L'Osservatore Eretico, part two

The casual manner by which the current editors of L’Osservatore Romano published an article denying the doctrine of Original Sin and the existence of the devil demonstrates yet again that the conciliar religion is not the same thing as Catholicism. It is really unfathomable that anyone who believes himself to be a member of the Catholic Church, no less anyone who acts in either an “official” or “semi-official” capacity could take any suggestion that there is no Original Sin or devil seriously.

However, the state of things conciliar is such that the entirety of the Sacred Deposit of Faith is up for grabs, and this is principally because many of the conciliar revolutionaries are practicing sodomites and Marxist ideologues of one stripe or another at the same time as those who rebel against God and against their own nature by immersing themselves in the perverse depravity of sodomy and all other forms of unnatural vice must “prove” that they are “good” people by committing themselves to what they call is “social justice” but is really a shield to cover their own moral degradation.

Those who put into question or outrightly deny the doctrine of Original Sin must perforce lose all sense of horror and dread about their own personal sins as they come to create a “social morality” that defines “sin” as climate change denialism, vaccine denialism, opposition to open borders and everything defined as “justice” by one world government globalists. Anyone is opposed to the direct, intentional killing of the innocent preborn without support the ideologues’ own magisterial pronouncements must be denounced as enemies of “justice,” and those who denounce “inclusive” misfits who identify as “LGBTQIMNOP” must be proclaimed “haters” who lack “compassion” for those who consider themselves on a “journey” to “find” “love,” “understanding,” and “acceptance.”

This just did not happen as there has been a systematic effort in philosophical circles since the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the early Eighteenth Century during the so-called Enlightenment to deny the doctrine of Original Sin and thus to contend that human beings are not inclined to sin and that they are the sole determinants of what constitutes what is “right” or “wrong” for them on purely subjective considerations “learned” from their own “experiences,” which are the only true “teachers” of men.

Father Denis Fahey explained that the attempt to eliminate any thought of Original Sin from the minds of men predated Darwinism as it was the active goal of Freemasonry to do so:

To the triumph of those ideals in the modern world, the Masonic denial of original sin and the Rousseauist dogma of the natural goodness of man have contributed not a little. The dogma of natural goodness signifies that man lived originally in a purely natural paradise of happiness and goodness and that, even in our present degraded state, all our instinctive movements are good. We do not need grace, for nature can do for what grace does. In addition, Rousseau holds that this state of happiness and goodness, of perfect justice and innocence, of exemption from servile work and suffering, is natural to man, that is, essentially demanded by our nature. Not only then is original sin nonexistent, not only do we not come into the world as fallen sons of the first Adam, bearing in us the wounds of our fallen nature, is radically anti-natural. Suffering and pain have been introduced by society, civilization and private property. Hence we must get rid of all these and set up a new form of society. We can bet back the state of the Garden of Eden by the efforts of our own nature, without the help of grace. For Rousseau, the introduction of the present form of society, and of private property constitute the real Fall. The setting up of a republic based on his principles will act as a sort of democratic grace which will restore in its entirety our lost heritage. In a world where the clear teaching of the faith of Christ about the supernatural order of the Life of Grace has become obscured, but were men are still vaguely conscious that human nature was once happy, Rousseau’s appeal acts like an urge of homesickness. We need not be astonished, then, apart from the question of Masonic-Revolutionary organization and propaganda, at the sort of delirious enthusiasm which takes possession of men at the thought of a renewal of society. Nor need we wonder that men work for the overthrow of existing government and existing order, in the belief that they are not legitimate forms of society. A State not constructed according to Rosseauist-Masonic principles is not a State ruled by laws. It is a monstrous tyranny, and must be overthrown in the name of "Progress" and of the "onward march of democracy.’ All these influences must be borne in mind as we behold, since 1789, the triumph in one country after another or Rousseauist-Masonic democracy. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

As Pope Leo XIII noted in Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891, men must be plunged into the darkness of error and thus prone to worship of the passing things of this earth once they lose sight of futurity:

But the Church, with Jesus Christ as her Master and Guide, aims higher still. She lays down precepts yet more perfect, and tries to bind class to class in friendliness and good feeling. The things of earth cannot be understood or valued aright without taking into consideration the life to come, the life that will know no death. Exclude the idea of futurity, and forthwith the very notion of what is good and right would perish; nay, the whole scheme of the universe would become a dark and unfathomable mystery. The great truth which we learn from nature herself is also the grand Christian dogma on which religion rests as on its foundation -- that, when we have given up this present life, then shall we really begin to live. God has not created us for the perishable and transitory things of earth, but for things heavenly and everlasting; He has given us this world as a place of exile, and not as our abiding place. As for riches and the other things which men call good and desirable, whether we have them in abundance, or are lacking in them -- so far as eternal happiness is concerned -- it makes no difference; the only important thing is to use them aright. Jesus Christ, when He redeemed us with plentiful redemption, took not away the pains and sorrows which in such large proportion are woven together in the web of our mortal life. He transformed them into motives of virtue and occasions of merit; and no man can hope for eternal reward unless he follow in the blood-stained footprints of his Savior. "If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him." Christ's labors and sufferings, accepted of His own free will, have marvelously sweetened all suffering and all labor. And not only by His example, but by His grace and by the hope held forth of everlasting recompense, has He made pain and grief more easy to endure; "for that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation, worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory." (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891.)

Pope Leo XIII had elaborated on this subject seven years previously in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1888:

Wherefore we see that men are publicly tempted by the many allurements of pleasure; that there are journals and pamphlets with neither moderation nor shame; that stage-plays are remarkable for license; that designs for works of art are shamelessly sought in the laws of a so-called verism; that the contrivances of a soft and delicate life are most carefully devised; and that all the blandishments of pleasure are diligently sought out by which virtue may be lulled to sleep. Wickedly, also, but at the same time quite consistently, do those act who do away with the expectation of the joys of heaven, and bring down all happiness to the level of mortality, and, as it were, sink it in the earth. Of what We have said the following fact, astonishing not so much in itself as in its open expression, may serve as a confirmation. For, since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and proposed that, artfully and of set purpose, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless license of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring. . . .

With the greatest unanimity the sect of the Freemasons also endeavors to take to itself the education of youth. They think that they can easily mold to their opinions that soft and pliant age, and bend it whither they will; and that nothing can be more fitted than this to enable them to bring up the youth of the State after their own plan. Therefore, in the education and instruction of children they allow no share, either of teaching or of discipline, to the ministers of the Church; and in many places they have procured that the education of youth shall be exclusively in the hands of laymen, and that nothing which treats of the most important and most holy duties of men to God shall be introduced into the instructions on morals. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884)

It was thirty-five years later that Father Edward Cahill, S.J., wrote the following in the Irish Ecclesiastical Review about the goals of Judeo-Masonry to subvert the family by means of state control of education and their own control of culture:

The immediate aim of the practical policy of Freemasonry is to make its naturalistic principles effective in the lives of the people; and first of all to enforce them in every detail of public life. Hence its political and social programme includes:

(1) The banishment of religion from all departments of government, and from all public institutions; and as a mark of the triumph of this policy, the removal of the Crucifix and all religious emblems from the legislative assemblies, the courts of justice, the public hospitals, the schools and university colleges, etc. (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, published originally by M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., in Dublin, Ireland, 1930, and republished by Kessinger Legacy Reprints, pp. 156-157.)

(2) The secularization of marriage.

(3) The establishment of a State system of so-called education which, at least in its primary stages, will be obligatory and conducted by the laity.

(4) Complete freedom of worship (at least for all except the true one.) (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, published originally by M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., in Dublin, Ireland, 1930, and republished by Kessinger Legacy Reprints, p. 157.)

So-called “public education,” including higher education (colleges, universities, professional schools), has been the adversary’s most effective weapon to advance and to institutionalize the Judeo-Masonic agenda outlined by Father Edward Cahill ninety-seven years ago in a serialized manner before it was published subsequently in book form.

Another contributor to the eclipse of a belief in Original Sin was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who believed there is a “conflict” between the present and the past that will result in “progress” for the future was based on the false principle of the Hegelian dialectic, which contends that an original thesis contains within itself the seeds of its very contradiction, the antithesis, and that the clash between the two produces the new “thesis,” that is, the synthesis. Hegel believed that the ultimate result of this clash would be the “ideal” thesis, at which point the dialectic would cease.

The evolutionary principle of a dialectical clash is a cornerstone of the Judeo-Masonic world of Modernity and its trust that “progress” is inevitable. Hegelianism influenced Karl Marx’s view of history, although he believed that he had turned it “right side up” by identifying the clash of economic classes (dialectical materialism) as opposed to Hegel’s clash of competing ideas (dialectical idealism). Charles Darwin’s own, disproved ideology of the evolution of the species made its own contribution upon the Modernity’s march toward “progress.” John Dewey, the ideological father of the content and direction of what is said to be “public education,” was a believer both in the evolution of the species and in the evolution of society in the direct of “progress.”

Dewey admitted Darwinism’s influence upon his own ideology as follows:

The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the doctrine of evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of simpler and more complex organic forms until we reach man. The development of organic forms begins with structures where the adjustment of environment and organism is obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is at a minimum. As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater number of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a more and more marked role, for it has a larger span of the future to forecast and plan for. The effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion that it is the activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world, the notion which goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in itself. For the doctrine of organic development means that the living creature is a part of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes, and making itself secure in its precarious dependence only as it intellectually identifies itself with the things about it, and, forecasting the future consequences of what is going on, shapes its own activities accordingly. If the living, experiencing being is an intimate participant in the activities of the world to which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the degree in which it is effective. It cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator.

(iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of getting knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere opinion -- the method of both discovery and proof -- is the remaining great force in bringing about a transformation in the theory of knowledge. The experimental method has two sides. (i) On one hand, it means that we have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has actually produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with and confirm the conception entertained. Short of such specific changes, our beliefs are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and are to be entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of experiments to be tried. (ii) On the other hand, the experimental method of thinking signifies that thinking is of avail; that it is of avail in just the degree in which the anticipation of future consequences is made on the basis of thorough observation of present conditions. Experimentation, in other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting. Such surplus activity -- a surplus with reference to what has been observed and is now anticipated -- is indeed an unescapable factor in all our behavior, but it is not experiment save as consequences are noted and are used to make predictions and plans in similar situations in the future. The more the meaning of the experimental method is perceived, the more our trying out of a certain way of treating the material resources and obstacles which confront us embodies a prior use of intelligence. What we call magic was with respect to many things the experimental method of the savage; but for him to try was to try his luck, not his ideas. The scientific experimental method is, on the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically -- or immediately -- unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful. (John Dewey, Democracy and Education, published by Macmillan in 1916, p. 323.)

To believe that man has evolved from apes results in a world where most men devolve into acting like apes, and it is to reaffirm primal ape-like behavior that public miseducation and its reliance upon junk science such as evolutionism is directed in order to produce the “productive” servant of the civil state. Some progress, huh?

There is but one word to describe the “contributions” of the likes of Hegel and Dewey, et al.: Sophistry. (Marxism, of course, is a “species,” if you will, based frankly on an anti-Theistic view of man and thus of the world.)

The late Father John Anthony Hardon, S.J., explained how John Dewey drew on the perverse patrimony of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin to oppose all forms of religious education for children and young adults:

Correlative to the scientific and industrial revolutions in the fields of knowledge and economy, there has been a democratic revolution in the political structure of government. And the democratic revolution means nothing, in Dewey's hypothesis, if not the destruction of barriers between different strata of the population. "It is fatal for a democracy to permit the formation of fixed classes,"[27] social, cultural or religious. And since education is a participation in social life, it must correspond to and promote the society in which it shares. "For education," also, therefore, "the distinction of classes must be definitely done away with. Such is the principle, the law, that dominates the whole social conception of education."[28]

An immediate corollary to this socialistic ideal is to give all the citizens of a democracy equal and unlimited educational opportunities. For this reason, "the devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact."[29]

But Dewey is not satisfied with "the superficial explanation that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated."[30] The real reason why education in a democracy is of its very essence is that "a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority [and] must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education."[31]

Summarily, therefore, the end of democratic education is to form a classless society, in which social stratification has disappeared.

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.... Obviously a society to which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must-see to it that intellectual opportunities are accessible toall on equable and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need be specially attentive only to the educationof its ruling elements.[32]

But, as the history of economics teaches us, in such a society "a small group . . . were free to devote themselves to higher things . . . because they lived upon the fruits of the labor of an industrially enslaved class."[33] Only in a classless society, promoted by socialized education, can we be spared "the confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others."[34]

OPPOSITION TO RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOLS

Consistent with his attitude toward religion, as seen in a previous article,[36] we should not expect Dewey to favor religious instruction in American public schools. However, we might not be prepared for the violent opposition to such instruction which he steadily maintained from his earliest years in education.

Writing in 1908 in the London Hibbert Journal, under the title, "Religion and Our Schools," Dewey observed:

If one inquires why the American tradition is so strong against any connection of state and church, why it dreads even the rudiments of religious teaching in state-maintained schools, the immediate and superficial answer is not far to seek. The cause was not, mainly, religious indifference, much less hostility to Christianity, although the eighteenth century deism played an important role. The cause lay largely in the diversity and vitality of the various denominations, each fairly sure that, with a fair field and no favour, it could make its own way; and each animated by a jealous fear that, if any connection of state and church were permitted, some rival denomination would get an unfair advantage.[36]

But this, he said, is only a superficial answer to the question:

...there was a deeper and by no means wholly unconscious influence at work. The United States became a nation late enough in the history of the world to profit by the growth of that modern (although Greek) thing — the state consciousness. This nation was born under conditions which enabled it to share in and to appropriate the idea that the state life, the vitality of the social whole, is of more importance than the flourishing of any segment or class. Sofar as church institutions were concerned, the doctrine of popular sovereignty was a reality, not a literary or legal fiction. Upon the economic side, the nation was born too soon to learn the full force of the state idea as against the class idea. Our fathers naively dreamed of the continuation of pioneer conditions and the free opportunity of every individual, and took none of the precautions to maintain the supremacy of the state over that of the class, which newer commonwealths are taking. For that lack of foresight we are paying dearly, and are likely to pay more dearly. But the lesson of the two and a half centuries lying between the Protestant revolt and the formation of the nation was well learned as respected the necessity of maintaining the integrity of the state against all divisive ecclesiastical divisions. Doubtless many of our ancestors would have been somewhat shocked to realize the full logic of their own attitude with respect to the subordination of churches to the state (falsely termed the separation of church and state); but the state idea was inherently of such vitality and constructive force as to carry the practical result, with or without conscious perception of its philosophy.[37]

This analysis, it must be admitted, is penetrating. It gives a logical but unhistorical basis for the opposition to religious instruction in the American public schools. The decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in the McCollum case was not based on Dewey's principles or his interpretation of American history. This decision outlawed the use of public school machinery and specifically of classrooms for religious instruction. In its majority opinion, the Court said that the practice of teaching religion in the public school fell "squarely under the ban of the First Amendment, as we interpreted it in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). There we said: ‘Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a Church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.'"[38] It is only logical that such a controversial subject as religion should be banned from public institutions of learning. The common good of the state as a political unit requires that anything which divides the citizens into hostile camps should be outlawed.

However, Dewey goes beyond this position. Not only does he oppose any kind of religious teaching in public schools, but he claims that only such schools — minus religion — are promoting the common good, which is the unity of the state. The one thing, he said, "which has done most to discredit the churches, and to discredit the cause . . . of organized religion [is]the multiplication of rival and competing religious bodies, each with its private interpretation and outlook."[39] Such division of peoples of different religions is fatal to political unity. And church-supported schools which teach their respective religions are fostering this discord. On the other hand, he maintained:

Our [public] schools, in bringing together those of different nationalities, languages, traditions, and creeds, in assimilating them together upon the basis of what is common and public in endeavour and achievement, are performing an infinitely significant religious work. They are promoting the social unit out of which in the end genuine religious unit must grow. Shall we interfere with this work? shall we run the risk of undoing it by introducing into education a subject which can be taught only by segregating pupils . . . ? This would be deliberately to adopt a scheme which is predicated upon the maintenance of social divisions in just the matter, religion, which is empty and futile save as it expresses the basic unities of life.[40]

And finally, in line with his distinction between "religion" and "religious" already seen,[41] he concludes that "schools are more religious in substance and in promise without any of the conventional badges and machinery of religious instruction, than they could be in cultivating hese forms at the expense of a state-consciousness."[42]

When Paul Blanshard published in 1949 his attack on the Catholic Church under the title, American Freedom and Catholic Power, John Dewey praised the book, saying, "Mr. Blanshard has done a difficult and necessary piece of work with exemplary scholarship, good judgment, and tact." This recommendation appears on the jacket of the book and is signed, "John Dewey, Dean of American Philosophers." Dewey's influence may be seen throughout Blanshard's work. His two chapters against American Catholic schools conclude with the following quotation from Dewey, arguing against any government support for Catholic education: "`It is essential that this basic issue be seen for what it is — namely, as the encouragement of a powerful reactionary world organization in the most vital realm of democratic life, with the resulting promulgation of principles inimical to democracy.'"[43] (John Dewey--Radical Social Educator.)

John Dewey’s pragmatism is all about conditioning children to be docile servants of the civil state and to live only according to their own subjective considerations as long as these are in accord with our masters encourage us to act, which is why are so many “teen takeovers” in cities across the United States of America that are nothing other than the sort of barbarism that occurs when the minds of men are not informed by the truths of the Catholic Faith nor their wills strengthened by life-giving power of Sanctifying Grace.

Pragmatism, shoving aside the residual influences of Protestantism while at the same time building on some of its basic premises, opened the way for the introduction and ultimate institutionalization of a wide variety of naturalistic ideologies and philosophies all designed to erode belief in the supernatural and to emphasize, much along the lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the infinite "perfectibility" of man by means of his own efforts (the heresy of Pelagianism) and by means of his social structures. Evolutionism, feminism, socialism, environmentalism, moral relativism and its close relative, legal positivism, and a whole assortment of other ideologies were introduced as a means to conduct massive social engineering experimentations upon children, who were encouraged in the 1970s and thereafter to keep "journals" on their parents' conversations as ostensible "writing projects" when the goal was to monitor, much as was done the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and is done today in Communist nations such as Red China, the thoughts of those who were deemed to "threats" to the social engineers' and ideologues' desire to spread their false concepts in the name of "diversity" and "toleration."

Unable to control or, in many instances, to "motivate" students who are steeped in the lies of naturalism, especially materialism and hedonism, social workers and psychoanalysts and psychologists and psychiatrists were hired by many school districts to recommend medication, especially Ritalin, and to mandate books that heroize those who are serial violators of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. These efforts to program children medically and psychologically have been combined, of course, with the efforts of the late Mary Calderone, a longtime member of Planned Parenthood and the founder of a committee (S.I.E.C.U.S.), and those who have followed her to "educate" children by means of explicit classroom instruction in the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, thereby breaking down the natural psychological resistance of children to information that is age-inappropriate for them and to teach them that it is neither possible nor desirable for them to attempt to resist "natural" desires.

Most young people alive today know nothing about Original Sin or even Our Lord’s Redemptive Act as they have been taught by the ideologues in public indoctrination institutions, which are called “schools,” to reject “old-fashioned” concepts of morality, and there are some places in the world where parents are being sent to jail for teaching their children not to participate in the prevailing cultural evils because they fear offending God:

BRAZIL (JUNE 16) — Brazilian parents Audato and Ieda Denardi have been sentenced to 50 days in prison for homeschooling their daughters. The parents were convicted of “intellectual neglect”, with the judge stating that the home education curricula failed to include programs on “gender and sex education” and “tolerance and diversity.”

The court also concluded that because the girls, aged 15 and 11, did not like “trap” or “sertanejo” (folk) music, their home curriculum had also failed to properly educate them in cultural diversity, despite the fact that they are both accomplished pianists and speak multiple languages.

The Denardis were initially sentenced by a lower court in São Paulo in April 2026. Now, they are appealing the ruling, challenging the state’s attempt to imprison them for exercising their right to direct their children’s education. Their sentence will be suspended pending the appeal, which will be heard by the 7 Cãmara Criminal do Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo, the highest state court. ADF International is providing legal support for the appeal.

“As a mother, I cannot conceive a more dictatorial state than the one that wants me in jail because I chose to exercise my right to direct the education and upbringing of my daughters. My husband and I are hopeful the court will recognize our right to choose the best education for our children and overturn this unjust conviction.”

– Ieda Denardi

“As a mother, I cannot conceive a more dictatorial state than the one that wants me in jail because I chose to exercise my right to direct the education and upbringing of my daughters.” said Ieda Denardi. “My husband and I are hopeful the court will recognize our right to choose the best education for our children and overturn this unjust conviction.”

The conviction came despite the prosecutor recommending that the court acquit the parents. After hearing the witnesses and evaluating the social and academic development of the girls, the prosecutor concluded that the parents had not neglected their children.

In his decision, the judge explicitly accused the parents of “using their daughters as pawns in an ideological struggle, subjecting them to a form of unregulated education, the effectiveness and quality of which lack adequate metrics within the Brazilian legal system, while completely excluding the State’s involvement.”

The Denardis’ case has drawn congressional attention, with lawmakers recently holding hearings at which the parents urged Congress to act in favor of homeschooling. A homeschooling bill was approved in the House of Representatives in 2022, but has since stalled in the Senate, creating legal uncertainty for parents who seek to homeschool their children.

“The prosecutor examined the witnesses and recommended for acquittal. An independent educational psychologist found no sign of neglect. The girls themselves described rigorous daily education. The judge convicted anyway – because a fifteen-year-old said she finds some music lyrics morally questionable, and because the curriculum didn’t include state-approved content on gender. A parent has been sentenced to prison not for failing to educate her children, but for educating them according to her own values. This is a grotesque abuse of the criminal law, and we will not let it stand.” said Julio Pohl, Legal Counsel for Latin America at ADF International.

Background

Despite over 70,000 children currently being homeschooled in Brazil, the lack of a clear legal framework has left many parents with additional obstacles when choosing home education.

In 2019, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that homeschooling did not contravene the Constitution, but required a federal law to regulate it. Homeschooling parents have relied on international law to defend their right to direct the education of their children. The lack of a federal law on the issue has left them in legal limbo and under constant threat of sanction. One such parent who has faced pushback in the courts is Regiane Cichelero, a Brazilian mother who was denied the right to homeschool her son by a state court last year. ADF International is supporting her appeal.

However, until now, it has been treated as an administrative offense for failing to register the children in school. The Denardis are the first parents to be criminally convicted for homeschooling their children.

The Denardi parents began homeschooling their daughters in 2020, after observing the shortcomings of the public education system during pandemic-era remote learning. Since they started homeschooling, they have seen significant improvement in their daughters’ academic performance and have also enjoyed being able to incorporate their faith and personal values into their learning. (Brazilian judge sentences parents to prison for homeschooling their daughters - Alliance Defending Freedom International.)

Sure, these are Orwellian “thought crimes” that are being penalized not only in Red China but increasingly in the supposedly “civilized” West, and both the United Kingdom and Canada are in the vanguard of ferreting out “thought criminals.”

In its own turn, therefore, Modernism accepts the evolutionary principle that rejects the doctrine of Original Sin. Nothing is “real” to the Modernist mind unless it has “evolved”—and whatever is “evolving” must tend in the direction of “progress,” falsehoods that were eviscerated by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907:

The following is their conception of the magisterium of the Church: No religious society, they say, can be a real unit unless the religious conscience of its members be one, and also the formula which they adopt. But this double unity requires a kind of common mind whose office is to find and determine the formula that corresponds best with the common conscience; and it must have, moreover, an authority sufficient to enable it to impose on the community the formula which has been decided upon. From the combination and, as it were, fusion of these two elements, the common mind which draws up the formula and the authority which imposes it, arises, according to the Modernists, the notion of the ecclesiastical magisterium. And, as this magisterium springs, in its last analysis, from the individual consciences and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit, it necessarily follows that the ecclesiastical magisterium must be dependent upon them, and should therefore be made to bow to the popular ideals. To prevent individual consciences from expressing freely and openly the impulses they feel, to hinder criticism from urging forward dogma in the path of its necessary evolution, is not a legitimate use but an abuse of a power given for the public weal. So too a due method and measure must be observed in the exercise of authority. To condemn and proscribe a work without the knowledge of the author, without hearing his explanations, without discussion, is something approaching to tyranny. And here again it is a question of finding a way of reconciling the full rights of authority on the one hand and those of liberty on the other. In the meantime the proper course for the Catholic will be to proclaim publicly his profound respect for authority, while never ceasing to follow his own judgment. Their general direction for the Church is as follows: that the ecclesiastical authority, since its end is entirely spiritual, should strip itself of that external pomp which adorns it in the eyes of the public. In this, they forget that while religion is for the soul, it is not exclusively for the soul, and that the honor paid to authority is reflected back on Christ who instituted it.

26. To conclude this whole question of faith and its various branches, we have still to consider, Venerable Brethren, what the Modernists have to say about the development of the one and the other. First of all they lay down the general principle that in a living religion everything is subject to change, and must in fact be changed. In this way they pass to what is practically their principal doctrine, namely, evolution. To the laws of evolution everything is subject under penalty of death -- dogma, Church, worship, the Books we revere as sacred, even faith itself. The enunciation of this principle will not be a matter of surprise to anyone who bears in mind what the Modernists have had to say about each of these subjects. Having laid down this law of evolution, the Modernists themselves teach us how it operates. And first, with regard to faith. The primitive form of faith, they tell us, was rudimentary and common to all men alike, for it had its origin in human nature and human life. Vital evolution brought with it progress, not by the accretion of new and purely adventitious forms from without, but by an increasing perfusion of the religious sense into the conscience. The progress was of two kinds: negative, by the elimination of all extraneous elements, such, for example, as those derived from the family or nationality; and positive, by that intellectual and moral refining of man, by means of which the idea of the divine became fuller and clearer, while the religious sense became more acute. For the progress of faith the same causes are to be assigned as those which are adduced above to explain its origin. But to them must be added those extraordinary men whom we call prophets -- of whom Christ was the greatest -- both because in their lives and their words there was something mysterious which faith attributed to the divinity, and because it fell to their lot to have new and original experiences fully in harmony with the religious needs of their time. The progress of dogma is due chiefly to the fact that obstacles to the faith have to be surmounted, enemies have to be vanquished, and objections have to be refuted. Add to this a perpetual striving to penetrate ever more profoundly into those things which are contained in the mysteries of faith. Thus, putting aside other examples, it is found to have happened in the case of Christ: in Him that divine something which faith recognized in Him was slowly and gradually expanded in such a way that He was at last held to be God. The chief stimulus of the evolution of worship consists in the need of accommodation to the manners and customs of peoples, as well as the need of availing itself of the value which certain acts have acquired by usage. Finally, evolution in the Church itself is fed by the need of adapting itself to historical conditions and of harmonizing itself with existing forms of society. Such is their view with regard to each. And here, before proceeding further, We wish to draw attention to this whole theory of necessities or needs, for beyond all that we have seen, it is, as it were, the base and foundation of that famous method which they describe as historical.

27. Although evolution is urged on by needs or necessities, yet, if controlled by these alone, it would easily overstep the boundaries of tradition, and thus, separated from its primitive vital principle, would make for ruin instead of progress. Hence, by those who study more closely the ideas of the Modernists, evolution is described as a resultant from the conflict of two forces, one of them tending towards progress, the other towards conservation. The conserving force exists in the Church and is found in tradition; tradition is represented by religious authority, and this both by right and in fact. By right, for it is in the very nature of authority to protect tradition: and in fact, since authority, raised as it is above the contingencies of life, feels hardly, or not at all, the spurs of progress. The progressive force, on the contrary, which responds to the inner needs, lies in the individual consciences and works in them -- especially in such of them as are in more close and intimate contact with life. Already we observe, Venerable Brethren, the introduction of that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity the factor of progress in the Church. Now it is by a species of covenant and compromise between these two forces of conservation and progress, that is to say between authority and individual consciences, that changes and advances take place. The individual consciences, or some of them, act on the collective conscience, which brings pressure to bear on the depositories of authority to make terms and to keep to them. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 7, 1907.)

We must remember that the Roman Empire was overthrown by barbarians because it had first rotted from the inside out. The same kinds of hedonistic sins, the same kind of government excesses of taxation and bloated bureaucracies, the same kinds of needless foreign wars, and brutal actions against political dissenters that existed then obtain now as well. We have not only refused to learn from history but are actively repeating the errors of the past because our leaders (and most of the citizens, to be honest) are as hostile to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His true Church as were the caesars and their minions sixteen hundred sixteen years ago when Rome fell to Alaric (although the Western Roman Empire would continue under nominal emperors who were under the authority of the invaders until it fell in 476).

The United States of America is not immune to God’s chastisements as its people have long misused liberty as a cloak for malice, confounded liberty with license, and have made the ugliness of sin something apparently “beautiful” and even “necessary.”

Father Henry James Coleridge, who was born in 1822 and converted to the Holy Faith in 1856, a little over a decade after the conversion of Father William Frederick Faber, used a series of sermons between 1860 and the time of his death in 1893 to comment on how men and their nations were being infected by toxic ideologies. Father Coleridge was particularly concerned about the rise of what we would call today ‘fake science” as a new “religion” of the miseducated elite, and he explained what the results of such a “religion” would be for what he called gluttonous countries of the United States of America, England and France. The excerpts below come from his sermon on "The Days of Noe":

I have been trying to point out to you, dear brethren in our Lord, the resemblance which exists, as to many remarkable features in both, between the days in which we live, and the days which, if you Lord be not a false prophet, will be at the end of the world immediately before His coming to judge the whole human race. You have seen, in the first place, that we live in the presence of a false popular creed, the influence of which is spreading every day, (Darwinism) and is likely to spread further and further. This false creed, with those over whom it prevails, will certainly account for the strange feature of the last days which our Lord mentions, the indifference of the men of that time to the signs of His coming. It will account for that indifference, because it will destroy in their minds all the principles, doctrines, and feelings which could make them otherwise that indifferent. Such a creed, whether it survive to the last days or not, is at least like that false belief which will then prevail. (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 77-91. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Although the ideology of Darwinism was then its early years, Father Coleridge understood that that evolutionism was designed to replace even generic Christianity as the foundation of social thought and popular culture. Evolutionism denies Special Creation in favor of a disproved ideology that has convinced most people alive today that human beings are descended from apes. We have been eyewitnesses to the rotten fruit of this disproved ideology as those who believe that they are descended from apes and do not have human natures wounded by Original Sin will come to act like apes over the course of time. The empirical proof for this is visible to anyone who can see the world through the eyes of the true Faith as one shops anywhere these days and encounters heavily tattooed people who speak in guttural tones and lack even simple decency on the natural level. So many people today are totally self-absorbed and believe that the word “hygiene” to refers to how they might greet a man named “Eugene” (“Hi, Gene.”) Dirty, unkempt people abound in our world, and those who are just the ones holding public office, mind you, and this is to say nothing about foul, offensive language full of immodest speech and vulgar profanities are uttered publicly by tattooed-bedecked parents with dyed hair in front of their grossly overweight children with Mohawk haircuts.

Alas, as has been noted throughout this commentary, the ideology of evolutionism dispenses with belief in Original Sin, Our Lord’s Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross, the necessity of saving one’s soul as members of the Catholic Church and, ultimately, all thought of the Particular and General Judgments. It has been one of the many means—along with Protestantism and the panoply of naturalistic errors that stem from Judeo-Masonry—of promoting a thoroughly Godless world populated by heathens whose god are their bellies and whose glory is to be found their shameless behavior as they have no sense of personal shame.

The next excerpt from Father Coleridge’s sermon discussed the similarities between the decay of what he called the Christian world in the late-Nineteenth Century and those of the latter days that had been prophesied by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ:

In the second place, you have seen that the present condition of the Christian populations throughout the world, taken as a whole, abundantly justifies the application to our own times of those mournful words of our Lord, in which He predicted that in the latter days there would be a great decay among the many of true Catholic and Christian charity. We tested this by the opinions and doctrines prevalent over large portions of the Christian world, whereby the necessity of Christian communities are paralyzed by that disease which is the special antagonist and death of charity – that is, the sin of schism. Again, we saw last Sunday that our Lord describes the political state of our own times in the very same words in which He described that of the last age of the world, when nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And, if any one of these features of the last days which are to be found in our own time strikes us as pointing to the conclusion that we may at any moment have the reign of the last persecution, the reign of Antichrist, and the final judgment upon us, surely the combination of these several features together points with still greater force to the same conclusion. There still remain more features than one of resemblance between our own age and the last to which your attention must be drawn. I shall speak of one of these to-day, and draw from its consideration one or two practical reflections.

The first of these features of the last days of which I have to speak, is one of which we certainly have a very strong and remarkable anticipation in our own time. I mean the absorbing and engrossing manner in which material pleasures and enjoyments hold the souls of the mass of mankind in captivity, dulling them and blinding them, as our Lord says of the men of His own generation, making their hearts gross and heavy, so that they have not the power, it may almost be said, to perceive the truths which God sets before them in His Church. In the passage from which the text is taken, our Lord selects two times from the whole of human history, and He says that it shall be in the latter days as it was in those times. Those were times of great catastrophes, of great punishments of God on the sinfulness of man, when the chastisement took men by surprise because they were so engrossed in the enjoyments of life. It may be that the chief point, so to say, of the comparison in our Lord's words lies in the suddenness of the chastisement, but still it cannot be without a meaning that He should have chosen those two periods for the purpose of His warnings to us. For the suddenness of the chastisement which will fall on the last generation of mankind will not consist in the absence of warnings beforehand, but in the dulness and blindness of men to warnings, however startling. Such dulness and such blindness, as we know well from Scripture, are the inevitable results of engrossments in temporal and material goods, and when this engrossment is possible then are its fruits possible, as we see in those times which our Lord speaks. They were times of enormous degradation and licentiousness, but that degradation and that licentiousness were brought on by the fearful engrossment of those who were the subjects of God's chastisements in the pleasures of the senses and the enjoyments of this world. The first of these two periods is the period before the universal Deluge, and the second is the time of Lot, when God destroyed the Cities of the Plain on account of their loathsome and unnatural sensuality. If these times have in common the feature of the entire unexpectedness of the calamity which then fell on men, they have also that other feature in common, of the excessive sensual enjoyment of those who perished in those catastrophes. (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 77-91. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

Loathsome and unnatural sensuality rule the day now, and anyone who opposes the agenda of the homosexual collective is branded as a bigot and “hater.” The members of the organized crime family of the naturalist “right” have surrendered to the “left” on this issued, and it must be remembered by those who are reflexively uncritical supporters of President Donald John Trump that the forty-fifth president of the United States of America has appointed numerous sodomites to his administration, including the “married” Richard Grenell as the American ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany Pope Pius IX explained that the heresy of religious indifferntism and religious liberty would result in the triumph of materialism over all that is supernatural:

But, although we have not omitted often to proscribe and reprobate the chief errors of this kind, yet the cause of the Catholic Church, and the salvation of souls entrusted to us by God, and the welfare of human society itself, altogether demand that we again stir up your pastoral solicitude to exterminate other evil opinions, which spring forth from the said errors as from a fountain. Which false and perverse opinions are on that ground the more to be detested, because they chiefly tend to this, that that salutary influence be impeded and (even) removed, which the Catholic Church, according to the institution and command of her Divine Author, should freely exercise even to the end of the world -- not only over private individuals, but over nations, peoples, and their sovereign princes; and (tend also) to take away that mutual fellowship and concord of counsels between Church and State which has ever proved itself propitious and salutary, both for religious and civil interests.

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

Men prefer to wallow in their pleasures and to accumulate wealth and “toys” as they waste their time on vain amusements. They are as immune to the warning signs of a decaying society today as were the men at the time of the Flood and destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha. This is eminently understandable as most so-called Scripture scholars have “de-mythologized” Holy Writ, and this work of de-mythology has been promoted with the great glee in Catholic seminaries in the control of the counterfeit church of conciliarism and by the conciliar “popes,” especially the German Hegelian and rationalist, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, and his successor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who promotes a de-mythologized view of Holy Writ that is a heretical rejection of the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, every word of which was written under the Divine inspiration of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. Bergoglio and his Jacobin/Boleshevik comrades have done this specifically to justify a de facto endorsement of divorce and remarriage without a conciliar decree of nullity and of a “ministry” to those engaged in sodomy and related vices.

Father Coleridge explained that those who ignore God’s warnings, including those given by His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, bring themselves and their nations to destruction:

With regard to the antediluvian world, there is this feature besides, that God undoubtedly warned the race of mankind that His judgments were about to come on them. It appears from the Scripture account that the ark took a hundred years to build, and that during that time Noe was a preacher of repentance. We know but little indeed of those marvellous days, when human life, as the Scripture tells us, was so long, but if that were so, it would be quite enough to account for the forgetfulness of the things of God and of the soul, and for the extreme profligacy of which we also read of the anteldiluvian. Alas! So it is. If life in our days could be prolonged for twice or thrice its ordinary span, it would more probably be for the greater misery that for the greater happiness of mankind. And when we are told, as we are times told in Scriptures, that God has shortened the days of the ordinary human lifetime, it is certain that He has done so in pity rather than in anger. Then also, the antediluvians seem to have dwelt in the very fairest region of the earth, they seem to have been more full of natural knowledge and of acquired skill in the use of the resources of enjoyment and physical wellbeing that those who came after them, and it is very likely indeed that their numbers were not such as to cause that struggle for existence which is now the lot of the populations of so many countries of the world, in which the great enjoyment of the good things of the earth is not yet the free inheritance of the many. At all events, they were so fearfully and outrageously corrupt, morally and socially, that the sacred writer tells us that their wickedness was so great, that it made God repent in His heart that He had created them. Such was the population of the earth, or of those parts of it then inhabited by man, on whom the great destruction of the Flood came like a thief in the night.

As to the other period and generation of which our Lord speaks, and to which, in its heedlessness and unwatchfulness, He compares the men of the last days, why need I speak? Sodom and Gomorrha, the Cities of the Plain – the very name is synonymous with everything that is most foul and licentious, even to the degradation of our human nature. The land in which they dwelt was one of unexampled beauty and fertility. We are told in the book of Genesis, that “the country about Jordan was watered throughout before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrha, as the paradise of the Lord, and like Egypt as when one comes to Segur.” (Gen. Xiii. 10) And as the Flood had been brought on by list, so also was it with the destruction of these fair cities and their wicked inhabitants. Here, then, we find also these two features, immense material enjoyment and the most intense moral degradation. We are not told that the people of these cities were directly warned of the chastisement which they were bringing on themselves, but, at all events, they had had for some time resident among them a chosen servant of God Lot, the sister's son of Abraham, of whom St. Peter speaks as if he had been a witness to virtue and morality, “oppressed by the injustice and lewd conversation of the wicked, for in sight and hearing he was just, dwelling among them, who day by day vexed the just soul with ungodly works.” (2 St. Peter ii 7, 8.) So that if they had not a direct warning, they had the witness of a holy life among them to reproach them for their profound foulness of lust. And we may daily suppose that if they were not warned by any more direct signs or predictions of their coming destruction, it was because they were so deeply engrossed in their sensuality as not to be capable of conversation, or of arousing, by any such means, as it is indeed the characteristic of men who are given to those enormous sins of lust, to be incapable of compunction, and beyond the reach of the most startling warnings of Providence. (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 77-91. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

The excerpt from Father Coleridge’s sermon above describes most men alive today, including most who adhere to the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left,” including most such true deplorables in the two houses of Congress, and many within the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right,” including President Trump himself, who is without remorse for any of notoriously scandalous personal behavior and his entirely unbothered about the fact that he has undercut his own credibility by saying different things at different times, including his denial that he knew of consigliere Cohen’s arrangement to pay hush money to Stephanie Clifford, which shifted to a narrative that there was nothing illegal about it, which is true enough. Why, then, lie about the matter to begin with and thus hand one’s vengeful political opponents and special counsel intent on removing him from office?

Those who wantonly defy the immutable laws of the good God and regularly and unrepentantly offend against holy purity and honest speech are to be found on the “left” and on the “right” and everywhere else in-between in our topsy-turvy world of relativism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, ecumenism, statism, collectivism, globalism and just plain Machiavellianism.

Father Coleridge’s sermon, which must have been riveting to hear in person, continued to elaborate on how Our Lord’s warnings applied to his own time over one hundred thirty years ago now:

Now I have already said that the direct point of the comparison between the days of which we are speaking, and the days at the end of the world, which is drawn by our Lord, lies in the unexpectedness of the destruction which fell upon them, and which will fall on the men of the last days. But our Lord's description points also to the resemblance in moral and social matters which shall be found between these periods. For He describes them in His own merciful way, as eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, that is, as being occupied in the ordinary enjoyments and rejoicing of this world, without a fear of the coming judgment. And we know from experience that, when men do these things which our Lord names without any thoughts of God, and of His laws, they indulge in every sensual pleasure and lust without remorse or fear. And what is required to make any period of the world's history like, in this respect, to the two periods her named by our Lord, is not so much necessarily that it shall be a period of loathsome sensuality, as that it should be a period in which the common goods and enjoyments of life are so engrossing to the majority of the population, as to make them entirely heedless of Divine warnings and utterly unprepared for a doom which is hanging over them.

And now, my brethren, let us look around us, and we shall certainly find features in our own times, which may at least prepare us for the state of things of which our Lord speaks. I am not about to say whether or not the men of our time are equal to the antediluvians and to the men of Sodom and Gomorrha in the extent of their unbridled licentiousness. That may or may not be the case, thought if it were true that we at approached to the excesses of those days, it would be one of the most disgraceful charges that could be fixed upon us. For we live in the light of the pure doctrine of our Lord; we live when the work of the Church has been upon the world for centuries; we live with the example and character of Jesus and Mary before us, reflected to us from the lives of thousands and thousands of saints, men and women like ourselves. What is quite certain is, that we are far more luxurious than our forefathers, and that the possibility of an almost boundless luxury is far more nearly within the reach of the generality of men, that ever before since the introduction of the religion of our Lord into the world. This is, in great measure, due to the advance of our knowledge of the physical world and of the treasures which it concealed from those who went before us. If we ask ourselves in what chiefly has the progress of physical knowledge marked itself on the history of the human race, we are obliged to answer, in two things chiefly – in the multiplication of the powers of men to destroy one another, and in the multiplication and generation of the means of enjoyment. These are the chief uses which we make of the revelation of the resources with which God has provided the world in which we live. We apply our knowledge to the comforts and pleasures of life. The treasures of the earth's surface the stores of metals and minerals, and the other gifts of nature to the several climates and countries of the globe, are at our command to a degree hitherto unknown. Earth and air and water contribute now to our enjoyments far more than ever before. Consider in a great city like this, how every portion of the world send its contribution to furnish our tables or to adorn our dwellings – fruits, dainties, rarities, what can we not have, almost for the asking? The old satirists of Rome are full of the way in which the tables of the great gluttons of those times were supplied from every country known to the masters of the world, but we have a far greater command than they of the resources on which their luxury fattened. And, my brethren, I do not think that any Roman or Egyptian glutton in palace or villa the most luxurious of those days, gave himself more entirely to his enjoyment of what he had, in the spirit of those words quoted by St. Paul, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” than do men and women in the midst of Christian England or Catholic France or civilized America. And if a creed such as that of which I have had to speak takes possession of men who can command so many of the gifts of nature of which their ancestors were ignorant, what can we possible expect but that they will give themselves body and soul to sensual enjoyments, it may perhaps be with less brutality and grossness as to outward appearance than those of old giants of sensuality, but still with the same entire absence of all check and control except that of what is possible to them and what is not? And in our case there is this difference between the sensualists of the day and that of the old Roman Empire, that in those days the extravagance of indulgence was confined to the few, while the tendency of modern times is to open the door of physical enjoyments far wider than it has ever before been opened, and whole classes can now indulge themselves where before only a few here and there could do so. The decay of religion and the growth of the creed which tells men they have no God and no responsibility, go hand in hand with the growth of the facilities of gross enjoyment for the great mass of mankind in many countries of the world.

And here also, my brethren, we have an evil or a feature which is not likely in the course of time, taking into consideration the natural and probable course of events, to grow less prominent, but rather more so. The popularization of physical enjoyments and luxuries by means of the progress of the age is a thing of which we are more likely to see rapid strides in advance than any retrogression. The advance has a natural cause which cannot be changed or checked, and which has its root in the increased knowledge of mankind of the gifts of nature and the powers of nature, all of which can be made to become the vassals of man in the enjoyment of his brief span of life. And all this is simultaneous with the rise in so many countries of vast and crowded cities such as our ancestors never dreamed of, cities at once the centres of commerce and so of luxury, and also, alas! The seats of the deepest moral corruption. We shudder at the thought of what that corruption was which brought on the Cities of the Plain the vengeance of God, but comparing the probable population of those cities with what we know of the hundreds of thousands that are to be found either in or around a few great centres of modern life, such as London, or Paris, or New York, it is hard to think that in any of those great cities there is, day by day, and night by night, much less of foul offence to the Divine Majesty in the violation of the moral law which He has written in the heart of every child of Adam, than what would equal the accumulation of sin which brought on the Deluge, or devoted the Cities of the Plain to the fire which came down from Heaven.

Now it is well for a moment to have dwelt on such a feature as this of the last days, and of our own days as well as of those. It is well, because here is a point as to which we may all contribute to the balance on the side of good or on the side of evil. The men and women from whom we inherit the faith and religion of our Lord were men and women in few things more superior to those who have come after them than in the severity, the simplicity, the manliness and virtuous dignity of their lives. They rose early and ate and drank simply and sparingly, and were not afraid of heat or cold, they could brave the weather and live in the open air, and their houses and their chambers knew nothing of the thousand so-called necessities of the men and women of our time. Their amusements were manly and vigorous, their table was plain, their dress inexpensive, they could dance without danger to modesty, they conversed together without the chance of shameful anecdotes or inuendoes. When they were children they obeyed their parents, and did not expect to be petted and indulged in every whim and fancy, and when they became parents they watched over the purity and the piety of their children. I need not draw the other side of the picture, for it is but too plain how we have degenerated from them. But I say, here is a matter not for the priest alone, or the religious alone, it is a matter for laymen and gentlemen and fathers and mothers of families, as they vale their own souls, and the souls of their children, and as they will give an account of their responsibilities to the great Judge at the end of their time. Then they will be asked what they have done towards staying the plague of luxury and licence of manners, or whether they have been on the side of the increase of that licence and of the gradual declension of virtue and morality in a land which still calls itself Christian. It matters comparatively nothing how far the world may at this moment be from the final victory of licence and this immorality. What does matter to us, now and here, is this – that we should stand up in our generation for ancient purity, for frugality, and temperance, and virtue, for the holy discipline of the Christian home, for the manly severity of life, which made those who are gone before us able to resist as they did the tyranny of the State and the civil and social proscription under which they suffered, in order to hand on to us the treasures and traditions of old Catholic manners. If we throw these to the winds for the sake of the pleasures and effeminacies of modern life, how far more guilty shall we be, how far more severely punished, than those around us, who have lived like animals and no more bound than they to deny themselves any satisfaction – ignorant of God, ignorant of Jesus Christ, without the faith and the hope which might have been enough to give them courage to despise the things which are seen for the sake of the the things which are not seen, to forego the momentary enjoyments of earth for the sake of Heaven and of eternity! (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 77-91. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

We have arrived at the days of the sort that Father Coleridge did not believe existed in his time. Indeed, we have exceeded the lusts of the pagan Romans and the statism of its ceasars, and we are making Sodom and Gomorrha look like the Victorian England in which Father Coleridge lived all but the first fifteen years of his life. We have indeed arrived at a time when most men submit themselves to the tyranny of the civil state that has been coming upon us in incremental terms since July 4, 1776, a date that was but the inevitable result of the revolution begun on the continent of Europe by Martin Luther on October 31, 1517, and in England by King Henry VIII in 1534.

This concluding excerpt from Father Coleridge’s sermon above describes most men alive today, including most who adhere to the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left,” including most such true deplorables in the two houses of Congress, and many within the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right,” including President Trump himself, who is without remorse for any of notoriously scandalous personal behavior and his entirely unbothered about the fact that he has undercut his own credibility by saying different things at different times, including his denial that he knew of consigliere Cohen’s arrangement to pay hush money to Stephanie Clifford, which shifted to a narrative that there was nothing illegal about it, which is true enough. Why, then, lie about the matter to begin with and thus hand one’s vengeful political opponents and special counsel intent on removing him from office?

Father Coleridge’s sermon described the trajectory of a world steeped in naturalism in his own day. He saw clearly where this would lead, and it is tragic that so many believing Catholics believe that the United States of America will be made “great again” when its current path of destruction and decay was charted by the rationalists, freethinkers, deists, Freemasons who celebrated religious indifferentism, religious liberty, unfettered freedom of speech and of the press as the nation’s very foundation.

Is it possible for men and their nations to pursue the common temporal good without submitting to the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by His Holy Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls?

Is it possible for men to withstand the gates of hell in their own personal lives and in their nations when they sin unrepentantly and, worse yet, enshrine their sins in public laws as “human rights” and then celebrate then in all aspects of popular culture?

Is it possible for men to maintain virtue personally or to establish “civic virtue” in public life without repenting of their sins and seeking to do penance for them by a belief in and firm reliance upon the graces won for them by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour’s Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into their souls and hearts through the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces?

Of course not.

Let me turn once more the following words of Pope Pius XI in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937:

And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today -- prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God -- the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world. (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)

We live a very erratic world, one awash with violence against the innocent and hatred for the true Faith that is now fully out in the open for all to behold. That is, such violence and hatred is out in the happen for those who have the eyes of the Holy Faith to see.

As has been noted so frequently on this site, however, the lords of conciliarism have made their “official reconciliation” with the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity and have reaffirmed unsuspecting Catholics in their desires as fallen creatures to be like the rest of men in the unlimited enjoyment of the pleasures of this world. It is thus for most men alive today, including most Catholics, to realize that the party is over, and the agitation engendered by the constant conflicts between two sets of naturalists who disagree on some things but are united in their rejection of the necessity of adhering to Catholic truth and of cooperating with Sanctifying and Actual Grace as the means to personal and social order to see that there will no party for anyone in eternity who persists in grievous sin until the time of his death. There is no naturalistic means to stem the tide of evil that has overtaken us as surely as the Flood overtook the men of Noe’s time.

In this month of July, the month of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus, therefore, we beg Our Lady, who took meticulous care to attend to the her Divine Son’s Most Precious Blood and to ask the angels to do so when during His Passion Death, to send us the graces to make reparation for the many ways that our sins, having transcended time, were responsible for cruelties inflicted upon Our Lord once in time and also for how our sins, as well as those of the whole world, have worsened both the state of the world and the state of the Church Militant during this time of apostasy and betrayal. Our acts of reparation will better prepare our souls to receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord in Holy Communion and to strive with Our Lady’s help to grow in sanctity and not the sentimentality and emotionalism of worldliness.

Pope Pius I, whose feast is commemorated today celebrated today, Our Lady’s Saturday, July 11, 2026, commanded that priests clean up any and all drops of Our Lord’s Most Precious Blood that might spill in an accident during the offering of the ineffable Sacrifice of the Cross represented in an unbloody manner in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, something that Dom Prosper Gueranger explained in his introductory reflection for today’s feast as well as in his prayer to the first pope named Pius, which was the name taken by our last truly canonized pope and our last true pope thus far:

The ancient legend of St. Pius I, which has lately been altered, made mention of the decree, attributed in the Corpus juris to our Pontiff, concerning those who should carelessly let fall any portion of the Precious Blood of our Lord. The prescriptions are such as evince the profound reverence the Pope would have to be shown towards the Mystery of the Altar. The penance enjoined is to be of forty days if the Precious Blood have fallen to the ground; and wheresoever It fell, It must if possible be taken up with the lips, the dust must be burned, and the ashes thereof thrown into a consecrated place.

We call to mind, O glorious Pontiff, those words written under thine eye, which seem to be a commentary on thy decree concerning the Sacred Mysteries: “We receive not,” cried Justin the Philosopher to the world of that second century: “We receive not as common bread, nor as common drink, the food which we call the Eucharist; but just as Jesus Christ our Savior, being made flesh by the word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so have we been taught that the food made Eucharist by the prayer formed of His own word, is both the Flesh and the Blood of this Jesus who is made flesh.” This doctrine, and the measures it so fully justifies, found, towards the close of the same century, other authentic witnesses who, in their turn, would almost seem to be quoting from the prescriptions attributed to thee. “We are in the greatest distress,” said Tertullian, “if the least drop from our chalice, or the least crumb of our Bread fall to the ground.” And Origen appealed to the initiated to bear witness to “the care and veneration with which the sacred gifts were surrounded, for fear the smallest particle should fall; which, if it happened through negligence, would be considered a crime.” And yet in our days heresy, as destitute of knowledge as of faith, pretends that the Church has departed from her ancient traditions by paying exaggerated homage to the divine Sacrament. Obtain for us, O Pius, the grace to return to the spirit of our fathers; not indeed with regard to their faith, for that we have kept inviolate; but as to the veneration and love with which that faith inspired them for the Chalice of Inebriation, that richest treasure of earth. May the Pasch of the Lamb unite, as thou didst desire, in one uniform celebration, all who have the honor to bear the name of Christian! (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Pope Saint Pius I.)

Begging Our Lady to help us persevere in the Catholic Faith, which makes no terms with error or sin, until the point our deaths, we also pray to Pope Saint Pius I today to increase the fervor with which we receive the Blessed Sacrament and/or make a Spiritual Communion with It so that we recognize the ugliness of sin that continues to despoil our souls, to make no concessions with it in the lives others by acts of omission or commission, and to resolve here and forevermore never to abuse the mercy of the Divine Redeemer in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and to eschew the sentimentality begotten of worldliness once and for all.

Offer all the sufferings of the moment to the Throne of the Most Blessed Trinity as the consecrated slave of Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart Mary, whose triumph will be manifest when will least expect it.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 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 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 Balthazar, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius I, pray for us.

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L'Osservatore Eretico, part two

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