His Name Shall be John

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Today is the Feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, Our Lord's precursor who called sinners to repentance as he was preparing the way for Our Lord to assume His Public Ministry. Saint John the Baptist, who had been freed from Original Sin at the moment of the Visitation, lived an austere life of penance and mortification as the last Prophet of the Old Testament. His efforts to call sinners to repentance spared no one, including King Herod the Tetrarch, the son of the notorious Herod the Great who had sought to kill the Infant Jesus shortly after His birth in Bethlehem.

Saint John the Baptist's remonstrations with King Herod the Tetrarch stand in stark contrast to the cowardice of most of the false "bishops" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism in the United States of America, men who lack the prophetic courage to discharge their apostolic duties by denouncing those in public life, Catholic and/or non-Catholic, who support grave evils such as abortion and contraception and the perversion of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, among so many others. As the last of the Old Testament Prophets, Saint John the Baptist was merely carrying on the example and the work of Amoz and Osee and Nathan and Gad and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah. The words of Amoz were particularly harsh and stinging concerning the infidelity of the Chosen People and their leaders.

Saint John the Baptist's father, Zachary, was told of his son's mission by Saint Gabriel the Archangel:

And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And Zachary seeing him, was troubled, and fear fell upon him.

But the angel said to him: Fear not, Zachary, for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elizabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John: and thou shalt have joy and gladness, and many shall rejoice in his nativity.

For he shall be great before the Lord; and shall drink no wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb. And he shall convert many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias; that he may turn the hearts of the fathers unto the children, and the incredulous to the wisdom of the just, to prepare unto the Lord a perfect people.

And Zachary said to the angel: Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.

And the angel answering, said to him: I am Gabriel, who stand before God; and am sent to speak to thee, and to bring thee these good things. And behold, thou shalt be dumb until the day wherein these things shall come to pass because thou hast not believed my words, which shall be fulfilled in their time. (Lk 1: 11-20)

Zachary's being rendered dumb until after the Nativity of his son, Saint John the Baptist, the cousin and precursor of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man, is quite a contrast to the fact that his son preached eloquently and clearly even in the world. Saint John the Baptist leapt for joy in his mother's womb when he heard the sound of Our Lady's voice at the moment of the Visitation, which event we commemorate ion July 2 (for reasons explained in Magnificat). Saint John the Baptist preached clearly at that very moment as he was freed from Original Sin about the inviolability of human life in the womb and about the veneration that is to be paid to the Mother of God and to the adoration that must be paid to the One she carried in her virginal and immaculate womb, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Saint John the Baptist continued to preach clearly and unequivocally when he began his mission as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, preparing the way for the coming of Our Lord to assume His Public Ministry.

Indeed, one of the prayers I pray every day before Mass is to Saint John Baptist as I ask him to prepare the way for Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's coming into my soul by means of Holy Communion just as he had prepared the way for the coming of His Public Ministry by means of his own preaching in the wildnernesss.

Saint John the Baptist minced no words when denouncing King Herod the Tetrarch for his bigamous and adulterous "marriage" to the wife of his brother Philip, Herodias. Herod knew that the Baptist was correct and that he was living in sin. Herodias, though, did not share Herod's misgivings about their relationship, scheming with her daughter Salome to have the head of the Baptist delivered to her on a silver platter, thus fulfilling Saint John's prophesy about himself: " He must increase, but I must decrease" (Jn. 3: 30) Saint John the Baptist was unafraid to stand up in defense of the truth. He did not bow to the will of those in power who did evil. He did not have a "grand strategy" to try to mask the truth in order to make it more palatable to anyone, whether those in civil power or to the people in the crowds listening to his sermons. He knew that the One Whose way he had prepared would reward him for his fidelity to the mission that had been entrusted to him, which included a firm proclamation of uncomfortable truths to the lowly and the powerful alike.

The first bishops of the Church, the Apostles, became as bold as Saint John the Baptist following the descent of the Holy Ghost upon them and our dear Blessed Mother on Pentecost Sunday. They were unafraid to proclaim the truths of the Divine Redeemer, counting it as pure gain to be reviled by the Jewish religious authorities and to be misunderstood and persecuted by the secular Roman authorities. They did not shrink from telling all men that there was no other Name other than that of the Holy Name of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by which they could be saved from their sins. They trusted in the power of the graces won by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross to proclaim clearly and unequivocally what the Divine Master had entrusted to them, knowing that the seeds they planted might never come to fruition in their own lifetimes. They cared about fidelity to Christ their King, not about human respect or earthly privilege.

It has been the case throughout the history of the Church that bishops and priests and ordinary lay men and women have had to stand fast in behalf of the truths of the Divine Redeemer as He has revealed them through His true Church when those truths have been undermined and/or ignored by public officials. According to Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, thirteen million Catholics accepted death as the price of their fidelity to Our Lord rather than worship the false gods of the secular Roman Empire. Great bishops and priests and members of the laity stood fast against the injustices and immorality of some of leaders of Catholic Europe.

Saint Thomas a Becket asserted the rights of the Church against the claims of King Henry II.

Saint Stanislaus was slain personally by the jealous King Boleslaus.

Saint John Nepumocene was killed on orders of King Wenceslaus IV in Prague for refusing divulge the Queen's confession.

Saint John Fisher was the only bishop in England who remained faithful to Rome when King Henry VIII had Parliament declare him to be the "supreme head of the Church in England."

Saint Thomas More refused to assent publicly to that declaration or to the validity of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn. Over 72,000 Catholics, fully 3.1 percent of the population of England at the time, were put to death by Henry and his minions between 1534 and the time of his death in 1547.

Thousands of Catholics were persecuted during the French Revolution and its aftermath.

Countless numbers perished as a result of Bolshevism and Nazism. Father Maximilian Kolbe was imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he gave up his life for a fellow prisoner, because he was a fierce critic of all manner of secular political ideologies and movements, including Freemasonry and Zionism, that were poisoning the world and thus ruining souls.

The late Bishop Ignatius Kung spent over thirty years in a Red Chinese prison cell for his remaining steadfastly loyal to Pope Pius XII after the Chinese Communists had created their own schismatic, rump church, with which Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI made his "peace" on June 29, 2007.

This list could on and on and on. These great heroes of the Faith did not do the bidding of Herod's successors: they proclaimed the truth to the point of their deaths, trusting that the all-merciful Lord would reward them for their fidelity and that their efforts would be used by Our Lady in ways that that would not be made manifest to them until eternity.

How sad it is to note, therefore, that most of the "bishops" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, including the false "bishops" of the United States Conference of Conciliar "Bishops," have more in common with Herod the Tetrarch and with the enemies of the Faith over the centuries than they do with Saint John the Baptist and with the true Catholic bishops of the past. Most of the "bishops" in the conciliar structures in the United States of America, for example, believe that it is inopportune, imprudent, unpastoral or otherwise bad form to boldly proclaim truths in order to defend the integrity of the Holy Faith, including the integrity of what they purport, falsely, as we know, to be the Most Blessed Sacrament, a result in large part of a loss of the Faith among many in the hierarchy. Thus we find alleged "successors" of the Apostles tripping all over themselves to curry favor with the rich and powerful.

No, this is not a new phenomenon, to be sure. There were plenty of examples of bishops who did the bidding of corrupt rulers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, many more who did so in the aftermath of the Protestant Revolt (men who held their tongues in the fear that a rebuke to a public official might lose a particular country to the forces of Protestantism, as Father Denis Fahey noted so well in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.).

What is new, however, is that the counterfeit church of conciliarism's false "Mass" embraces a false spirit of an "opening up to the world", thus feeding the natural tendency of human beings to refrain from doing that which is difficult, especially as it pertains to the defense of the Faith and the proper formation of souls unto eternity, in order to maintain peace and a sense of "respectability."

A whole legion of Herod's helpers in the conciliar "hierarchy," therefore, has thus been created by the very ambiance of the heresies and the errors of conciliarism, not the least of which are religious liberty and the belief that the civil state must be separated from the Church. These Herod's helpers enable by silence and by public praise public officials who are at war with everything contained in the Deposit of Faith and thus everything that is necessary for the right ordering of souls and of societies. Why shouldn't they? It's what they do every day of their conciliar lives from the chancery offices they hold illicitly and as they offend God at the Novus Ordo table.

The loss of the sensus Catholicus in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism has been such that there has been a manifest rejection of the belief that a Catholic bishop must be willing to lose his head to defend the truths of the Holy Faith. So must we, obviously. A true bishop, however, has a special obligation by virtue of his possessing the fullness of the priesthood to bear a visible, courageous witness to the Holy Faith so as to inspire and embolden the faithful themselves to do so in every aspect of their own lives. Upon his immortal soul rests the eternal salvation of everyone who lives within the boundaries of his episcopal jurisdiction, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. If he does not see in Saint John the Baptist and the Apostles and the martyrs who came from the ranks of the episcopate and the priesthood his example of how to deal firmly with public scandal and with laws that are at variance with the laws of God and the rights of His Holy Church, then he is likely to be numbered in history among the largely anonymous vipers who went along with Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer in England nearly 470 years ago.

Then again, of course, the "bishops" of conciliarism lack the grace of state. They are not bishops. They are merely administrators of large corporate offices which exist to make war upon the authentic patrimony of the Catholic Church. Lost in the minds of these false shepherds is any knowledge--no less acceptance--of these stirring words of Pope Pius VI, contained in Inscrutabile, December 25, 1775:

Consequently, you who are the salt of the earth, guardians and shepherds of the Lord's flock, whose business it is to fight the battles of the Lord, arise and gird on your sword, which is the word of God, and expel this foul contagion from your lands. How long are we to ignore the common insult to faith and Church? Let the words of Bernard arouse us like a lament of the spouse of Christ: "Of old was it foretold and the time of fulfillment is now at hand: Behold, in peace is my sorrow most sorrowful. It was sorrowful first when the martyrs died; afterwards it was more sorrowful in the fight with the heretics and now it is most sorrowful in the conduct of the members of the household.... The Church is struck within and so in peace is my sorrow most sorrowful. But what peace? There is peace and there is no peace. There is peace from the pagans and peace from the heretics, but no peace from the children. At that time the voice will lament: Sons did I rear and exalt, but they despised me. They despised me and defiled me by a bad life, base gain, evil traffic, and business conducted in the dark." Who can hear these tearful complaints of our most holy mother without feeling a strong urge to devote all his energy and effort to the Church, as he has promised? Therefore cast out the old leaven, remove the evil from your midst. Forcefully and carefully banish poisonous books from the eyes of your flock, and at once courageously set apart those who have been infected, to prevent them harming the rest. The holy Pope Leo used to say, "We can rule those entrusted to us only by pursuing with zeal for the Lord's faith those who destroy and those who are destroyed and by cutting them off from sound minds with the utmost severity to prevent the plague spreading." In doing this We exhort and advise you to be all of one mind and in harmony as you strive for the same object, just as the Church has one faith, one baptism, and one spirit. As you are joined together in the hierarchy, so you should unite equally with virtue and desire.

The affair is of the greatest importance since it concerns the Catholic faith, the purity of the Church, the teaching of the saints, the peace of the empire, and the safety of nations. Since it concerns the entire body of the Church, it is a special concern of yours because you are called to share in Our pastoral concern, and the purity of the faith is particularly entrusted to your watchfulness. "Now therefore, Brothers, since you are overseers among God's people and their soul depends on you, raise their hearts to your utterance," that they may stand fast in faith and achieve the rest which is prepared for believers only. Beseech, accuse, correct, rebuke and fear not: for ill-judged silence leaves in their error those who could be taught, and this is most harmful both to them and to you who should have dispelled the error. The holy Church is powerfully refreshed in the truth as it struggles zealously for the truth. In this divine work you should not fear either the force or favor of your enemies. The bishop should not fear since the anointing of the Holy Spirit has strengthened him: the shepherd should not be afraid since the prince of pastors has taught him by his own example to despise life itself for the safety of his flock: the cowardice and depression of the hireling should not dwell in a bishop's heart. Our great predecessor Gregory, in instructing the heads of the churches, said with his usual excellence: "Often imprudent guides in their fear of losing human favor are afraid to speak the right freely. As the word of truth has it, they guard their flock not with a shepherd's zeal but as hirelings do, since they flee when the wolf approaches by hiding themselves in silence.... A shepherd fearing to speak the right is simply a man retreating by keeping silent." But if the wicked enemy of the human race, the better to frustrate your efforts, ever brings it about that a plague of epidemic proportions is hidden from the religious powers of the world, please do not be terrified but walk in God's house in harmony, with prayer, and in truth, the three arms of our service. Remember that when the people of Juda were defiled, the best means of purification was the public reading to all, from the least to the greatest, of the book of the law lately found by the priest Helcias in the Lord's temple; at once the whole people agreed to destroy the abominations and seal a covenant in the Lord's presence to follow after the Lord and observe His precepts, testimonies and ceremonies with their whole heart and soul." For the same reason Josaphat sent priests and Levites to bring the book of the law throughout the cities of Juda and to teach the people. The proclamation of the divine word has been entrusted to your faith by divine, not human, authority. So assemble your people and preach to them the gospel of Jesus Christ. From that divine source and heavenly teaching draw draughts of true philosophy for your flock. Persuade them that subjects ought to keep faith and show obedience to those who by God's ordering lead and rule them. To those who are devoted to the ministry of the Church, give proofs of faith, continence, sobriety, knowledge, and liberality, that they may please Him to whom they have proved themselves and boast only of what is serious, moderate, and religious. But above all kindle in the minds of everyone that love for one another which Christ the Lord so often and so specifically praised. For this is the one sign of Christians and the bond of perfection.

 

Just as we sometimes get bogged down in the trees of the forests of partisan politics, as I pointed out in Restoring Christ as the King of All Nations and in scores of articles on this site and in my lectures, it is also the case that we tend to get bogged down in the trees of ecclesiastical politics, forgetting that today's Herod's Helpers, such as Roger "Cardinal" Mahony and Donald Wuerl and Theodore "Cardinal" McCarrick and George Niederauer, are merely the successors of the late John Cardinal Dearden, in whose Archdiocese of Detroit Call to Action started, and the late Joseph "Cardinal" Bernardin, who invented the "consistent ethic of life" (seamless garment) to provide a cover for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion Catholic politicians with impunity. (And Dearden and Bernardin were merely carrying on the work of the late Francis Cardinal Spellman and the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, who were themselves merely the inheritors of the Americanism of John Carroll and John Ireland and James Gibbons, et al.)

The late Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II appointed these men. He did not remove them. His curial "cardinals" actually enabled them by undermining frequently the few "bishops" who stand up against them. The problem is not with the false "bishops" in the United States, my friends: it is conciliarism itself, iincluding the very conciliarist error of episcopal collegiality that has made war against and rendered most Catholics silent about the authentic patrimony of the Catholic Church during the past forty years as surely as Zachary himself was rendered dumb prior to the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on this very day. And this is to say nothing of all of the other things that have flowed from the wake of "Second "Vatican Council, namely, the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions.

Saint John the Baptist did not mince words when dealing with the situation of his own day. We cannot mince words either. Always making sure to pray for those whose words and actions we must denounce and to enfold them in the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, we must remember that the many of the great saints who confronted the errors and vices of their own days (Saint Jerome, Saint Nicholas, Saint Athanasius, Saint Boniface, Saint Anthony, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint John Marie Vianney, among many others) did so in a manner evocative of the spirit of Saint John the Baptist, denouncing falsehood firmly and without any concession made in the direction of the fuzzy sentimentality that exists in the world at present as the result of the rotten fruit of Protestantism and all of its permutations, including Modernism. No Catholic saint has desired to be "una cum" (one with) heretics and blasphemers (see the brief listing that I provided yesterday in Appeaers Never Learn).

One of the worst chastisement God can send is Church is bad bishops and bad priests, as was the case with the Americanist bishops and priests who helped to pave the way for Dignitatis Humanae and other conciliarist errors by their embrace of the civil state without the true Faith. Worse yet is the chastisement of false bishops and false priests! We are being chastised, make no mistake about it. We must therefore pray and do penance for our own sins and those of the whole world, especially for the sins of those in ecclesiastical authority who look askance at the example of Saint John the Baptist and the Apostles and their own predecessors in the line of Apostolic succession.

While it is important to chronicle the betrayals of  the "bishops" and "priests" of the countefeit church of conciliarsim, we must remember that those who are Herod's helpers will be consigned to the dust bin of ecclesiastical history if they do not repent of their treachery before they die. God will not be mocked. He will impose judgment on those members of the counterfeit church of conciliarism who have represented themselves falsely as Catholic bishops while they sought human respect and popularity rather than stand fast in His behalf to the point of physical torture and death.

Trusting, as always, in the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, may we offer her our daily prayers and penances and sacrifices, especially by means of praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, so that she can present them to the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in reparation for our sins and those of the whole world.

Saint John the Baptist helped to prepare way for the Coming of Our Lord to assume His Public Ministry. Like Saint John the Baptist and by his holy intercession, therefore, may we be heralds of Our Lord as we seek to prepare the way for His many "comings" into the lives of the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross, never failing to proclaim His truths with fidelity and with true Charity for the eternal good of others, offering all to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, 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 Zachary, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints