ding Dong School of Apostasy at the Casa Santa Marta and exhortations and encyclicals such as Evangelii Gaudium, November 26, 2013, Laudato Si, May 24, 2015, and Amoris Laetitia, March 16, 2016, to map out a program of theological relativism that has suborned hardened sinners in their lives and wickedness and given aid and comfort to every leftist, statist, collectivist, globalist, pro-abort, pro-perversity and pro-“palliative care” politician and social leader on the face of the earth.The truth is plain for all but the culpably blind to see: conciliarism is a false religion, and it has been such openly since the promulgation of Lumen Gentium on November 21, 1964, after its occult beginnings in the preceding six years.

Raymond Burke and Athanasius Schneider Refuse to See the Obvious Yet Again

It is thus tragic to see that the likes of Raymond Leo Burke grasping at straws as he, in essence, says time and time again that Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his comrades might be launching a new religion. Gee, do ya think?

The latest development that has led “Cardinal” Burke and “Bishop” Athanasius Schneider to step onto the precipice from which they always pull back concerns a proposal by a Jesuit pseudo-theologian to use “bread” made from the yucca plant for the matter of what is believed to the Holy Eucharist in the purported Roman Rite of the counterfeit church of conciliarism:

ROME, March 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Experts including Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider are sounding the alarm over a shocking proposal at the Vatican to consider changing the matter of the Eucharist.

Such a move, critics warn, would invalidate the Sacrament and create, in effect, a “new religion.”

Jesuit theologian Father Francisco Taborda last week raised the possibility that the upcoming Amazonian Synod scheduled for next October might consider changing the matter of the Eucharist, allowing  the use of a South American vegetable called yuca rather than wheaten bread.

Fr. Taborda told Crux on Feb. 28 that climate issues and inculturation warrant the change. Intense humidity during the Amazonian rainy season turns wheaten hosts into a pasty mush, he said, adding that “in the Amazon, bread is made out of yuca,” a shrub native to South America from which tapioca is derived.

Taborda, a professor of theology at the Jesuit university in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was a featured speaker at a study seminar held at the Vatican on Feb. 25-27, in preparation for the October synod on “Amazonia: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology.” (Prospal at Vatican to Change Eucharistic Matter Would Create a New Religionw)

Here is a bit of news for “Cardinal” Burke and “Bishop” Athanasius Schneider:

The Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service, which is sacramentally invalid and offensive to the Most Holy Trinity, was meant of its very false nature to be the liturgical expression of a new theology for a new religion. Those who planned this abomination of desolation desired to use their synthetically concocted liturgy as a singular vessel of perdition to so accustom Catholics to ceaseless changes what purports to be the Sacred Liturgy so that they would be conditioned to accept the sort of changes to Catholic Faith and Morals that are now being made more manifest than ever before by Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

This is not really news, however, as the conciliar revolutionaries told us this themselves in their very own words:

We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants." (Annibale Bugnini, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.)

"[T]he intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should coincide with the Protestant liturgy.... [T]here was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and I, repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass" (Dec. 19, 1993), Apropos, #17, pp. 8f; quoted in Christian Order, October, 1994. (Jean Guitton, a close friend of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI. The quotation and citations are found in Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Great Facade, The Remnant Publishing Company, 2002, p. 317.)

Let it be candidly said: the Roman Rite which we have known hitherto no longer exists. It is destroyed. (Father Joseph Gelineau, an associate of Annibale Bugnini on the Consilium, 1uoted and footnoted in the work of a John Mole, who believed that the Mass of the Roman Rite had been "truncated," not destroyed. Assault on the Roman Rite) 

Moreover, the late Monsignor Klaus Gamber, who was not a traditionalist, was honest enough to state that the Novus Ordo represented a destruction of the Faith of the preceding one thousand years:

Not only is the Novus Ordo Missae of 1969 a change of the liturgical rite, but that change also involved a rearrangement of the liturgical year, including changes in the assignment of feast days for the saints. To add or drop one or the other of these feast days, as had been done before, certainly does not constitute a change of the rite, per se. But the countless innovations introduced as part of liturgical reform have left hardly any of the traditional liturgical forms intact . . .

At this critical juncture, the traditional Roman rite, more than one thousand years old and until now the heart of the Church, was destroyed. A closer examination reveals that the Roman rite was not perfect, and that some elements of value had atrophied over the centuries. Yet, through all the periods of the unrest that again and again shook the Church to her foundations, the Roman rite always remained the rock, the secure home of faith and piety. . . .

Was all this really done because of a pastoral concern about the souls of the faithful, or did it not rather represent a radical breach with the traditional rite, to prevent the further use of traditional liturgical texts and thus to make the celebration of the "Tridentime Mass" impossible--because it no loner reflected the new spirit moving through the Church?

Indeed, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the prohibition of the traditional rite was announced at the same time as the introduction of the new liturgical texts; and that a dispensation to continue celebrating the Mass according to the traditional rite was granted only to older priests.

Obviously, the reformers wanted a completely new liturgy, a liturgy that differed from the traditional one in spirit as well as in form; and in no way a liturgy that represented what the Council Fathers had envisioned, i.e., a liturgy that would meet the pastoral needs of the faithful.

Liturgy and faith are interdependent. That is why a new rite was created, a rite that in many ways reflects the bias of the new (modernist) theology. The traditional liturgy simply could not be allowed to exist in its established form because it was permeated with the truths of the traditional faith and the ancient forms of piety. For this reason alone, much was abolished and new rites, prayers and hymns were introduced, as were the new readings from Scripture, which conveniently left out those passages that did not square with the teachings of modern theology--for example, references to a God who judges and punishes.

At the same time, the priests and the faithful are told that the new liturgy created after the Second Vatican Council is identical in essence with the liturgy that has been in use in the Catholic Church up to this point, and that the only changes introduced involved reviving some earlier liturgical forms and removing a few duplications, but above all getting rid of elements of no particular interest.

Most priests accepted these assurances about the continuity of liturgical forms of worship and accepted the new rite with the same unquestioning obedience with which they had accepted the minor ritual changes introduced by Rome from time to time in the past, changes beginning with the reform of the Divine Office and of the liturgical chant introduced by Pope St. Pius X.

Following this strategy, the groups pushing for reform were able to take advantage of and at the same time abuse the sense of obedience among the older priests, and the common good will of the majority of the faithful, while, in many cases, they themselves refused to obey. . . .

The real destruction of the traditional Mass, of the traditional Roman rite with a history of more than one thousand years, is the wholesale destruction of the faith on which it was based, a faith that had been the source of our piety and of our courage to bear witness to Christ and His Church, the inspiration of countless Catholics over many centuries. Will someone, some day, be able to say the same thing about the new Mass? (Monsignor Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, p. 39, p. 99, pp. 100-102.)

The truth is, of course, that the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service is itself responsible for the loss of the Faith on the part of countless millions upon millions of Catholics worldwide, a point that has been made on this site repeatedly (for a sampling of a few of the articles on this subject in the past few years or so, please see With Perfection Staring Directly At Them, Turning Perfection Aside For A More Perfect Banality, Taking The Obvious For Granted, Enough Spin To Make Our Heads Spin, Calling Cesar Romero, Calling Cesar Romero, part two, Transforming the Extraordinary Into the Ordinary and The Better Mousetrap, Jorge's Intellectually Dishonest Defense of the Indefensible, Jorge's Intellectually Dishonest Defense of the Indefensible, part two, Jorge Codifies His Irreversible Revolution/Jorge's Intellectually Dishonest Defense of the Indefensible, part three and They Have Eyes, But They Do Not See the Abomination of Desolation). 

The Novus Ordo service contains options galore for the "presiders" and their liturgical committees.

To wit, those who stage the Novus Ordo service can say a few "introductory" words at its beginning after they make the Sign of the Cross as they face the people. It is interesting to note that the Immemorial Mass of Tradition begins with the priest addressing God with the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar. The Novus Ordo begins with the "presider" speaking to the people.

Those who stage the Novus Ordo service can choose one of several "options" for what is called "the Penitential Rite." They can use the modernized version of the Confiteor followed by the Kyrie eleison. They can simply recite the Kyrie eleison. Or they can make up words of their own choosing ("For making us so wonderful, O Lord, we give you thanks, Lord have mercy. . . ." yes, I have heard this with my own ears).

In the United States of America for example, there are, in addition the four "Eucharistic Prayers" that came with the original "cracker jack box" in which the Novus Ordo was contained as the "surprise" for those who love junk liturgy, three "Eucharistic prayers" for children's Masses (see: Eucharistic Prayers for Masses with Children I - III) and two for "reconciliation" (see: Eucharistic Prayers forReconciliation I-II). There are also four other "Eucharistic prayers," derived from the now infamous "Swiss Synod Eucharistic Prayer," for "various needs" (see:Eucharistic Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions I - IV). Among those "other" needs are (1) "The Church on the Way to Unity," which means, once again for the slow learners out there, that the Mark of Unity does not exist in the Church of Christ that is the Catholic Church; (2) "God Guides the Church on the Way to Salvation;" (3) "Jesus, Way to the Father;" and (4) "Jesus, the Compassion of God."  

These facts are readily available. Indeed, I had known about the "nine" "Eucharistic prayers" personally from my years of unfortunate involvement in the Novus Ordo world, suffering through a variety of "offerings" of this abomination throughout the United States and Canada before withdrawing from that world of confusion and sacrilege and ceaseless revolutionary novelty and change. I must admit, however, that I had not known until about a decade ago that the so-called "Swiss Synod Eucharistic Prayer," which was composed in 1974 and received approbation from the Modernists in the Vatican in 1994 for use universally in the counterfeit church conciliarism, served as the basis of four additional "Eucharistic prayers," bringing the total number of such “approved” "prayers" in the United States of America to thirteen.

Any talk of a stable liturgical rite, even absent an admission of the Novus Ordo service's invalidity, that is capable of communicating the immutability and transcendence of the Blessed Trinity is absurd in the context of the synthetic novelty known as the Novus Ordo service, which cannot help but breed instability and uncertainty in parish liturgical life. And this is to say nothing of the gross sacrileges that have taken place in the context of so-called “papal” liturgies around the world in the past forty years or more.

Nothing has changed. The options galore that are made readily available in the General Instruction to the Roman Missal makes the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo service a singularly apt device to destroy the Catholic Faith as it was designed by its architects to do in the very first place. It is the Novus Ordo's war against Catholic Faith and Worship that has driven millions of Catholics away from the true Church and that has swelled the ranks of various evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant sects, and it is the Novus Ordo's war against Catholic Faith and Worship that has destroyed the sensus Catholicus of many, although far from all, of the Catholics who expose themselves to this offense against the Most Blessed Trinity on a weekly, not daily, basis (see They Like It!), and Jorge Mario Bergoglio said in 2017 that there was no “turning back” as his false religion is horizontally-based. It is about the celebration of man just as much as Marxism itself.

All one needs to do to understand the revolutionary spirit with which the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service is imbued is to read Paragraph Fifteen of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal:

The same awareness of the present state of the world also influenced the use of texts from very ancient tradition. It seemed that this cherished treasure would not be harmed if some phrases were changed so that the style of language would be more in accord with the language of modern theology and would faithfully reflect the actual state of the Church's discipline. Thus there have been changes of some expressions bearing on the evaluation and use of the good things of the earth and of allusions to a particular form of outward penance belonging to another age in the history of the Church. (Paragraph 15, General Instruction to the Roman Missal, 1997.)

Acts of outward penance belong to every age in the history of the Catholic Church, unless, that is, Our Lady herself, the very Mother of God, was wrong when she said:

"Penance! Penance! Penance!. . . .  Kiss the ground as a penance for sinners." (Our Lady's Words at Lourdes.)

"Are you willing to offer yourselves to God and bear all the sufferings He wills to send you, as an act of reparation for the conversion of sinners? (May 13, 1917.)

"Then you are going to have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort." (May 13, 1917.)

"Pray, pray very much, and make sacrifices for sinners; for many souls go to hell, because there are none to sacrifice themselves and pray for them." (August 19, 1917.) (Our Lady's Words at Fatima.) 

As noted in my recent reflection on Lent that was republished on Ash Wednesday, March 6, 2019, there are only two days of mandatory fast observed during Lent in the faux Roman Rite of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. That should be proof enough—in addition to everything listed above—of the simple fact that what emerged from the “Second” Vatican Council has not been, is not now nor can ever be the Catholic Church as it is an entirely different religion.

Even though the use of "bread" from the yucca plant as the matter of the hosts in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service is, the conciliar Vatican says, (Yucca Bread Off the Table at the Amazon Synod) "off the table" for discussion at the upcoming Amazon synod, tt is beyond fathomable that supposed “bishops” can contend publicly that such a new religion has not been foisted upon Catholics in order to destroy the sensus fidei and substitute a new faith that conforms to the “world” and its exigencies. To be concerned about the use of “bread” made from the yucca plant at this late night is a bit similar for a ship steward aboard the Titanic to have expressed concern about a missed note by a trombone player in the band that played while the ship was sinking deep into the waters of the North Atlantic one hundred seven years ago. After all, none other than the “restorer of tradition” himself, Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger, approved the use of the Assyrian Eucharistic prayer that contains no actual words of consecration. What’s the fuss about yucca “bread” when your vaunted “Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI” approved a prayer that omits the words of conscration?

Here is what the German New Theologian write in 2001 upon approving the Assyrian anaphora with the blessing of “Saint John Paul II”:

Indeed, at least one tragic concession was made to effect the reception of Bishop Mar Bawai Soro into the Chaldean Rite Eparchy of Saint James the Apostle: permission granted to him and his priests to continue using the Anaphora of Addai and Mari of the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East that does not contain any actual words of consecration within its text. The fact that this Anaphora, which was rejected by the authority of the Catholic Church in the Sixteenth Century when the Chaldeans (the former Nestorians) were reunited with Rome and once again in 1902 when news reached Rome that many priests of the Chaldean Rite were still using the old Assyrian Anaphora of Addai and Mari without the words of consecration, was "approved" by the then Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II in 2001 does not give one a great deal of comfort (unless one believes in rank positivism, in which case one must confront the simple fact that the highest authorities in the Catholic Church were wrong on this issue for over 440 years!):

The principal issue for the Catholic Church in agreeing to this request, related to the question of the validity of the Eucharist celebrated with the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, one of the three Anaphoras traditionally used by the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East. The Anaphora of Addai and Mari is notable because, from time immemorial, it has been used without a recitation of the Institution Narrative. As the Catholic Church considers the words of the Eucharistic Institution a constitutive and therefore indispensable part of the Anaphora or Eucharistic Prayer, a long and careful study was undertaken of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, from a historical, liturgical and theological perspective, at the end of which the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith on January 17th, 2001 concluded that this Anaphora can be considered valid. H.H. Pope John Paul II has approved this decision. This conclusion rests on three major arguments.

In the first place, the Anaphora of Addai and Mari is one of the most ancient Anaphoras, dating back to the time of the very early Church; it was composed and used with the clear intention of celebrating the Eucharist in full continuity with the Last Supper and according to the intention of the Church; its validity was never officially contested, neither in the Christian East nor in the Christian West.

Secondly, the Catholic Church recognises the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East as a true particular Church, built upon orthodox faith and apostolic succession. The Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East has also preserved full Eucharistic faith in the presence of our Lord under the species of bread and wine and in the sacrificial character of the Eucharist. In the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East, though not in full communion with the Catholic Church, are thus to be found "true sacraments, and above all, by apostolic succession, the priesthood and the Eucharist" (U.R., n. 15). Secondly, the Catholic Church recognises the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East as a true particular Church, built upon orthodox faith and apostolic succession. The Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East has also preserved full Eucharistic faith in the presence of our Lord under the species of bread and wine and in the sacrificial character of the Eucharist. In the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East, though not in full communion with the Catholic Church, are thus to be found "true sacraments, and above all, by apostolic succession, the priesthood and the Eucharist" (U.R., n. 15).

Finally, the words of Eucharistic Institution are indeed present in the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, not in a coherent narrative way and ad litteram, but rather in a dispersed euchological way, that is, integrated in successive prayers of thanksgiving, praise and intercession.

4. Guidelines for admission to the Eucharist

Considering the liturgical tradition of the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East, the doctrinal clarification regarding the validity of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, the contemporary context in which both Assyrian and Chaldean faithful are living, the appropriate regulations which are foreseen in official documents of the Catholic Church, and the process of rapprochement between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East, the following provision is made:

1. When necessity requires, Assyrian faithful are permitted to participate and to receive Holy Communion in a Chaldean celebration of the Holy Eucharist; in the same way, Chaldean faithful for whom it is physically or morally impossible to approach a Catholic minister, are permitted to participate and to receive Holy Communion in an Assyrian celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

2. In both cases, Assyrian and Chaldean ministers celebrate the Holy Eucharist according to the liturgical prescriptions and customs of their own tradition.

3. When Chaldean faithful are participating in an Assyrian celebration of the Holy Eucharist, the Assyrian minister is warmly invited to insert the words of the Institution in the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, as allowed by the Holy Synod of the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East.

4. The above considerations on the use of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari and the present guidelines for admission to the Eucharist, are intended exclusively in relation to the Eucharistic celebration and admission to the Eucharist of the faithful from the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East, in view of the pastoral necessity and ecumenical context mentioned above.

Rome, July 20th, 2001 Guidelines for Chaldean Catholics receiving the Eucharist in Assyrian Churches

What's a mere matter of words to men who make short work of the nature of dogmatic truth, thus making short work of the very nature of God Himself?

Words?

Mere words?

They matter as much as the matter of used for the Eucharist.

Death to the Commandments, Death to the Death Penalty Itself

Such concerns at this late date, however, really miss the point rather entirely as a religion headed by those who believe in dogmatic evolutionism and who have been and continue to be serial violators of the First, Second and Third Commandments is no religion at all.

Moreover, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has recently reiterated his opposition to capital punishment, which is a Natural Law right of the civil state to impose upon malefactors adjudged guilty of heinous acts after the discharge of the dur process of law. The same culpably blind conciliar “bishops” who are aghast at the proposed use of yucca bread for use in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service in the Amazon are saying that Bergoglio’s opposition to the death penalty is heretical. Of course, it is, but this is not the first time that the Argentine Apostate has said what he did recently as he did so just last year in almost the same terms:

Ah, after having used Amoris Laetitia, March 19, 2016, to deconstruct the indissolubility of a ratified and consummated marriage and to reaffirm unrepentant sinners in their lives of perdition as a display of his false concept of “mercy,” the Argentine Apostate used his defense of dogmatic evolutionism as the basis to justify the death penalty both in theory as well as in practice:

Along these same lines, I would like now to bring up a subject that ought to find in the Catechism of the Catholic Church a more adequate and coherent treatment in the light of these expressed aims.  I am speaking of the death penalty.  This issue cannot be reduced to a mere résumé of traditional teaching without taking into account not only the doctrine as it has developed in the teaching of recent Popes, but also the change in the awareness of the Christian people which rejects an attitude of complacency before a punishment deeply injurious of human dignity.  It must be clearly stated that the death penalty is an inhumane measure that, regardless of how it is carried out, abases human dignity.  It is per se contrary to the Gospel, because it entails the willful suppression of a human life that never ceases to be sacred in the eyes of its Creator and of which – ultimately – only God is the true judge and guarantor.  No man, “not even a murderer, loses his personal dignity” (Letter to the President of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, 20 March 2015), because God is a Father who always awaits the return of his children who, knowing that they have made mistakes, ask for forgiveness and begin a new life.  No one ought to be deprived not only of life, but also of the chance for a moral and existential redemption that in turn can benefit the community.

In past centuries, when means of defence were scarce and society had yet to develop and mature as it has, recourse to the death penalty appeared to be the logical consequence of the correct application of justice.  Sadly, even in the Papal States recourse was had to this extreme and inhumane remedy that ignored the primacy of mercy over justice. Let us take responsibility for the past and recognize that the imposition of the death penalty was dictated by a mentality more legalistic than Christian.  Concern for preserving power and material wealth led to an over-estimation of the value of the law and prevented a deeper understanding of the Gospel.  Nowadays, however, were we to remain neutral before the new demands of upholding personal dignity, we would be even more guilty.

Here we are not in any way contradicting past teaching, for the defence of the dignity of human life from the first moment of conception to natural death has been taught by the Church consistently and authoritatively.  Yet the harmonious development of doctrine demands that we cease to defend arguments that now appear clearly contrary to the new understanding of Christian truth.  Indeed, as Saint Vincent of Lérins pointed out, “Some may say: Shall there be no progress of religion in Christ’s Church?  Certainly; all possible progress.  For who is there, so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it?” (Commonitorium, 23.1; PL 50). It is necessary, therefore, to reaffirm that no matter how serious the crime that has been committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person.

 “The Church, in her teaching, life and worship, perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes” (Dei Verbum, 8).  The Council Fathers could not have found a finer and more synthetic way of expressing the nature and mission of the Church.  Not only in “teaching”, but also in “life” and “worship”, are the faithful able to be God’s People.  Through a series of verbs the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation expresses the dynamic nature of this process: “This Tradition develops […] grows […] and constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth, until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her” (ibid.) (Heretic Bergoglio Says the "Dynamic Word of God Cannot be Mothballed.)

I will let Saint Thomas Aquinas provide the antidote to this rank heresy on the death penalty:

Objection 1. It would seem unlawful to kill men who have sinned. For our Lord in the parable (Matthew 13) forbade the uprooting of the cockle which denotes wicked men according to a gloss. Now whatever is forbidden by God is a sin. Therefore it is a sin to kill a sinner.

Objection 2. Further, human justice is conformed to Divine justice. Now according to Divine justice sinners are kept back for repentance, according to Ezekiel 33:11, "I desire not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live." Therefore it seems altogether unjust to kill sinners.

Objection 3. Further, it is not lawful, for any good end whatever, to do that which is evil in itself, according to Augustine (Contra Mendac. vii) and the Philosopher (Ethic. ii, 6). Now to kill a man is evil in itself, since we are bound to have charity towards all men, and "we wish our friends to live and to exist," according to Ethic. ix, 4. Therefore it is nowise lawful to kill a man who has sinned.

On the contrary, It is written (Exodus 22:18): "Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live"; and (Psalm 100:8): "In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land."

I answer that, As stated above (Article 1), it is lawful to kill dumb animals, in so far as they are naturally directed to man's use, as the imperfect is directed to the perfect. Now every part is directed to the whole, as imperfect to perfect, wherefore every part is naturally for the sake of the whole. For this reason we observe that if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away. Now every individual person is compared to the whole community, as part to whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since "a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump" (1 Corinthians 5:6).

Reply to Objection 1. Our Lord commanded them to forbear from uprooting the cockle in order to spare the wheat, i.e. the good. This occurs when the wicked cannot be slain without the good being killed with them, either because the wicked lie hidden among the good, or because they have many followers, so that they cannot be killed without danger to the good, as Augustine says (Contra Parmen. iii, 2). Wherefore our Lord teaches that we should rather allow the wicked to live, and that vengeance is to be delayed until the last judgment, rather than that the good be put to death together with the wicked. When, however, the good incur no danger, but rather are protected and saved by the slaying of the wicked, then the latter may be lawfully put to death.

Reply to Objection 2. According to the order of His wisdom, God sometimes slays sinners forthwith in order to deliver the good, whereas sometimes He allows them time to repent, according as He knows what is expedient for His elect. This also does human justice imitate according to its powers; for it puts to death those who are dangerous to others, while it allows time for repentance to those who sin without grievously harming others.

Reply to Objection 3. By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood, in so far as he is naturally free, and exists for himself, and he falls into the slavish state of the beasts, by being disposed of according as he is useful to others. This is expressed in Psalm 48:21: "Man, when he was in honor, did not understand; he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them," and Proverbs 11:29: "The fool shall serve the wise." Hence, although it be evil in itself to kill a man so long as he preserve his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned, even as it is to kill a beast. For a bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful, as the Philosopher [Aristotle] states (Polit. i, 1 and Ethic. vii, 6). (Saint Thomas Aquinas,, Question 64, Summa Theologica.)

Bergoglio’s whole argument about human “dignity” and his effort to place his false concept of “mercy” about justice, thereby once again creating a false dichotomy between justice and mercy, is nothing other than a complete rejection of right reason and of Holy Writ itself. To assert that the Holy Mother Church erred in the past by her support of the imposition of the death penalty according to the particular circumstances of the time is say that the Catholic Church has never been the spotless, mystical spouse of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head and Mystical Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Indeed, Bergoglio believes that the Catholic Church has been guilty of many errors, and he sees it as his own singular mission and purpose to make amends for them once and for all.

Despite Bergoglio’s protestations, no one can say legitimately that the civil state does not have the authority to put criminals adjudged guilty after the exhaustion of the means of due process of law to death.

Innocent human life is inviolable. Life adjudged guilty of a crime is not inviolable. The imposition of the death penalty by the civil state is not an exercise in vengeance. It is an exercise in the administration of justice, that is, the imposition of a just penalty upon one who has grievously wounded the common good.

The death penalty, if administered in a Catholic state that was subordinate to the Social Reign of Christ the King, would also be viewed an exercise of spiritual mercy upon the doomed felon. One who knows that he is going to die at certain time on a certain date is far more likely to make a good Confession of his sins and to be a companion in eternity of Saint Dismas, the Good Thief, than he would be if languished in a prison for the rest of his life, dying a bad, sacramentally-unprovided-for death from a sudden heart attack after thirty years of incarceration.

One of the supreme ironies of our time is that many Catholics who are vocal about their opposition to the death penalty are equally vocal about their support for baby-killing under cover of law. Those who have committed grievous crimes are showered with admiration. Those who have committed no crime, including those whose "reduced" "quality of life" makes them candidates for disposal by means of "palliative care," are reviled as "burdens" to be eliminated from existence.

Furthermore, no Catholic trained in Thomistic thought and who understands, therefore, the different principles at work in the Fifth Commandment is permitted to equate the taking of innocent human life in the womb, either by chemical or surgical means, with the justified execution of an actual criminal who has had a fair trial and has been sentenced to death for his crime or crimes. The Catechism of the Council of Trent notes the following about this matter:

Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime or murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by repressing outrage and violence. Hence these words of David: In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord. (The Roman Catechism.)

Whether the death penalty should be imposed on any particular person is a judgment that must be made by the civil authorities. Some persons might well be deserving of clemency. Others might not be. However, the simple Catholic truth is this: the civil state has the authority to put malefactors to death and no one has any more authority to say that it does not than he has to say that there are eight persons in the Divine Godhead. Once again, we see the triumph of the sentimentality and irrationality of Modernism over simple Catholic truth, which is why Bergoglio had to attack the nature of dogmatic truth so directly yet again four days ago.

All the more reason, of course, to flee from everything to do with conciliarism and its false shepherds. If we can't see that the counterfeit church of conciliarism is based on a warfare against the nature of dogmatic truth is offensive to God and can in no way lead to any kind of authentic restoration of the "Catholic" Church, then it is perhaps necessary to recall these words of Saint Teresa of Avila, whose feast day we commemorate today, the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, in her Foundations: 

"Know this: it is by very little breaches of regularity that the devil succeeds in introducing the greatest abuses. May you never end up saying: 'This is nothing, this is an exaggeration.'" (Saint Teresa of Avila, Foundations, Chapter Twenty-nine)

[Another translation]--Now we are all in peace, Mitigated and Reformed : no one hinders us in the service of our Lord. Therefore, my Brothers and Sisters, since His Majesty has so graciously heard your prayers, up and haste to serve Him ! Let the present generation, who are eyewitnesses of it, consider the mercies He has done us and the troubles and disquiet from which He has delivered us : and those who are to come after, since they find the way made plain, let them, for the love of our Lord, never suffer a single thing which belongs to perfection to slip away. Let it not be said by their fault as is said of some Orders, that their beginning was praiseworthy. Now we are beginning : but let them try to keep on beginning to go on from good to better continually. Let them remember that the devil keeps using very small faults with which to bore holes through which the very greatest may find entrance. Let them never catch themselves saying, "This does not matter : they are over particular." Oh my daughters, everything matters which hinders our progress. For the love of our Lord I entreat them to remember how soon all will be over, and what a mercy our Lord has done us in leading us into this Order, and what a heavy penalty will be incurred by anyone who initiates any relaxation. Nay, let them keep their eyes ever fixed on the race of holy prophets from which we are sprung. What Saints have we in heaven who wore this habit ! Let us aspire with a holy audacity, by the grace of God, to be ourselves like unto them. Short will be the battle, my Sisters ; the issue is eternal. Let us put aside those things which are really nothings, for only those are realities which lead us to our true end, to serve and love Him more, seeing He liveth for evermore. Amen. Amen. To God be thanksgivings! (Saint Teresa of Avila, the History of Her Foundation, Chapter Twenty-nine, p. 238. See "Saint Theresa : the history of her foundations".)

The adherents of the new religion that emerged from the “Second” Vatican Council has been composed of “popes” and “bishops” who defect from numerous articles of the Catholic Faith. However, there is no minimal number of articles of the Holy Faith to which one must adhere as a disbelief in even one article of the Catholic Faith expels himself from the bosom of Holy Mother Church:

With reference to its object, faith cannot be greater for some truths than for others. Nor can it be less with regard to the number of truths to be believed. For we must all believe the very same thing, both as to the object of faith as well as to the number of truths. All are equal in this because everyone must believe all the truths of faith--both those which God Himself has directly revealed, as well as those he has revealed through His Church. Thus, I must believe as much as you and you as much as I, and all other Christians similarly. He who does not believe all these mysteries is not Catholic and therefore will never enter Paradise. (Saint Francis de Sales, The Sermons of Saint Francis de Sales for Lent Given in 1622, republished by TAN Books and Publishers for the Visitation Monastery of Frederick, Maryland, in 1987, pp. 34-37.)

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine:they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

No, “partial credit” does not cut it to retain one's membership in good standing within the maternal bosom of Holy Mother Church:

Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected: ‘This is the Catholic Faith, which unless a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved’ (Athanasian Creed). There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim ‘Christian is my name and Catholic my surname,’ only let him endeavor to be in reality what he calls himself.

Besides, the Church demands from those who have devoted themselves to furthering her interests, something very different from the dwelling upon profitless questions; she demands that they should devote the whole of their energy to preserve the faith intact and unsullied by any breath of error, and follow most closely him whom Christ has appointed to be the guardian and interpreter of the truth. There are to be found today, and in no small numbers, men, of whom the Apostle says that: "having itching ears, they will not endure sound doctrine: but according to their own desires they will heap up to themselves teachers, and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables" (II Tim. iv. 34). Infatuated and carried away by a lofty idea of the human intellect, by which God's good gift has certainly made incredible progress in the study of nature, confident in their own judgment, and contemptuous of the authority of the Church, they have reached such a degree of rashness as not to hesitate to measure by the standard of their own mind even the hidden things of God and all that God has revealed to men. Hence arose the monstrous errors of "Modernism," which Our Predecessor rightly declared to be "the synthesis of all heresies," and solemnly condemned. We hereby renew that condemnation in all its fulness, Venerable Brethren, and as the plague is not yet entirely stamped out, but lurks here and there in hidden places, We exhort all to be carefully here and there in hidden places, We exhort all to be carefully on their guard against any contagion of the evil, to which we may apply the words Job used in other circumstances: "It is a fire that devoureth even to destruction, and rooteth up all things that spring" (Job xxxi. 12). Nor do We merely desire that Catholics should shrink from the errors of Modernism, but also from the tendencies or what is called the spirit of Modernism. Those who are infected by that spirit develop a keen dislike for all that savours of antiquity and become eager searchers after novelties in everything: in the way in which they carry out religious functions, in the ruling of Catholic institutions, and even in private exercises of piety. Therefore it is Our will that the law of our forefathers should still be held sacred: "Let there be no innovation; keep to what has been handed down." In matters of faith that must be inviolably adhered to as the law; it may however also serve as a guide even in matters subject to change, but even in such cases the rule would hold: "Old things, but in a new way." (Pope Benedict XV, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, November 1, 1914.)

Pope Pius XI, writing in Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928, also rejected any notion of a distinction between "fundamental" and allegedly "non-fundamental" doctrines of the Catholic Faith:

Besides this, in connection with things which must be believed, it is nowise licit to use that distinction which some have seen fit to introduce between those articles of faith which are fundamental and those which are not fundamental, as they say, as if the former are to be accepted by all, while the latter may be left to the free assent of the faithful: for the supernatural virtue of faith has a formal cause, namely the authority of God revealing, and this is patient of no such distinction. For this reason it is that all who are truly Christ's believe, for example, the Conception of the Mother of God without stain of original sin with the same faith as they believe the mystery of the August Trinity, and the Incarnation of our Lord just as they do the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, according to the sense in which it was defined by the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. Are these truths not equally certain, or not equally to be believed, because the Church has solemnly sanctioned and defined them, some in one age and some in another, even in those times immediately before our own? Has not God revealed them all? For the teaching authority of the Church, which in the divine wisdom was constituted on earth in order that revealed doctrines might remain intact for ever, and that they might be brought with ease and security to the knowledge of men, and which is daily exercised through the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops who are in communion with him, has also the office of defining, when it sees fit, any truth with solemn rites and decrees, whenever this is necessary either to oppose the errors or the attacks of heretics, or more clearly and in greater detail to stamp the minds of the faithful with the articles of sacred doctrine which have been explained. But in the use of this extraordinary teaching authority no newly invented matter is brought in, nor is anything new added to the number of those truths which are at least implicitly contained in the deposit of Revelation, divinely handed down to the Church: only those which are made clear which perhaps may still seem obscure to some, or that which some have previously called into question is declared to be of faith.  (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)

There cannot be a “stable” liturgy in an unstable religion that was described prophetically in the following terms by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907:

It remains for Us now to say a few words about the Modernist as reformer. From all that has preceded, it is abundantly clear how great and how eager is the passion of such men for innovation. In all Catholicism there is absolutely nothing on which it does not fasten. They wish philosophy to be reformed, especially in the ecclesiastical seminaries. They wish the scholastic philosophy to be relegated to the history of philosophy and to be classed among absolute systems, and the young men to be taught modern philosophy which alone is true and suited to the times in which we live. They desire the reform of theology: rational theology is to have modern philosophy for its foundation, and positive theology is to be founded on the history of dogma. As for history, it must be written and taught only according to their methods and modern principles. Dogmas and their evolution, they affirm, are to be harmonized with science and history. In the Catechism no dogmas are to be inserted except those that have been reformed and are within the capacity of the people. Regarding worship, they say, the number of external devotions is to be reduced, and steps must be taken to prevent their further increase, though, indeed, some of the admirers of symbolism are disposed to be more indulgent on this head. They cry out that ecclesiastical government requires to be reformed in all its branches, but especially in its disciplinary and dogmatic departments They insist that both outwardly and inwardly it must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity and authority which is too much concentrated should be decentralized The Roman Congregations and especially the index and the Holy Office, must be likewise modified The ecclesiastical authority must alter its line of conduct in the social and political world; while keeping outside political organizations it must adapt itself to them in order to penetrate them with its spirit. With regard to morals, they adopt the principle of the Americanists, that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice. They ask that the clergy should return to their primitive humility and poverty, and that in their ideas and action they should admit the principles of Modernism; and there are some who, gladly listening to the teaching of their Protestant masters, would desire the suppression of the celibacy of the clergy. What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed by them and according to their principles?  (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 38)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his band of conciliar revolutionaries do not believe in God as their false deity is but a mutable figure of their own pantheistic imagination. “Pope Francis’s religion is nothing other than a phantasm of the demons who whisper in his ear without ceasing.

No Excuses to be Culpably Blind at This Point

One can only be culpably blind at this point not to see that it is all or nothing with Catholicism, including acceptance of the fact that heretics have never served on the Throne of Saint Peter despite what keeps being repeated on certain “conservative” and “pro-life” websites. Those who keep repeating the contention about “heretical popes” continue to ignore the simple fact Saint Robert Bellarmine dispelled this falsehood and that the Fathers of the [First] Vatican Council examined this matter thoroughly before pronouncing dogmatically on Papal Infallibility, July 18, 1870.

It was a hundred years later that author Robert Leckie, who wrote American and Catholic, saw some problems with what was happening after the “Second” Vatican Council and was disturbed enough to make some observations that are worth repeating here to demonstrate that even though things may not have been clear forty-nine years ago, they are eminently clear today.

Mind you, Mr. Leckie was a partisan of Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, the founder of the Society of Saint Paul (the Paulist Fathers), whose writing and life's work helped to propagate the heresy of Americanism. Leckie was of the erroneous belief that Americanism was a "phantom heresy." This is very ironic as Americanism is indeed a celebration of the "world" and of the Catholic's taking his place in it while being content to practice his Faith quietly even though he was very critical and concerned about the "Second" Vatican Council's own celebration of the "world." He did not see that the Potomac had flowed into the Tiber just as surely as had the Rhine. And he was confused on a number of points, including his erroneous belief that the Council of Trent had placed the Church in a "spiritual strait-jacket."

Despite these errors and confusion, however, Mr. Leckie did ask some very pertinent questions that are even more relevant today. The questions that Leckie raised are very relevant now as he considered himself a dispassionate observer, a journalist, who was concerned about the future of Holy Mother Church. Although he was sympathetic to the "traditionalist" cause, he was not really a traditionalist, simply a Catholic who was concerned about the future of the Church. If one who was not a traditionalist could ask such questions in 1970, just five years after the end of the "Second" Vatican Council and one year after the introduction of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service, how can anyone, pretend as though the problems that Leckie saw forty-one years ago are not the result of the rise of a counterfeit religion headed men by who have defected from the Catholic Faith?

Permit me, therefore, to present a few the closing pages from Robert Leckie's American and Catholic. The text really speaks for itself. What is remarkable is that Mr. Leckie was given the graces by Our Lady to see the problems and to write about them publicly when so few others were doing so: 

Traditionally, the Christian or at least the Catholic teaching on a man's duties toward society was expressed by Thomas More's remark that the world will be good when men are good, thus placing the emphasis on the individual, on the gospel of salvation. But now the American Church under the impetuous urging of the New Breed appears to be shifting toward the social gospel advocated by liberal Protestantism during its gallant but unsuccessful attempt to confront modernity. In effect, they are dividing the indivisible Christian recipe for salvation--faith and good works--and giving precedence to good works. Reversing Christ, they put Martha over Mary. And here, in this American Catholic cold war, there has entered on the side of authority, if not necessarily on the side of the hierarchy, a huge, unheard-from group of Catholics who are in some ways comparable to President Nixon's "great, silent majority."

These are the traditionalists. They are not conservative, they are not reactionary, and they are just as intelligent and informed as the intellectuals of the New Breed. Unhappily, few of them edit "impartial" journals of opinion or have columns to write. In the main, they are middle-aged or elderly Catholics, priests and laymen, who are afraid that the "fresh air" which Pope John wanted to let into the Church had turned into a tornado. They fear that "renewal" is actually the kind of reform that empties out the baby with the bath. It seems to them that the New Breed are trying to get Christ out of Christianity, and they are mindful of the Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr's judgment on the "liberalization," i.e., watering-down of his own faith: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." To those innovators who appear so zealous to reform the work of Jesus Christ, they might quote the cynical Talleyrand's remark to a member of the Directory who wished to form his own faith based on reason: "To found his religion, Jesus Christ suffered and died. I suggest you do something of the same." The traditionalist view is another word for accommodation. In Jacques Maritain's phrase it is a "genuflection to the world."

If religion is not a criticism, it is nothing; and hen it ceases to criticize what is loosely called "the world," it ceases to be a religion. True enough, this concept may be open to the charge of being based on "old-fashioned morality," but the fact is that the American Church was until recently the last major repository of any reasoned or reasonable concept of morality in the United States, and that, if the Universal Church should decide to submit to the current moral fashion of permissiveness, she will have abandoned her authority at the one critical period in history when it was needed most. To say "authority," of course, is not to say the medieval or autocratic authority wielded by a prelate like Cardinal McIntyre [of Los Angeles]. But neither is the solution to the abuse of authority a swing of the pendulum to the extreme of permissiveness. Furthermore, the world judges itself by its own standards, and these are as much a compound of sin, selfishness and blind materialism as of nobility, energy and efficiency. In truth, the world has only one standard: success. Is the Church founded by the Divine Failure to make the standard of success the norm to which it must adapt itself? Can it really "secularize" Christianity, as so many spokesmen for the New Breed are urging, without become secular--even as liberal Protestantism?

Again to quote Maritain, a thinker whose theories had much to do with the advent of aggiornamento: "Like Christ, the Church is of God, not of the world. And we have to choose to be friends of the world, or friends of God." This is a hard saying, but since when was Christianity a facile faith? From Jesus Christ himself came repeated warnings against the world. The Gospel of St. John is full of them. "The world cannot hate you, but me it hateth: because I give testimony of it, the works thereof are evil." "In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world." "My kingdom is not of this world." St. James, Christ's own kinsman, was ever harsher. "Adulterers, know you know that the friendship of the world is the enemy of God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of this world, becometh an enemy of God." "Love not the world or the things of the world."

It may well be argued by the New Breed that it would be cowardly for the Church not to confront modernity, that it would be a betrayal of the Holy Spirit for her not to divest herself of the spiritual strait jacket laced about her by the defensive strictures of the Council of Trent [Droleskey note: the Council of Trent, of course, met under the direction of God the Holy Ghost]. To this, none but an ostrich could say anything other than "Amen!" Nevertheless, both rapport and rapprochement imply an exchange of views between parties meeting under their own standards. Anything else is submission. Thus, if the world's standard is success, then the Church should strive to understand it more clearly; she should belittle it less and also abandon her own emphasis on resignation or the traveler complex. But she must never forget that her own standard is the Cross, the crucified Christ, "unto the Jews indeed a stumbling block and unto the Gentiles foolishness." Is it possible that today's Gentiles, for which read secularism or modernity, are preparing to alter this attitude? Hardly. The religious revival of the late forties and the fifties is already on the wane, dying quickly down like a paper fire. The twentieth century no longer appears a particularly auspicious one for religion. In the Catholic Church, conversions have fallen off sharply and attendance and collections, under the impact of the defection of many of the older Catholics who feel that they have been turned out of their ancestral home by the innovations of the New Breed, are also down. Other religions report similar hard times. At an interfaith meeting in Istanbul in February of 1969, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto and Zoroastrian representatives all testified to a reduction in growth.

The problems appear to be one of indifferentism, a kind of religious leveling which regards any faith as just as good as the next one, and all as the product of human speculation and regulation. No creed, says indifferentism, can speak with authority or certainty. The Catholic Church, of course, always did--claiming Christ as its invisible and the Pope as its visible head. but now, Christ and his cross are glossed over and the Pope is ignored. The scrape the barnacles of the centuries from the bark of Peter the New Breed appears willing to stove in the planking as well, and Christianity is cleansed by washing Christ away. This is not exaggeration. In many Catholic colleges and universities today the teaching of the Pope counts for so little that his decisions on such matters as birth control are not only discounted or defied by his very magisterium is made a debatable question. [Droleskey note: This was because the "pope," Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, was no pope at all. He was a man who defied anathematized propositions and embraced errors and heresies that had been condemned consistently by the Catholic Church.]

As for Jesus Christ, one might well enter any of these institutions or one of the new Catholic churches and say, with Mary Magdalene: "They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him." True enough, the colleges are ending an era when lay teachers were looked upon as clerical employees rather than associates, or when all scholarship had to be undertaken "under correction," and in the simplicity, grace and function of some contemporary church architecture one might well say that here are wood, stone and steel speaking with the very spirit of our times. Nevertheless, one must still ask: Where is Christ? Is he at Notre Dame, now under lay control, where one professor of theology attacks the resurrection and another the papal pronouncements on birth control, or at St. Peter's College [in Jersey City, New Jersey], where a third teaches "Marxist Christianity," whatever that is? Is he on the Catholic campus at all? One must doubt it, if one judges from the poll of students of sixty-nine Catholic colleges which put Jesus Christ as the fifth most important man in history and John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert as Numbers One and Two. Here is Christianity not only cleansed of its Founder, here is the testimony to the absolute failure of the history departments in Catholic education. If not Christ first in history, then certainly Alexander or Augustus, Moses or Buddha, Socrates or Aristotle, Galileo or Columbus, Lenin or Luther, or any of those geniuses after whom mankind was never the same--but the Kennedy brothers? Is this the New Breed's triumph over parochialism?

To seek for Christ on many college campuses, then, appears to be a vain search indeed. If He is there at all, it is often as a simple man, a fanatic perhaps, who only gradually became conscious of His having issued from God, and whose virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, etc., all may be reduced to the natural order. To find Him in the writings of the New Breed, except as a perfunctory bow in some final or omnibus paragraph, is most difficult indeed. One may read chapter after chapter in a New Breed apostle such as Father Greeley (who offers John Kennedy as a Doctor of the Church!) and not see His name at all, nor that of God, His Almighty Father. One will find, however, frequent allusions to the Holy Spirit, which seems suggest that the "renewed" American Church might be preparing to come down heavily on the third person of the Holy Trinity.

Although the Holy Spirit is frequently mentioned in the New Testament, He may actually be quite acceptable to the modern world. He has no virgin birth, no reincarnation, no hypostatic union, or resurrection, or miracles or ignominious death to be defended against the doubters of modernity. Nor is a creator God like the Father Almighty, which removes all necessity to defend design against accident; or the deity who made a compact with the Jews, thus making His uncomfortable entry into human history, His unseemly entry, even, if one remembers Him as "the God of Battles." But the Holy Spirit has never appeared on earth, like Jesus Christ who trod the soil and drank the wine of Judea; or the Father Almighty, who spoke to Abraham and Isaac, changed Jacob's name to Israel and appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush. It is true that the Virgin Mary was conceived by the Holy Spirit [Droleskey note: Our Lady was preserved from all stain of Original and Actual Sin as she was conceived in the natural manner; Our Lord was conceived in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost], but inasmuch as the virgin birth is already in question, this does not seem too great a difficulty in the way of reconciling Catholicism with the modern world. Otherwise, the Holy Spirit does not do anything. He merely "inspires" and "comes upon" people is "received" by them, or else He is invoked. But he is not an actor in human history, and He is therefore a much more comfortable or convenient God than the other members of the Holy Trinity. thus, one may expect to hear rather more about Him and less about Christ from the missionaries of the New Breed. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 364-368.) 

One will see that Leckie was confused on a number of points, not the least of which was concerning the working God the Holy Ghost in the life of the Church as it is He Who is our Sanctifier, He Whose working through the Sacraments makes it possible for us to receive Sanctifying Grace. The point that Leckie seems to have been making, however imprecise in terminology, is nevertheless valid. That is, the conciliar revolutionaries, of whom the then Father Joseph Ratzinger was a leading light, emphasized the "direct" impulse of God the Holy Ghost within souls as a means to ignore and then totally override the immutable teaching of the Catholic Church. Even though he seems not to have realized the contradiction, Leckie was criticizing the very phenomenon of Americanism that he had dismissed as but a "phantom heresy" earlier in his book. Mr. Leckie was incapable of realizing that the very problems he critiqued in the final pages of his book were the result of the Americanist seeds that had been planted in the Nineteenth Century by the Americanist cardinals and bishops whom he viewed as attempting to "release" the Church from the "strait jacket" that had been "imposed" by the Council of Trent, which was indeed the work of God the Holy Ghost.

Pope Leo XIII understood the false prophetic spirit of Americanism's penchant for relying upon the "direct inspiration" of God the Holy Ghost in souls as though He did not speak definitively to men through the magisterium of the Holy Church, which can never contradict itself as there not a shadow of contradiction, change or paradox within the Most Blessed Trinity:

And shall any one who recalls the history of the apostles, the faith of the nascent church, the trials and deaths of the martyrs- and, above all, those olden times, so fruitful in saints-dare to measure our age with these, or affirm that they received less of the divine outpouring from the Spirit of Holiness? Not to dwell upon this point, there is no one who calls in question the truth that the Holy Spirit does work by a secret descent into the souls of the just and that He stirs them alike by warnings and impulses, since unless this were the case all outward defense and authority would be unavailing. "For if any persuades himself that he can give assent to saving, that is, to gospel truth when proclaimed, without any illumination of the Holy Spirit, who give's unto all sweetness both to assent and to hold, such an one is deceived by a heretical spirit."-From the Second Council of Orange, Canon 7.

Moreover, as experience shows, these monitions and impulses of the Holy Spirit are for the most part felt through the medium of the aid and light of an external teaching authority. To quote St. Augustine. "He (the Holy Spirit) co-operates to the fruit gathered from the good trees, since He externally waters and cultivates them by the outward ministry of men, and yet of Himself bestows the inward increase."-De Gratia Christi, Chapter xix. This, indeed, belongs to the ordinary law of God's loving providence that as He has decreed that men for the most part shall be saved by the ministry also of men, so has He wished that those whom He calls to the higher planes of holiness should be led thereto by men; hence St. Chrysostom declares we are taught of God through the instrumentality of men.-Homily I in Inscrib. Altar. Of this a striking example is given us in the very first days of the Church.

For though Saul, intent upon blood and slaughter, had heard the voice of our Lord Himself and had asked, "What dost Thou wish me to do?" yet he was bidden to enter Damascus and search for Ananias. Acts ix: "Enter the city and it shall be there told to thee what thou must do."

Nor can we leave out of consideration the truth that those who are striving after perfection, since by that fact they walk in no beaten or well-known path, are the most liable to stray, and hence have greater need than others of a teacher and guide. Such guidance has ever obtained in the Church; it has been the universal teaching of those who throughout the ages have been eminent for wisdom and sanctity-and hence to reject it would be to commit one's self to a belief at once rash and dangerous.

A thorough consideration of this point, in the supposition that no exterior guide is granted such souls, will make us see the difficulty of locating or determining the direction and application of that more abundant influx of the Holy Spirit so greatly extolled by innovators To practice virtue there is absolute need of the assistance of the Holy Spirit, yet we find those who are fond of novelty giving an unwarranted importance to the natural virtues, as though they better responded to the customs and necessities of the times and that having these as his outfit man becomes more ready to act and more strenuous in action. It is not easy to understand how persons possessed of Christian wisdom can either prefer natural to supernatural virtues or attribute to them a greater efficacy and fruitfulness. Can it be that nature conjoined with grace is weaker than when left to herself? (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

The "New Breed" about which Robert Leckie complained so much in the final pages of American and Catholic was not so "new" after all. The members of this "new breed" were simply the embodiment of an ethos that had been promoted by American bishops for a long time, an ethos that Pope Leo XIII recognized as false and condemned in a true prophetic sense as being opposed to the good of souls and thus of the civil state itself.

Leckie, though, certainly had some interesting insights concerning the revolution that had been brewing for centuries but had made itself fully manifest in the 1960s and thereafter. The problems that Leckie cited have not improved. They have worsened. They must continue to worsen in the counterfeit church of conciliarism as that which is false cannot help but worsen over the course of time.

Two more sets of excerpts from the final pages of American and Catholic will be provided to demonstrate the fact that even a man who was confused about the root causes of the problems he critiqued had a few insights that are as true today as they were forty-nine years ago now:

Whether or not this shift in emphasis is conscious or deliberate is difficult to say. In fairness, it should be suggested that many who embrace it are perhaps not aware of the consequences more than they perceive the destructiveness of the popular new theories advanced by the late French Jesuit, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. They apparently are not disturbed by theories which turn Christianity upside-down. Teilhard has gotten rid of the Fall and Original Sin and the consequent need for a Redeemer. Catholic Christianity always held to the Incarnation, the proposition that God who made man became man to save what He had made. The story of Adam and Eve and the Fall shows that man was not equal to God's great gamble of free will. He preferred himself to God. This was the first sin, Original Sin, and after it man was unable to help himself. He had to have a Redeemer, and he was Christ the Savior. To Teilhard, however, the God-man is not Jesus the Savior but "the evolutionary principle of universe in motion." To simplify, and admittedly only a trained philosopher or theologian should attempt to simplify a writer as difficult as Teilhard, he has put perfection at the end of creation, not at the start, where it was lost and only to be regained through the merits of Christ the Redeemer. In short, the is really no need for Jesus Christ.

Again looking for Christ: is he in the Churches? Certainly he is present in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar [Droleskey note: well, not really], and some "old-fashioned" churches still represent him on their crucifixes or in their stained-glass windows. But there are many Catholic parishes in America where the crucifix has been taken down, along with those too-disturbing stations of the cross so crudely daubed with red paint, and a Catholic of another century entering some contemporary churches could be forgiven if he thought he had stumbled by accident into, say, a Quaker meetinghouse. Charming in a chaste and simple way, some of the new design seems to arrive at this quiet beauty by the simple expedient of excluding anything powerful, harsh, or provactive--especially the crucifix--which might suggest a religion based on sacrifice and suffering. Once again, the baby has vanished with the bath; and so, the new design is not actually simply but only bland. Our God is no longer a Jealous God. he is the Permissive One, and we must not embarrass Him with anything but the must demure devotion. Yearning for the old atmosphere of the sacral and the reverent, the traditionalist had better get him to a bank or a brokerage house, where the Sons of Mammon, at least, still take their god seriously. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, p. 368.) 

These are excellent insights of a believing Catholic. Robert Leckie was sixty years of age when he wrote American and Catholic. He saw that something was happening, and many of his insights, such as the ones in the paragraph just above, save for his belief that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was still in the tabernacles of Catholic churches, were profound and even prophetic. What’s the excuse for others not seeing this today?

Even though Mr. Leckie believed that Mass in the vernacular was commendable, he did see that the new order of things liturgically had introduced a bewildering spectacle resembling the worship of Ba’al atop Mount Carmel:

Even the sacrifice of the Mass has become a source of dismay to the traditionalist. For the liturgical reformers to have achieved their great objective of having Latin all but abolished form the Roman rite and the various vernaculars put in its place was truly an attainment of the highest order, and one on which they would deserve congratulation, had they not celebrated their success by introducing such indecencies as the "tom-tom mass," the so-called "folk mass" accompanied by guitars in the hands of youths who know ever so much more about Christianity that their elders. Apparently, to the New Breed, the acorn is worth more than the oak, and the adult is the ruination of the child. As a result, many older Catholics, devout people who suffered social ostracism or lost advancement or employment because of their courageous witness to their religion, men and women who sacrificed for years for the faith that they loved, have simply walked out of the American Church in disgust. For them, all the awe and reverence and mystery has gone out of the Mass. Chesterton said that all drama must be a foot above the ground, but the drama of the new Mass is now on everybody's level--and perhaps even a little lower.

The new liturgy, they feel, is soulless. It may be more accurate as a result of biblical scholarship, but it has no poetry in it. Thus, many older Catholics say, in effect, that if they were asked to swear on the new Bible they would not feel obliged to the truth. Traditionalist horror, however, only amuses some of the New Breed, especially the members of the New Breed, specially members of the so-called "Underground Church," who find any attachment to "old-fashioned" ritual or "archaic" parochialism a kind of quaint Neaderthalism. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 368-370.)

The “new liturgy” is soulless because it is not of God and results in the loss of Faith and an increase of agnosticism and atheism to the point that the naturalism preached by Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his band of rebels, miscreants, dreamers and heretics is the foundation to the false doctrines, invalid and sacrilegious liturgical rites and moral relativism they preach and make the basis for liturgy and pastoral practice.

Robert Leckie could not see this in 1970, but he sure saw a lot of the problems back then that many of us did not see—and that some of us, including this writer, refused to see clearly despite the admonitions of others for a very long time thereafter. At this point, however, one must be culpably blind not to see and to admit the apostasy that is at hand and that that in Catholicism it is black and white, yea or nay, “this” or “that,” truth or error, Christ or chaos.

On the Feast of Saint Frances of Rome

Today is the Feast of Saint Frances of Rome, who tried even as a married woman to avoid the vanities of life, including, “as far as possible from going to shows, feast, and such like amusements,” setting an example that we should follow in our own lives but especially during this penitential season of Lent.

Here is the account of her life as included in Matins for today’s Divine Office:

The noble Roman matron Frances was born in the year 1384, and was a pattern of godliness from her earliest years. As a child she shrank from games, and set no store by the amusements of the world, but delighted to be continually alone and engaged in prayer. At the age of eleven years she desired to consecrate her virginity to God, and to enter a convent, but humbly yielded obedience to the wishes of her parents, and was married to Lawrence de' Pontiani, a young man whose rank was equal to his wealth. As a wife she persevered, as far as she lawfully could, in her determination to lead an austere life; she abstained as much as possible from going to shows, feasts, and such like amusements, dressed plainly in woollen stuffs, and spent in prayer or the service of her neighbour whatever time she did not occupy with her duties as mistress of her husband's house. She strove earnestly to wean the married women of Rome from the vanities of the world and the frivolities of dress. To this end she founded during her husband's lifetime the Sisterhood of the Oblates, under the rule of the Benedictine congregation called of the Mount of Olives. When it pleased God, (in the year 1413,) that her husband should be banished, all her goods taken away, and her home ruined, she meekly bowed down before His holy will, often repeating the words of the blessed Job The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. i. 21.

On her husband's death she (in 1437) betook herself immediately to the house of the Oblates, and, with her feet bare and a rope round her neck, threw herself down on the threshold, entreating the sisters with tears to receive her into their number. When she obtained her wish, although she was the mother of them all, she would be among them only as one that served, glorying rather to be called the most degraded of women and a vessel of uncleanness. Her lowly esteem of herself was shown both by her word and example. She passed often through the city from a vineyard in the country carrying a bundle of sticks on her head, or driving an ass laden with faggots; she succoured the needy, for whom she collected large alms, and visited the sick in the hospitals, ministering to them both food for the body and exhortations healthful for their souls. She strove continually to bring her body into subjection by watchings, fastings, haircloth, the wearing of an iron girdle, and the often use of a scourge. She never ate but once a day, and then only vegetables, and she took no drink but water. These severities she however sometimes relaxed, in obedience to her confessor, on whose word and wishes she framed her customs.

So great was her mental realisation of the things of God, and chiefly of the sufferings of the Lord Christ, and so abundant her tears in contemplating them, that she seemed sometimes about to sink under her grief. Often when she was engaged in prayer, and principally after she had received the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, her spirit became altogether lifted up to God, and she remained motionless, carried away by the thought of heavenly things. The enemy of man assailed her with divers reproaches and buffetings to break her off her intent, but she feared him not, and with the help of an Angel whom God gave her to be her familiar friend, she won a noble victory over the tempter. God glorified her with the gifts of healing and of prophecy, whereby she foretold things to come, and saw the secrets of the hearts of men. More than once while her thoughts were busy in God she remained unwet by streams or rain. When there was left only bread enough for three sisters, the Lord at her prayers was pleased so to multiply it, that fifteen had enough, and the basket was filled again with the fragments. In the month of January also, when the sisters were gathering sticks in the country, and were thirsty, she satisfied them abundantly with bunches of fresh grapes from a tree. She departed to be with the Lord, famous for good works and miracles, in the fifty-sixth year of her age, (upon the 9th day of March, in the year of our Lord 1440.) The Supreme Pontiff Paul V. caused her to be numbered among the saints. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saint Frances of Rome. For a fascinating account of Saint Frances of Rome’s life, please see Story of a Soul: Saint Frances of Rome.)

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., composed a prayer in honor of Saint Frances of Rome that we should make our own on this her feast day so as to be inspired by the sentiments the Abbot of Solemses expressed in her honor to follow her example now and to the very hour of our death:

O Frances, sublime model of every virtue! thou wast the glory of Christian Rome, and the ornament of thy sex. How insignificant are the pagan heroines of old compared with thee! Thy fidelity to the duties of thy state, and all thy earthly actions, had God for their one single end and motive. The world looked on thee with amazement, as though heaven had lent one of its angels to this earth. Humility and penance put such energy into thy soul, that every trial was met and mastered. Thy love for those whom God Himself had given the, thy calm resignation and interior joy under tribulation, thy simple and generous charity, to every neighbor—all was evidence of God’s dwelling within thy soul. Thy seeing and conversing with thy angel guardian, and the wonderful revelations granted thee of the secrets of the other world, how much these favours tell us of they merits! Nature suspended her laws at thy bidding; she was subservient to thee, as to one that was already face to face with the sovereign Master, and had the power to command. We admire these privileges and gifts granted thee by our Lord: and now beseech thee to have pity on us, who are so far from being in that path, in which thou didst so perseveringly walk. Pray for us, that we may be Christians, practically and earnestly, that we may cease to love the world and its vanities; that we may courageously take up the yoke of our Lord, and do penance; that we may give up our pride; that we may be patient and firm under temptation. Such was thy influence with our heavenly Father, that thou hadst but to pray, and a vine produced the richest clusters of fruit, even in the midst of winter. Our Jesus calls Himself the true Vine; ask Him to give us of the wine of His divine love, which His cross hast so richly prepared for us. When we remember to how frequently thou didst ask Him to let thee suffer, and accept thy sufferings for poor sinners, we fell encourage to ask thee to offer thy merits to Him for us. Pray, too, for Rome, thy native city, that her people may be stanch to the faith, edifying by holiness of life, and loyal to the Church. May thy powerful intercession bring blessings on the faithful throughout the world, and to their number, and make them fervent as were our fathers of old. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year: Volume IV: Septuagesima, pp. 341-343.)

We must strive to follow the path of Saint Frances of Rome to Heaven, but for this we, who are not blessed with mystical revelations or to see our Guardian Angels must turn to Our Lady with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as they must be to Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart and to remember to as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, especially during his penitential season of Lent, which is only its fourth day now.

We can must make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world by enslaving ourselves to her Divine Son through her Immaculate Heart, giving unto whatever merit we earn each day so that she can dispose of that merit however she sees fit for the honor and glory of the Most Holy Trinity and for the good of souls in the Church Suffering in Purgatory and here in the Church Militant on earth.

The final victory belongs to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. We must consider it a privilege that we are alive in these times to plant a few seeds for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and for the restoration of Christendom in the world.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Andrew the Apostle, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Frances of Rome, pray for us.