Phenomenal Refusal to Acknowledge Reality, part two

As I need a bit more time to review the sacrileges and blasphemies that took place over the past three days in Assisi, Italy, on the fortieth anniversary of Karol Jozef Wojtyla/John Paul II’s first “World Day of Prayer of Peace,” I thought that it would be useful to compose a follow-up to yesterday’s commentary, Phenomenal Refusal to Acknowledge Reality, about the conciliar church’s foundational rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King that has shaped the apostate mind of Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV throughout the entirety of his adult life.

Indeed, to be far to the American-born conciliar missionary to Peru, Robert Francis Prevost probably never heard of the Social Reign of Christ the King when he was growing up in Dolton, Illinois, the city that would one day herald the so-called “super mayor,” Tiffany Henyard, who has since moved to Georgia and is running for election as a Republican to the Fulton County Commission, as this immutable teaching of Holy Mother Church simply was not taught much in this country, noting a few exceptions here and there.

This large-scale American Catholic ignorance of the Social Reign of Christ the King was the result of the simple fact that most, although not all, of the first priests in colonial America and in the newly founded United States of America wanted Catholics to accept the “freedoms” in the United States of America that Catholics did not enjoy in England and Ireland and thus to fit in with the Protestant majority by simply going to Mass without seeking to convert Protestants nor the country itself to the true Faith.

Caught in the Devil’s Trap

To be sure, Catholics in the colonies, few in number though they were in the eighth decade of the Eighteenth Century, were in a very untenable situation. Indeed, they were in a trap that had been laid for them by the devil, finding themselves torn in a situation where they were not being killed, as had been the case for so long in England, but were still a hated minority in the land where some of their ancestors had lived for over one hundred forty years. A very small number of Catholics remained loyal to the British Crown as the first shots in the Revolutionary War were fired in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775. Most Catholics, however, were to be found on the side of the self- styled “patriots,” that is, colonists who desired to break from the mother country, Great Britain.  

The “religious liberty” desired by Catholics came at quite a price: their fidelity to the Social Teaching of Holy Mother Church. There was never a time in the one hundred eighty-six years between the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the “Second” Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, that the American “bishops” sought to teach the necessity of converting their land to the true Faith. To do so, obviously, would be to jeopardize their own acceptance and to disturb civil peace, they believed. Rather than seek to convert their fellow countrymen to the true Faith, the American bishops presided over the conversion of their fellow Catholics to the “republican spirit” of “freedom” and “democracy” and “independent thinking” that would lead most Catholics in the United States of America to come to view Holy Mother Church over the course of time through the lens of republicanism, “freedom” and “democracy.”

Such a spirit of independence from Roman “interference” had developed amongst Catholics in the colonies that Father John Carroll defied Bishop Richard Challoner (after whom the Challoner Douay-Rheims Bible is named)after he had been assigned to oversee the dismantling of the Society of Jesus following its suppression by Pope Clement XIV on July 21, 1773:  

Although shocked by the enmity which passage of the Quebec Act had unleashed against his faith, Father Carroll nevertheless sided with the Patriots in their dispute with England. He proudly followed the career of his famous cousin, Charles, sympathizing with his republican convictions and becoming so independence-minded himself that he refused his obedience to Father John Lewis, acting as Bishop Challoner’s vicar-general. By this act, like so many of his fellow priests in America, he made it clear that he had no wish to submit to ecclesiastical authority based in England. Nevertheless, John Carroll was far from enthusiastic when his cousin Charles approached him with the astounding invitation to help win the Catholics of Canada to the Patriot cause (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, p. 48.)  

Anti-Catholics though the leading colonists may have been, they were also as pragmatic as their

British overlords. Some of those leading colonists believed that a way could be found to win over Catholics to the “patriot” cause, an invitation that suited the purposes of the Carrolls of Maryland in order to win acceptance and thus general “tolerance” for their co-religionists in each of the colonies when they became states in an independent United States of America.  

The late Mrs. Solange Hertz described the Masonic background of Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who had enlisted his cousin, Father John Carroll, to accompany the libertine Freemason Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase on a mission to Canada to win over the very people who had been the object of such hatred after the Quebec Act to the cause of American independence:

Charles Carroll, born in Annapolis in 1737, had become very active politically on completing his education abroad. He served 23 years in the Maryland legislature as well as in the U.S. Senate until it became illegal to hold both offices simultaneously. At the t i m e of the Revolution he was probably the richest man in America, owning some 80,000 acres in Maryland alone. Enjoying a reputation as a somewhat eccentric, but affable money-grubber, he was invaluable in managing the finances of the Continental Army. It has been pointed out that he stood most to lose should the Revolution fail: “There go a few millions!” exclaimed one onlooker who watched him sign the Declaration of Independence. But this was to lose sight of the fact that he also stood the most to gain if the Revolution succeeded and English taxes thereby abolished. His gamble paid off gloriously.  

He was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration, whose language a true son of the Church would have held under the deepest suspicion. Although he never denied the Faith and was sober and disciplined in his personal habits, he was not noted for any outbursts of piety. His birth may have been illegitimate, inasmuch as his parents’ marriage certificate bears a date some twenty years after he was born. His wife died young, a victim of opiates, and he never re-married. All his children died out of the Church, his only son Charles of Homewood renouncing the Faith, taking to drink and never holding any position worth mentioning.  

The Masonic builders of liberty had the utmost confidence in Charles Carroll. He not only helped win Maryland to the Articles of Confederation and later to the hotly resisted Constitution, but through his connections abroad, smoothed Franklin’s path in Paris to seal the French Alliance whereby France threw her weight against the English king. In February 1776 the Continental Congress resolved “that a committee of three–two of whom to be members of Congress–to be appointed to repair to Canada, there to pursue such instructions as shall be given them by that body.” Those named were the dean of American Masonry, Benjamin Franklin, together with the Maryland Protestant Samuel

Chase–and Charles Carroll. This despite the fact that he was only an observer at the

Congress, Catholics being barred from serving as delegates. (Solange Hertz, The Star Spangled Heresy: Americanism: How the Catholic Church in America Became the American Catholic Church, Veritas Press: Santa Monica, California, 1992, pp. 36-37.)  

The mission to Quebec that Father John Carroll undertook with his cousin, a Master Mason, and the chief of the Masons in the English colonies, Benjamin Franklin, began the official co-opting of leading Catholics by men who had no use for the Faith other than to use Its adherents for their purposes of promoting the “new science of politics” represented by their false ideas. This is not an exaggeration. Leading American “patriots” sought to do this very explicitly, something that Robert Leckie demonstrated (without understanding that he was doing so) in American and Catholic:  

After its first outburst against the Quebec Act, Congress [the First Continental Congress] had second thoughts about Canada. On the very same day that it had excoriated King George for tolerating in America a religion which “has deluged your land in blood,” they addressed a quite dissimilar letter to the people of Quebec, inviting them to join the fight against tyranny and declaring:  

We are too well acquainted with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation, to imagine, that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us. You know, that the transcendent nature of freedom elevates those, who unite in her cause, above all such-low minded infirmities.  

The Canadians, however, were also “too well-acquainted” with the true religious sentiments of the Protestants to the south, and they angrily spurned the overtures of what they called “the perfidious Congress.” Moreover, Bishop [Jean-Oliver] Briand of Quebec deeply distrusted the Americans, and forbade any of his flock to join them under penalty of excommunication. Thus, Canada remained loyal to the British crown, and in 1775 Congress, despairing of diplomacy, authorized a two-pronged military assault on Montreal and Quebec under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold. Although this expedition ultimately ended in failure, Congress flip- flopped back to diplomacy again. Already aware that the traditional American hatred of Catholicism was going to have to be muted during the war against England, it authorized a diplomatic mission to Canada charged with impressing upon the Canadians its new-found tolerance of Popery. Benjamin Franklin was the obvious choice to lead the embassy, along with Samuel Chase, known to have Catholic friends, and the Catholic Charles Carroll. A few weeks later the British-born

General Charles Lee wrote to his friend John Hancock: “I should think that if some Jesuit

of Religieuse or any other Order (he must be a man of liberal sentiments, enlarged mind and a manifest friend of Civil Liberty) could be found out and sent to Canada, he would be worth battalions to us.” The same idea had occurred to John Adams, who wrote to a friend: “We have empowered the Committee to take with them, another gentleman of Maryland, a Mr. John Carroll, a Roman Catholic priest, and a Jesuit, a gentleman of learning and Abilities.” Obviously, John Adams, could he swallow his hatred of priests, and especially Jesuits, to the extent that he could praise one, Catholicism was once again in good odor in Philadelphia. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 48-49.)  

Only a corrupted version of Catholicism displays “liberal sentiments” with an “enlarged mind” and is a “manifest friend” of “Civil Liberty.” In other words, the Catholicism desired by Charles Lee and his fellow anti-Catholics was a “safe Catholicism.” Although it took much time and many struggles of one sort or another, the “safe,” “acceptable” brand of Catholicism that emerged after the Revolutionary War was a prophetic harbinger of the “safe Catholicism” that now exists in the entire world. It is called the counterfeit church of conciliarism that most people in the world believe is the Catholic Church but is in fact her counterfeit ape.  

It was on that mission to Quebec in 1774 that the colonial elite began to realize that they could neutralize “popery” by extending leading “papists” some baubles of recognition, thus convincing them that they could all live together in peace and brotherhood while they, the Catholics, surrendered any claim to seek the conversion of the country to the true Faith. Furthermore, the colonial elite believed that the Catholics could be convinced to “stand up” to any kind of “Roman interference” in their “internal affairs” in an independent American nation the way that they were standing up to King George III and the military might of the British Empire.  

It was a year after the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Revolutionary War and resulted in concessions by England to France and Spain that Father John Carroll was selected to be the de facto superior of the approximately 25,000 Catholics who lived in the new country, the United States of America. Benjamin Franklin personally recommended his old friend from the Quebec mission to Pope Pius VI’s papal nuncio to France for the position. Some of the American priests, having worked for so long without a superior, were resentful at the mere notion of the sudden appearance of a hierarchy, no less one established by “Rome.” Father Carroll himself was so concerned about the appearance of “foreign interference” that he wrote to Leonardo Cardinal Antonelli, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith from May 2, 1780, to June 25, 1784, to request him to phrase his appointment in such a way so that Protestants would not be frightened:  

In the official letter to Carroll, Cardinal Antontelli confirms that he was chosen because “it is known that your appointment will please and gratify many members of that republic, and especially Mr. Franklin, the eminent individual who represents that republic at the court of the Most Christian King [Louis XVI of France]. Accepting the appointment, Carroll urged the Cardinal to find some method whereby in future it would not appear that the American Church was receiving its authority from a foreign power! He had petitioned the Pope not to leave American Catholics under the jurisdiction of their prelate in England, alleging that this could not be done “without open offense at this supreme magistracy and political government.” (Solange Hertz, The Spar Spangled Heresy: Americanism: How the Catholic Church in America Became the American Catholic Church, Veritas Press: Santa Monica, California, 1992, p. 38.)

Father John Carroll was sincerely concerned about the growth of the Faith in the United States of America. He simply believed that a way could be found to do this without appearing to threaten the Protestants.  

An admirer of Father Carroll, Jay P. Dolan, quoted Carroll at length on the matter:  

I consider powers issued from the Propaganda not only as improper, but dangerous here. The jealously in our Governments of the interference of any foreign jurisdiction is known to be such that we cannot expect, and in my opinion ought not to wish, that they would tolerate any other, than that which being purely spiritual, is essential to our Religion, to wit, an acknowledgment of the Pope’s spiritual Supremacy, and of the see of S. Peter being the center of Ecclesiastical unity. The appointment therefore by the Propaganda of a Superior for this Country appears to be a dangerous step, and, by exciting the jealousy of the governments here may lend much to the prejudice of Religion, and perhaps expose it to the reproach of encouraging a dependence on a foreign power, and giving them an undue internal influence by leaving with them a prerogative to nominate to places of trust and real importance, and that ad scum beneplacitum [at their own pleasure]. (Quoted in Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, Doubleday, 1985, p. 106.)  

The future proto-bishop and archbishop in the United States of America, John Carroll, also believed passionately in what Pope Saint Pius X would term a thesis absolutely false, separation of Church and State, a thesis that was condemned repeatedly by pope after pope in the Nineteenth Century. No matter Archbishop John Carroll’s becoming a bit more “conservative” in his later years, especially concerning the necessity of Church discipline and the retention of Latin in the Sacred Liturgy despite having supported the use of the vernacular thirty years previously (in the 1780s), he remained a champion of the falsehoods of “separation of Church and State” and “religious liberty” until the day he died on December 3, 1815. This was no mere pragmatic concession to the reality of the situation in which Catholics found themselves. This was a complete and total commitment to these insidious falsehoods as a matter of firmly rooted principle, thus preparing the way for the triumph of conciliarism in our own days:  

In addition to being independent and American, a third dimension of the republican blueprint of Catholicism was an insistence on the separation of church and state. In the seventeenth century, Lord Baltimore had implemented this practice when he refused to allow the Jesuits any special privileges; at the time, it was a pragmatic decision rooted in the necessity for religious toleration in a Catholic colony populated by Protestants. With the Protestant takeover in Maryland, religious toleration became an orphan. Only with the [American] Revolution, did this republican idea became actualized once more. This time it emerged not as a pragmatic concession to a religiously plural environment, but as a fundamental human right endorsed by the Revolution. Catholics accepted this rights-ofman philosophy and enthusiastically supported the concept of a free church in a free society. Such thinking placed American Catholics squarely in the mainstream of Catholic Enlightenment thought. (Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, Doubleday, 1985, p. 108.)  

Such a description could have been written by Antipope Emeritus Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself, who does indeed see the events of the American Revolution as decisive in shaping the ethos of the “Second” Vatican Council:

In the meantime, however, the modern age had also experienced developments. People came to realize that the American Revolution was offering a model of a modern State that differed from the theoretical model with radical tendencies that had emerged during the second phase of the French Revolution. (Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to Members of the Roman Curia, December 22, 2005.)  

The model of the “modern State” “offered” by the American Revolution was no less radical than the one that emerged during the “second phase of the French Revolution.” Although many Catholic apologists of the American founding have sought to portray it as different than the radicalism of the French Revolution, the differences are matters of degree, not of kind, as the principle root is the same: the belief that men and their nations could be well-organized absent a due subordination to the Sacred Deposit of Faith as It has been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which is hinged the totality of social order. The devil had to attack France with the violence and bloodshed that began to be unleashed on July 14, 1789, as the Cross of the Divine Redeemer had been planted firmly into the French soil; he used more subtle–and hence more insidious–means to co-opt American Catholics into becoming just as hostile to the Social Reign of Christ the King as were the Jacobins of the French Revolution.  

There are others who claim that the “independent” spirit that has long characterized Catholicism in the United States of America is the reason that the traditional movement had a much larger following, relatively speaking, than in Europe. One may concede that point, only to note, however, that there would be no need for any kind of traditional movement anywhere in the world if the virus of Americanism had not incubated during colonial days and then began to spread following the end of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, which, as will be seen in volume two of this book, would later infect the entirety of the world and become the very foundation of the conciliar church’s embrace of separation of Church and State and religious liberty and of false ecumenism itself.  

Jay P. Dolan came to this conclusion in an admiring, not critical, way in The American Catholic Experience:

For Roman Catholics, modernism is a term generally associated with a theological controversy that surfaced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But the rise of historical-mindedness, or what can be called the modernist mentality, clearly predated this controversy. As regards European Catholicism, the evidence for this is extensive. Even though the evidence is not so extensive for American Catholicism, a definite modernist impulse can be discerned in some leading American Catholic thinkers. Though they did not call themselves modernists, nor did the self-conscious think of themselves as such, they were thinking and acting according to a modern perspective that theologically viewed the church as historically conditioned–unlike the classicist or neo-Scholastic mentality, which viewed it as unchanging and immune to the influence of history.  

John Carroll was an intellectual heir of the Enlightenment, and his thinking on the nature of the church leaned in the modern direction. As previously noted in the chapter on republican Catholicism, John Carroll wanted to adapt certain practices of the church to the American environment. These included the training of priests, an English liturgy, friendly relations and cooperation with Protestants, and a church independent of foreign interference. In this manner he envisioned a church in the United States distinct from Roman Catholic churches in other countries. Such a program of adaptation to the American cultural situation clearly pointed in the modernist direction. Though these types of adaptation were more external and would not alter the intrinsic meaning of the church, Carroll did go further. He advocated the separation of Church and state, and promoted the idea of religious liberty. This touched on the very meaning of the church. According to the institutional model, the church was the one perfect society, and the state or civil society was subject to the rule of the church. Carroll promoted a different point of view, and in doing so modified the institutional model of the church as the one perfect visible society. Though he never fully explained how church and state would be separated and the consequent relationship between the two, his advocacy of the general concept of separation according to the American model clearly put him at odds with the prevailing model of the church as the one perfect society. In addition, Carroll celebrated religious liberty, not as a pragmatic concession to a religiously pluralist society, but as a natural human right. This, too, challenged the prevailing Roman Catholic position that said error had no rights and false religious beliefs could not be tolerated. The logic of Carroll’s position suggested that, in a religiously pluralist society, Roman Catholicism could not claim to be the one and only visible church.   

In advocating these positions on religious liberty and the separation of Church and state, Carroll was implying that the understanding of the church should be adapted to the cultural context, in this case the United States. Such thinking reflected a historical consciousness, a modern mentality in other words, when it came to defining the meaning of the church. This does not mean that Carroll self-consciously was adopting a historical, modern perspective in place of the classicist point of view. Nor was Carroll alone. During the Republican era, other American Catholics advocated religious liberty and separation of church and state. Unlike in Europe, such thinking did not result in a new school of thought or a new theology, but it did set a precedent. The precedent was the need of the church to adapt itself to the American context, not just in externals, but even in its very definition. (Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, Doubleday, 1985, pp. 304-305.)  

The process of converting Catholics to an acceptance of the secular state of Modernity began with the arrival of Catholics in Maryland in 1634. It became institutionalized in the decades thereafter, anchoring itself upon the mooring provided by the Constitution and the “founding principles.” The process of adaptation used by John Carroll has become that of the conciliar church. Unfortunately, for John Carroll, however, his desire to adapt the Faith to the American experience resulted in the precise thing he feared: Catholics becoming more and more Protestant in their mentality over the course of time:  

Obviously, American Catholicism did not seem to have a promising future [in 1785], and Father Carroll’s report reflects his deep concern for its chief problem of “leakage.” By then, the country contained an estimated quarter-million lapsed Catholics, ordinary people who, unlike the wealthy planters of Maryland, and farmers of Pennsylvania, had found it exceedingly difficult to practice their religion. With the shortage of priests continuing, and the immigrant tide rising daily, many more were to be lost irrevocably. Even today [1970], the presence of so many Protestant Irish in the South testifies to the mass defection of their ancestors. They lost their faith, wrote Father Carroll, not only because they found no place to practice it or found hostility to the public profession of it too much to bear, but also because of “unavoidable intercourse with non-Catholics.” This produced moral laxness, or at least a relaxing of comparatively stricter Catholic morality, and what the prefect apostolic considered a greater danger: mixed marriages. Again and again, Carroll was to complain of this problem and his helplessness against it. In 1798 he wrote to a friend in England: “Here our Catholics are so mixed with Protestants in all the intercourse of civil society and business public and private, that abuse of intermarriage is almost universal and it surpasses my ability to devise an effectual bar against it. No general prohibition can be exacted without reducing many of the faithful to live in a state of celibacy.” In other words, if one Catholic family was set down in a community of, say, thirty Protestant families, where would the Catholic children find partners? And if they accepted reality and chose them from among the Protestants, would it be very likely that the offspring of the dominant majority would embrace an abhorred minority faith? If one is to judge from so distinguished a Catholic as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, here is the answer: all of Carroll’s children married non-Catholics; and apparently none of his grandchildren were raised as Catholics. Another outstanding Catholic, Dominick Lynch of New York, one of the pillars of the Church who signed the letter to Washington, fathered a family of thirteen children, but within a few generations almost all of his descendants were lost to the faith. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, 1970, p. 64.)  

Archbishop John Carroll found himself in a quandary as he never wavered in his support for the very thing that made it possible for the pluralism about which he complained to flourish and thus to take hold of the minds, hearts and souls of Catholics in the United States of America: the founding principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the very framework of the American Constitution that enshrined the principles of separation of Church and State and religious liberty without ever using those exact words. And it would be the rotten fruit of those principles that was to plant insidious seeds for the rise of a counterfeit ape of the Catholic Church headed by men who believed that the expression of Church teaching is indeed historically conditioned and must be adapted to the circumstances of time and place.  

Even with the accommodations that were made, however, Catholics in the United States of America still faced overt persecution throughout most of the Nineteenth Century just because Protestants and Freemasons knew and were fearful of what Catholics should believe concerning her teaching on no salvation outside of Holy Mother Church and Papal Primacy even though most Catholics at the time simply wanted to make a living and live in peace. Anti-Catholic riots took place in Providence, Rhode Island, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, at various times before the War between the States.

As the Church became more established in the United States of America and grew because of successive waves of immigration (from Ireland before the War between the States and from Italy, Central, and Eastern Europe following Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in the 1870s during the Industrial Revolution thereafter), tensions began to develop between Americanist bishops who believed that immigrants had to put aside their native languages and pious customs in order to become “Americanized” and the few bishops, such as Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester, New York, who understood that a practical religious indifferentism had become an established fact in the life of most American Catholics that risked losing a zeal for the salvation of their non-Catholic friends and neighbors.

Americanist bishops such as Archbishop John Ireland, who was the Archbishop of Saint Paul from 1884 to 2018, urged Catholics to make their peace with the “age,” thereby serving as a perverse prophet on behalf of the false principles that would be enshrined at the “Second” Vatican Council and in the “magisterium” of the conciliar “popes.”

Here are a few excerpts from the sermon given by Archbishop Ireland on the occasion of Cardinal Gibbons’ twenty-fifth anniversary of episcopal consecration:

The New Crusade–Bringing Into Close Contact Church And Age

What! the Church of the living God, the Church of ten thousand victories over pagans and barbarians, over false philosophies and heresies, over defiant kings and unruly peoples–the great, freedom-loving, philanthropic, truth-giving Catholic Church–this Church afraid of the nineteenth century! afraid of any century! not seeing in the nineteenth the fervent ebullitions of noblest sentiments, the germinations of her own Christlike plantings; this Church not eager for the fray, not precipitating herself with force irresistible upon this modern world to claim it, to love it, to foster and admire or to correct and cure, to own it for Christ, and with her impetuous arm to lift it to the very summit of its highest aspirations, to which only the Church’s aid this panting, hoping, despairing world can every reach! Far, far from Catholics be the chilling, fatal, un-Catholic thought!

I preach the new, the most glorious crusade. Church and age! Unite them in the name of humanity, in the name of God.  

Church and age! Bring them into close contact; they pulsate alike; the God of humanity works in one, the God of supernatural revelations works in the other–in both the self-same God.

It Is An Age of Liberty--the Age of the Democracy.

It is an age of liberty, civil and political; it is the age of the democracy, when the whole people, tired of the unrestricted way of sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, and exercise with more or less directness the power was always their primarily by divine ordinance. The age of the democracy! The Catholic Church, I am sure, has no fear of the democracy, this flowering of her own most sacred principles of the equality, fraternity, and liberty of all men, in Christ and through Christ. These principles are spread upon every page of the gospel. From the moment they were first confided to the Church they have been ceaselessly leavening minds and hearts towards the fullest recognition of rights and the dignity among all men, toward the elevation of the multitudes of men, and the enjoyment by them of freedom from unnecessary restrictions, of social happiness mingled with as few sorrows as earth's planet permits. The whole history of the Catholic Church is the record of the enfranchisement of the slave, the curbing of royal tyranny, the defence of the poor, of the people, of woman, of all the social entities that pride and passion choose to trample upon. The great theologians of the Church, an Aquinas, a Suarez, provide in their teachings complete foundations for the political democracy, which assumes in the presume age its plenary form. They assert and prove that all political power comes from God through the people, whose delegates kings and princes are, and that when rulers become tyrants the inalienable right of revolution is reserved to the people. The Church lives under all forms of government. When ratified by the people all forms of legitimate; but the government which more than another is that of the people, by the people, and for the people, is the one where the Church of the people, the Catholic Church, breathes air most congenial to her principles of her heart. . . . .

It is an age of social battlings for justice to all men, for the right of all men to live in the frugal comfort becoming rational creatures, to all of whom birth in the world gives them title of a sufficiency of the things of the world. Very well; is not this sudden revolution which has come upon men in the plea for social justice and social comfort the loud outburst of the cry which has ever been going forth from the bosom of the Church since the words were spoken by the Founder: "Seek first the king of God and His justice, and all things else should be added unto you"? It is not sufficiently made public that the principles underlying the social movement of the times in all its legitimate demands are the principles constantly taught in Catholic theological schools, as, for instance, this chief one proclaimed by the Cardinal Manning, to the horror of the aristocratic England, that in case of extreme need of food all goods become common property. Catholics have of late been so accustomed to lock up their teachings in temple and seminary that when the same teachings appear in active evolution upon the broad sea of humanity they do not recognize them; they even fear and disown them.

It is an age of material progress, of inventions, of the subjugation of nature's forces to the service of man, of the building up of the man over all irrational creatures. Does Church in these things condemn the age? It is her doctrines that the earth was given to man that he dominates over it. Progress of every kind the Church blesses; for progress along the lines of all human activities and human uses is the divine ordering,--stagnation and inactivity calling down from God reprobation, as we learn from the parable of the talents. (Archbishop John Ireland, A Sermon of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Episcopal Consecration of His Eminence James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. Full text found in The Voice of the Church, a book published by the Bishops of the United States of America in 1899, pp. 103-113. We were given this book by a friend of ours who believed that it would be of use in my work. It is a treasure of Americanism mixed in with various articles that are authentically Catholic. In other words, it was very representative of the state of confusion that existed in the minds of Catholics in the United States of America at the end of the Nineteenth Century, a state of confusion that has now been spread worldwide as a result of conciliarism's embrace of "the age.")

The bilge from the likes of the conciliar “pontiffs” about “renewing fidelity to the Mystery of Christ” is thus nothing new as the Americanists and the Sillonists helped, along with others, to pave the way for the triumph of the conciliar sect’s rejection of Holy Mother Church’s immutable teaching concerning the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that utterly rejects as condemned the modern concepts of “religious liberty” and “separation of Church and State.”

Well, I think it prudent, wise and necessary to call upon three popes named Pius at this juncture:

80. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.- -Allocution "Jamdudum cernimus," March 18, 1861. (Pope Pius IX, The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864.)

It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: 'These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts.' On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason'; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.' Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: 'Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Moreover they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

Those who want to channel the thought and carry out in deed the false teaching of the likes of John Ireland are, whether or not they realize it, channeling the devil as it is he who desires Holy Mother Church to be adapted to an "age" that has been born and is now foundering as the direct consequences of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the subsequent rise of Judeo-Masonry that followed in its wake.

As has been noted, the conciliar sect’s “official reconciliation” with the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic principles of Modernity took place at the “Second” Vatican Council and it was an American bishop, Albert “Cardinal” Meyer of Chicago, then the conciliar “archbishop” of Chicago, took to the floor to recommend that schema on Divine Revelation include a frank recognition of the belief that Holy Mother Church could fail in her interpretation of Tradition and other doctrines, whose formulation may have more to do, Meyer, believed, with the historical circumstances of the time rather than any true “connection” with sound teaching. The intervention of “Cardinal” Meyer, who continued the work of his predecessor, Samuel Cardinal Stritch, of aligning the Archdiocese of Chicago with one Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (everything ties together, ladies and gentlemen), caught the attention, of course, of none other than a German peritus, Father Joseph Ratzinger, whose acceptance of the Modernist precept of the evolution of dogma was the means by which he had sought to dispense with “past” teaching because of its supposedly historically “conditioned” nature.

Yes, according to the likes of apologists for the “Second” Vatican Council and the “magisterium" of the conciliar “popes” tradition is “historically conditioned” and “still developing” in order to determine “what is doctrine to be preserved and what is “historically conditioned.”

Father Francis Sullivan, S.J., explained that there was a remarkable similarity between the points about Tradition that had been made by Albert “Cardinal” Meyer, Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger and the report of the so-called “Faith and Order Commission” of the pro-abortion, pro-perversity, pro-contraception supporter of one world governance, the World Council of Churches, which has a sorry history of supporting Communist regimes around the world:

In his commentary on the way the question of tradition was handled at Vatican II, Ratzinger made a positive reference to the same way this question had been treated by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches in a conference that took place in Montreal in July of 1963, between the first and second sessions of Vatican II. It is illuminating to see how the report of that conference anticipated the question raised by Meyer and Ratzinger about the need to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic traditions. The report began by distinguishing between different meanings of the word tradition. ‘We speak of the Tradition (with a capital T), tradition (with a small t), and traditions. By the Tradition is meant the Gospel itself, transmitted from generation to generation in and by the Church itself. Christ himself present in the life of the Church. By tradition is meant the traditionary process. The term traditions is meant in two senses, to indicate both the diversity of forms of expression and also what we call confessional traditions, for instance what we call the Lutheran tradition or the Reformed tradition.

The report gave a fuller explanation of what it meant by the Tradition in a passage that Ratzinger quoted with approval in his commentary on Dei Verbum. There the Faith and Order Commission had said: “Thus we can cay that we exist as Christians by the Tradition of the Gospel (the paradosis of the kerygma) testified in Scirpture, transmitted in and by the Church, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Tradition taken in this sense is actualized in the preaching of the Word, in the administration of the Sacraments and worship, in Christian teaching and theology, and in mission and witness to Christ by the lives of the members of the Church.

The report went on to speak of traditions and of their evaluations. It said:

“But this tradition which is the work of the Holy Spirit is embodied in traditions (in the two senses of the word, both as referring to diversity in forms of expression, and in the sense of separate communions). The traditions in Christian history are distinct from, and yet connect to, the Tradition. They are the expressions and manifestations in diverse historical forms of the one truth and reality which is Christ. The evaluation of the traditions poses serious problems. For some, questions such as these are raised. It is possible to determine more precisely what the content of the one Tradition is, and by what means? Do all traditions which claim to be Christian contain the Tradition? How can we distinguish traditions embodying the true Tradition and merely human traditions? Where do we find the genuine Tradition, and where impoverished tradition or even distortion of Tradition? Tradition can be a faithful transmission of the Gospel, but also a distortion of it. In this ambiguity the seriousness of the problem of tradition is indicated. These questions imply a search for a criterion. This has been the main concern of the Church from the beginning.”

There is a remarkable agreement between the point that Cardinal Meyer raised in his intervention at the Second Vatican Council, the commentary that Joseph Ratzinger wrote on chapter 2 of Dei Verbum, and the report of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. All three agree on the necessity of distinguishing between Tradition, as the whole mystery of Christ as it has been handed on in the teaching, life, and worship of the Church, and traditions, which are the particular beliefs and practices in which that mystery has been embodied in the ongoing life of the church. Obviously, such beliefs and practices must have a venerable history and be widely shared to be justified as “traditions.” But the problem is, whether the venerable history and wide diffusion of a particular tradition necessarily means that this is an authentic rather than a distorting tradition; in other words, whether it is a genuine embodiment of divine Tradition or merely human tradition. (Father Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., Catholic Tradition and Traditions. Michael J. Lacey and Francis Oakley, editors, The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 114-115. See The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity.)

None other than the late Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, who, of course, understood in the 1960s that it was not possible, humanly speaking, to realize the Social Reign of Christ the United States of America given the firm grip that error had on the mind of most Americans, although he was always unyielding in his defense of the Church’s true social teaching, explained that the attempt to historicize Catholic teaching did indeed have roots in Americanism, citing specifically Pope Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae in doing so.

Monsignor Fenton explained the problem in a treatise on the background of what led Pope Saint Pius X to issue The Oath Against Modernism on September 1, 1910, emphasizing the importance of the sainted pontiff’s introductory text to the Oath itself:

The Modernists and their most influential sympathizers were, in great part, drawn from the ranks of the Catholic clergy. Thus they were, in the words of the introduction to the Sacrorum antistitum, the "enemies who are all the more to be feared by reason of their very nearness to us." These Catholics who taught or favored Modernism were the men whose influence within the true Church of Jesus Christ St. Pius X sought to counter by the teaching and the directives contained in the Sacrorum antistitum.

(6) Finally, in the introduction to this famous Motu proprio, St. Pius X makes it very clear indeed that the Bishops of the Catholic Church were bound in conscience by the obligations of their office to act energetically against this teaching that contradicted the divinely revealed truth proposed as such by the true Church. The "defence of the Catholic faith" and strenuous efforts "to see to it that the integrity of the divine deposit suffers no loss" are definitely not works of supererogation. These are the duties prescribed by Our Lord Himself for the leaders of the Church, which He has purchased by His blood.

The conclusion to this document, the last of the three great anti-Modernist declarations issued by the Holy See during the reign of St. Pius X, is even more enlightening than the introduction. In this we see how St. Pius X enunciated, more clearly than in any other document, the most fundamental position of the Modernists. The text of this conclusion follows:

Moved by the seriousness of the evil that is increasing every day, an evil, which We cannot put off confronting without the most grave danger, We have decided to issue and to repeat these commands. For it is no longer a case, as it was in the beginning, of dealing with disputants who come forward in the clothing of sheep. Now we are faced with open and bitter enemies from within our own household, who, in agreement with the outstanding opponents of the Church, are working for the overthrow of the faith. They are men whose audacity against the wisdom that has come down from heaven increases daily. They arrogate to themselves the right to correct this revealed wisdom as if it were something corrupt, to renew it as if it were something that had become obsolete, to improve it and to adapt it to the dictates, the progress, and the comfort of the age as if it had been opposed to the good of society and not merely opposed to the levity of a few men.

To counter such attempts against the evangelical doctrine and the ecclesiastical tradition, there will never be sufficient vigilance or too much severity on the part of those to whom the faithful care of the sacred deposit has been entrusted. (Sacrosanctum Antistitum: The Background of The Oath Against Modernism.)

One can see very clearly that Pope Saint Pius X’s introduction to The Oath Against Modernism stands as a stinging rebuke to the “living tradition” of Albert “Cardinal” Meyer and Karol Jozef Wojtyla/John Paul II, the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict’s philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned “hermeneutic of continuity,” and the outright dogmatic evolutionism of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV.

Monsignor Fenton went on to explain the connection between Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae and The Oath Against Modernism:

It is interesting to note the parallel between what St. Pius X says about the intentions of the Modernists and what his great predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, had to say about the basic premise of the errors he pointed out and condemned in his famed letter, the Testem benevolentiae. St. Pius X declares that the Modernists "arrogate to themselves the right to correct this revealed wisdom as if it were something corrupt, to renew it as if it were something that had become obsolete, to improve it and to adapt it to the dictates, the progress, and the comfort of the age as if it had been opposed to the good of society and not merely opposed to the levity of a few men." And Pope Leo XIII states:

The principles on which the new opinions We have mentioned are based may be reduced to this: that in order the more easily to bring over to Catholic doctrine those who dissent from it, the Church ought to adapt herself somewhat to our advanced civilization, and, relaxing her ancient rigor, show some indulgence to modern theories and methods. Many think that this is to be understood not only with regard to the rule of life, but also to the doctrines in which the deposit of faith is contained. For they contend that it is opportune, in order to work in a more attractive way upon the wills of those who are not in accord with us, to pass over certain heads of doctrines, as if of lesser moment, or so to soften them that they may not have the same meaning which the Church has invariably held. ⁷

Thus, when we examine the actual texts of the Testimonium benevolentiae and of the Sacrorum antistitum, it becomes quite apparent that Pope Leo XIII and St. Pius X were engaged in combating doctrinal deviations that actually sprang from an identical principle, the fantastically erroneous assumption that the supernatural communication of the Triune God could and should be brought up to date and given a certain respectability before modern society. The men who sustained the weird teachings condemned by Pope Leo XIII, a document, which, incidentally, did not denounce any mere phantom body of doctrine, and the men who taught and protected the doctrinal monstrosities stigmatized in the Lamentabili sane exitu and in the Pascendi dominici gregis, based their errors on a common foundation. The false Americanism and the heresy of Modernism were both offshoots of doctrinal liberal Catholicism.

This belief that the meaning of the Church's dogmatic message was in some way subject to change and capable of being improved and brought up to date was definitely not an explicit part of the original or the more naive stage of the liberal Catholic movement. The first components of liberal Catholicism, during the earlier days of the unfortunate Felicite De Lamenais, were religious indifferentism, some false concepts of human freedom, and the advocacy of a separation of Church and state as the ideal situation in a nation made up of members of the true Church. But, after these teachings had been forcefully repudiated by Pope Gregory XVI in his encyclical Mirari vos arbitramur, a new set of factors entered into this system. These were inserted into the fabric of liberal Catholicism because the leaders of this movement persisted in defending as legitimate Catholic doctrine this teaching, which had been clearly and vigorously condemned by the supreme power of the Catholic magisterium. Most prominent among these newer components of liberal Catholicism were minimism, doctrinal subjectivism, and an insistence that there had been and that there had to be at least some sort of change in the objective meaning of the Church's dogmatic message over the course of the centuries. ⁸

The liberal Catholic since the time of Montalembert has been well aware of the fact that the basic theses he proposes as acceptable Catholic doctrine have been specifically and vehemently repudiated by the doctrinal authority of the Roman Church. If he is to continue to propose these teachings as a member of the Church, he is obliged by the very force of self-consistency to claim that the declarations of the magisterium, which condemned his favorite theses do not at this moment mean objectively what they meant at the time they were issued. And, if such a claim is advanced about the Mirari vos arbitramur, there is very little to prevent its being put forward on the subject of the Athanasian Creed. Pope Leo XIII and St. Pius X were well aware of the fact that the advocates of the false Americanism and the teachers and the protectors of the Modernist heresy were employing this same discredited tactic.

This common basis of the false doctrinal Americanism and of the Modernist heresy is, like doctrinal indifferentism itself, ultimately a rejection of Catholic dogma as a genuine supernatural message or communication from the living God Himself. It would seem impossible for anyone to be blasphemous or silly enough to be convinced, on the one hand, that the dogmatic message of the Catholic Church is actually a locutio Dei ad homines, and to imagine, on the other hand, that he, a mere creature, could in some way improve that teaching or make it more respectable. The very fact that a man would be so rash as to attempt to bring the dogma of the Church up to date, or to make it more acceptable to those who are not privileged to be members of the true Church, indicates that this individual is not actually and profoundly convinced that this dogmatic teaching of the Catholic Church is a supernatural communication from the living and Triune God, the Lord and Creator of heaven and earth. It would be the height of blasphemy knowingly to set out to improve or to bring up to date what one would seriously consider a genuine message from the First Cause of the universe.

The conclusion to the Sacrorum antistitum brings out more clearly than any other statement of the Holy See the fact that Modernism sprang from the same basic principle, as did the false Americanism pointed out and proscribed in the Testem benevolentiae of Pope Leo XIII. (Sacrosanctum Antistitum: The Background of The Oath Against Modernism.)

Anyone who cannot understand that Monsignor Fenton’s brilliant analysis lays bare the heresies of the counterfeit church of conciliarism and of the conciliar “popes,” including the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the supposed “restorer of Tradition,” and his two immediate successor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV, is not being intellectually honest.

Those who want to continue to criticize those of us who are completely unyielding in our opposition to Americanism, which was nothing other than an effort on the part of American bishops in the Nineteenth Century to “celebrate,” not merely “tolerate,” the ethos of religious liberty and separation of Church and State as harbingers of Dignitatis Humane and Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, and the “social magisterium,” if you will, of the conciliar “popes,” may do so only by ignoring the fact that Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton himself saw the direct connection between Americanism and Modernism.

Indeed, Ratzinger/Benedict himself said on December 22, 2005, that the “hermeneutic of continuity” explained the “new teaching” of the “Second” Vatican Council on religious liberty and separation of Church and State:

Secondly, it was necessary to give a new definition to the relationship between the Church and the modern State that would make room impartially for citizens of various religions and ideologies, merely assuming responsibility for an orderly and tolerant coexistence among them and for the freedom to practise their own religion.

Thirdly, linked more generally to this was the problem of religious tolerance - a question that required a new definition of the relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions. In particular, before the recent crimes of the Nazi regime and, in general, with a retrospective look at a long and difficult history, it was necessary to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel.

These are all subjects of great importance - they were the great themes of the second part of the Council - on which it is impossible to reflect more broadly in this context. It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.

It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.  

On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change.

Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded, whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can change. Thus, for example, if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge.

It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.

The Second Vatican Council, recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State with the Decree on Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church. By so doing she can be conscious of being in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself (cf. Mt 22: 21), as well as with the Church of the martyrs of all time. The ancient Church naturally prayed for the emperors and political leaders out of duty (cf. I Tm 2: 2); but while she prayed for the emperors, she refused to worship them and thereby clearly rejected the religion of the State.

The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one's own faith - a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God's grace in freedom of conscience. A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. She desires to transmit the gift of the truth that exists for one and all. (Christmas greetings to the Members of the Roman Curia and Prelature, December 22, 2005.)

This address is what served as the proximate motivation for me to review once again the material that I had studied periodically in the preceding two years concerning the plausibility of sedevacantism as the only logical explanation in accord with Catholic teaching to explain such heresies against the nature of dogmatic truth and such blasphemies against the martyrs of the early Church were the work of men who had lost the Catholic Faith and thus could not hold ecclesiastical office within the ranks of Holy Mother Church. In other words, Ratzinger/Benedict’s “official” endorsement of Americanism is what led me to review the fact that the problem is not with this or that particular conciliar “pope;” the problem is with a false religion based on Modernism and the “New Theology” that the conciliar “popes” have endorsed and propagated.

I will let the late Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton have the final words as the analysis he provided below demonstrates very clearly that the Seine and the Potomac flowed into the Tiber at the “Second” Vatican Council just as much as the Rhine and have produced a “humanitarian,” “non-religious” “pope,” Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is just as much the end-product of conciliarism as former President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro was the ultimate end product of Americanism:

In this conclusion to the Sacrorum antistitum, St. Pius X expressly recognizes the fact that the Modernists and their sympathizers, the anti-anti-Modernists, were actually working, in agreement with the most-bitter enemies of the Catholic Church, for the destruction of the Catholic faith. It is interesting and highly important to note exactly what St. Pius X said. He definitely did not claim that these men were working directly to destroy the Church as a society. It is quite obvious that, given the intimate connection between the Church and the faith, a connection so close and perfect that the Church itself may be defined as the congregatio fidelium, the repudiation of the Catholic faith would inevitably lead to the dissolution of the Church. Yet, for the Modernists and for those who co-operated in their work, the immediate object of attack was always the faith itself. These individuals were perfectly willing that the Catholic Church should continue to exist as a religious society, as long as it did not insist upon the acceptance of that message which, all during the course of the previous centuries of its existence, it had proposed as a message supernaturally revealed by the Lord and Creator of heaven and earth. They were willing and even anxious to retain their membership in the Catholic Church, as long as they were not obliged to accept on the authority of divine faith such unfashionable dogmas as, for example, the truth that there is truly no salvation outside of the Church.

What these men were really working for was the transformation of the Catholic Church into an essentially non-doctrinal religious body. They considered that their era would be willing to accept the Church as a kind of humanitarian institution, vaguely religious, tastefully patriotic, and eminently cultural. And they definitely intended to tailor the Church to fit the needs and the tastes of their own era.

It must be understood, of course, that the Modernists and the men who aided their efforts did not expect the Catholic Church to repudiate its age-old formulas of belief. They did not want the Church to reject or to abandon the ancient creeds, or even any of those formularies in which the necessity of the faith and the necessity of the Church are so firmly and decisively stated. What they sought was a declaration on the part of the Church's magisterium to the effect that these old formulas did not, during the first decade of the twentieth century, carry the same meaning for the believing Catholic that they had carried when these formulas had first been drawn up. Or, in other words, they sought to force or to delude the teaching authority of Christ's Church into coming out with the fatally erroneous proposition that what is accepted by divine faith in this century is objectively something different from what was believed in the Catholic Church on the authority of God revealing in previous times.

Thus the basic objective of Modernism was to reject the fact that, when he sets forth Catholic dogma, the Catholic teacher is acting precisely as an ambassador of Christ. The Modernists were men who were never quite able to grasp or to accept the truth that the teaching of the Catholic Church is, as the First Vatican Council designated the content of the Constitution Dei Films, actually "the salutary doctrine of Christ," and not merely some kind of doctrine, which has developed out of that teaching. And, in the final analysis, the position of the Modernists constituted the ultimate repudiation of the Catholic faith. If the teaching proposed by the Church as dogma is not actually and really the doctrine supernaturally revealed by God through Jesus Christ Our Lord, through the Prophets of the Old Testament who were His heralds, or through the Apostles who were His witnesses, then there could be nothing more pitifully inane than the work of the Catholic magisterium. (Sacrosanctum Antistitum: The Background of The Oath Against Modernism.)

The following passage, contained in the quotation from Monsignor Fenton's article of sixty-four years ago, is an exact description of what Robert Francis Prevost and Victor Manuel Fernandez believe and openly profess:

What these men were really working for was the transformation of the Catholic Church into an essentially non-doctrinal religious body. They considered that their era would be willing to accept the Church as a kind of humanitarian institution, vaguely religious, tastefully patriotic, and eminently cultural. And they definitely intended to tailor the Church to fit the needs and the tastes of their own era. (Sacrosanctum Antistitum: The Background of The Oath Against Modernism.)

This is, of course, a perfectly prophetic description of the entire false nature of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Anyone who cannot see this by now is truly willfully blind or fearful of what could happen to him if he embraced the simple fact that the Catholic Church is inerrant and that a true pope is the guarantor of Catholic orthodoxy and can never be its foe.

On the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude

Today, Wednesday, October 28, 2026, is the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude, the latter of whom is, of course, the Patron of Hopeless Cases.

While it may seem that our ecclesiastical and temporal situations are “hopeless,” we must remember that everything occurs within the Providence of God, meaning, of course, that there is work for us to do to plant a few seeds for the restoration that is to occur and Saints Simon and Jude serve as ready helpers to aid us at all times in our spiritual and temporal needs.

Here is Father Francis X. Weninger’s reflection on Saints Simon and Jude:

St. Simon, whose festival the Catholic Church commemorates to-day, was surnamed the Cananaean or Canaanite, because he was born at Cana, a town in Galilee. In this town, Jesus wrought his first miracle, by changing water into wine, as is known from the Gospel. Nicephorus and some others are of opinion, that Simon was the bridegroom whose wedding our Lord and His holy Mother honored with their presence, but that he afterwards left his bride with her consent and followed Christ. St. Jude, the brother of Simon, is called Thaddeus to distinguish him from the other Jude or Judas' who betrayed and sold the Lord. According to Nicephorus, Mary Cleophas was their mother, and James the Less their brother. Other writers say that Simon and Jude were not brothers. The Gospel tells us that both Simon and Jude were chosen by Christ as Apostles; but when or under what circumstances this took place, is not recorded, nor have any particulars of their words and actions been left us. There is, however, not the slightest doubt that they, as all the others, constantly followed the Saviour, and although they forsook Him when He was taken prisoner, they had, after His resurrection the grace to see Him frequently, to be present at His Ascension, and to receive the Holy Ghost on Pentecost.

When, later, the Apostles separated to preach the Gospel, St. Simon went to Egypt and St. Jude to Mesopotamia. Both however, were also in other lands, to preach the word of Christ, and after thus spending 30 years in apostolic labors, they met again, by divine dispensation, in Persia. On their arrival in this land, they found the Persian army in the field; for the King had declared war against India, and was in the act of marching against it. Baradach, the general in chief, had offered many sacrifices to the gods, desiring to know the issue of the war; but no answer was given, which had always been given before, as the Evil spirits spoke through the idols. Hence Baradach, amazed at such unusual silence, sent to another idol which was kept in a place far from the camp, and desired to know the reason of it. Satan, answering through it, said, that the presence of two Apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ was the cause of the silence of the gods, as the power of these two Apostles was so great, that not one of the gods, until now so greatly honored, dared to appear before them.

Baradach, having received this answer, had the two Apostles brought before him. He met them with great manifestations of respect and listened to them while they spoke to him of the nothingness of the gods which he worshipped. As he was desirous to know the issue of the war, they made use of the occasion to show him how false were the words of the idols and hence how groundless was the notion of their divinity. They bade him propose his questions to the idols, through the magicians as usual, and told him that they would give his gods permission to speak. The magicians were ordered to ask the gods, and returned with the answer, that the result would be a long, bloody, and disastrous war. The Apostles having heard this, said to Baradach: "Now, great prince, recognize the falsity and the deceit as well of your magicians as of your gods. A deputation of the Indians will arrive to-morrow, at this hour, in your camp, to request peace of you on whatever conditions you may choose to prescribe." Baradach, surprised at these words, awaited with great impatience the following day. At the very hour the Apostles had foretold, the Indian embassy came humbly begging for peace, which was forthwith concluded.

This event was reported to the king, who resided at Babylon. He called the Apostles into his presence, listened with great attention to their words, and after having been sufficiently instructed in Christianity, was baptized by his holy teachers. The example of the king was followed by the whole court and a great part of the city. After this, the holy men went through the other towns and villages of the kingdom, everywhere preaching the mysteries and truths of the Christian faith. Many thousands became converts, only the magicians and fortune-tellers remained in their blindness, and seeing, with deep resentment, that they were everywhere despised and derided, they sought means to kill the holy Apostles. To this end, they excited the inhabitants of a town, which was far distant from the residence of the king, against the Saints, who had no sooner arrived there than they were seized and dragged, the one before an idol of the sun, the other before that of the moon, and were commanded to offer incense. The holy men refused to comply with so wicked a demand, saying that they sacrificed only to the true God; after which they began to preach the Gospel. But the furious Pagans refused to listen to them, and in their rage, cut St. Simon asunder with a saw, and beheaded St. Jude. In this manner these two holy Apostles ended their lives and earned the glorious crown of martyrdom.

I cannot pass over in silence an event which took place while St. Simon and St. Jude preached the Gospel. The daughter of a noble Persian became the mother of a child, and said that a deacon of the Apostles was its father. The truth of this was not doubted, and the deacon was brought before the king. The holy Apostles, knowing that he was innocent, went to the king, and desired that the parents of the slanderer and the child should be summoned. When they appeared, one of the Saints asked the infant, in the presence of the king and the parents, whether the deacon was its father. The child answered loudly and distinctly: "No! the deacon is innocent." The king and all present thanked and praised the Almighty who had so miraculously saved His servant. The parents, begging pardon of the latter, as well as of the Apostles, requested that the child should be asked who was its father, but the Apostles said. " We come not to accuse the guilty, but to protect the innocent:" This great miracle was not only instrumental in increasing the esteem in which the holy Apostles were held, but was also the means of converting many heathens, and strengthening the faith of those who had already embraced Christianity.

It has further to be remarked that we have, in Holy Writ from the pen of St. Jude, a short but powerful Epistle, in which he admonishes the faithful to guard themselves against those who, having forsaken the true Church, preach heresy; to remain constant in their faith, and to practise diligently all virtues, especially charity, chastity and purity. Luther rejected this Epistle from Holy Writ, though St. Augustine had counted it among the inspired books more than a thousand years before, and also several Councils had declared it canonical. Without doubt Luther was actuated by the fact that he, and such as he, are painted with living colors in the same Epistle.

In the life of St. Bernard we find that this Saint had a particular devotion to St. Jude. He received, with extraordinary joy and veneration, the relics of this holy Apostle which were sent to him, and, on his death-bed, he requested that they should be laid on his breast and be buried with him.

Practical Considerations

I. More than thirty years did the holy Apostles work with unwearied zeal for the salvation of souls. Thousands of dangers, persecutions, nay, even death they did not fear, bearing everything joyfully, filled only with the thought of saving souls. What incited them to this? Doubtless, the love of Jesus Christ, who had ransomed those souls with His precious blood, and also pity, as they knew that, blinded by their error, these people would lose eternal life. St. Jude, in his epistle, exhorts us to have compassion on all those who are seduced by the heretics, and to save them from the fire, that is, from the fire of hell. "But others save, pulling them out of the fire; and on others have mercy." (Jude, xviii.) To-day I request you to have pity on your own soul. "Have pity on thy own soul," says the Wise Man. (Eccl., xxx.) Your soul has been bought with the priceless blood of Christ: esteem it accordingly, and take care that the blood of your Saviour may not have been shed for it in vain. Your soul, in its sin, is in the greatest danger of being cast into eternal fire. Have pity on it, and drag it forcibly from the precipice on which it stands. It is your soul, your own immortal soul, so dearly bought by Christ, given to you to guard and keep it. If you gain the life to come, your soul will be forever happy; but, if you lose it, your soul will eternally suffer in hell. Who will be injured by this but you? Therefore, commit nothing which may draw after it eternal punishment, and leave nothing undone which may aid you in obtaining the glories of heaven. It is your soul. "Have pity on your own soul!"

II. St. Simon is brought to the idol of the Sun, and St. Jude to that of the Moon, with the command to sacrifice; and, when both declare that they sacrifice only to the true God, both suffer martyrdom. Can you also say, with truth, that you sacrifice only to the true God? How many hours, how much labor, trouble and care have you sacrificed to vanity and pride, to the world, the flesh and the devil? Do you consider that less punishable than to offer a few grains of incense to a lifeless image? Oh! learn to despise this way of conducting yourself, and endeavor to live in such a manner that you may truthfully say that you offer sacrifice to the true God alone. Offer to the Almighty, early in the morning, all your thoughts, words and actions, all your cares and labors, and all that you may have to suffer during the day. During the day, offer to Him the incense which is most agreeable to Him,--that of prayer and good works. Offer Him your self-abnegation, the control of your evil inclinations, especially anger, impatience, and curiosity. Offer your self-conquest, by forgiving those who wrong you; by abstaining from unchaste and slanderous conversation; from intemperance in eating and drinking,--in one word, from everything displeasing to Him. Offer to Him, especially at night, a repentant and contrite heart, a heart ready to serve Him zealously and constantly." A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit; a contrite and humble heart, O God, thou wilt not despise" (Psalms, 1.). "It is a wholesome sacrifice to take heed to the commandments, and to depart from all iniquity." (Eccl., xxxv.) (Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J., on the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude.)

I am going to revisit parts of this reflection in my next commentary as the martyrdom of Saints Simon and Jude condemns the conciliar sect’s participation in idolatrous events, including the now concluded Assisi abomination that offended the infinite majesty, honor, and glory of the Most Holy Trinity.

May Our Lady continue to help us in this month of October and at all times by power of her Most Holy Rosary, which we must pray with fervent devotion and full attention of our soul every time of our lives as this is the will of God for our own sanctification and salvation as well as for the triumph of Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Vivat Christus Rex!

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.

Saints Simon and Jude, pray for us.