Bergoglio receives Pelosi, ignores the Dobbs decision. The Ogre has "jumped the shark"

Friends,

When the Dobbs v. Jackson U.S. Supreme Court decision was announced last Thursday, June 24, it was the biggest Supreme Court decision in decades, probably since the original Roe v. Wade (that itself was subsequently followed by a decision removed what restrictions Roe had imposed (Doe v. Bolton, also 1973), and then by Casey decision (Casey v. Planned Parenthood, 1992). N.B. For good review of what the Dobbs decision argued, see Margot Cleveland's comment at The Federalist in this article.

Bergoglio and Dobbs

But Bergoglio, the false, fake, fraudulent pope, the flagrant anti-pope, the Ogre, didn't publicly acknowledge it. Didn't even say, "Thank God that abortion will be at least a bit more restricted in the U.S. than it was." Didn't even say, "I heard something from the U.S." Nothing. Crickets. Actually, he response gives a new meaning to "The Sounds of Silence".

Or, at least that was so until "San Fran Nan" came to town. Nancy Pelosi visited Bergoglio in the Vatican. She went to Mass where the anti-pope was officiating, and a bevy of "con-celebrating" priests. (Sorry, I detest those clown shows.) Apparently, she received Holy Communion. In fact, her own archbishop, the Most Reverend Salvatore Cordileone, back in San Francisco banned her from receiving Holy Communion mainly because of the old witch's over-the-top support of abortion. So, "Pope Francis" gives it to her. By this act, the scapegrace sticks his crozier in the eye of the archbishop Cordileone , and pretty much all Catholics everywhere who worked to stop abortion.gives it to her. (I hope the good SF archbishop has a large, private, retirement fund, and wasn't expecting to be made a Cardinal, at least in this life!)

Notice how Bergoglio has alienated one section of the Church's ranks after another. Certainly, he's gone out of his way to alienate the Trads, but also the JPII "Conservative" Catholics, and every shade in between. He's seems to actually LOATHE real Catholics, i.e. Catholics who adhere to the Faith as taught for centuries and who worship the traditional way. As I say, he does the same to middle-of-the-roaders. The only people he seems to like are the deviants and Leftist government bureaucrats.

But the anti-abortion crowd contains all kinds, every shade and hue, except the most Leftward, anti-Christian "Catholics" that exist. He's backhanded everyone but the Hard Left. He's an awfully confident ogre!

Church online commentator Taylor Marshall has an interesting take on all this here. He says Bergoglio DID indeed, comment. How? By publicly receiving that future denizen of Hell, Nancy Pelosi (in theory, she can repent, but as with Fat 'Arry 8, or a skirt-chasing manager I used to have, the more one sins the less likely a repentance can be expected), in a public Mass. Marshall is outraged. Myself, I'm too Irish and jaded. It's what I expect these evil people to do. As soon as I read about it, I said to my wife, "Of course she did; just the thing for Pelosi and Bergoglio to arrange!"

Bergoglio is evil, plain and simple, and that's obvious by his actions, regardless of whether his election was valid. Pelosi sold her soul so long ago her face already looks like it's been gone since Jack Kennedy was president. And anyone, anyone, who tells you "It doesn't matter" or some sort of "God wills it" who (or what) the "pope", smack 'em for me.

But Marshall goes on a fine rant!

12:20 in: Taylor Marshall speaking initially in a alternate voice: "Yeah, but Tailor, you're so hard on Francis." (And then in full voice) We gave him a chance. 2013, 14, 15, 16, amoris, scandals, financial, sexual, McCarrick, lies, hiding, Pachamama, restriction of the Traditional Latin Mass, restriction of traditional sacraments, suppression of beautiful, holy, cloistered nuns, suppression of budding, beautiful, traditional religious orders, (smashes right fist into left palm repeatedly). Francis is constantly, constantly beating against the life and the growth of good things in the Church. And it is absolutely shameful.

"Yeah, but Taylor, just give him..." NO! We have given him chances. He has taken off his mask. He has shown us who he is. This is his response to you, right here. (Shows photo of beaming Nancy Pelosi and crazily grinning husband being greeted by the Ogre.) (13:20)

I pray to God his shames me. He comes out with – someone in Rome watching watching this right now, show this bit to Francis right now. I pray to God he says, "You know what? I'm going to troll those Trads. I'm going to troll Taylor Marshall; I'm going to come out and praise it (Dobbs) and praise it." Please do. I would love to eat crow on it. But as of right now, Wednesday after everything has been going down, this is what we get? This is a PR stunt. It is all over social media. (14:00)

(Later) "See, you can be a devout Catholic and be pro-Abortion." That is what this is all about. That is what this is all about. Total wickedness." (16:21)

AnP again:

Yes, indeed. Total wickedness. Of all the nasty, stupid, idiotic things certain popes did historically, this has to rank with Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII, (reigned August 1623 to his death in 1644), infamous today mostly for the Galileo affair, but actually, his siding with the French and Cardinal Richelieu, who sported the Protestants in the Thirty Years War, lost the Counter-Reformation. All because Barberini hated the Habsburgs.

In something of the same vein, Bergoglio is trying to lose the entire Church. So, I suppose he's even worse than Urban VIII! "Amoris, scandals, financial, sexual, McCarrick, lies, hiding, Pachamama, restriction of the Traditional Latin Mass, restriction of traditional sacraments, suppression of beautiful, holy, cloistered nuns, suppression of budding, beautiful, traditional religious orders, (smashes right fist into left palm repeatedly). Francis is constantly, constantly beating against the life and the growth of good things in the Church." That's is the wretched Bergoglio's legacy.

Can we all finally agree that this monster is no pope? He is vile, simply vile, and intolerable. Look at his latest ploy to eradicate the Latin Mass: new papal apostolic letter Desiderio Desideravi: On the Liturgical Formation of the People of God. Read about it here at OnePeterFive. 

It just never ends with "Bergi" and his gay and Commie creatures and hangers on.

No, no, infinitely no: the Argentinian is not pope and we're no more obliged to obey him than were we members of a very conservative anti-abortion Protestant congregation, should our minister invite an abortionist politician to our church to promote abortion. We'd toss both o them out. On their ears. Regarding Pelosi, it is as Taylor Marshall put it, "Pelosi, you didn't move the needle, you pulled the level, on making abortion on demand."

Marshall ends his talk with this observation:

"We need cardinals in Rome to like Cardinal Burke, and continue admonishments and to call for a trial, a system, to address tyranny and heresy those two questions have to be resolved." (36:50) He quote the famous 16th-17th century Cardinal Bellarmine, who wrote about how to go about formally removing a bad pope, who could be removed over heresy and tyranny (and Bergoglio has racked up multiple examples of both!

But I can't see them doing it. They blew their chance. They could have smacked Bergoglio down earlier, "reigned him in" when they owned the corral, i.e. when there was more of them above ground and not in the next life. Not many of that type are left: Bergoglio has been naming reprehensible replacements at every level. All the remaining orthodox Cardinals are waiting now for Bergoglio to grunt out what's left of his life in sinful mental squalor, and they'll not try to get him to convert. They would not dare to try to save his porcine soul, miserable as that must be. No. Let him croak. They're jockeying for who to replace him.

But unless the Lord God of Hosts Himself intervenes, Bergoglio 1 will be replaced by a younger Bergoglio 2. The old devil himself has seen to that. Although I strongly suspect that by dissing the Dobbs decision in the way he has, Bergoglio has crossed a line where the next stop is true schism.

         AnP

Part 2 A world without the Traditional Latin Mass: our culture's violence and hatred exemplified

Friends,

I'm considering why, today, in 2022, we have such outrageous, Hieronymus Bosch-freak show-level deviants rioting in the streets, demanding, DEMANDING, the right to murder babies and promoting deviant sexual carnality that always preceded a civilization's collapse.

1970 to 2022

One major social and cultural element that paralleled the moral collapse of Western society in the last half century was the trashing out of the Traditional Latin Mass.

1. This deconstruction of the Holy ("set apart") Liturgy began in 1964 with the closing of the Second Vatican Council, the official documents of which called for some liturgical change but only change deemed absolutely necessary.
2. It could be said to begin earlier when the Communist Frankfurter Schule's plan for social and familial dissolution began to show manifest progress.
3. It appeared over a decade after the U.S. in its attempt to keep Germany down, began to promote pornography and immorality in Germany (E. Michael Jones details this).
   
4. It manifested when the children born post-war, children who did not experience the privations and hardships of the Great Depression or World War II, came of age and found themselves awash in money and porn.
5. And most of all, it occurred in a Catholic Church trying to find a reason for its existence, unable to justify its conduct in either World War I or II, and prodded by Modernist theologians and their nouvelle théologie, the central tenant of which was everything evolves, even God.
   

All this lay behind the full occultation of the Traditional Latin Mass. (Thank God, like a full occultation of the moon, it did not – and could not – last.)

For decades after 1970, however, one simply could not find it. This sacred liturgy lived on in the memories of its forlorn, cast adrift adherents, of course, and in the Heavenly Liturgy which it represents. But it was otherwise non-existent except for the work of a handful, such as the incomparable Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who founded the SSPX in that pivotal year 1970.

But the people, the demos, the Church's hoi polloi, the public of the Church's res publica, kept the pressure on for its return. Finally, with that miserable effeminate recluse Paul VI finally dead, Pope John Paul II could let up on it a bit, although he met resistance and did not move too far. Pope Benedict XVI, though, opened the Church doors wide for it, and got deposed for it, too (believe it). Now the anti-pope Bergoglio is doing his damnedest to get rid of it again. He clearly hates it, and has gathered to his black standard those who loathe it. Currently, I see one of his American cronies, Wilton Gregory of D.C., is considering banning it from his archdiocese. Oh Lord God, save us from these imps and hobgoblins of Satan!

As far as I am concerned, as far as most traditional morality goes, a law that is immoral is no law, an order that is reprehensible (like, "Soldier! Shoot those Jews!") is no lawful order. Bergoglio and his homosexual lavender mafia have thus abdicated their positions in the Church by their actions, regardless of whether they were lawfully installed in the first place. (See this article at Ann Barnhardt's blog for an excellent essay on why Benedict's abdication is invalid.)

I think John Paul and Benedict acted the way they did regarding the TLM because they could easily see that the mainstream Church was collapsing in numbers: ever fewer active Catholics, ever fewer baptisms and marriages. Ever more divorces. Fewer and fewer laity believed in the Real Presence. These statistics were known. In 1963, 3/4s of Catholics attended Sunday Mass, by 1983, that was almost exactly reversed. So they pragmatically let the TLM in the back door. But for Bergoglio and his ilk, they're terrified of the TLM's success. That would invalidate their entire lives. "Latin Massers" may be still few in numbers compared to mainstream Catholics in raw numbers, but they still total in the many millions. They also have large families; the Mass and its adherents attract converts. (Bergoglio infamous called proselytizing "solemn nonsense".) AND they are much more likely to believe in the Real Presence and attend Sunday Mass without fail. They're a crack, elite unit of Catholics, a Catholic Marine Corps or Guards Army, and are leading the way to the Faith's Restoration. So of course, they have to be smacked down. Humiliated. Scourged.

It is highly significant that the evil Bergoglio has so far (as of this writing) said nothing about the Dobbs decision. No thanking God, no praise for this great work. (Haha, certainly no word of thanks to a certain Donald John Trump!) The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has commented, as have bureaucrats in the Vatican, but all that has so far been relatively muted. You don't need to be a Richard Feynman to realize they're not overjoyed by Dobbs. They are thus driving yet another nail in the mainstream/mainline Church's coffin because a large number of Catholic Christians have labored long to get ride of Roe, it's been the life's work and thousands, and now that it is gone, these heroes notice the crickets' muted chirping in the ruined choirs of the hierarchy.

What's so important about the TLM? Our Religious Hard-Wiring

What the Traditional Latin Mass did, besides wonderfully celebrate the Seventh Covenant, the New Covenant, the Most Holy Eucharist by participation in which we are saved (see St. John's Gospel, Chapter 6; St. Luke 22:19-20), was put people's mental framework in order. It reminded people – indeed, it actually leads people – into the threshold of the Divine World, the Other World of the Holy, the Sacred, the Divine Real Presence. 

That once-a-week hour worked on an individual on many levels. Almost all humans, of whatever culture, have some sense of the Sacred, the Holy, these words meaning literally: that which is 'set apart' from normal life. We seem to be hardwired to want that, although in theory this can be the only world we know. Maybe in small doses for most, but we want it. That's because we are hardwired to want God, to spend eternity with God, whether as adults we might reject God or not. Satan and his Fallen Angels were also made that way, and one of the worst pains of Hell is to still want that intimacy with the Divine yet be eternally denied it, eternally suffering Tantalus-like.

Now, I understand that not everyone has a strong sense of this desire for the Set Apart. Like curiosity or math ability, it is stronger in some than in others; but to be completely without it is somehow not to be human. And different Christian groups manifest different levels of desire for it. While never having been a Protestant, I grew up with them and believe I understand Protestantism inside and out. I work with them now, from time to time on editing projects. And in terms of the more "popular" versions, church-in-the-wildwood types I'm most familiar with, I can understand the desire to worship God out in the open air, as it were, so to speak, building an altar of unhewn stones and sacrificing the sheep and goats and oxen on it, setting the fire, and watching the smoke of the oblation ascend into the sky, "God-ward", my hands raised.

But then I also understand the innate desire to "Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, lets us ascend unto Jerusalem, for I rejoiced when I heard them say, let us go unto the House of the Lord", to enter the outer courts, then the inner courts, getting ever closer to the Real Presence. (I can only imagine the music they had in the great Temple! Harps, lyres, lutes, the 12-string psaltery, the shofar horn, trumpets of various sorts, flutes/pipes, double oboes, timbrels-tambourines, sistrums, cymbals, bells.) I certainly understand what God inspired Solomon to create. King David represents the former, simpler open-air inclination, Solomon the high liturgical one. And I too desire to ascend, as it were. (There's a reason why, despite a few certain exceptions, usually Anglican in some way, that Protestantism never developed a monastic tradition.)

What this means "in the world"

Many mainstream Catholics react negatively to Trad Catholics, sneering, "You think you're better than us, don't you? That the sacraments are more valid in a TLM." I actually rarely hear that, but I can say that for us the entire Traditional liturgy is more "set apart", heightened, elevated God-ward for those of us bearing this appreciation. That is just a truism.

And of course, a man or woman or child who frequents such heights remains for life a bit more removed, a bit less attached, to the things of this world. The Divine World makes itself felt. It takes a much greater act of rejection of God to shrug it off. A Novus Ordo Mass with its talky vernacular, its marching-band everyone-in-lockstep praying, its overall more casual, more mundane spirit, its no damnation/painless salvation is just easier to leave, to put it simply. It's rejection lies more lightly on a soul.

Ergo...

Therefore, the evils of the world, all the "sex, lies, and videotape", or more traditionally the world, the flesh, and the Devil, present less of a counterpoint to the Novus Ordo than the TLM does. Only rarely does the Devil go in for a High Luciferian Satanism. His demons usually offer a much more mundane, casual, relaxed way in their temptation to evil. "No drama damnation", as it were, to match the modern "No drama salvation".

The one thing in which the TLM is definitely superior to the Novus Ordo, and it stands profoundly superior, is that it presents to this mundane world we reside temporarily in the Holy, the Sacred, The Other in its every fiber. The Holy Ghost worked through Churchmen for centuries to perfect that sense. Bugnini and the designers of the Novus Ordo consciously rejected all that because they thought it "medieval", and that modern man would not tolerate it. So, "the Bug" turned his back on it as fully as Luther did. (Luther did so for different reasons, but still.) And "modern man" was represented for the Bug and his would-be Reformers by the then archbishop of Milan, one mousey Giovanni Battista Montini, who carried a business man's brief case about with him. To them, Montini was the way, and the wave, of the future. Honestly, the future Paul VI carrying a briefcase excited a LOT of comment in the press.

It was just silly. And vacuous, as was so much of Vatican II and the infamous "spirit of Vatican II" that followed. And the new, practical, nonsensical, spiritually business man Church, the Vatican II Church and its "just business" liturgy sat uncomfortably without any continuity in the timeline of the Church's 2000-year past. No wonder if failed, and is about to pass with the death of Bergoglio. Either a more Bergoglio-than-Bergoglio will be elected, and if so I expect the College of Cardinals to fracture as that would be intolerable, or some more "conservative" prelate with be elevated, which whatever they might say about it, will represent the high-water mark of Vatican II. It begin a drain away, an ejection that will inevitably accelerate as the world crashes through war, starvation, energy blackouts, and the final putting down and execution of the latest eugenics idiots who run the World Economic Forum, 2030, the Great Reset, etc.

Sounds a bit fanciful?

After all, in the face of the absurd Covid fraud, the entire Vatican II Church basically dried up like a desert tumble weed, and blew away. How could it possibly deal with a real world crisis? War? Famine? The lights of this technological civilization going out?

  An Préachán

Part 1 A world without the Traditional Latin Mass: our culture's violence and hatred exemplified

Friends,

First, of course, all thanksgiving and praise to the Lord God Who provided this pro-life victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. All good things come from God; we're just instruments of His will. And of course we should thank President Donald Trump, the true U.S. President, exiled for now, and I do not doubt the the "powers-that-be" will stop at nothing to keep him out of power. However, he did what Reagan could not, and we need to appreciate his work in this.

But...

Why is it that today, in 2022, we have such outrageous, freak-show level deviants rioting in the streets, demanding, DEMANDING, the right to murder babies and promoting deviant sexual carnality that always preceded a civilization's collapse? Truly, is it not as though God replaced their living hearts with hearts of stone, and exactly, EXACTLY fulfilling St. Paul's famous observations in Romans 1:21-32. It is as though a divine hand has appeared and is writing on our civilization's wall.

How far we've come – how far we've fallen – since 1973. No riots of marauding sexual deviants filled the streets then, when Roe v. Wade was decided. And had the Supreme Court decided against Roe, there would have been no riots of marauding sexual deviants, ether. Now, though, look at how many people are today simply too degenerate to be imagined. Note the Roe date, 1973. The Novus Order Liturgy was foisted upon us by ecclesiastical fiat in late 1970. I think these dates are significant, as I'll explain below.

1973 to 2022

Hieronymus Bosch was a prophet. Since the the Dobbs Supreme Court decision last Friday, it seems like Hell has vomited its most disgusting Boschian entrails upon us. Have we seen anything like this since the Emperor Nero's prancing about? He's the patron saint of the homosexual movement and one of the first to "marry" a, well, non-woman. (A castrated boy.) Throughout this June, though, if one can stomach recalling it, throughout what they call "Pride" month, we've been inundated with the pukey, the vomity, the infantile and continual upchuck of the just simply Boschian-bizarre, insane cockroaches of modern sexual deviancy. (Haha, sounds like I'm referring to the Biden family or certain Catholic bishops and priests!)

Sodom and Gomorrah come again, indeed. One can easily imagine, were God to send a couple of angels to a "pride event" like the one in Chicago were people were just shot up (in that heavily gun-controlled city) – that the carnal zombies would, indeed, try raping them. It has to do with a lot more than the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, doesn't it? The reaction is too extreme, bizarre. The lizard 'ruler of the world' churns and wreathes in his hellish Pit.

Sure, Satan himself has take a blow to the head, Dobbs being a sort of upward palm to his crooked nose. He's reminded that even in what seems his hour of triumph, he's always and ever going to lose. So, of course, he lashes out. (It has to be frustrating, to always lose, and never lose with class.)

But part of it also goes back to that cadet academy of Satan, the infamous Frankfurter Schule in 1920s Germany, the group of Communists (many of them sexual deviants themselves) who promulgated the idea that the way to bring about their unholy and ultimately asinine and eternally exquisitely boring revolution was to destroy the Western family and Churches through sex stuff. Just spread lustful deviancy, make people morally and physically debilitated through carnal decadence and abasement, to simply dissolute the society to the point it collapsed. Roe v. Wade in 1973 was a "great leap forward" for that, actually. It in essence mandated worshiping Moloch nation-wide. It is extremely ironic that the sexually perverse are so proud of their perversions, when in fact they're just tools of long-dead Communist theorists. If you're going to throw away your soul, that's a poor reason for doing it

The Dobbs decision, however, is like taking a two-by-four (more like a four-by-four) and slamming it battery-ram style right to the face of all those years of effort. That's because Dobbs allows the people themselves, democracy-style, to debate these issues and actually decide on them through voting, as opposed to having all of it vomited on us by judicial fiat. Hence the brilliance of Clarence Thomas in saying the Dobbs opens the opportunity to reconsider a host of other imperial judicial fatwas, such as the idiotic Obergefell. (And of course of the rage of the Left at his comment is very enjoyable.)

Just as with the World Economic Forum and the Covid lockdowns, all of this has to be imposed on people from above. The people themselves would never vote for it. And of course it was the same for the Church's liturgical changes in the 1960s and '70s. We are constantly being imposed upon. Why do we let them?

One reason is that the Church has failed to stand up for us. I'll have more of that in Part 2.

   An Préachán

Dr. Malone has climbed halfway out of the Virus Cult, but he's not free yet.

 Dr. Robert Malone has an article here at his Substack site. At one point, Dr Malone wrote:

"And there is no way we can ever get back to that point in time, because almost everyone has either been vaccinated or infected at the present."

AnP

"Everyone ... infected at present." Dear Dr. Malone, NO ONE is "infected" because Covid doesn't exist. It's an umbrella term for a host of pneumonia-like illnesses, mostly derived from 5G EMFs and also things like Roundup being spread into the atmosphere via "bio-fuels". For FOUR HUNDRED years we've known that exposure to electricity can cause influenza – the long history of this revelation is thoroughly documented in the book, The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg. But "Big Pharma" can't money off of that! (And it is a threat to another world-wide business, Global Communication.)

This  is SO frustrating. In the entire history of Virology, from Louis Pasteur thinking the idea up and inventing the word "virus" when he couldn't prove bacteria caused all illnesses, up through the first "discovered" "virus" (the tobacco leaf mosaic virus in the early 1900s), through the application of the electron microscope when it was invented in the 1930s – after which for two decades virologists tried desperately to make it find viruses for them, only to get totally confused when they discovered exosomes – which look exactly like viruses are supposed to and which we are still learning about – to John Franklin Enders' 1954 invention of the "cell culture isolation" method that his own control experiment proved didn't work, down to today – when so many attempts have been made, as with the tireless researcher Christine Massey, to get government agencies and private labs to fess up to they're not having Covid virions, the theoretical form of a virus outside of a host cell, through Drs Malone and Peter McCullough turning partially against their former colleagues – all of this, and never once has anyone used a density-gradient method to "find" viruses because, of course, a method like that that could find them must not be used because it won't find them.

Most think this virus-doesn't-exist idea is pure insanity; I have a friend who earned a PhD in microbiology who just screams at me, literally, when I bring it up (no rational argument at all: he can't seem to even process the idea, and goes into meltdown), but when one bothers to read Firstenberg's history, or even the Method sections of the scientific papers supposedly "proving" Covid as Dr Andrew Kaufman has done videos on, one realizes they've proved nothing. (Kaufman notes that some authors of those early papers even admit this!) But the propaganda machine of Big Gov/Big Pharma/Big Medicine just keeps chugging away because this offers an endless supply of money for Big Pharma and and endless supply of zombies for Big Gov.

They will most certainly keep at it till they have all of us "vaccinated" a hundred different ways against simply living on Earth.

Does anyone bother to ask the obvious question? How did we ever evolve in so deadly a bio-dome in the first place? Or are they simply trying to vaccinate us from being human?

Drs Malone and McCullough have crawled sort of half-way out of "the Virus Cult" but still trying to square the circle. I hope they escape it before government/Pharma turns us all into the Borg.

  An Préachán

Third from Faddis: Biden must be removed ASAP

 Friends,

Here, Sam Faddis reviews the Biden presidency.

An excerpt:

You may choose to believe that all of this is happening because Biden is the most incompetent President in American history. You may choose to believe, as I do, that such a conclusion is too kind. A man whose family has taken untold millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party over the years must at least be suspected of being subject to some degree of foreign influence. Everything we are seeing makes a lot more sense if you view it as a deliberate wrecking operation designed to destroy the United States from within.

Regardless of why it is happening, however, what is indisputable is that all this is happening. Our nation is being torn apart.  Perhaps worst of all, there is no sign of any change in course or policy. The response of the Biden administration to all complaints is to deny reality and double down on demonstrably dangerous and damaging decisions.

There is open debate now about whether or not we are already in a recession. Such discussion is irrelevant. We will be in a full-scale depression within six months at this rate. We may also be in a shooting war with both Russia and China by then and facing threats right here in our own hemisphere.   We will, as a bankrupt nation, torn apart by internal division, be plunged into conflicts on a scale we have not seen since World War II.

It is time to recognize the obvious. Joe Biden must be removed from office. The 25th Amendment must be invoked in order to save the republic. We cannot sit idly by and watch as this man drives the nation off a cliff.

Then we can move on to the next problem. What do we do about Kamala?

AnP again:

This is our existential problem. We are conquered from within, just as is the case with the Church. Both Bergoglio and Biden are installed charlatans. They are not truly pope or president, but those in the hierarchy of government and Church are letting them destroy everything in their path. That in itself is beyond incredible. Yet, it is happening. People whom the System, in both Church and State, assigned to correct such a situation are abrogating their responsibility. Lawlessness rules. Satan reigns. And it looks like the Democrats and RINOs will steal the November elections this year. Already we see that in Georgia, deeply unpopular RINO bigshots have won their primaries. Besides, all the Biden peeps have to do is to declare another Covid crisis to shut everything down again.

So, I have very little hope in either the case of the Church or the U.S. government. And this all has been planned for decades. It's been a "war of position" rather than a "war of movement". For decades. Since the end, or even during, WWII. Really, it is all just Cloward-Piven. We let it happen. Now what?

Perhaps the coming economic collapse and also the Taiwan war will cause such system stress in the U.S. and Europe that at last the bad guys will meet Mussolini's fate. We can hope. But the damage done already is incalculable. And the Covid "Vaccine" Holocaust is just starting. 

We need to pray.

An Préachán

First from Sam Faddis: the U.S. economy is in unspeakably dire straights...

Friends, for those who don't know, Sam Faddis served in the U.S. Army and then in the CIA for quite a while as an Operations officer overseas before retiring, and now writes at AND Magazine, on Substack. I've seen him interviewed by John-Henry Weston, and Faddis is a absolutely no-nonsense guy. So, as a framework to cover a lot of territory succinctly, I'm linking to three Faddis articles everyone should read.

Sam Faddis on why we'll be in a full-blown Depression soon.
For example, U.S. consumers currently owe $22 billion in overdue utility bills.

An excerpt:
"The cost of energy is becoming unaffordable," said Mark Wolfe, executive director of NEADA. U.S. consumers currently owe $22 billion in overdue utility bills. That is double what that figure has been historically. Housing prices are going through the roof. The cost of any kind of housing is soaring. "We could have severe hardship in this country," Wolfe said. "Families' budgets are being cut. It's like they're being taxed, and there's no end in sight.

American households are increasingly simply out of money, and as a consequence, they are not buying anything that is not a necessity. The clearest possible indicator of that can be seen in the volume of container traffic coming across the Pacific from China.

The cost to move a container from Asia to a major port in North America or Europe has dropped by 23% since the beginning of this year, according to maritime research firm Drewry. No one is shipping anything. Containers are simply unfilled.

AnP again:

The Biden Regime, and the Democrats and most of the other Democrat Party, the RINO Republicans, have betrayed us. Our media have betrayed us. We've abandoned traditional morality in both the secular and ecclesiastical worlds.

No wonder God is silent. Well, his Mother prophesied all this for us at Fatima and after, so, in truth, we've no excuse. (See also the prophesies of Our Lady of Good Success. These prophesies, from the 1580s into the next century, made to Mother Mariana in Quito, Ecuador, are about the 20th century and are incredibly spot on.)

An Préachán

Second from Faddis: China will soon grab Taiwan, probably via blockade

Friends,

Sam Faddis on the Chinese Communist coming takeover of Taiwan.

After describing how the CCP will likely do it via blockade, Faddis writes:

Joe Biden is in the White House. He was an empty suit in his prime. That was many, many years ago. Over the years, the Biden family has taken literally tens of millions of dollars from the Chinese Communists. Biden is surrounded by men, like himself, who have gotten rich off of their relationships with Beijing.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the CCP to move on Taiwan. Any day it wants it can start cyber attacks on Taiwanese companies, utilities, and institutions. Without breaking a sweat Beijing can put aircraft and ships around Taiwan and begin to enforce a blockade of imports of food, fuel, and other key materials. The Taiwanese will lack any capacity to respond meaningfully or to break this blockage on their own. They will be isolated and starving in the dark and fully dependent on the United States of America to rescue them.

With Joe in the Oval Office, there is no chance such help will be forthcoming. Surrender will be inevitable.

Call it whatever you want – war or “non-war” – this is the almost inevitable future for the Taiwanese.

AnP again:

A Chinese grab for Taiwan will further crash the world economy, not least in China, which is exhibiting some severe financial troubles of all sorts. But Xi is as stupid as Bergoglio, and as monomaniacal. Xi will be modeling his moves on what Putin did in Ukraine, but there's no even remote guarantee it will work out the same way.

For one thing, the Taiwanese can be under no illusion what fate awaits them in China. Look at Hong Kong. Consider the Uighurs. Consider Tibet. And unlike in Ukraine, there's no large chunk of the Taiwanese population sympathizing with the invader. None.

For another, Chinese bureaucrats are even less moral, less industrious, less merit based than American ones. While we have, especially lately, hired and promoted bureaucrats and military leaders based on cronyism and "political correctness", that sort of thing is half century-long endemic to the Chinese. Likewise, our military the Biden Regime has tried to destroy on many levels, but the Chinese Communist Party controls the "People's Liberation Army" completely; it is not China's army, but the CCP's army. Literally. So, just how is this going to work in a major military operation on an island as rugged and defended as Taiwan? 

Also, unlike the general European military, which is mostly lacking in both numbers and hardware, the Japanese are not in that condition, nor are the Vietnamese, both of whom loathe Xi and the CCP. Then there's India: are they going to let Xi make himself even more powerful than he is? India and Brazil are near-future superpowers, but not if China overlords them.

Finally, would the American military – active duty and not – even in its current grotesquely demoralized state – really "stand down" in such a crisis? War changes everything and just about anything can happen. Especially since it would be SO easy for the Chinese to accidentally (or not so accidentally) destroy U.S. military assets?

We'll see. It looks like we will definitely see, and soon.

An Préachán

Utterly bad, truly incomprehensible Catholic Church news: a 'must read'

 Amici,

Have you see this? Lifesite reports Bergoglio has restricted Traditional Catholics in yet another way: restricting Vatican approval for associations of the faithful.  

An excerpt:

The new restrictions placed upon diocesan bishops will have the practical effect of stifling the growth of new communities or orders, particularly traditional ones, should they not meet with the approval of the staunchly anti-traditionalist Braz de Aviz. 

When combined with Traditionis Custodes, Cardinal-elect Arthur Roche’s Responsa ad dubia, and the 2018 document Cor Orans – described as a “cruel and merciless” assault against contemplative orders, motivated by “hatred” – the new Rescript adds to the recent string of stringent Vatican actions attempting to curtail the future of the Traditional Latin Mass and groups who are devoted to it.

Speaking to LifeSiteNews, Brother Martin of the Oblates of St. Augustine – which is itself a de facto association – warned that “the immediate intent of this change in the Code of Canon Law appears to be to prevent traditional Catholic Religious communities, such as new Franciscan or Augustinian communities, from acquiring juridic personality.”

AnP again:

Bergoglio is an intolerable tyrant. He's doing everything he can to smother the life out of the one part of the Church that has life in it. And the bishops who attended Fr. Earl Fernandes's episcopal ordination in Columbus, Ohio, are Bergoglios American imps and hobgoblins in evil.

I can't see any hope that Fernandes, with those particular gargoyles peeping over his shoulder, will do anything but toe the Bergoglian party line.

But this following news is truly incomprehensible, about Fr. James Altman's evil bishop in Wisconsin appointing the "Grindr Gay Hook-Up Priest to a parish!  

An excerpt: "Bishop William Callahan of La Crosse defended Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill's appointment on the basis that his homosexual activity did not constitute ‘illegal conduct.’"

Oh, yeah, right. Of course. Ugh!

This Callahan (why does he have to have an Irish name?) I had thought to be merely a pompous ass, a tool and creature of the Unspeakable Cupich in nearby Chicago. Lo and behold, Callahan is obviously as evil as Cupich and his dark master in Rome! Putting a disgraced, caught-in-the-act homosexual "hook-up" moron into a parish, and all the while completely exiling and "cancelling" an absolutely excellent priest, Fr. James Altman?

My friends, this is TOO MUCH! I am apoplectic with rage. This is obscenely evil and they are so in-your-face about it! Too much. They do not care what we think. They do not care what God thinks. And they are as open about it as they can be.

Lifesite says:

In a June 11 statement, Callahan announced that Burrill would begin service as administrator of the St. Teresa of Kolkata parish the same day and asked for “prayers of support” for Burrill and his new parishioners as he picks up his new appointment.

Callahan continued, noting Burrill’s resignation from active ministry and subsequent “extended leave” before being called to administrate the diocesan parish. “Monsignor Burrill engaged in a sincere and prayerful effort to strengthen his priestly vows and has favorably responded to every request made by me and by the Diocese,” Callahan wrote.

Damn Callahan and the horse he rode in on. He REVOKED Fr. Altman's priestly faculties, but not this "caught red-handed" queer's!

 

It is just too much.

Psalm 12

Usquequo, Domine, oblivisceris me in finem?

usquequo avertis faciem tuam a me?

2 Quamdiu ponam consilia in anima mea;

dolorem in corde meo per diem?

3 Usquequo exaltabitur inimicus meus super me?

Psalm 12 Douay-Rheims (Psalm 13 in Protestant and newer Catholic translations)

1 Unto the end, a psalm for David. How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me unto the end? how long dost thou turn away thy face from me?

2 How long shall I take counsels in my soul, sorrow in my heart all the day?

3 How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

  An Préachán

Bíonn grásta Dé idir an diallait agus an talamh.

Well, we're about to hit the ground.

Got the SADS? Millions are dropping of it all over the world...

Friends,

A chairde,

A great article at LifeSiteNews about SADS, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Very important to read.

Being a Corvine, I'm philosophical about it. I (one of many) tried to warn people not to take the experimental "vaccines", and now all I can do is say, be prepared for the SADS. If you're Catholic or Orthodox, go to Confession. Otherwise, make peace with God in your own way. And if you didn't take the "vaccine" potions, pray for those who did.

And remember, not everyone will drop over dead, dying from blood clots. Sterilization was also on the agenda of the "vaccine" creators.

An excerpt:

For doctors who care about their public status, to even entertain the idea that an experimental injection developed by a criminal recidivist pharmaceutical giant like Pfizer with its record of hiding damning data, might play a role in some of the mysterious deaths is unthinkable. Like a High Priest questioning the dogma of the Holy Grail of the New Religion of Science. You don’t question cult leaders or their core message.

The article seems to suggest that these mysterious deaths of young, healthy people have always happened, and we just haven’t noticed. We missed it before when kids like this 12-year-old Canadian girl or this 18-year-old died in their sleep, as these did recently. It’s normal that 13-year-olds drop dead at summer camp, and teens collapse in track and field , and young farmers die while plowing their field,  and young Marines die on leave and young mothers of children don’t wake up, and young athletes perish of silent heart inflammation without warning.

AnP All these people dying, without fighting, without resisting. Pitched into eternity when they thought they had years yet of living. Such a sudden, unexpected ending.

The compliant ones die first, as was ever true.

 An Préachán

(A northern skald chanting...)

Long ago, trudging troops espying –

Odin's cadre corvines, cawing – battle standards stalking, 

Eyeing warriors gutted – halberds, swords, life-taking;

Then ravens, crows – callous eulogy calling

To brutal Thor his blood libations – in their fresh feeding.

But now no heroes – no clanging battle,

No need for skald nor bard chanting, 

for

Death is hidden, and necromancer given.

Answering queries from a Protestant friend

Amici,

You write about religious questions, so here's my responses.

First query was what is going on in the Catholic Church? Bergoglio seems a heretic, according to you, but also this Taylor Marshall guy. So, what gives. 

My friend, you write about religious questions, so here's my responses.

Thanks for the Taylor Marshall video about The Beast Bergi at that Candlemass address back in February of this year, where the layman stood up and contradicted Bergoglio. (And got himself escorted out for his efforts.) In his presentation, Marshall early on made a common sense observation, to wit, either Bergoglio is right in 2022 and Pius XII was wrong in 1943, or Pius was right in 1943 and Bergoglio is wrong in 2022. They can't both be right.

Indeed.

In general, one has to wonder just what Bergoglio thinks like, or what he knows, or whether he cares a whit about the Trad Catholics he is trashing out? One can ask the same question about Joe Biden, too. Or any of our governing elites in many countries. Ever listen to Neil Oliver? He discusses just this here. (Neil Oliver, When You Accept That Modern Western Government Considers Citizens Their Enemy, Then All the Outcomes Make Sense.) 

AnP: And this is true in the Churches, too.

This bizarre hated of the followers of the Modernists founders has long roots in the ecclesiastical field. "Modernist" Reformers of the 1960s on, I think, are necessarily damned. Plain and simple. They put their theories before actual people. That's evil. They did not care that the living Hell they were about to unleash would drive most Catholics from the Church. (The Church lost well over half its population of 1960.) Did they think the people would just "suffer through" and "grin and bear it"? Did they think people would just stay stuck in the pews when in the Church of their parents and grandparents sacrificed (back 2,000 years, ultimately), being decomposed into a lame imitation of modern mainstream Anglican or Luthernism.

These 1960s-1970s reformers lied and stole, breaking a number of basic commandments. Certainly, if nothing else, God had commanded them to feed His sheep, but they instead tried experiments on His flock. 

1. Yet by far the nastiest thing they did was use Traditional Catholics' deep-seated sense of duty to obey the Church as a tool they could use against such Trad Catholics. 
2. As they trashed all of Traditional Catholicism, incrementally, the one thing they kept was the traditional duty of obedience. "You have to obey us!" Yeah, right.
3. They essentially said, "You have to obey our orders to tear down the churches your grandparents sacrificed to build." In essence, "You have to obey our order to shoot yourselves." A great many did. But many did not.

This heightened the "cognitive dissonance" that has since remained far, far too strong in the Church.

Some cognitive dissonance examples:

• You're at Mass to begin with to worship God, but the priest faces you over (what's technically called) a Cranmer table. You all look at each other, like a customer and a clerk in a store.
  
• God is vertical, above us; He had to incarnate Himself to be among us, and in all its actions and prayers, the sacred liturgy promotes this – something obvious in the Traditional Latin Mass or the Eastern Liturgies. The veil between earth and heaven is pulled back and we're in the the Divine Presence.
• Yet in the "new" Mass (Novus Ordo), that is not clear at all. We do not face "East" toward God but inward, toward ourselves.
  
• Also, used to be the Incarnate God in the form of consecrated bread and wine was kept in the tabernacle on the altar, center, high, for all to see; but now He is shunted off to the side, or out in the hall. Massive cognitive dissonance. Textbook, really.
  
• The new Mass went to a three-year Biblical reading cycle so that Catholics would hear more of the Bible read at Mass, yet ironically, the new cycles leave out all the Hellfire and Damnation passages!
  
• Ironically too, the new form of the Novus Order in itself took out a HUGE portion of the daily Scripture readings that used to serve throughout the liturgy in every Mass! They took out the variable readings and much of the standing Sunday readings. (N.B. I'm always amazed at how much Holy Writ I can read in the various places it is used in every Sunday TLM Mass. So, therefore, how could they remotely claim to be promoting Bible verses when they intentionally vanished or watered down thousands of already in place Scripture verses?
• In general, nothing in the new Mass is vertical; all is horizontal. The simple message is "We're here to reaffirm ourselves and feel good about ourselves and to socialize by sharing a ceremonial meal together." They even modeled the new Offertory prayers (before the Consecration) on the old Jewish meal prayers!
  
• The sermons are certainly all as though written by some crappy psychology major in the "I'm ok, you're ok" school of psychology.
  
• On and on it goes, all pouring rivers of cognitive dissonance upon us as occurred in Noah's flood.
  

You write about Luther, Martin, doctor of theology

As for the Reformation of the 16th century, sometimes called "The Great Reformation", two things to note that most people raised Protestant don't know.

First, the Church continually cycles through "reformations" historically, about every four or five generations, sometimes more, sometimes less. Before Luther and Calvin in the 16th century, there were Sts Dominic and Francis in the 12th century. That was a very successful "reformation" that swept through the entire 13th century and only began to wane after 1300, where, in the century of the 100 Years War, the Black Death, and the Mongol invasions, and peasant revolts, you begin to see dismal, dour thinkers (William of Occam and Marsilius of Padua to name two) who would eventually lead intellectually to Luther.

• They were called Nominalists, and they believed a lot like Muslim philosophers did, such as the amazing 11th-century genius al-Ghazali (Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭūsiyy al-Ġazzālīy) that God was capricious, alien, utterly "Other". (When you think of the dire times they lived it, this isn't so odd a development!)
• They believed God was unknowable, cruel, and damning. Modern-day "Modernists", on the other hand, believe "God" is just as remote, but not because He is Allah, but rather because he is evolving like everything else, and that ultimately we basically make Him up; it is this that would be Bergoglio's true belief if anyone could pry it out of him.)

But before the 11-12th century Reformation, there was a major reformation in the 10th century. The popes of that era (9th-early 10th centuries), made the Renaissance popes ALL look like saints! For example:

1. Popes John X and John XII (both 10th century) had many women and lived dissolute lifestyles, with John XII being known as a rapist, and even infamous for incest!
   
2. They called him "a Christian Caligula". And like that depraved emperor, John XII was knifed to death by an outraged husband in the midst of carnal relations with the husband's wife.
   
3. Or compare John XII with Pope Stephen VI, who, in 897, dug up his predecessor and put the corpse on trial! (Not surprisingly, the corpse lost his case!) This ended up being called the Cadaver Synod! Pope Stephen VI was later strangled to death.
   
4. As Wikipedia puts it, "Between 872 and 965, two dozen popes were appointed, and between 896 and 904 there was a new pope every year. Often, these brief papal reigns were the result of the political machinations of local Roman factions, about which few sources survive."
5. While all that was going on in Rome, in the provinces a great monastic reform was gathering steam – the Clunaic Reform – and it eventually swept into Rome.
   

So the reformation of the 10th century involved cleaning all this insanity up and establishing the College of Cardinals, who would henceforward elect a pope, rather than having him be a product of Italian Mafia-like machinations.

The Great Reformation

Now for the second point I mentioned earlier. You never hear of this stuff because The Great Reformation started in the 16th century, and the reformers of that one were not saints – Luther claimed a Christian "saint" was someone who ate hearty, pleasured the ladies with gusto, and who despite all that felt "saved"! I.e. Saved by faith alone. He boasted he could sin 100 – or was it 1000? – and doing what, exactly) times a day and it would not affect his salvation.

So those reformers harped on the Renaissance popes to justify their actions and ignored the long history of the Church. But those Renaissance popes were not depraved like the 10th century guys. None of them departed from orthodox Christian (Catholic) teachings. Personally lax, they still maintained the Deposit of Faith. They may have fought wars (like Julius II, "the warrior pope") or had long-standing mistresses and fathered children (Alexander VI had about seven kids by two different long-time mistresses, all of whom he openly acknowledged), but they didn't promote heretical teachings, as does Bergoglio today.

• Alexander VI, the second Borgia pope (family from Spain, originally) is probably the most notorious Renaissance pope. Like the other popes of that time, he was very learned and a patron of art and promoted Latin and learning in general. The historically significant writer Machiavelli dedicated his famous political essay "The Prince" to Alexander's son Cesare Borgia, himself a classic Renaissance ruler. The pope's daughter Lucrezia was famous for her blonde beauty and brilliant politics (being a governor of a city for some time) and for her many husbands, important princes. However, some modern scholars have argued that given Alexander's location at the time these were children born, they almost certainly weren't his actual kids. Before you judge him, also consider this. A visitor to Rome asked him if all the rumors about his affairs and political intrigues didn't upset him. And do you know what he said? He said, "Rome is a free city, and the citizens of Rome are free to speak their minds and say what they want." Pretty amazing, isn't it?
  

But Luther did not go the route St. Francis of Assisi went, or Saint Dominic Guzman, Luther had little (or no) patience and instead of getting local problems fixed, he kept pushing ever more extreme positions till he destroyed the Church and replaced it with his Lutheran Church creation, a state church controlled not by churchman (whether good ones or bad) but by secular princes. Mimicking him, Henry VIII did the same in England. John Calvin took over the Swiss town of Geneva and ran it like a Mideastern mullah! NO separation between Church and State.

Keep in mind, too, that the Reformers kept complaining of the Church selling indulgences (something that indeed, needed reformation) and taxing people, but the Medieval Church was the SOLE provider of welfare for the people, maintaining hospitals, old-folk homes (hospices), schools galore, including universities (something the Church created). The Church also provided work to thousands of craftsmen and masons, continually building or rebuilding ecclesiastical buildings. Millions of serfs lived safely on Church lands (treated better than secular rulers treated their own peasants), while non-serfs rented their farms from the Church.

Shakespeare has King Henry V say in Henry V, Act 4, scene 1,

Not to-day, O Lord,

O, not to-day, think not upon the fault

My father made in compassing the crown!

I Richard's body have interred anew;

And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears

Than from it issued forced drops of blood:

Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,

Who twice a-day their wither'd hands hold up

Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built

Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests

Sing still for Richard's soul. More will I do;

Though all that I can do is nothing worth,

Since that my penitence comes after all,

Imploring pardon.

It was thus the Medieval World was built, the great cathedrals, the endless churchs, the beautiful art, schools endowed, hospitals established, the poor maintained, all indulgences pleading for the penitent giver. 

Luther's doctrine of grace destoryed it all. 

After the Reformation, the secular state took over all this and usually sold it off to rich laymen, who either ejected the free-born tenants or cracked down the serfs who couldn't leave. "Clearances" began, as in England, where the poor farmers and tradesmen where thrown off their estates.  Occasionally, the new state bureaucracies tried to provide schooling and so on, but it was nothing like it had been. Charles I of England tried to push hard for government charity and got beheaded for his troubles. And no new churches were built for a 100 years or more, either, though about half or so of Europe's artistic heritage (most of it ecclesiastical) was destroyed by Protestant mobs acting in a true Islamic spirit.

We saw the same occur after Vatican II, BTW, only with Catholic bureaucrats doing the destroying. It is called "iconoclasm": the intentional destruction of Church-related art. As part of all iconoclasm, churches are simply robbed, not just of their art, but their gold and silver, their lands, their incomes (reduced to state-provided handouts), and so on. Beautiful windows were removed. The Trappists ruling the Kentucky monastery Thomas Merton attended took out the church's windows and stored them away. 

The Reformation-era Catholic churches were truly smashed. What makes me especially angry is the destruction of the old monastic libraries. God only knows what was lost. A good example is the Beowulf Old English epic. It was found in only one manuscript written about the year 1000 (the poem itself could be 200 years older). It came to the attention of the literary world about 1650, when it was found in a private library. No one has ANY idea of where it came from. Apparently the family that had it had no clue. It's a complete mystery. But you can imagine that some Medieval Monastic library had it, and that it was looted. How many more Beowulf's were lost? We know the libraries were scattered when the secular owners who bought them from Henry VIII took them over. They didn't want old books; they wanted the land and the buildings. (Or just the lands; roofs were taken off the churches and they were left to deteriorate.) 

Of course, the big issue in the 16th century Reformation was theology; specifically, just how one is "saved"? How did that work? By "grace" or by "faith" and faith in conjunction (or not at all) with "works".

Luther came up with a novel way of understanding how Faith works, or even what it is. He had a new idea of what grace was, and of course he damned all "works" root and branch. In short, Martin Luther simply rewrote the source code of the Christian Faith. When in public debate, Johann Eck got him to say he, Luther, would trust his own judgement of Scripture over a Church Council, every jaw in the room had to drop open. One guy, a youngish academic with no parochial experience, and with a narrow Nominalist university education in a corner of Germany, claimed to know more than a parliament of Churchman, many of whom were far older and more learned, than he? Many of whom would be from wide-spread countries, too.

But that is Martin Luther in a nutshell. ("Tell them Doctor Martin Luther would have it so!" he would write later.) And when at the imperial Diet in Worms in 1521, the emperor, Kaiser Karl, Charles V himself, the most powerful ruler in all Europe, asked Luther in astonishment, "What of all our ancestors who believed in the old Faith, as it was for centuries?" Luther literally answered, "Who cares!" (Well, literally, he said, "What is that to us?" but the drift was plain as a smack in the face.)

Such was Luther.

Since he was one who started the Reformation (Jan Huss and John Wycliffe tried to do so a generation or so earlier, but the secular princes did not think to use them against the Church, as they would do with Luther), historians have painted him the best they could. But he really was neither wise nor faithful. At one point, he approved of a German prince's committing bigamy! (That got out – of course it did – and has tarnished Luther's reputation ever since.)

The Core Christian Teaching

The core Christian idea is that God incarnated Himself into the human race so that those humans who accepted Him could in turn be incarnated into God. God takes over a person via Grace, a transforming spiritual substance, changing his fundamental nature, and creating a New Creation in Christ.

This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples:
•    John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation) And of course the whole "You must be born again" colloquy in John 3.

•    2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.

In Romans 8, St. Paul talks about receiving the spirit of sonship so that you can call God Himself "Abba", a Hebrew word meaning 'father' but specifically 'my particular father'. Obviously, to be able to do that, one is a new creation indeed.

Or obviously in the Gospel of John, chapter 1:

12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

Once you know what to look for, this truly becoming a new creation in Christ, "children of God not of natural descent...but born of God" is everywhere in the New Testament.

For two thousand years, the Church has taught the "infusion" of grace via baptism and the sacraments. Luther and Calvin, etc., taught that God merely "imputed" or "assigned" the grace of His Son to those who professed Faith in Christ. But the Historical Church, East and West, and Further East and Deep South (Egypt and Ethiopia) taught St. Paul's and St. John's New Creation in Christ as the way of salvation. The Greeks have always called it Theosis.

But Martin Luther never felt a "new creation in Christ". He always felt like old sinful Martin Luther. Nothing he did helped, no prayer, no confession, no penance. When he said Mass, he admitted he felt terrified. He hated God for not making him feel a new creation. He hated himself for being so messed up. His confessor, Johann von Staupitz said to him, "Martin, God is not angry with you, you are angry with God." All-in-all, Martin Luther is not really the kind of guy one wants to base Faith in Christ on.

Romans 3:28: "The verse that launched the Reformation"

Finally, one more bit of detail Biblical reading and we're done. Reading Roman 3, specifically verse 28: "For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law," Luther took this "works of the law" set phrase to mean doing any good thing, whatsoever. None of it helps or is necessary for salvation. Therefore, one did not have to do good things to be saved. Indeed, one could "sin a 1000 times a day" and it not affect one's salvation. (Isn't that an example of cognitive dissonance in itself, though?)

The phrase "works of the law" had been debated before, however, by no one less than St. Augustine back in the Fifth Century, who argued it meant all moral law (10 Commandments or whatever). St. Jerome, his contemporary but who had wider experience and who had lived and studied with Jews at one point in his long career, said no, "works of the law" meant Jewish temple ceremony, eating kosher, being circumcised, and so on. As the phrase only appeared in St. Paul, there was no way to get a handle on it until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of which, dealing with ceremonial law, uses the exact phrase! This is 4QMMT, (Miqsat Ma'asei ha-Torah: Some of the Works of the Law). It was a letter written by the Essenes (a very strict Jewish sect) to the Pharisees, in order to correct the Pharisees in some of their teaching. In the title and in the letter, "works of the law" definitely means ceremonial law. So, St. Jerome was right and Augustine wrong! And of course, therefore Martin Luther was wrong. Flat out.

We also know he was wrong because of how he read New Testament authors who quoted from Old Testament writings. Luther interpreted the Romans 3:28 in light of his reading of the earlier part of Romans 3, where a succession of verses lament, "(10) There is no one righteous, not even one; (11) there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. (12) All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” (This is only a partial quote.)

Luther took these to mean no ONE PERSON in the all world was worthy, all fallen and failed. No one had sufficient grace from God! But each of these verses are from the Psalms (with one from Isaiah) and when a New Testament writer quotes an Old Testament verse, one is expected to recall the entire psalm or chapter it is in. A startling example is Our Lord on the Cross, reciting the first line from Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The idea is He recited the entire psalm, or a goodly portion of it (it is long). St. John expects his readers to know this detail. Sts Matthew and Mark do not have to explain it. That's how they wrote in those days. Everything is important. (And anyway, no chapter numbers or verse numbers existed until much later.)

And thus it is that the first lines above from St. Paul's chapter 3 lament originated from Psalm 14, the one that starts, "The fool says in his heart, there is no God." But if you read the whole psalm (it isn't long), you get to this startling verse:

"(4) Do all these evildoers know nothing? They devour my people as though eating bread; they never call on the Lord. (5) But there they are, overwhelmed with dread, for God is present in the company of the righteous."

Whoa! If everyone is fallen and no good, who are these "company of the righteous"? Who are "my people"? Well, they're the good guys who keep the Faith! Not everyone everywhere is no good, then. That was in no way what old St. Paul meant. God has His righteous! (Actually, note that He always does. Remember First Kings, 19:18? "I have kept 7,000 in Israel who have not bent the knee to Ba'al".) And if you take the time and trouble to look up each psalm verse St. Paul quotes, and read the psalms they come from (and Isaiah), you'll find the SAME thing. Luther read chapter 3 COMPLETELY wrong and Protestantism was founded on a profound misunderstanding.

Now, I could go on, and will, upon request, but this is pretty long. For right now, then, Luther (and Calvin, who had in many ways a VERY different take on the Faith than Luther did, but isn't nearly as colorful or dramatic a character) were quite wrong in their Biblical exegesis.

Their sola scriptura doctrine soon split the Church into major pieces, and after the American Constitution of 1787, thousands of denominations have appeared and metastasized across the world. (The U.S. Constitution was the first to regulate religion to limbo, a personal eccentricity. The Iroquois told Ben Franklin – I read somewhere long ago – that the Founders were crazy to do this, but of course who listened to Indians?)

Hopes this helps set things in perspective.

An Préachán