Wars and Rumors of Wars, part six, August 19, 2025

As noted throughout the course of the past three and one-half years, I believe that my original commentaries about the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Feast of Saint Matthias, have been sound and remain so today as President Donald John Trump, having met with the man who decided to order his nation's armed forces (later backed by mercernaries from places such as the prison camp know as North Korea), Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, August 15, 2015, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelesnky along with various leaders within the obsolete North Atlantic Treaty Organization (United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, President of the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte) yesterday, Monday, August 18, 2025, within the Octave of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin and the Commemoration of Saint Agapitus (and, in some, places of Saint Helena), to try map out a road to an end to the hostilites is still taking innocent lives as Russian forces target civilian population centers and as Ukrainian forces contine a futile effort to hold onto territory that has been traditionally Russian and was not part of Ukraine until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics redrew the map of Ukarine to suit its purposes in 1919 and thereafter.

A secular commentator, John Daniel Davidson, has commented on the recent developments as follows:

President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday didn’t yield the ceasefire deal Trump was hoping for, but there was apparently enough progress made that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and top European leaders are meeting with Trump in Washington today to discuss the possibility of peace negotiations and a deal to end to the war for good.

What might such a deal look like? Simply put, it would consist of territorial concessions in exchange for security agreements. Ukraine would cede portions of Russian-occupied territory in Crimea and the eastern provinces in exchange for a security alliance with the United States and European powers. Trump himself has alluded to this, mentioning “land swaps” ahead of his meeting with Putin on Friday.

This formula — Ukrainian territorial concessions in exchange for security and political independence — was always how the Ukraine war was going to end. The corporate press is pretending to be shocked and scandalized by the mention of an adjustment of Ukraine’s borders, but the outrage is feigned. Given Russia’s strategic imperatives and Ukraine’s indefensible borders, the broad outlines of a peace settlement are exactly what they were in February 2022, before Russia launched its invasion.

Putin himself, in his remarks to the press on Friday, affirmed the need for Ukrainian security, indicating that the Russians have likely resigned themselves to the inevitability of European troops in Ukraine once the war is over. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed that during Friday’s summit in Anchorage, Putin agreed with Trump that the U.S. and its European allies could, as part of a peace deal, offer Ukraine NATO-like security guarantees. “We got to an agreement that the United States and other European nations could effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee,” Witkoff told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, describing it as “game-changing.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio alluded to this on Sunday, saying that territorial concessions will be up to the Ukrainians, and also that “Ukraine has a right, like every sovereign country, to enter into security alliances and agreements with other countries.”

Hence, Moscow is likely focused entirely on territorial adjustments in the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine, which makes perfect sense to anyone with passing familiarity with Ukraine’s recent history.

Ukraine’s current borders are a relic of Soviet propaganda, invented by Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 as part of an effort to make the Warsaw Pact look like a diverse coalition of strong states. When the Soviet Unio collapsed in 1991, those fictional borders were made “real,” leaving Ukraine with a Soviet nuclear arsenal, Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and control of the ports of Sevastopol and Odessa.

The situation this created was obviously untenable. Under pressure from the United States, Kiev returned the nuclear arsenal and the Black Sea fleet to Russia, and signed a long-term lease agreement giving Moscow control over the warm-water port at Sevastopol. But it left Ukraine itself with an indefensible territory and millions of Russian inside its borders. As Mario Loyola explained in these pages three weeks before Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022, Ukraine in 1991 wasn’t really a viable state: “It wasn’t at all clear that Ukraine would be strong enough to maintain both political independence and territorial integrity given the weight of vital Russian interests involved.”

As long as Ukraine stayed in Russia’s orbit, it could control its territory. But, as Loyola writes, “the moment it definitively broke away from Moscow in 2014, it immediately lost control of those areas that were most vital to Russian interests, and nobody with an even minimal sense of Russian and Ukrainian history can pretend to have been taken by surprise.”

As it now stands, Ukraine can have political independence or territorial integrity, but it cannot have both. That was true in 2014, it was true in 2022 before the Russian invasion, and it is true today. It’s not parroting Russian propaganda to say that Ukraine will have lasting peace and stability only with an adjustment of its borders, it’s simply a statement of historical fact. If Ukraine wants to be oriented toward Europe and politically independent of Russia, then its borders will have to be adjusted.

This should have been obvious to anyone familiar with the relevant history and geography. Indeed, these solid, unchanging realities of history, geography, and Moscow’s strategic imperatives have always been at the heart of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. There was never a scenario, for example, in which Russia was going to allow the government of Ukraine to control the warm-water port at Sevastopol, much less join NATO (although, as we’ve seen, Moscow might be willing to accept a NATO-like security guarantee for Ukraine). Those are red-lines for Russia, and the idea that the United States or the E.U. was going to cross them, risking World War Three for the sake of preserving Ukraine’s indefensible Soviet-era borders, was always unrealistic — a corporate media fiction totally unmoored from reality.

Reality is really the big difference between the Biden administration’s approach to the war and Trump’s approach. Biden and his top officials routinely talked about Ukraine in a way that was so unrealistic it bordered on the fantastical. More than once, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken dismissed the possibility of a negotiated peace until Ukraine could “defend itself” and Russia withdrew all its troops from Ukrainian territory. In June 2023 he told CBS News that any peace agreement must uphold the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence. Biden and Blinken repeatedly insisted that nobody can veto NATO membership. But of course that’s not true; Putin vetoed NATO membership for Ukraine when he invaded the country.

And here we come to heart of the difference between Biden and Trump’s view of the war, and of foreign policy broadly speaking. The establishment foreign policy experts that ran things during Biden’s term (and Obama’s) think the world operates according to theories and abstractions rather than solid realities like history and geography. They thought they could simply invoke something like sovereignty, without grappling with the possibility that sovereignty and territorial integrity, given Ukraine’s history and its untenable borders, might be mutually exclusive.

That mindset is representative of an entire class of policymakers in Washington who fail to grasp that the outcome of a war — any war — is far more likely to be decided by something as unmovable as a mountain range or a warm-water port than vague invocations of sovereignty. Likewise, a common language or a shared 1,000-year history between warring peoples are going to be more important factors than the bureaucratic minutiae of a multi-lateral security agreement drafted in Brussels.

After years of attrition warfare between Ukraine and Russia, bankrolled largely by western powers, the underlying factors in the conflict have not changed — and they never will. An adjustment of Ukraine’s borders, together with security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe, is actually in everyone’s best interests, not just Russia’s. Ukraine as it’s currently constituted is indefensible, as events have shown. Lasting peace will require grappling with the history of Ukraine’s borders and adjusting them to reflect solid realities — not some hazy platitudes about democracy and sovereignty. Those kind of abstractions are a big reason we’re in this mess, and rejecting them is the only way we’re going to get out of it. ( The Ukraine War Was Always Going To End This Way.)

This commentary represents the only real way to resolve the ongoing slaughter of innocent human beings, which has gone on for no good purpose for far too long and principally because globalist leaders, including former President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., propped upped Volodomyr Zelensky in their efforts to use him, Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian citizens as their proxies against Vladmir Putin.

Putin, for his part, is an amoral monster who has thought nothing of targeting innocent human beings. He is not any kind of representative for the "resoration of Christianity" as is he both personally and politically immoral. He is former leader of the Soviet KGB and has said repeatedly in recent decades that the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the greatest tragedy of his lifetime. He does not concede that Communism is evil in se, and anyone who cannot admit this simple fact is will be inclined to act in a manner worthy of the commissars.

Zelensky, of course, is a secular Jewish narcissist who has been unable to come to grips with the fact an Ukrainian military victory has always been impossible but who has nevertheless prolonged a war by use of amoral means worthy of Putin himself, including sending drones to destroy apartment buildings in various parts of Russia. He has innocent blood on his hands jsut as much as Putin.

It is important, therefore, to review the events of the past three years in a nutshell and then to proceed to review some of the real root causes that neither Vladimir Putin, being a Russian nationalist and thus a Pan-Slavian imperialist, are capable

There was no immediate threat to Russia of an imminent invasion by Ukrainian military forces.
Whatever military action Ukraine took within its own borders to retake the Donbas did not of its own pose a sufficient reason for a wholesale invasion of Ukraine by the forces of the Russian Federation and its mercenary associates (the Chechens, Syrians, et al.).
The level of force being used by the Russians is completely unjustifiable. No one has to support Volodymyr Zelensky, who is a show boater and extortionist par excellence, to recognize that the deliberate, intentional killing of Ukrainian citizens is not justifiable. Indeed, such killing—and the massive destruction of cities and the country’s infrastructure—has not been a matter of Ukrainian disinformation. While there has been such disinformation on both sides, to be sure, any Catholic whose heart is not filled with sorrow over the bombings of civilian residences, the ruthless killing of innocent children, the slaughter of whole families by remorseless Russian soldiers, and the displacement of over 4.5 million Ukrainian nations is not thinking clearly.
Ukrainian political officials and elite, to be sure, have sold their souls to the globalists in the Deep State of the Federal government in the United States of America, the European Union, the World Economic Forum, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and other such entities (see Ukraine, It Was All Written in the Rand Corp Plan). Doing so made gave Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin every excuse imaginable to launch his invasion of Ukraine as his real desire has been to subsume it into the Russian Federation or, at the very least, to partition in in a manner that would create something approximating a new “iron curtain” inside of Ukraine by keeping the disputed eastern sections of the country and making sure that a “friendly” regime is installed in Kyiv.

To wit, consider these qualifications under the Just War Theory that I have discussed many times on this site but have been summarized very succinctly on a Thomistic website:

D. Qualifying Conditions – from the justification of self-defense and the theory of double-effect.
- Cannot intend intrinsically evil actions: Combatants must respect non-combatants.
  a. Combatants who cease to be such.
  i. Surrendering.
  ii. Wounded.
  b. A nation can never justly target civilians.
  i. Civilian casualties, while foreseeable, cannot be intended.
  ii. Measures must be taken to minimize civilian casualties.
- The violence inherent in war is the tolerated evil secondary effect, never directly intended; the primary good effect of peace must be directly intended.
- Proportionality: the good to be achieved outweighs the evil of war.
  a. One cannot war justly over a slight cause.
  (i. War is a last resort.)
  (ii. There must be a reasonable hope of success; one cannot engage in justified, but hopeless actions.)
  b. One may only use the minimal force necessary to achieve just ends. (Just War – Thomistic Philosophy Page.)

Anyone thinks that either Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelensky (a) care about these principles or (b) have ordered his forces to observe them during the Russo-Ukrainian War that began when Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is living in an alternative universe. Catholics must stop living in imaginary worlds in which they place their own Catholic thoughts into the skulls of people who are not Catholics, do not think as Catholics, and who care nothing for the thought of their eternal salvation.

Vladimir Putin is a killer who came to power in what amounted to coup (War brought Vladimir Putin to power in 1999) as the drunken snot Boris Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation who came to power after the collapse of the Union of Socialist Republics on December 25, 1991, had run the Russian economy into the ground. And all the former actor named Volodymyr Zelensky cares about is milking the cash cow that is the administration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and the various governments of the European Union. Neither man has had a bit of compunction about using their young citizens and mercenaries as so much cannon fodder.

Zelensky, for his part, of course, does not understand he could have ended this bloodshed a long time ago if he had been willing to make territorial compromises according to the teaching of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ:

Or what king, about to go to make war against another king, doth not first sit down, and think whether he be able, with ten thousand, to meet him that, with twenty thousand, cometh against him. 32 Or else, whilst the other is yet afar off, sending an embassy, he desireth conditions of peace. (Luke 14: 31-32.)

War is a consequence of Original Sin and of the Actual Sins of men, and wars and rumors of wars there will be until the Second Coming of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in glory on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the living and the dead:

And Jesus being come out of the temple, went away. And his disciples came to shew him the buildings of the temple. [2] And he answering, said to them: Do you see all these things? Amen I say to you there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed. [3] And when he was sitting on mount Olivet, the disciples came to him privately, saying: Tell us when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the consummation of the world? [4] And Jesus answering, said to them: Take heed that no man seduce you: [5] For many will come in my name saying, I am Christ: and they will seduce many.

[6] And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. [7] For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places: [8] Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows. [9] Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall put you to death: and you shall be hated by all nations for my name's sake. [10] And then shall many be scandalized: and shall betray one another: and shall hate one another.

[11] And many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many. [12] And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. [13] But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved. [14] And this gospel of the kingdom, shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come. [15] When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand.

[16] Then they that are in Judea, let them flee to the mountains: [17] And he that is on the housetop, let him not come down to take any thing out of his house: [18] And he that is in the field, let him not go back to take his coat. [19] And woe to them that are with child, and that give suck in those days. [20] But pray that your flight be not in the winter, or on the sabbath.

[21] For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be. [22] And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened. [23] Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him. [24] For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. [25] Behold I have told it to you, beforehand.

[26] If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not. [27] For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be. [28] Wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered together. [29] And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be moved: [30] And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all tribes of the earth mourn: and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty. (Matthew 24: 1-30.)

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ taught us to remain calm in every circumstance of our lives, explaining that there will be wars and rumors of wars but that the end is not yet to come. We must remain ever calm in the loving arms of Our Lady, who told Juan Diego the following as his uncle was suffering from an illness from which Juan Diego thought he was going to die:

"Listen and take heed, least of my sons," she said quietly. "There is nothing which thou needst dread. Let not thy heart be troubled. Do not fear this illness, neither any other illness or affliction. Am I not here beside thee; I, thy Merciful Mother? Am I not thy hope and salvation? Of what more dost thou have need? Let nothing distress or harass thee. As to the illness of thy uncle, he will not die of it. Indeed, I ask thee to accept as a certainty my assurance that he is already cured." (Frances Parkinson Keyes, The Grace of Guadalupe, published in 1941 by Julian Messner, Inc., pp. 47-48.)

We are not to fear any illness or affliction. There is no suffering, nor any world crisis, that we can bear in this life that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His fearful Passion and Death as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were plunged through and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I am not a prophet of end times or of any times and cannot explain to anyone with any kind of authority or “infallible” insight what the tragic events still unfolding in the needless war that Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin has undertaken in neighboring Ukraine, with which it has a long and most complex historical relationship, including the Soviet-era forced starvation of Ukrainians that killed upwards of ten million people (advising the presence of graphic images of starving human beings, see History of Ukraine: The genocide of Ukrainians by Stalin for more details). I do know, however, that all that happens is within the Providence of God and that we must simply realm in a spirit of perfect equanimity as remain steadfast upon Our Lord, especially through her Most Holy Rosary, through these incredibly tumultuous times when neither men nor their nations are willing to submit themselves with docility to Christ the King and His true Church.

War Must be Just, and to be Just There Must be a Casus Belli

As has been noted so many times before on this website, the Just War Theory, which was expounded at first by Saint Augustine and then by Saint Thomas Aquinas eight centuries later with variations of it having been formulated over the centuries, requires a reason for engaging in armed conflict. What follows is an attempt to apply the principles of the Just War Theory to the present circumstances in Ukraine.

There must be a wound to justice that poses a real and imminent threat to the good order of nations and/or to the territorial integrity or well-being of innocents by an aggressor. The threat must be real, not imaginary, not concocted for political purposes. In this instance, there was no real and imminent threat to the good order of nations nor to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federated Republic. Russia had already annexed Crimea in 2014 and two breakaway regions, Donetsk, and Luhansk, had declared themselves to be “people’s republics.” International agreements in 2015 let the situation in these two regions stay as they were, and there was no immediate reason for Russia to invade Ukraine, admitting that Ukraine stands accused of shelling Donbas, a Russiophilic part of Urkiane near the country’s borders with Russia. There was, however, absolutely no wound to justice to justify a massive invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no threat to Russia’s legitimate national security to the extent that required the sort of invasion that has been taking place for the past five days.
All peaceful means to avoid armed hostilities must be exhausted. Diplomatic efforts to avert war must be genuine. It was the authority of the Vicar of Christ himself during the Middle Ages and various times thereafter who attempted to broker disputes in order to avoid war. In the Ukrainian tragedy, there were no serious negotiations undertaken to prevent the use of armed force, and it is clear that Vladimir Putin simply wanted to install a regime in Kiev that would not be enticed to joining the useless, moribund collection of woke globalists in the North American Treaty Organization, which he believed had crossed a “red line” by erecting military bases near his country’s border. However, it is quite immoral to appear to open to negotiations when one’s only goal is to wage an full-scale war upon a sovereign nation and thus put innocent civilians in harm’s way.
A duly constituted authority must make the determinations concerning the waging of war. This means that a legitimate governing authority guided by right intentions and right principles must be in charge of the decision-making process, one that has not usurped power, or as is happening at this time in Ukraine, by a governmental leader, Vladimir Putin, who has sought war unjustly as a first means to prosecute plans of territorial expansion and/or nationalistic or geopolitical ends.
The goals of a war must be well-defined and have a reasonable chance of being realized. In other words, there must be a reasonable chance for success in the pursuit of narrowly defined goals. Goals are to be defined narrowly so as to limit the harm caused by a needlessly protracted war, yes, even when a nation is prosecuting a just cause. Such is not the case at all with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The good end being sought must not be outweighed by the foreseen evil to be done. This is known as the Catholic principle of proportionality, which states that a good end can be rendered unjust to pursue if a judgment is made that the amount of the foreseen evil to be done in the prosecution of a just war will cause greater evils than the one the war is being waged to eradicate. Putin cares about none of this.
As far as is possible, noncombatants must never be deliberately targeted in warfare. The United States has a mixed record when it comes to the realization of this part of the Just War Theory. Our military forces have tried to use remarkable restraint in many instances. Other times, however, they have not. William Tecumseh Sherman used raw terrorism against civilian population centers as he cut a swath of fiery destruction from the Atlantic Ocean to Atlanta during the War between the States. The government of the United States of America aided the anti-Catholic Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (the latter two of which were known to contain the highest concentrations of Catholics in Japan) were bombed during World War II. Something less than laser precision caused thousands of civilian casualties during the Gulf War and during our long and immoral presence in Afghanistan, which commenced on October 7, 2001, and during and after the American invasion and occupation of Iraq on March 20, 2003. In the present instance, although Russian military forces are encountering fierce resistance from Ukrainian military forces and armed civilians, they do not have any scruples about mowing down unarmed civilians or bombing heavily populated centers of civilian population.
A just cessation to hostilities must be realized as soon as possible. Once again, the record of the United States’ own record in this regard is very mixed. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done so as to force an unconditional surrender from Japan, something that the Soviets insisted on in the Potsdam Conference as their condition for entering the war against Japan (so that they could recover claims lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.) Japan was willing to surrender conditionally. Those who are convinced of their absolute moral and racial superiority over others, though, cannot consider ending hostilities even if it is possible to conclude a peace that is just without having humiliated one's enemies. Vladimir Putin wants only one thing: for victory on his terms, something that will serve as a warning to other countries neighboring Russia, especially Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as all other former “republics” under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, whose leaders want to become a stooge of American and globalist interests while pretending to be “democracies” when they are anything but that. It is clear, though, that Putin is going to have to settle for his military gains in Ukraine thus far. Only time will tear if he will abide by the terms of any peace agreement that emeges from the current negotiations being led by American President Donald John Trump.

In other words, none of the predicates of the Just War Theory had been met. This does not mean that there was no intransigence on the part of Ukrainian officials between 2014 and 2022, onlty that a on some matters. However, that intransigence, which is part of both diplomacy and an effort to secure the integrity of the borders of o a casus belli justifying a massive invasion of foreign troops and the deaths of innocent civilians. This is an immoral, unjustifiable war.

No “White Hats” or “Black Hats” in the Ukrainian Situation: A Brief Historical Summary

It was eleven years ago when some Americans were upset with then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro for his response an earlier crisis in Ukraine, which began when its then corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown in a American-sponsored and engineered coup d’etat on February 22, 2014, fleeing to exile in Russia (see Did We Provoke Putin’s War in Ukraine?). While Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro was indeed a vacillating fool on matters of foreign policy, a man who was tongue-tied and paralyzed when it comes to dealing with even the hint of a suggestion that Mohammedanism is evil in se, no American president has ever had any business meddling the affairs of Ukraine. There have been too many American presidents who have made it a point to meddle in the affairs of other nations, engaging in exercises of social engineering that resulted in the persecution of foreign nationals and the needless deaths of untold numbers of Americans, who should never have been put in harm’s way in the first place.

Yanukovych, who had been Prime Minister of Ukraine from November 21, 2002, to December 31, 2004, had been elected to the presidency in 2004 before the Supreme Court of Ukraine invalidated his election on grounds on election fraud following days of protest that came to be known as the “Orange Revolution.” The man who was elected in the presidency in the court ordered rerun election, Viktor Yushchenko, proved himself to be corrupt in his own right and did not even qualify for the ballot to run for re-election in 2010, at which time Viktor Yanukovych was elected and actually got to serve as the president of Ukraine until his ouster nearly three months ago now. In other words, politics in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was in existence, albeit with an ever-changing set of national boundaries from March 10, 1919, to December 25, 1991, are filled with intrigue, corruption, and scandal. Sort of sounds like the naturalist farce that takes place here in the United States of America, doesn’t it?

Indeed, as more than one secular commentator has noted, ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been decades in the making because of a truly bipartisan effort on the part of American presidential administrations to give Russia every reason to be suspicious of a pro-globalist and supposedly “pro-democracy” Ukraine. Ukrainian leaders helped to undermine a president, Donald John Trump, whose administration had actually provided them with military arms, something that the administration of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., refused to do despite their “pro-democracy” rhetoric, to cover up for Hunter Biden, thus weakening Ukraine militarily with Russia. As Trump himself has noted and as a majority of Americans agree, Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if he had been president (see 62% of Voters Say Putin Wouldn’t have invade Ukraine if Trump Were President).

Vladimir Putin cannot be indemnified for the deadly course of action that he has taken, but Ukrainian leaders deserve much blame for tying themselves as they did to the American intelligence and national security apparatus that put in place a man, Biden, who has been wrong about every national security matter in his entire fifty-year career in the government of the United States of America.

The Errors of Russia: A Chastisement for Us All

Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation a former Soviet KGB agent and director of one of its successors, the FGB, under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, from 1998 to 1999, is a corrupt Russian autocrat by dint of his own personality. It was his assignment to track down foreign nationals in the Democratic Republic of [East] Germany, a task to which he devoted himself with utmost diligence. He has distinguished himself during his two different tenures as President of the Russian Federation as a corrupt man who rewards his friends lavishly, something that the czars and commissars did before him, of course, and who is not averse to the harassing and silencing of those in his country who dare to criticize him, whether publicly or privately. If you think about this for a moment or two, it might occur to you that it is an act of utter hypocrisy for American President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., to criticize Putin’s suppression of dissent within the Russian Federation as he, Biden,, resents and seeks to punish, especially by means of the Unite States Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, those who criticize him and his policies, which he believes are infallible and thus beyond question.

As a Russian nationalist who has aligned himself with the heretics of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leaders have long sought to persecute Ukrainian Catholics, especially those who belong to the Uniate Rite Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which has roots dating back to the very Christianization of Russia itself and has been a Uniate Rite since the late-Sixteenth Century at the time of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1595, Vladimir Putin attempted to portray his actions eight years ago in Crimea (which was given to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita S. Khrushchev, who was known as the “Butcher of the Ukraine”–see Crimes of Khrushchev Against the Ukrainian People and The Bumpkin Butcher) during his time as the regional governor until Stalin, in 1954) and in the eastern part of Ukraine as being a bulwark against the godlessness of the Western world’s New World Order. Some “conservatives,” including some here in the United States of America, have fallen for this public relations effort.

It must be remembered that Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism are one and the same, which is why the late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who suffered in the gulags under Joseph Stalin for having criticized him, was an admirer of Putin’s in the late-1990s precisely because of the latter’s Russian nationalism and why the late Pultizer Prize laureate in literature, who was justly critical of Western immorality, materialism, legal positivism, and relativism, hated the Catholic Faith. For all of his excellent work condemning Marxism and Western liberalism, Solzhenitsyn equated Christianity with Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism.

Moreover, as has been noted on this site many times in the past, the errors of Russia spoken of by Our Lady in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal, refer to the antecedent roots of Bolshevism (also see Occult roots of the Russian Revoliution), Russian Orthodoxy.

Indeed, Marxism-Leninism, the most aggressive, atheistic form of socialism, was but a logical successor of nearly one thousand years of errors in Russia that made it possible for Talmudic financiers to build on the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by Orthodoxy by instituting the overtly anti-Theistic rule of the politburo. Just look at three of the pre-Communist errors of Russia, which remains, I believe, an instrument by which a chastisement will be visited upon the West for its infidelity to Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen:

1. Denial of Papal Primacy, presaging the errors of Martin Luther and John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer, et al.

2. Denial of the Magisterial Authority of the Catholic Church, leaving doctrinal decisions in the hands of committees of bishops.

3. The subordination of the Orthodox Church to the civil state, presaging the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the separation of Church and State wrought by Martin Luther and cemented by the rise of Judeo-Masonry and other, inter-related forces of naturalism.

Obviously, the errors of Russian Orthodoxy helped to shape the nature of Russian government over the centuries, something that Greek Orthodoxy, finding itself immersed in the heart of Mohammedanism, could not do. Thus, Russian Orthodoxy helped to pave the way over the centuries for Protestantism and Freemasonry by means of its rejection of the Social Reign of Christ King as it must be exercised by the Catholic Church.

The principal error of Modernity, the rejection of the Incarnation as an absolute necessity in the right ordering of men and their nations, had its antecedent roots in Russia. The errors of Russia influenced, albeit indirectly at times and through many filters, the ideas of the so-called Enlightenment in the West. And the failure of those anti-Incarnational and, at times, anti-Theistic ideas to resolve social problems, which have their remote cause in Original Sin and their proximate causes in the Actual Sins of men, made possible the rise of all manner of utopian theories.

Vladimir Putin is thus no friend of the true Faith. He, a thoroughly amoral man in both his public and private lives, has simple wrapped himself up in the mantle of Russian Orthodoxy to arouse support in the Russian Federation and to win the sympathy of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, having first wrested control of Crimea from the 2014 provisional government in Kiev, which is, the birthplace of Christianity in Russia, in order to isolate those who overthrew Viktor Yanukovych and put the economic squeeze on them so that they will eventually make their peace with “Greater Russia,” which he has been unable to do under the Jew named Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin has long desired to reconstitute parts of Imperial Russia and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For a review of the many times in which the boundaries of Ukraine have been redrawn over the centuries, please see 22 Maps That Explain The Centuries-Long Conflict In Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin also has geopolitical goals to accomplish as he seeks to reestablish a semblance of Russian dominance in a region that he seen come under the influence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the apparatchiks who run the European Union. Viktor Yanukovych has been in exile for eleven years now because he accepted Vladimir Putin’s bribe of “economic assistance” rather than that offered by the Eurosocialists of the West, whose ways of “freedom” and “diversity” caused the Obama administration to organize the “mobs” that showed him the way out of Kiev to his exile in Moscow. The American coup of eleven years ago made possible two successive Ukrainian administrations that were so friendly to the West that they cut off their face to spite their nose, thereby provoking the Russian bear into an invasion that was not justified proportionally to the provocation.

In other words, the dispute in Ukraine has not been about “right and wrong.” It is about which set of errors, the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity adhered to by the West or the errors of Russian nationalism that have persecuted untold millions of human beings, including our coreligionists in Poland, Lithuanian, Belarus and Ukraine over the centuries, is going to serve as the driving political force in what will remain of the territorial boundaries of Ukraine after Putin is finished with this latest effort to redraw those lines.

The West and the Overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014

For its part, the morally corrupt leaders of the pro-abortion, pro-perversity governments of the European Union and the United States of America have a vested interest in helping to spread the same joys of “democracy” and “freedom” that have permitted licentious to lay waste to the remnants of formerly Catholic Europe, whose indigenous population, choked off by means of chemical and surgical abortifacients, is being overcome by the descendants of the Mohammedan hordes who were turned back by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours on October 10, 732 A.D., by the combined Christian forces under the leadership of King John of Austria in the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, and by the forces under the command of Polish King John Sobieski in the Battle at the Gates of Vienna on September 12, 1683. Western leaders and their Talmudic financiers have wanted to establish a foothold in the former birthplace of Christianity in Russia, taking full advantage of the fact that over sixty-two percent of the population of Ukraine is atheistic, fruit of over seventy years of Bolshevik rule, interrupted in some parts of the country because of Nazi occupation during World War II. This is all about the consequence of the errors of Russia spreading as Our Lady said would be the case if it was not consecrated to her Immaculate Heart by a true pope and all of the world’s true bishops.

Western leaders, steeped in their support of all manner of social evils as they advance a statism whose goals are Marxist in conception if not in name, saw the mobs that ousted the Russian-friendly Yanukovych instruments to enslave Ukraine under their schemes of social engineering and banking, which makes their condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s current invasion of the country quite hypocritical as they sought to accomplish with bribery and flattery what Putin is seeking to accomplish with armed force.

Indeed, the aforementioned Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn identified the West’s ethnocentrism as the chief reason its leaders are incapable of understanding the rest of the world, including his own beloved Russia, then in Soviet captivity:

There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units. For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in communist captivity. It may be that in the past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West, I am no judge here; but as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it stands apart from the Western world in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered peoples’ approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success, there were no geographic frontiers to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the twentieth century came the discovery of its fragility and friability. We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious, and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.)

Those who have any sense of history know how well American attempts to Americanize other countries, starting with Our Lady’s own beloved Mexico, have worked in the course of this country’s history (see Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part one, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part two, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part three, Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part four and Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part five). Catholics suffered mightily under the yoke of one American-backed revolutionary Masonic regime after another, the devil’s revenge for Our Lady of Guadalupe’s having converted over nine million Aztecs and Mayans to the true Faith.

Unlike his starry-eyed opponents in the West, however, Vladimir Putin does not blink when he sets out to assert Russia’s dominance over a country. He knew that the weaklings in the West would not risk a nuclear conflagration over Ukraine, and he knows now that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr, and the rest of the globalist gang than could never shoot straight would never be able to stop his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, somethng that Putin admitted in a press conference on August 15, 2025, would not have happened in Donald John Trump been in office at tha time.

Alas, you see, it was far easier for Putin to pacify lands that are historically with the Russian sphere of influence than it was for the blind statists and globalists of the West to “Americanize” or “democratize” lands that will never conform to the American model of “democracy” that is responsible for the triumph of unbridled licentiousness and the rise of a neo-barbarism that calls to mind the state of much of Europe before it as Catholicized in the First Millennium.

There is simply no moral high ground on which the United States of America, which permits the chemical and surgical assassination of nearly four thousand innocent babies in their mothers’ wombs every day and untold numbers of people in hospitals by means of starvation and dehydration or by vivisection for their body members even though they are not dead, to stand to denounce Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine as he is merely doing what comes naturally to a Russian nationalist: to protect the people of his nationality for his own domestic political purposes in the Russian Federation and to show the West that Russia will not dance to the tune of its bankers.

Whither the Catholics of Ukraine

Only about a third of the country of Ukraine is Christian, which is part of the wretched legacy of godless Communism in Ukraine during the seventy years of Bolshevik rule (1919-1989), a fact that almost no secular Of that percentage, only nine percent are Catholics, who constitute about three percent of the total population in Ukraine. Nearly sixty-six percent of Christians in Ukraine belong to one of three different sets of the Orthodox.

Still and all, the Russian Orthodox leadership, with which Vladmir Putin has allied himself, has long been upset about the presence of any form of Catholicism in the Ukraine, no less of the Latin elements that remain among Roman Rite Catholics in the country. The Russian Orthodox have never gotten over the inroads made by Catholicism in Ukraine during the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1569 to 1795. Much like their counterparts in “ecumenical dialogue” in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, staring with Patriarch Krill himself, desire to eradicate true Catholicism, although the Russians want to do so not for the sake of conciliarism but to make Ukraine “pure” for Russian Orthodoxy without the “corrupting” influence of what is seen as the “Roman religion.”

A from the Catholic News Agency in 2022 summarized the history of Catholic suffering in Ukraine:

Though most of Ukraine's population is Eastern Orthodox, Catholics are among those suffering amid Russia's invasion of the country. Russian military entered Ukraine at several points on Thursday, and missile strikes on military targets and cities were also reported.

Here is what to know about Ukraine's Catholic population:

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

About 9 percent of Ukrainians (about 3.6 million persons) are Greek Catholics, meaning they are Catholics who belong to Churches of the Byzantine rite. The vast majority of these are part of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is led by Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuck of the Ukrainian Archeparchy of Kyiv-Halych.

The Byzantine rite celebrates the liturgy in the form used by the Eastern Orthodox Churches, regularly using the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

Ukrainian Greek Catholics are concentrated in the country's western oblasts bordering Poland, particularly Lviv. There are, however, 16 eparchies or exarchates (equivalent to dioceses or vicariates) of the Church throughout the country, including in Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is rooted in the 10th century Christianization of Kievan Rus', a state whose heritage Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus all claim. That event also forms the roots of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

This Church also has a diaspora, with a sizable presence in the U.S., Canada, Poland, and Brazil, and smaller communities elsewhere in Europe, and in Argentina and Australia.

Latin rite Catholics

There is also a Latin, or Roman, rite hierarchy in Ukraine, to which about 1 percent of the population belongs (about 371,000 persons). This is also concentrated in the west of the country, with six dioceses being suffragan to the Archdiocese of Lviv, and it has cultural ties to Poland and Hungary.

Others

Ukraine is also home to the Ruthenian Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, and the Armenian Catholic Archeparchy of Lviv.

The Ruthenian Catholic Church also uses the Byzantine rite, and it is centered in an oblast that borders four of Ukraine's western neighbors. There are nearly 320,000 Catholics in the Mukachevo eparchy, who are served by about 300 priests.

There is an Armenian Catholic Archeparchy in Lviv, though it has been vacant since World War II. Armenian Catholics in Ukraine are few in number, and are often entrusted to the pastoral care of priests of other Catholic Churches.

Persecution

Catholic Churches were severely persecuted in Ukraine while the country was part of the Soviet Union, and the renewal of conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the 2010s brought with it fears of ecclesial conflict and persecution.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was outlawed under Soviet rule, from 1946 to 1989, and the Ruthenian Catholic Church was suppressed in 1949.

In 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea and armed conflicts in other border regions between Ukrainian military forces, and pro-Russian rebel groups and Russian soldiers, the then-apostolic nuncio to Ukraine warned of a return of persecution because of Russia's expansion into Ukrainian territory.

“The danger of repression of the Greek-Catholic Church exists in whatever part of Ukraine Russia might establish its predominance or continue through acts of terrorism to push forward with its aggression,” Archbishop Thomas Gullickson said Sept. 23, 2014.

Archbishop Gullickson was nuncio to Ukraine from 2011 to 2015, and he retired in 2020, at age 70.

“Any number of statements emanating from the Kremlin of late leave little doubt of Russian Orthodox hostility and intolerance toward Ukrainian Greek-Catholics,” he said in September 2014 to directors of Aid to the Church in Need.

“There is no reason for excluding the possibility of another wholesale repression of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church as came about in 1946 with the complicity of the Orthodox brethren and the blessing of Moscow,” he stated.

Many Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic clergy were forced to leave Crimea after its annexation. Both Roman and Greek Catholics faced difficulties in properly registering ownership of church property and in ensuring legal residency for their clergy.

Under the Soviet Union, 128 priests, bishops, and nuns of the Ruthenian Catholic Church were put in prisons or sent into exile in Siberia. The eparchy of Mukachevo had 36 priests martyred during the persecution. (Things to Know About the Catholic Church in Ukraine. By the way, Eastern rite bishops are, by and large, true bishops as they have apostolic succession and are consecrated in a valid rite of the Catholic Church.)

Pray for the Catholics of Ukraine at this time. Catholics have suffered mightily under the yoke of Russian oppression in the past, and those who remain after the eventual Russian conquest of their country will suffer as their ancestors had done. Indeed, given the fact that will suffer mightily if Russians are able to install their stooges in Kiev.

None of this is to indemnify the amorality of Zelensky and the government he leads. Certainly not. He is simply an Eastern European dictator who has cancelled elections, imprisoned critics, and has gone so far as to shut down the heretical and schismatic Ukrainian Orthodox Church simply because it is associated with Russia.

However, it is nevertheless true that those who are literally “rooting” for Russia because of the amoral Vladimir Putin’s opposition to Western globalism and its agenda of perversity are generally the same people who look the other way as Donald John Trump continues his promotion of that same agenda now as he has done throughout the entirety of his life.

There are no “good guys” in any of this, only men, such as Zelensky, who are not baptized or who, though baptized, act in a depraved manner in their own personal lives that their intellects are more darkened and thus inclined to savagery than if they obeyed the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in their own lives and would thus be disposed to act with those laws in their public duties.

Our True Popes to the Rescue

The history of the disputed regions is very complex as the Russians had troops in the Donbas region even before the events of 2014 (A Woman Imprisoned for Years by Separatists in Eastern Ukraine Says No One Wants to Stay There) and neither the governmental officials of Ukraine nor of Russia have covered themselves in glory. The Russians have committed atrocities against Ukrainians in the Donbas region and the Ukrainians have sent drones to destroy residential apartment buildings in Russia.

Alas, Slavs tend to have long memories, and long memories without the forgiveness found in the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus are used by the adversary to lead people to hate those they blame for their problems and then to justify acts of violence against them. Here, good readers, we see once again what happens when men and their nations do not submit themselves to Christ the King and His true Church, a situation that has been exacerbated aplenty during this time of apostasy and betrayal and the absence of a true Pope to teach and guide men in the ways of true peace and everlasting salvation.

As well-intentioned as President Donald John Trump’s efforts to end the killing caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there can be no true and lasting peace within nations if the souls of men are in a state of perpetual warfare against the Most Holy Trinity by means of either Original Sin and/or Actual Sin. Peace is more than the absence of conflict.

The world must be punished because men continue to sin unrepentantly and because they believe that they can establish a “better” world and build “peace without Christ the King and His true Church and without a tender devotion to and firm reliance upon His Most Blessed Mother, especially through her Most Holy Rosary. This is true of the West, and it is true of Russia, which has not been converted back to Christianity as true Christianity is found only in the Catholic Church:

Just as Christianity cannot penetrate into the soul without making it better, so it cannot enter into public life without establishing order. With the idea of a God Who governs all, Who is infinitely Wise, Good, and Just, the idea of duty seizes upon the consciences of men. It assuages sorrow, it calms hatred, it engenders heroes. If it has transformed pagan society--and that transformation was a veritable resurrection--for barbarism disappeared in proportion as Christianity extended its sway, so, after the terrible shocks which unbelief has given to the world in our days, it will be able to put that world again on the true road, and bring back to order the States and peoples of modern times. But the return of Christianity will not be efficacious and complete if it does not restore the world to a sincere love of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In the Catholic Church Christianity is Incarnate. It identifies Itself with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society, which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for Its visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles. It is the continuation of the mission of the Savior, the daughter and the heiress of His Redemption. It has preached the Gospel, and has defended it at the price of Its blood, and strong in the Divine assistance and of that immortality which has been promised it, It makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which it has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect it in its inviolable integrity. Legitimate dispenser of the teachings of the Gospel it does not reveal itself only as the consoler and Redeemer of souls, but It is still more the internal source of justice and charity, and the propagator as well as the guardian of true liberty, and of that equality which alone is possible here below. In applying the doctrine of its Divine Founder, It maintains a wise equilibrium and marks the true limits between the rights and privileges of society. The equality which it proclaims does not destroy the distinction between the different social classes. It keeps them intact, as nature itself demands, in order to oppose the anarchy of reason emancipated from Faith, and abandoned to its own devices. The liberty which it gives in no wise conflicts with the rights of truth, because those rights are superior to the demands of liberty. Not does it infringe upon the rights of justice, because those rights are superior to the claims of mere numbers or power. Nor does it assail the rights of God because they are superior to the rights of humanity. (Pope Leo XIII, A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902.)

Those of you who have yet to accept the simple truth that the Catholic Church cannot make any compromises with error ought to reread the following sentence from the passage above as the conciliar “popes” have indeed made terms with error have polluted the integrity of the doctrine of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and all that Jorge Mario Bergoglio at this time to put these errors in easily understandable terms to as to tickle the itching ears of the multitudes:

It makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which it has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect it in its inviolable integrity. (Pope Leo XIII, A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902.)

Yes, Pope Leo XIII was a very wise pope, and we love had not the voice of a true pope for nearly sixty-three and one-half years, which is why so many people are looking to “conservative” figures in the counterfeit church of conciliarism for leadership and guidance. The counterfeit church of conciliarism is no more the standard bearer of Christianity than is the Russian Orthodox Church.

As Pope Pius XI noted in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937:

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.)

Yes, we must reform our own lives with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as they must be to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. In order to do this, of course, we love God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church with our whole mind, our whole soul, our whole body, our whole heart and our whole strength. We must love others for love of Him, Who wills the good of all men, which is the salvation of their immortal souls as members of the Catholic Church.

We must use this Octave of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to beg her for he peace of her Divine Son, a peace that can be had in the lives of us all if we pray, fast, go to Confession regularly (if possible in this time of a paucity of true priests), pray the Rosary with fervor, keep the promises of the Brown Scapular, protect ourselves with the Miraculous Medal and distribute blessed Green Scapulars to all those God’s Holy Providence places in our path during our journey in this passing, mortal vale of tears.

Do not fear what may happen because of current events. Just beg Our Lady to help you stay in a state of Sanctifying Grace as sin is not only more deadly the coronavirus, but also more dangerous and deadly than any world conflict.

Pray the Rosary daily.

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 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 John Eudes, pray us.

Appendix A

On Saint Eudes, Apostle of the Most Pure Heart of Mary

Today, Tuesday, August 19, 2025, is the one hundred eighth anniversary of Our Lady's fourth apparition to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and their cousin Lucia dos Santos. This particular apparition was delayed for six days because the children were being held by the Mayor of Ourem, Portugal, who tried to intimiate them into recanting their testimony about what they had seen and heard on the thirteenth of each of the preceding three months.

As is well known, Jacinta and Francisco Marto and their cousin Lucia dos Santos were spirited away by the atheistic Mayor of Ourem, Portugal Artur de Oliveira Santos, the founding president of the local Masonic lodge, on August 13, 1917, in order to intimidate them into denouncing the apparitions of the "beautiful Lady"in the Cova da Iria in Fatima. The three children were thrown into jail, where they prayed Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary at around noontime on August 13, the time that Our Lady was scheduled to appear to them in the Cova da Iria. The Mayor of Ourem then took the children to his own home, where he threatened to boil them alive in oil. His threats were to no avail. He had to give up when the children preferred to face death rather than to renounce their beautiful Lady, who had shown them a vision of Hell a month before and had asked them to promote devotion to Her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Artur de Oliveira Santos had the sense to give up when he knew that he could not get anywhere with Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia, whose own parents had their doubts about the Heavenly visions they claimed to have seen in the Cova da Iria. Although Artur Santos released the three children on the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1918, he refused to believe in Our Lady of Fatima even after the Miracle of the Sun, working to thwart a procession to the Cova da Iria on May 13, 1920, and involved in the plot that resulted in the roof of the chapel in the Cova being blown off on March 6, 1921 (the date of my own late mother's birth in Kansas City, Missouri), as two bombs near the holm oak tree atop which stood Our Lady during her visits failed to explode.(See The 1921 Bombing of the Shrine of Fatima by the Freemasons.) The Mayor of Ourem, a bitter atheist, hated the Mother of God and wanted to do everything in his power to stop belief in the Fatima Message.

It is no accident, therefore, that Our Lady chose to appear to the three shepherd children on August 19, 1917, after they had been freed as each of the dates she appeared had a connection with the liturgical feast of the day. Specifically, August 19 was the feast of Blessed John Eudes, who would be canonized by Pope Pius XI on May 31, 1925, a date that Pope Pius XII would designate in 1954 for the Feast of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Lady's delayed apparition to Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia on the feast of Blessed John Eudes, therefore, is highly significant as he helped to propagate devotion to Our Lady's Most Pure Heart, which he taught was inseparable from the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Saint John Eudes, whose feast is celebrated today, Saturday, August 19, 2023, helped to establish formal devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus some thirty years before the revelations that Our Lord gave to Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque. He also promoted devotion to the Holy Heart of Mary. His own priestly heart was such that he stressed the importance of priests to have the very Hearts of Jesus and Mary in the confessional, exhorting sinners to amend their lives, to be sure, but doing so with an understanding of the frailties of fallen human nature and the manner in which Our Lord wants His Mercy to be extended to the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. Saint John Eudes will help us to trust in the tender Mercies of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary during these times of apostasy and betrayal, especially as we pray the Holy Rosary to which he was so personally devoted.

The readings for Matins in today's Divine Office taught us about the remarkable life of this great apostle of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Most Pure Heart of Mary:

John was born in the year 1601, of pious and respectable parents, at a village commonly known as Ri, in the diocese of Seez. While still a boy, when he was fed with the bread of Angels, he cheerfully made a vow of perpetual chastity. Having been received at the College of Caen, directed by the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, he was conspicuous for a remarkable piety; and, committing himself to the protection of the Virgin Mary, when still a youth he signed with his own blood, the special covenant he had entered into with her. Having completed his courses of letters and of philosophy with great distinction, and having spurned opportunities of marriage which had been arranged for him, he enrolled himself with the Congregation of the Oratory de Bérulle, and was ordained priest at Paris. He was on fire with a marvellous love towards his neighbour: for he took the most constant pains in caring for both the souls and bodies of those smitten with the Asiatic plague, in many different places. He was made Rector of the Oratorian house at Caen, but since he had been thinking for a long time of educating suitable young men for the ministry of the Church, earnestly asking for the divine assistance, with a brave spirit he most regretfully departed from the associates with whom he had lived for twenty years.

Accordingly, associating five priests with himself, in the year 1643, on the feastday of the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary, he founded a Congregation of Priests, to whom he gave the most holy names of Jesus and Mary, and opened the first seminary at Caen; and a great many others followed immediately in Normandy and Brittany, also founded by him. For the recalling of sinful women to a Christian life, he founded the Order of Our Lady of Charity; of which most noble tree, the Congregation of the Good Shepherd of Angers is a branch. Furthermore, he founded the Society of the Admirable Heart of the Mother of God, and other charitable institutions. He was the author of many excellent treatises, and laboured as an Apostolic Missionary to the very end of his life, preaching the Gospel in very many villages, towns, and cities, and even in the royal court.

His matchless zeal was very conspicuous in promoting the salutary devotion towards the most sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, whose liturgical worship he was the first of all to devise, although not without some divine inspiration. He is therefore held to be the father, the teacher, and the apostle of that worship. Courageously withstanding the doctrines of the Jansenists, he preserved unalterable obedience towards the Chair of Peter, and he constantly prayed to God, both for his enemies as well as for his brethren. Broken by so many labours, rather than by years, desiring to be freed and to be with Christ, on the 19th day of August, 1680, frequently repeating the sweet names of Jesus and Mary, he died in peace. As he became illustrious by many miracles, Pope Pius X added him to the list of the Blessed, and as he still shone forth with new signs and wonders, Pope Pius XI, in the holy year and on the day of Pentecost, placed him among the Saints, and extended his Office and Mass to the universal Church. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saint John Eudes.)

Perhaps we can, in honor of Saint John Eudes and his deep connection to Our Lady, recite this salutation of his to Our Lady, who is meant to reign as the Queen of all men and all nations here on earth:

Hail Mary! Daughter of God the Father.

Hail Mary! Mother of God the Son.

Hail Mary! Spouse of God the Holy Ghost.

Hail Mary! Temple of the Most Blessed Trinity.

Hail Mary! Pure Lily of the Effulgent Trinity. God.

Hail Mary!! Celestial Rose of the ineffable Love of God.

Hail Mary! Virgin pure and humble, of whom the King of Heaven willed to be born and with thy milk to be nourished.

Hail Mary! Virgin of Virgins.

Hail Mary! Queen of Martyrs, whose soul a sword transfixed.

Hail Mary! Lady most blessed: Unto whom all power in Heaven and earth is given.

Hail Mary! My Queen and my Mother! My Life, my sweetness and my Hope.

Hail Mary! Mother most Amiable.

Hail Mary! Mother most Admirable.

Hail Mary! Mother of Divine Love.

Hail Mary! IMMACULATE! Conceived without sin!

Hail Mary Full of Grace. The Lord is with Thee! Blessed art Thou amongst Women and Blessed is the Fruit of Thy Womb, Jesus!

Blessed be thy Spouse, St. Joseph.

Blessed be thy Father, St. Joachim.

Blessed be thy Mother, St. Anne.

Blessed be thy Guardian, St. John.

Blessed be thy Holy Angel, St. Gabriel.

Glory be to God the Father, who chose thee.

Glory be to God the Son, who loved thee.

Glory be to God the Holy Ghost, who espoused thee.

O Glorious Virgin Mary, may all men love and praise thee.

Holy Mary, Mother of God! Pray for us and bless us, now, and at death in the Name of Jesus, thy Divine Son.

Appendix B

Pope Pius XII and His Rebukes of Russian Orthodox Persecution of Faithful Catholics

Unlike, the conciliar “popes,” including Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Pius XII spared no words when it came to praising Catholics, such as Saint Andrew Bobola, who sought the conversion of the Orthodox, which he, Pope Pius XII, did not treat as a true church because it is a heretical, schismatic sect that defects from the Catholic Faith in numerous ways.

Here is reminder of Pope Pius XII’s elegy in behalf of the work and martyrdom of Saint Andrew Bobola:

9. It is not surprising, then, that this athlete of Jesus Christ, adorned with these gifts of grace, should have achieved such notable progress in the apostolic field, and been able to gather rich fruits in the saving of souls. He was on fire to preserve, extend, and defend the Catholic faith. Thus, when serving as a teacher at Vilna, and later when living in other cities, he diligently taught the elements of Christian doctrine, and encouraged devotion to the Eucharist, and an ardent and filial-love of the Virgin Mother of God.

10. But afterwards, when he was raised to the dignity of the priesthood — in the same year and on the same day that Ignatius and Francis Xavier were inscribed at Rome in the calendar of the Saints — he chose before all else to spare no labor, in ministerial journeys and by sermons on holy things, in order that he might spread everywhere a Catholic faith which would not be ineffective, but productive of good works.

11. But the Catholic Church, particularly in the countries to the East, was facing an extremely grave crisis owing to the efforts of the schismatics, who were striving by every device to draw the faithful away from the unity of the Church into their own errors. Andrew went, therefore, into those regions on the instruction and command of his Superiors, and by public sermons and private instruction through their cities, towns, and villages, and most of all by the fervor of his exceptional holiness and the burning zeal of his apostolate, he freed the wavering faith of a multitude of Christians from beguiling falsehood, brought them back to sound principles, and joyfully invited all he could to return to the one fold of Jesus Christ. (Pope Pius XI, Invicti Athletae, May 16, 1957.)

How can anyone not grasp the clear contrast between the life and zeal for souls of Saint Andrew Bobola with the dismissal of Catholic doctrine by the conciliar “popes,” up to and including their lovingly warm embrace of the leaders of the Protestant sects and the Orthodox churches, embraces that mock the martyrdom of such Catholic heroes as Saints Josaphat Kuncewicz and Andrew Bobola without a thought of their every existence.

Pope Pius XII, however, sought to bring the memory of Saint Andrew Bobola to the forefront of Catholic minds at the height of the Cold War, which was characterized, of course, by the close cooperation of Orthodox leaders with Communist authorities in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and elsewhere throughout Eastern and Central Europe:

12. He did not merely restore and strengthen the faith of the Christians, languishing and on the verge of collapse, but roused them also to weep for their own sins, to settle their disputes, to heal their divisions, to restore true morality. It seemed that, like his Divine Master, wherever he passed by doing good, a new spring blossomed forth, bright with heavenly flowers and fruits of salvation. Consequently, as tradition has it, he received from all, even from the schismatics, the significant title of “hunter of souls.”

13. This tireless apostle of Jesus Christ had lived by faith, had spread the faith, and had defended the faith; so too, he did not hesitate to die for the faith of his fathers.

14. Notable among almost countless others was the unforgettable and savage onslaught on the Catholic religion which flared up in the 17th century in the Eastern countries. The Cossack forces then invaded those lands, and directed their furious attack on Catholics and their pastors, and on the heralds of the truth of the Gospel. Temples dedicated to the divine worship were utterly destroyed; monasteries were consumed by fire; priests and their flocks were everywhere put to the sword; everything was laid waste; all that was sacred was scattered to the winds.

15. Andrew Bobola could apply to himself that saying, “Nothing that is known to belong to God, do I consider outside my interests.”[6] He feared death and sufferings not at all. On fire with love for God and his neighbor, he entered the fray with all his resources, in order to draw back as many as he could from a foreswearing of the Catholic faith, and from the snares and errors of those who were separated from the Church, and in order to provide a valiant and rousing encouragement for the preservation of Christian teaching in all its integrity. (Pope Pius XI, Invicti Athletae, May 16, 1957.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio would recoil at the title of “hunter of souls,” wouldn’t he?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio would rather die fighting for the rights of heretics and schismatics than even to consider doing so for the Faith of our Fathers. Indeed, the conciliar revolutionaries have delighted in doing the same thing as the Lutherans, the Calvinist and the Anglicans had done in the Sixteenth Century and that the Cossacks did a century later: to destroy temples dedicated to the divine worship and by laying waste to the liturgy and traditions of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, which extend now to even changing the words of the Pater Noster and of the Gloria in Excelsis Deo prayers at the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service.

We return now to the denouement of Pope Pius XII’s pithy summary of the life and martyrdom of Saint Andrew Bobola:

16. But on May 16, 1657, on the feast of our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, he was seized near Janovia by the enemies of the Catholics. We do not think this filled him with fear, but rather with a heavenly joy. For We know that he had always prayed for martyrdom and had often recalled the words of the Divine Redeemer, “Blessed are you when men reproach you, and persecute you, and speaking falsely say all manner of evil against you, for my sake. Rejoice and exult, because your reward is great in heaven; for so did they persecute the prophets who were before you.”[7]

17. The mind shudders as it recalls all the tortures which the athlete of Jesus Christ endured with unconquerable fortitude and a faith resolute and unbroken. For, “beaten with rods, struck with blows, dragged by a rope behind a horse on a painful and blood-stained path, he was brought to Janovia to be delivered to the final torture.

18. “In that contest, the Polish Martyr rose to the heights of the noblest triumphs which the Church commemorates. Andrew was asked if he were a priest of the Latin rite, and he replied, ‘I am a Catholic priest; I was born in the Catholic faith; in that faith I wish to die. My faith is true; it leads to salvation. Do you rather repent; give place to sorrow for sin, else you will be unable, in your errors, to win salvation. By embracing my faith, you will acknowledge the true God, and will save your souls’.”[8]

19. At these words, those wicked men, utterly devoid of humanity, were roused to a fiendish barbarity, and reached such a degree of cruelty that they inflicted still more horrible sufferings on the soldier of Christ. Once again, “he was scourged, a crown like that of Jesus Christ was bound about his head, he was struck heavy blows and lay wounded by a scimitar. Next, his right eye was gouged out, strips of skin were torn off, his wounds were savagely scorched and rubbed with prickly bundles of straw. Nor was that enough: his ears, nose and lips were cut off, his tongue torn out by the root, and finally, a weapon plunged into his heart. And, at long last, the valiant athlete, three hours after midday, displaying a truly marvelous example of fortitude, was pierced by a sword and achieved the glory of martyrdom.”[9]

20. The victorious martyr, crimsoned in his own blood, has been received through his triumph into heaven, and on earth, the Church, when she beheld his resplendent holiness attested and confirmed by God Himself through truly remarkable miracles, proposed him for the devotion and imitation of the whole community of Christians. For in 1853, Our Predecessor of venerable memory, Pius IX, enrolled him among the Blessed in heaven, and in 1938, Our immediate Predecessor of immortal memory, Pius XI, solemnly placed him in the ranks of the Saints.

21. We have been pleased to sketch in brief outline, through this Encyclical Letter, the principal points in the life and holiness of Andrew Bobola, so that all sons of the Catholic Church throughout the world might not only admire, but also imitate with equal fidelity his sound religious teaching, his unwavering faith, his fortitude in defending the honor and glory of Christ even to martyrdom. Under your guidance and encouragement, Venerable Brothers, may all men contemplate his illustrious virtues, especially during these centenary celebrations. Let them understand that it is their duty to follow in his holy footsteps. (Pope Pius XII, Invicti Athletae, May 16, 1957.)

Saint Andrew Bobola’s holy martyrdom should inspire us anew to suffer whatever we must to remain firm in our conviction that we cannot maintain any ties at all to the counterfeit church of conciliarism, especially by repeating by repeating his stirring words prior to his martyrdom that Pope Pius XII had quoted in Invicti Athletae:

“I was born in the Catholic faith; in that faith I wish to die. My faith is true; it leads to salvation. Do you rather repent; give place to sorrow for sin, else you will be unable, in your errors, to win salvation. By embracing my faith, you will acknowledge the true God, and will save your souls’” (As found in: (Pope Pius XII, Invicti Athletae, May 16, 1957.)

Moreover, Pope Pius XII came to the defense of Ruthenian Rite Catholics when they were under attack by the Soviets and their Orthodox puppets in the very immediate aftermath of World War II in 1945.

His Holiness described the history of Russian persecution of Ruthenian Rite Catholics under the czars and then the commissars, starting by highlighting the martyrdom of Saint Josaphat Kuntzevitch:

47. The first of their number to come to our mind is the holy pontiff Josaphat Kuntzevitch, whose unconquerable fortitude we have briefly praised above. When he was murderously sought out by abandoned enemies of the Catholic name, he freely offered himself to the murderers, and gave himself as a victim to bring about as soon as possible the return of his dissident brethren. He was the outstanding martyr for Catholic faith and unity at that period, but not the only one; not a few both of the clergy and the laity received the same palm of victory after him; some were slain with the sword, some atrociously flogged to death, some drowned in the Dnieper, so passing from their triumph over death to heaven.

48. Not much later, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Cossacks openly took up arms against Poland. Then the hatred of those who opposed religious unity became ever stronger and more violent; they were convinced that the introduction of this union was the cause of all the calamities and evils that had befallen them; they were determined therefore to use every way and means to cast it down and destroy it. There resulted almost innumerable wrongs to the Catholic Church of the Ruthenians; many churches were profaned, pillaged, demolished, and their furnishing and property destroyed. Not a few of the clergy and a great number of the faithful were severely flogged, terribly tortured, most cruelly done to death. Even the bishops themselves were despoiled of their goods, ejected from their sees and forced to flee. However, even amid the raging of this storm, their spirit did not fail; they did everything possible for the protection and safe-keeping of the flocks entrusted to them, and, more than that, in their dire straits they exerted every effort, by prayer and argument and labor, to bring the whole Russian Church with the tsar Alexis into the unity of the fold.

49. Besides all this a new and no less bitter persecution of Catholicism was begun a few years before the partition of Poland. At the time when the troops of the Russian emperor had invaded Poland many churches of the Ruthenian rite were taken away from the Catholics by force of arms; the priests who refused to abjure their faith were put in chains, insulted, scourged and cast into prison, where they suffered cruelly from hunger, thirst and cold.

50. Not inferior to these in constancy and fortitude were the clergy who, about the year 1839, suffered the loss of their goods and even of their liberty, rather than abandon their religious duties. Among these we wish to recall in a special way the well-known priest, Joseph Ancewski, who was kept in harsh confinement in the monastery of Suzdal for thirty-two years, attaining the reward of his singular steadfastness in 1877, when he died a most holy death. We recall also the one hundred and sixty priests, who for open profession of the Catholic faith were torn away from their families, which were left in wretchedness, were transported into the interior of Russia and imprisoned in monasteries, but could not be turned from their holy resolve by hunger or any other affliction.

51. Equally conspicuous for fortitude were the many, both clergy and laity, of the eparchy of Chelm, who with unconquerable courage resisted the persecutors of the Catholic faith. For example, when troops came to seize their church and hand it over to the schismatics, the inhabitants of Pratolin did not resist force by force, but, unarmed, put their crowded bodies in the way of their attackers like a living wall; some were wounded and savagely ill-treated, some suffered long imprisonment or were deported to the icy regions of Siberia, some, finally, were put to the sword and shed their blood for Christ. The cause of those who sealed their Catholic faith by death has been begun in their eparchy, and so there is hope that at length it may be permitted to number them among the blessed. These iniquitous crimes were not, however, perpetrated in only one place, but in many cities, towns and villages. First, all the churches of the Catholics were handed over to the followers of schism, all the clergy driven from their places and forced to leave unguarded the flock committed to them. Then the faithful, with no account taken of their own wishes, were enrolled in the dissident Church. However, although orphaned of their pastors and deprived of the offices and helps of their religion, they made supreme efforts to hold fast to their faith. Thus it was that later when members of the Society of Jesus secretly went to them, in disguise and at the peril of their lives, to instruct, to exhort and to comfort them, they welcomed them with the greatest joy and devotion.

52. But a wonderful and happy spectacle was to be seen in the Ruthenian districts in 1905, when liberty to profess any religion was to some extent granted. Innumerable Catholics came forth from their retreats into open day. They had no priests of their own Eastern rite, so they went in a body, singing their thanks and praise to God, with the standard of the cross carried on high and their sacred pictures publicly exposed for veneration, to the churches of the Latin rite, entry to which had previously been prohibited to them under severe penalties. There they begged the lawful ministers of the Church to open their doors to them, receive their profession of faith and enroll them again among the Catholics. In this way in a short time 200,000 faithful were duly received back into the Church.

53. However, even in more recent times the bishops and priests and their faithful flocks have needed fortitude and constancy of spirit to retain their Catholic faith, protect the Church and defend its sacred liberty. Among them we must recall here, with special honor, the metropolitan Andrew Szepticky. During the first European war, when Galicia was occupied by Russian armies, he was expelled from his see and deported to a monastery, where he was for a time at least kept in prison; he had no greater desire than to testify to his great veneration for the Apostolic See, and even, sustained by God’s grace, gladly to suffer martyrdom for his flock, for whose welfare he had already long spent his strength and solicitude.

54. We have now seen, from the brief historical relation of events in this letter, how many and how great were the benefits and blessings brought to the Ruthenian people by its union with the Catholic Church. This is not, indeed, to be wondered at; for if “it was God’s good pleasure to let all completeness dwell” in Christ,[14] no one can enjoy this completeness who is separated from the Church which “is his body.”[15] As our predecessor Pelagius II asserts, “whoever is not in the peace and unity of the Church will not be able to possess God.”[16] We have seen, too, that this beloved Ruthenian people has had to suffer great hardships, perils and vexations in defending to the best of its power its Catholic unity, but from these Divine Providence has freed it again and again and restored peace to it. (Pope Pius XII, Orientales Omnes Ecclesias, December 23, 1953.)

Good readers, there has been a steady Russian persecution of Catholics over the centuries. Do not be fooled by the appearance of a toleration of Catholicism that exists in some parts of the Russian Federation at this time, and do not forget the persecution by the Communists from which the Orthodox profited handsomely after World War II that was described and denounced by our last true pope thus far, Pope Pius XII:

55. But now, with the greatest fatherly anguish of heart, we see a new and terrible storm threatening this Church. The information which reaches us is scanty, but is sufficient to cause solicitude and fill us with anxiety. It is the anniversary of the day three hundred and fifty years ago, when this ancient community of Christians was happily united to the supreme pastor, the successor of St. Peter; but this same day has become for us “a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of clouds and whirlwinds.”[17]

56. For we have learnt with great grief that, in those territories which have recently been made over to the sway of Russia, our dear brethren and sons of the Ruthenian people are in dire straits in consequence of their fidelity to the Apostolic See; every means are being employed to take them away from the bosom of their mother, the Church, and to induce them, against their will and against their known religious duty, to enter the communion of the dissidents. Thus it is reported that the clergy of the Ruthenian rite have complained in a letter to the civil government that in the Western Ukraine, as it is called today, their Church has been placed in an extremely difficult position; all its bishops and many of its priests have been arrested; and at the same time it has been prohibited that anyone should take up the government of the same Ruthenian Church.

57. We are well aware that this harsh and severe treatment is speciously attributed to political reasons. But this is no new procedure used today for the first time; very often in the course of the centuries the enemies of the Church have hesitated to make public profession of their opposition to the Catholic faith and to attack it openly; they brought cunning and subtle allegations that Catholics were plotting against the State. In the very same way the Jews accused the Divine Redeemer himself before the Roman governor, saying “We have discovered that this man is subverting the loyalty of our people, forbids the payment of tribute to Caesar.”[18] But faces and events themselves plainly manifest, and show in its true light, what was and is the real cause of this savagery. For, as is well known, the patriarch Alexis, recently elected by the dissident bishops of Russia, openly exalts and preaches defection from the Catholic Church in a letter lately addressed to the Ruthenian Church, a letter which contributed not a little to the initiation of this persecution. (Pope Pius XII, Orientales Omnes Ecclesias, December 23, 1953.)

A Brief Interjection:

Please note that, entirely unlike the conciliar “popes,” Pope Pius XII courageously denounced the Russian Orthodox patriarch at the time, Alexis, for his efforts to encourage Ruthenian Rite Catholics to apostatize to the heretical and schismatic Russian Orthodox sect as the price of being “saved” from Joseph Stalin’s own “denazification” efforts. It is important to know true history as Our Lady, who loves Russia and its people, did not appear in the Cova da Iria in Fatima to reaffirm Russia in its errors but to ask us all to pray her Most Holy Rosary for the conversion of Russia and its proper collegial consecration to her Immaculate Heart by a pope together with all of the world’s bishops. Error is never the foundation of anything but discord and violence.

Pope Pius XII went on to note in Orientales Omnes Ecclesias:

58. These griefs cut us the more deeply because while the cruel war was yet raging almost all the nations of the world, through a gathering of their representatives, solemnly proclaimed among other things that no persecution of religion must ever be undertaken. This had given us hope that peace and true liberty would be granted everywhere to the Catholic Church, the more so since the Church has always taught, and teaches, that obedience to the ordinances of the lawfully established civil power, within the sphere and bounds of its authority, is a duty of conscience. But, unfortunately, the events we have mentioned have grievously and bitterly weakened, have almost destroyed, our hope and confidence so far as the lands of the Ruthenians are concerned.

59. Amid these heavy calamities, since human help is seen to be of no avail, nothing remains, venerable brethren, but earnestly to implore the most merciful God, who “will do justice to the needy and will avenge the poor,”[19] that of his loving kindness he would himself calm this terrible storm and at length bring it to an end. We again and again exhort you and the flock committed to you to join with us by humble prayer and works of penance in imploring him by whose heavenly light the minds of men are illumined, by whose heavenly command their wills are directed, to spare his people and not to give up his heritage to reproach,[20] and speedily to free the Church of the Ruthenians from this hurtful crisis.

60. In this sad and anxious state of affairs our fatherly heart goes out especially to those who are so harshly and bitterly oppressed by it, and first of all to you, venerable brothers, the bishops of the Ruthenian people. Great as are the trials which afflict you, you are more burdened with anxiety for the safety of your flocks than for the injuries and sufferings inflicted upon yourselves, in accordance with the words: “the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.”[21] The present is dark and the future uncertain and full of cares, but do not lose heart. Rather so display yourselves, presenting “such a spectacle . . . to the whole creation, men and angels alike,”[22] that all the faithful of Christ may see in your endurance and courage a shining example. Courageously, and steadfastly enduring this attack of your enemies, and afire with a divine love for the Church, you become “the good odor of Christ unto God, in them that are saved and in them that perish.”[23] In bonds as you are, and separated from your sons, it is not in your power to give them instruction in our holy religion, but your very bonds more fully and profoundly proclaim and preach Christ.

61. As a father we next address you, our beloved sons who have received the seal of the priesthood, and must therefore follow more closely in the footsteps of Christ, “who suffered for us,”[24] and still more than others must bear the brunt of battle. We are deeply moved by your distress, but rejoice that we can say to the greater number of you, borrowing the words of the Divine Redeemer: “I know of all thy doings, thy faith, thy love, thy generosity, thy endurance, how in these last days thou art more active than at first.”[25] We exhort you to continue steadfastly and inflexibly to stand firm in your faith in these lamentable times; continue to uphold the weak and support the wavering. So far as there is need, warn the faithful of Christ entrusted to you that it is absolutely unlawful, even merely exteriorly or verbally, to deny or abandon Christ and His Church; expose the cunning wiles of those who promise men earthly advantages and greater happiness in this life, but destroy their souls. Show yourselves “as the ministers of God, in much patience, in tribulation, in necessities, in distresses . . . in chastity, in knowledge, in long-suffering, in sweetness, in the Holy Ghost, in charity unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God; by the armor of justice on the right hand and on the left.” [26] (Pope Pius XII, Orientales Omnes Ecclesias, December 23, 1953.)

It is thus remarkable that anyone—and I mean anyone—could fall for the Russian-inspired propaganda being spread by “Archbishop” Carlo Maria Vigano and so many other traditionally-minded Catholics that Russia is going to serve as a “Third Rome.”

What is this nonsense?

Catholics have suffering at the hands of Russian heretics and their superiors in whatever form of government has prevailed in Russia over the past millennium.

Take Russia at its word?

Consider the experience of Pope Saint Pius X in 1914 as he read the riot act to the Russian Ambassador to the Holy See about treatment of Catholics in Imperial Russia:

"There was no shade of weakness in him", Cardinal Merry del Val wrote, "He had the inflexible firmness of a ruler convinced of the responsibilities his high office imposed on him, and he was determined to fulfill them, cost what it might."

The Russian ambassador to the Vatican once discovered the firmness of the Pope. Shortly before his death [in 1914], Pius X granted this ambassador an audience. But he received him sternly, without a trace of a smile on his face. Full of majesty, he turned to his visitor. "I cannot accept good wishes from the representative of a power that fails to keep the promises it makes. Until now Russia has not kept a single one of the promises she made to the Catholics of Russia."

The ambassador had not expected such a greeting, and he was frightened. "Holy Father," he stammered, "this is not true!"

The Holy Father rose from his throne and, with a gesture that betrayed deep indignation, cried, "I will repeat what I have said: not a single promise has been kept! And you dare to say that I lie, Mr. Ambassador! I must ask you to leave this room!"

As pale as death, the ambassador stumbled out the door.

So with firmness and mercy, Pope Saint Pius X carried on his work--a worthy successor to Peter, of him it was said, "Upon this rock I will build my church." (Father Walter Diethelm, Saint Pius X: The Farm Boy Who Became Pope, published originally by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc., in 1956, republished by Ignatius Press in 1994.)

Why are many of you so willing to believe the Russians today just because the leaders of the West and their dupes in Ukraine are themselves without credibility?

Can it not be that both are equally without credibility before God and men?

Why live in Manichean world where one side must be “good” because the other side is “bad”?

Why fall for the trap of false opposites?

Russia is the seat of the errors of Modernity that gave birth to the anti-Incarnational lies of Judeo-Masonry, Protestantism and, in due course, Communism:

Remember these words of Saint Anthony Mary Claret in this regard:

On Christmas Day God infused into me the love of persecution and calumnies. . . . I dreamed I was imprisoned for a crime of which I was innocent. . . . To one who would have defended me, as St. Peter wished to defend Our Savior, I said: 'Shall I not drink the chalice my Father has given me?'

"On January 6, 1859, Our Lord made known to me that I am like the earth . . . which is trampled upon, yet doesn't speak. I, too, must be trodden underfoot and say nothing. The earth suffers cultivation. I must suffer mortification. Finally, to produce anything, the earth needs water; I, for the performance of good works, divine grace."

How consoling it must have been to hear Jesus promise him divine love, while tenderly addressing him as: "My little Anthony"--on April 27, 1859! And how he strove, ever harder, to obey his Redeemer's injunction, given at 4:25 a.m., on September 4, of that same year: "You have to teach your missionaries mortification, Anthony," to which, a few moments later, Our Lady added, "Thus will you reap fruit in souls, Anthony!"

And, now conditioned to receive supernatural messages in precise words and audible tones, and when they were precepts, to obey perfectly, he was ready for the most glorious promise and the most portentous revelation of all. "At 7:30 on the morning of September 23, Our Lord told me: 'You will fly across the earth . . . to preach of the immense chastisements soon to come to pass.' And He gave me to understand those words of the Apocalypse: 'And I behold and heard the voice of one eagle flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a a loud voice: Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabitants of the earth; by reason of the rest of the voices of the three angels who are yet to sound the trumpet.' this meant that the three great judgments of God that are going to fall upon the world are: 1) Protestantism and Communism; 2) the four archdemons who will, in a truly frightful manner, incite all to the love of pleasure, money, reason and independence of will; 3) the great wars with their horrible consequences."

Can we read this prophecy, set down for us a century ago, just when our world was entering upon the "golden age" of industry and commerce, of the scientific achievement that our grandfathers were assured was destined to create a life so good for all peoples that war would be banished forever, and doubt from whence it came? And do we dare to trace it from the Protestant Reformation to the curse of Communism; from the conquest of materialism to the deification of poor weak human reason and self-determination into "the great wars and their horrible consequences"! Upon the clean tablet of Anthony Claret's selfless spirit Our Lord engraved the warning His servant was to spell out for us" the incredible but inevitable graph of the "progress" of one century--our century! (Franchon Royer, The Life of St. Anthony Mary Claret, published originally in 1957 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1985, pp. 211-213.)

Behold the great wars with horrible consequences that have befallen men and their nations, including the one taking place in Ukraine at this time, in the past one hundred sixty-three years.

Concluding Remarks

As for Ukraine, it is suffering because of its own embrace of Western errors, especially its embrace of the surgical assassination of the innocent preborn and of providing special “rights” to those engaged in the sins of Sodom and all its related perverse vices, which keep mutating by the day, it seems, to say nothing how Ukraine is but a shell of its former self spiritually thanks to seventy years of atheistic Communist totalitarianism and thirty years of embracing the anti-Incarnational errors of Judeo-Masonry. We can only imagine what a terrible fate awaits us here in the United States of America for all the lies its leaders have told and all the grievous sins its laws have promoted in the name of human “rights” and “freedom.”

No nation, including Ukraine, which has been governed by its own oligarchs and or Western dupes/plants since 2004 (see Was Ukraine betrayed by its elites?), can know true peace unless men resolve to repent for their sins and cease their promotion under cover of the civil. Nations whose laws permit the slaughter of innocent babies and that promote perversity will always be at risk of those, such as Putin's Russia, who have no more regard for the lives of those who live in other nations than they have for the lives of the innocent preborn. The shedding of innocent blood under the cover of the civil law has consequences for all men and all nations, and this is one of the proximate reasons why there is much crime and violence in the United States of America and so many ruthless killers such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in the world.

Have I told you lately that it’s Christ or chaos, Catholicism, or the abyss?

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Wars and Rumors of Wars, part six, August 19, 2025

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