Changeling Church: A Humanist Council Produced a Humanist Church; It Is Now Collapsing

Friends,

St. Matthew 7:24-27 reports Our Lord telling the parable of the man who built his house on rock as opposed to the man who built his house on sand. The Vatican II Church built itself on sand, i.e. Humanism. Kennedy Hall has reported on this Humanism aspect to Vatican II, and his podcast is well worth listening to. (See below for link.)

But is the Vatican II Church coming to its end because it was ill founded on an almost pure Humanism? A "Man is the measure of all things" humanism that draped itself in a bit of Catholic bunting? It is a great insight. Are not the most important segments of its most important decrees just that? Humanism with Catholic bunting? 

This Vat II Church bears a boat-load of issues, problems and wounds: most self-inflicted. And its agonized spasms often drive one to ask: "Is the Church suicidal, or what?" What are we to make of it trying to kill of the most exciting, laity-driven reform since time-out-of-mind: the TLM revival, and madly sacking orthodox bishops while promoting the heterodox (to be polite) into high office? All this self-flagellation drives millions away from the Church.

How odd a situation we are in that we have to demand of the Church to stop its self-destruction, cease being incoherent, and most of all to stop robbing us of our Catholic inheritance. The Traditional Latin Mass IS our inheritance, our spiritual inheritance going back to the beginning. Give it back to us! Give us back our traditional prayers and liturgy and theology. It isn't something anyone – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Humanist, Communist, etc. – has any right to take from us, any more than the Confederacy had the right to strip the South's poor whites of their American citizenship (then kill them for four years to keep the theft in place).

The Church's self-demolition exists because the Vatican II Church was founded on Humanism, not the Gospel, not Church Tradition that embodies the Gospel. To conjure Irish folklore, it is a Changeling Church. At first, it was more Catholic than not, but slowly, then more quickly, like a Changeling, since 1964 it has shown itself to be NOT the Church we thought it was. 

"The True Spirit of Vatican II and Apostasy"

Find Kennedy Hall's excellent podcast on this Humanist revelation here. "The True Spirit of Vatican II and Apostasy". As such, I would argue that this is quite true and thus this historical Church version we have to suffer through, a Humanist-grounded ecclesiastical "avatar", quite naturally didn't take three-score and ten to crumple in upon itself. It's a house built on sandy Humanism.

Note that by "Vatican II Church" I mean, in the first instance, merely the Church of our time, but in the second instance, I mean a Church veering off the course set by Tradition (which, as Archbishop Lefebvre said, IS the Deposit of Faith), and which is now morphing into the notorious "Ape of the Church" foretold by Archbishop Fulton Sheen: a.k.a. the Synodal Church.

1. The Vatican II Council began the Vatican II Church. 
2. That Council infamously pretended to be only a "pastoral council" (said ad nauseam) but since it ended, Modernists have treated it as the Dogmatic Council of ALL TIME. 
3. It remains the ONLY Council of any import. The others? What Councils? There's only THE Council. (Paul VI and John Paul II both lauded it in this manner via hyper absurd praise.)
   
4. Holding high its voluminous writings and decrees, its verbose, rambling documents that no one can read (I've thoroughly read short ones like Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae: effusive efforts at wrapping heresy in twaddle) that sound – give or take – sorta Catholic...
   
5. ...But reading seriously, one realizes that as always, and here literally, the Devil is in the details.

Modernism = Evolution

The basic argument of Modernism is evolution. This remains very well hidden (much of the time) by the Neo-Modernists. But the core idea of it is that people evolve, as taught by Darwin, that hammer-wielding, animal skull-crushing atheist who invented eugenics. 

• Our relationships, duties, family structures, cultures also evolve. 
• No timeless truths exist. "Truth" is an illusion. 
• Our understanding of the world, via the new religion, "science", evolves us. (Just read Yuval Noah Harari, and other such futurist mavens.)
  
• And certainly, in terms of religion, our theology evolves, our sense of the divine develops in all sorts of ways.
  
• That's the attraction of this to so many: they get to "Invent Church". Sound familiar?
  
• Finally: the penultimate revelation is that God Himself evolves. He is not the God of Hebrews 13:8-9 "Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today: and the same for ever. Be not led away with various and strange doctrines." Or of course Exodus 3:14 "God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM. He said: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, hath sent me to you." 
• But the ultimate revelation of all that only gets revealed to the highest Gnostic geniuses is that God Himself doesn't exist; i.e. that we make Him up. (This is so Freemasonic, isn't it?)
  

All of the above shows how literally "Gnostic" evolution and humanism both are; how Gnostic so much of modernity is. So, Humanism (Christian veneer or not) always remains "Man is the measure of all things", and certainly the measure of God. In other words: God is completed, fulfilled, perfected through the perfection of man. Kennedy Hall mentions this as well.

History

The Vatican I Church was a tough, no-nonsense Church, really; a sort of Katholische Festung that survived Napoleon, Marx, loss of the Papal States, and two World Wars. It had its problems, sure, but basically it was doing great. So, for many: Modernists, yes, and always the Masons, many Protestants, certainly the Communists of all stripes, and even certain Jewish groups (such as got the Easter Good Friday Liturgy changed in 1955), it had to be bagged. Brought down. Stopped.

1. Note: These ecclesiastical "avatars" follow one another through history: the Counter-Reformation Church – one of the Church's high points in its 2,000-year history – existed from about 1540 to the Thirty Years War a century later...
2. ...when the Bourbon dynasts of France, Spain and Italy replaced it with the Bourbon Church until 1789, when in turn, the French Revolution ended the Bourbon Church (and many of the Bourbons). 
3. Each avatar has its essential mood or cast of spirit, its good points and its failures, its great saints and its sinners. The Vatican I Church really began with Pope Pius VII's resistance to Napoleon, and thereafter it continued to resist the modern world.
   

But all had the Traditional Latin Mass. Let me repeat that: ALL Catholic Church versions had the Latin Mass, the core elements of which go back to the "Dreamtime" of the early Faith. (Read 1 Corinthians, starting at 11:17.) All had the traditional theology. All stood fundamentally for orthodoxy. Certainly, none of these Church avatars, even the relatively corrupt earlier one in the 1000s, has ever produced a series of popes failing the basic Deposit of Faith. I don't mean popes exhibiting basic moral failings in themselves: many at certain times were great sinners. I mean failing to hold the traditional and ancient universal (Catholic) teaching such as the Vatican II Church has consistently veered away from – and of course NONE of them produced a Jorge Bergoglio. Not remotely.

Bottom Line

Watch the Kennedy Hall podcast. Take notes. He's working from a book, Prometheus, published by Angelus press. Note Pope Paul VI's speech that ended the council. At 8:05 into the podcast, Mr. Hall reads from Paul VI, "This entire Council may be reduced to its definitive religious significance which is none other other than a powerful and friendly invitation to the humanity of today and to find God once more through the path of Brotherly Love." Kennedy Hall comments that the entire council is reduced to "the spirit of fraternity", and that this sounds like Bergoglio. And Paul does, doesn't he? Remember Bergoglio's disastrous roll out of a "fraternity" event at the Vatican some months ago? No one came? Bergoglio has always hustled fraternal Humanism, as Elizabeth Yore writes here at Lifesite News. Kennedy Hall opines, "People think Pope Francis is really liberal; Pope Francis is not really that much different than Paul VI." Neither, ultimately, were John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Mr. Hall discusses this, and how Benedict's idea that the ancient Vetus Ordo and the modernist Novus Ordo would "enrich" each other. That's pure Hegelism, Kennedy points out: thesis, antithesis, and a resulting synthesis. (From this Humanistic insight I'm discussing, one would think great minds like JP2 and B16 would have seen the Novus Ordo for the pallid, Humanistic, horizontal liturgy it is. Maybe they did, but then they were true papal Humanists, apparently.)

Therefore, comprehending the reality of the Humanist Council and its Humanist tendrils wriggling through the Church's subsoil, we are seeing today the necessary, and I mean NECESSARY denouement of the Vatican II Church and its fully Humanist creed. How else could it have ended? It has produced a great multitude of Apostates. Tens of millions. Although many join other churches, separating themselves from the Holy Sacraments necessary for salvation that way, the majority leave the Church, as Mr Hall says, not to join Protestant churches, but to just stop religious practices. "Self-satisfied prigs" the kids in the Narnia Chronicles would label them. No wonder the murderous Anthony Fauci doesn't feel the need to attend Mass, as he's pontificated recently. That freak thinks he's been perfected. Totally immersed in all his post-Vatican II education (much of it Jesuit), he's a true "self-satisfied prig," a "know it all" snot who has obtained a higher plane of existence. Fauci thought nothing of killing millions. Humanists do that. (Doesn't this sound like Yuval Noah Harari and so many of "our betters" who want to refashion the world? It's hardly a Catholic-only failing.)

Good riddance, Vatican II Church; the Synodal Church, the "Ape of the Church" is next up. Yet it won't have Catholics in it. Many middle-of-the-road Catholics of today, mainly those who insist the Second Vatican Council was great and necessary, and who insist Bergoglio is pope, will under the wheels of the Synodal bus just stop practicing the Faith. That is, after all, the goal of the Modernists. But alas, notice how they're so often closing parishes and taking down good church buildings as they "clear outta town", closing them forever? That's to make sure no TLM can replace them. They want to leave a desert and sow it with salt, because, after all, they've achieved a nigher Gnostic enlightenment than the troglodytes they're leaving behind.

Doesn't that sound Masonic-like? Hmmm. 

           AnP

Pray against Catholic Church Collapse by Contemplating Catholic Truths

Friends,

Catholic Church collapse is happening rapidly now. It is self-evident. On November 30, Bergoglio publicly said in an address to theologians: “This is the job I ask of you: Please, demasculinize the church.” (What? Like him and his creeps?)

OK. That's it for me. The Vatican II Church is comatose. It is about to breathe its last. Meanwhile, the True Church is being crucified. I could thesaurus all the synonyms for "putrid" I can find, but enough. The Church's "rank and file" bishops are already "demasculinized". They're reprehensible eunuchs.

We're on our own. Well, we have Someone on our side. 

Pray for God's will to be done as the Synodal Church/Bergoglio's Mirror Church gains strength and seemingly stomps and wallops the True Church. For some detail on that, see Anthony Stine's report here about how incredibly bad things are getting: such as one archbishop formally excommunicating priests and laity for simply celebrating/attending any Traditional Latin Mass in his archdiocese while allowing some Voodoo thing to occur, or Msgr Charles Pope deleting and recanting his refreshingly and perfectly honest 'X' commentary about how nasty Bergoglio is showing himself to be, and so on. (Anthony Stine does excellent reporting.) 

Now, I know it seems trite, cliché, the constant advice to "pray". But there's prayer and then there's prayer. 

Try contemplative prayer at this time of the liturgical year – Advent. It's the beginning of the liturgical year and the end of the secular year, and as we can be certain 2024 will be a disaster on all levels, it is a good time collect ourselves.

Adventus, the Coming of Christ. It's a Lenten time of fasting and preparation for Christ's Incarnation. Consider praying by reflecting on what the Incarnation itself means.

God rejoices in His creations, and His creations rejoice in Him, and in us. Incarnate Creation reflects His Glory, His Being. Prayerfully reflect on

Psalm 5: ⁴ For I will behold thy heavens, the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars which thou hast founded. ⁵ What is man that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man that thou visitest him? ⁶ Thou hast made him a little less than the angels, thou hast crowned him with glory and honour: ⁷ And hast set him over the works of thy hands. ⁸ Thou hast subjected all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen: moreover the beasts also of the fields. ⁹ The birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea, that pass through the paths of the sea.

God incarnated us into being as a wonder. Our unique part angelic, part animal ensouled body constituting a being to rejoice in His Creation of us in the marvel of His earthly creation. The good angels certainly glorify Him for material existence and for creating us. Can we do less? And He blessed us, and our world, in the first three verses of Genesis 2. I take this to be a Covenantal blessing. The Lord God made a pact with his physical Creation, and that is why He did not kill Adam and Eve when they fell as Genesis 3 reports; instead, God kept them alive, cursing them, yes, but covenanting with Eve, as well, promising that her seed would rise up to crush the Devil's head (Genesis 3:15). 

That first Covenant with Humanity turned our shame into blessing. No one, no anti-Christ, can undo that. We can follow Satan to Hell, yes, but we cannot undo God's glory, only witness to it, even in the Inferno.

Prayerfully reflecting on this, how can Bergoglio and his lavender monkeys in clerical garb separate us from what God ordained for us? They cannot. Especially in this season. God, the pure spirit, takes on human nature, becomes a true human being yet wholly God as well. The Incarnation. Contemplate it. God has thus elevated our nature by His Incarnation in us, that we may take on God's nature, the Church doctrine called in Greek Theosis. And the good angels, God's first creations, pure spirits formed in the image and likeness of God, they marvel and rejoice in this awesome Divine Incarnation and the superlative transformation this miracle sets in motion.

Not by nature, but by grace (i.e. gift: all creation is gift), "Theosis" (Divinization) enables our incorporation into Christ, raising us up to participate in His Divinity, as St. Peter teaches in 2 Peter 1:4. Usually described in the Western Church as an Infusion of Grace, our natures are changed. Protestantism teaches Imputation of Grace: God assigns grace to us but doesn’t actually divinize or change our nature.

•    St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460]
•    St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]
•    This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Prayerfully contemplate Romans, chapters 6 and 8 ("Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry 'Abba, Father'). See also:
•    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)

•    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.

•    Two Old Testament examples: Isaiah 65:17; Ezekiel 36:25-26

So, Friends,

Despite the Church's woes and the disgrace she suffers with that mountebank anti-pope currently installed and her gutless emasculated sons who won't remove him, we should rejoice with our angelic brethren, and they’ll show us how, joining our voices – and our awe – to theirs, together contemplating the Divine Glory of Our Blessed Lord’s Incarnation into human nature, and what it portends for our salvation. The True Church is bursting with this most incredible grace, this all-conquering gift. May it triumph, by God's will.

The Peace of Our Lord be with you all and all priests who "believe in His name" and may Bergoglio, the Scourge of the Vatican II Church and would-be murderer of the True Church, repent and believe before it is to late – and Bergoglio and his creatures and hangers-on experience the eternal payment for their evil. 

And shame, great shame, on Msgr Charles Pope and all the bishops who won't stand up for Christ in this time of trial. After a decade of Bergoglio, they have absolutely, ontologically, no excuse.

An Préachán

Vatican II Destroyed Western Civilization: the Proof

My friends, amici,

To write "Vatican II Destroyed Western Civilization" sounds hyperbolic in the extreme, perhaps, but it is true, and here's the proof.

Vatican II allowed unprincipled, depressed and a number of very, very stupid people to attack the Traditional Latin Mass, and indeed, do their best to erase it. The root of that destruction precede Vatican II, but the project was fully launched via individuals thereafter

Why the depression? 

• The Church's impotency to effect anything regarding World War I and World War II (I think it could have but the pope's involved took their own counsel, and chose caution when their martyrdom would have better served the Faith, and Europe) left a great many Catholic VIPs on the Continent of Europe depressed, morose. 
• They thought a Church Council would be a pick-me-up and a "new beginning", usher in a "new Pentecost" – an inherently blasphemous idea, that God's Pentecost had run out of spiritual steam! (I wish someone had told Pope John Paul II "This is blasphemy!" the minute he first uttered such nonsense).
  
• So, in their pride and unwisdom, these VIPs thought they'd make Catholicism attractive to Protestants by making its central rite Protestant-like, and together they would all march into a glorious new Pentecost sunrise singing Kumbaya.
  

What these desperate, fevered optimists didn't understand was that the entirety of Western Civilization was a superstructure built upon the hull of Catholic culture, and the very keel of Catholic culture, from time immemorial, was the Traditional Latin Mass. (Pope Gregory the Great, died 604, did not create it; it predates him: it comes from the "dream time" of the Church in Rome and Latium, and is actually the oldest liturgy any Church has.)

How the Mass Created Western Civ

Cult is always the root of culture, etymologically and anthropologically. Look at it this way: if your cult is the Twelve Olympians, you are going to have a different culture than if you worship the Aztec gods, with their demand for endless human sacrifice. Or if you adhere to the cults of Vishnu, or Brahma, or Shiva the Destroyer of Worlds (my fav Hindu character), you're going to have a very different culture than if you worship Allah via his "prophet" Muhammad. But when the central cult is gone, collapsed, or retired and replaced by a new cult, then the culture goes too. When NO cult replaces the old, however, then your civilization dies, as well.

A great example is Japan. They worshiped the emperor as a god. No one, and I mean NO ONE could be less "godlike" than Hirohito, but in Shinto, he was their god. After the war, he was allowed to stay as emperor but quickly ceased to be seen as a deity – not exactly hard to do! Now notice Japan today. Wealthy, yes, prosperous, certainly. Technologically very advanced, with their own space program. 

• But a depressed society of people who won't reproduce themselves. 
• The Japanese are going extinct. 
• Why? 
• Well, it is obvious! Their cult is gone, their culture has lost its focus, and neither Christianity – or anything else – has been able to gain their allegiance. (Buddhism has coexisted with Shinto for centuries but never replaced it as the national cult of Nippon. In fact, they kinda-sorta blended together.)

Now...

Compare Japan to Islam. Backward, violent, barbaric, completely misogynistic, the religion of the Prophet is the strongest retrograde force on Earth, according to Winston Churchill. Yet bomb them, slaughter them, do what you want to them, Muslims keep coming back. And back. And back. They're spreading throughout Europe and the world beyond. Move every Muslim Arab from Gaza to Egypt and voila! You've moved an intractable problem 25 miles away. Good luck with that. Islam will keep coming back and back and back, martyring you and martyring themselves in ever increasing numbers! 

Why?

• Because their central cult is still intact! 
• The black-draped Kaaba in Mecca (only women wear black in fully Muslim cultures), with its vulva-shaped silver orifice in which you can see the Moon Goddess' back rock will never cease having millions of Muslim men Haj pilgrims swirling and dancing around it in ecstasy. 
• As long at the cult is intact, that unstable lunar witchcrafty culture will remain. Forever. 

Catholic Church Destroyed Western Civilization

So, cult is the source of culture – with "civilization" being an intentional, planned superstructure built on top of culture, a construction that, unlike one's basic, inherited culture, you have to be educated into. (One has to be taught to like fine art, high literature, or classical music – something most of our current educators have no clue about.) Yet the unprincipled, depressed and ignorant people who created the Reformation 2.0 of the Catholic Church in the decades after 1962, knew none of this. Or they knew, and wrought evil intentionally. 

1. Destroying the Traditional Latin Mass cut the keel out of the hull of Western Civ. 
2. Think just of the great churches, the cathedrals and monastic churches that were built from the Dark Age on through the early Middle Ages and on into the High Middle Ages, right up till the Reformation put an abrupt halt to it in much of Europe. 
3. Or think of the Baroque gems created from the Counter-Reformation on. Magnificent. All "stage-sets" for the Traditional Latin Mass! 
4. And beyond the architecture, think of the exquisite music, the philosophy, the grand theology, the paintings and sculpture and carvings in stone and wood! 
5. ALL that, the very STUFF of a civilization, its heart, its soul created to house, adorn, honor, glorify that Traditional Latin Mass and the Real Presence of Christ within it, to defend it and promote His Presence.

All to be replaced with a quasi-Methodist knock-off service having some Catholics prayers shoe-horned in.

Words fail.

One can go to that excellent website Canon212.com to read the many articles detailing the collapse of Catholicism. I see the Church is going comatose in Poland, with fewer and fewer seminarians for every year Bergoglio does his "Emperor's New Clothes" shtick. And via Canon212 I read a comment the other day in Fr Z's blog about how the Faith has fled "Atlantic Canada" and how the author expected it not to survive in the western Provinces much longer. Anyone reading this from Europe or the U.S.A. also can attest to the simply jaw-dropping fall-off in Mass attendance, and the growing imbecility of sermons in the Masses they do attend, and the general meretriciousness of the Novus Ordo "liturgy" and the bishops who promote it. (No one is more meretricious than Bergoglio.)

I do not counsel despair. Fr. Mawdsley has an excellent podcast titled Can you stand? Endure the Church's passion, enjoy the victory of the resurrection. Christus vincit! It isn't exactly easy right now to be Catholic, but it wasn't easy for the first 300 years of the Church, either, or for much of the rest of Church history. Wars, invasions, great heresies (Arianism, Islam itself, Protestantism) have afflicted us since the beginning. Think of the persecutions Christians are suffering today, in all manner of ways. "Then Jesus said to his disciples: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." Matt 16:24-25) And "If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you." (John 15:18)

Fight Back Knowing this about the Mass

But at least we can fight back for the Traditional Latin Mass. Knowing its civilizational importance; we can demand it be returned to us and categorically refuse the false web of wizardry the "Lavender Mafia" has woven around it, and us, for 60 years. We don't just want our Mass back, we want to save what's left of our civilization, and everyone from your local parish priest to Bergoglio has to know that we know exactly just what the Traditional Latin Mass is, and how our civilized world depends on it. For just as the Church took the heart from Western Civilization, the Church can restore it, with God's help.

Not to mention our salvation. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. The law of prayer is the law of belief. If we pray like Catholics, we'll believe like Catholics.

How hard can this be to understand, Tio Jorge?

          AnP

Bishop Athanasius Schneider on Pope Francis' Validity, and the Lesson of Humanae Vitae

Friends,

Once an eagle, pierced by the bow-sped shaft, looked

At the feathered device and said, “Thus, not by others,

But by means of our own plumage are we slain”.

- Aeschylus

Adventures in Cognitive Dissonance

I rant and rave about Tio Jorge, a.k.a. Pope Francis, and I know I sound extreme, shrill, unhinged. Not very "Christian" of me, and I apologize for that, but I think the stakes are horrifically high. One of my brothers long ago got involved with a con-artist, and I've had friends in such situations. Another brother was in Vietnam, and the military situation was nuts. Look at our "woke" military today! They lost an F-35 – not at sea or in some remote jungle, but in South Carolina! – and had to advertise on social media, "Has anyone seen our $80 million airplane? Call...." After a decade of observing him, one can honestly say Bergoglio has all the traits exhibited by con-artists and incompetent woke hierarchies, alas, and we need to practice solid common sense about him, and certainly not cognitive dissonance.

So, to balance my ravings a bit, and to give the other side of things, here's Bishop Athanasius Schneider's article: Bishop Athanasius Schneider on the Validity of Pope Francis.

Bishop Schneider makes a number of points, such as despite speculations in previous centuries by some weighty saint-philosophers, such as St. Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621), no mechanism exists to remove a bad pope. Bishop Schneider also explains how the 1917 Code of Canon Law excised legislation that offered a way to depose bad popes – i.e. a pope who deviates from orthodox Catholicism. It is astounding and shocking to read that they once had such a law, but deleted it! "The Church has no power over the pope formally or judicially," he writes. The only option is to "...in the case of a heretical pope, the members of the Church can avoid him, resist him, refuse to obey him, all of which can be done without requiring a theory or opinion that says that a heretical pope automatically loses his office or can be deposed consequently."

Oh, really? But how does that follow? And therein is the problem.

All this is no doubt in answer to the "cancelled" priest Fr. James Altman, who made an impassioned oration that Bergoglio is not pope because he's manifestly not Catholic, an opinion I obviously share, though neither Altman nor I have any sort of standing whatsoever to make that argument for other people than perhaps ourselves. (At least our position is one of cognitive consonance.)

Alright. Fair enough, Bishop Schneider. 

But here's the problem with your program. It is illogical. And potentially catastrophic. Why? Because if the pope is validly pope, he has tremendous authority to wield as he sees fit. It's been built in to the office for centuries, patiently, intentionally. Clearly, too much authority of the wrong kind, as it turns out in this peculiar case. But there's nothing legal to do about it. We're hamstrung. The power comes with the job. And if we criticize him, still more, disobey him, then we're actually the ones illegal resisting valid authority. See the "Catch-22"?

It's what they call a "bitter irony."

And it fits the eagle's lament as Aeschylus recorded it. We're shooting ourselves in the foot. Or one could argue it's a classic example of cognitive dissonance, the mental conflict that occurs when one's beliefs do not correspond to one's actions. 

So, see the problem? How can one "resist" orders from a valid authority? We look like knaves! It's an ecclesiastical version of the Führerprinzip. If the Führer insists on issuing immoral orders, sure, you can resist him, true, but a majority will think we're rogues and rebels. And he also has the power of the state behind him to simply shoot you. (After all, we're rebelling against valid authority, remember.) He can replace you with someone more malleable. Why? Well, he's the Führer, remember? You insist he is, right? As such, he demands allegiance, as Bergoglio does. We saw this play out in the U.S. and Canada and the Western World with the civilian police forces. Every day "valid authorities" ordered the police to do immoral things to force people to isolate for Covid, and no remedy existed. Occasionally a sheriff or police chief, or even one or two governors, "resisted" but so what? Minor speed bumps to a legal – if immoral – juggernaut.

Francis/Bergoglio walks clearly on an obvious path to utterly gut and hamstring the Roman Catholic Church. He conspicuously, indubitably, wants its carcass nailed to his office door in Santa Marta. After ten years of the man, let's please give the Argentine his due: he clearly wants to trash the remnants of the pre-Vatican II Church (the only form of the Church that's growing via the TLM) and replace it NOT with the usual insipid Vatican II simulacrum of a Church (by which its response to Covid it basically committed suicide), but replace even that milquetoast "Church" with something quite different. If this statement is not patently obvious to you, then write me off as a crank and go happily "Synodaling".

Now, Bishop Schneider, as quoted above, says we "can avoid him, resist him, refuse to obey him". But how is that going to work if we also, simultaneously, assert and declare him to be a valid pope? Just a few pitiful examples:

1. If he is a valid pope, what's to stop him from removing Bishop Joseph Strickland (whom Bishop Schneider supports) – which will happen any day now? 
2. What's to stop Bergoglio from relieving Bishop Schneider himself? Would Bishop Schneider "resist" an order by a "valid" pope? What sort of precedent would THAT set? 
3. After all, "Pope Francis" took over the Order of Malta and round-filed its chaplain, Cardinal Burke, and its properly elected grand knight – nothing came of that. All gave in. Bergoglio triumphant.
   
4. And he also sacked Burke from his position in the Vatican court system. (Burke is now somewhere about the orbit of Pluto, truly "on the outside looking in".)
   
5. Bergoglio dumped Cardinal Müller out of the Holy Office (or CDF or "dicastery" or whatever they call it now). Müller is now on the outside, looking in.
   
6. And nothing and no one has stopped Francis from inserting his wretched sidekick "Kissy" Tucho Fernádez into that crucial spot. Anyone see any "resistance" about that? (A few howls, a few groans; otherwise, crickets.)
   
7. Manifestly, nothing and no one has stopped "Bergi" from trashing the Traditional Latin Mass. (Pilgrimages are held, to be sure, and letters written; but the bigshots Bergoglio has installed could care less. They hold us all in profound contempt.) How can we "avoid him, resist him, refuse to obey him" in that? Any priest who ignores his bishop about the TLM will be relieved of his faculties, and any bishop – supposedly, according to Vatican II, a direct successor of the Apostles, no less! – who ignores Bergoglio will be relieved of his episcopacy. It's already happened. See Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres; Diocese of Arecibo; Puerto Rico. (Summarily Führer-ed out the door, and now on the outside looking in.)

Bishop Schneider also brings up the fact that God will decide Bergoglio's fate, whenever it befalls him. True. Popes come and go, yes. Although Bergoglio clearly has his possible successors hand-picked. But it remains true our "sins of omission" that will damn us.

Especially if we "wait him out." Why would that be? Let's take a short, succinct lesson from history, shall we, about the dangers of dithering?

Casti Connubii and Humanae Vitae

In 1930 the formidable Pius XI ("Achilles" Ratti; he lived up to his baptismal name) issued Casti Connubii ("of chaste wedlock" in Latin), an encyclical promulgated after the 1930 Anglican Lambeth Conference in which it relaxed its stance on birth control – it proffered a boatload of caveats, of course, which Anglicans of course promptly ignored. Casti Connubii, however, asserted the unchanged Catholic Church laws on artificial birth control: it is absolutely prohibited it in any and all situations. Pius XII reaffirmed it in 1951.

A mere 11 years later, however, Vatican II began (October 1962) and was seized by the "Young Turk" Modernists, who threw out all but one of the documents John XXIII had prepared for it. Apparently, they wanted to recast Casti Connubii, as well, calling marriage a "community of love" (as opposed to a sacrament to help spouses gain salvation and to bring new servants of God into the world). The new pope, Paul VI, knew which way the wind was blowing, so he removed this issue from their claws. Why? We can speculate, but he said he'd issue a new such document soon enough. The Council ended in December 1965, but Paul (Giovanni Battista Montini), a classic effeminate, "weak sister" type of bureaucrat, dithered around and didn't issue a new Casti Connubii till 1968. It was titled Humanae Vitae.

Humanae Vitae reaffirmed, rather clumsily, with a lot of sociological claptrap, classic Church teaching, BUT SO MUCH TIME HAD PASSED that many Catholic laity and clergy thought sure it would give them permission to practice artificial birth control. (Satan had made his plans, see, and he wasn't going to be gainsaid.) When published, the Bubulum Stercus hit the rotary air circulation device; i.e.

• "Six hundred Roman Catholic scholars signed a statement challenging Humanae Vitae, many episcopates attempted to soften the harsher aspects of the encyclical, a flood of priests left the church, and the number of U.S. Catholics attending mass weekly fell from 70 percent before the issuing of the encyclical to 44 percent a few years afterward. The total marital fertility (the number of children in a completed family) of U.S. Catholics (2.27 in 1975) became virtually the same as that of non-Catholics (2.17)." (From Britannica; boldface mine)
• Now, of course, 1968 (a bad year, indeed) saw the first public offering of the new "Novus Ordo" Mass. It was held in the Sistine Chapel for a synod of bishops, of whom one-third rejected it outright and another third voted to accept it ONLY if changes were implemented (they weren't). Paul 6 suffered a crying fit. He had given up the papal tiara crown, symbol of Christ's Sovereignty on Earth, but alas, the dunce cap he had assumed instead must have pinched. Anyway, the Catholic world was saddled with the Novus Ordo liturgy starting in Advent, 1970, so we can't say if "Mass attendance" fell solely because of Humanae Vitae or because the new Mass was so lame. Either way, the blow-back was such that the "weak sister" never issued another encyclical. He died in August 1978, after a full ten years in a sort of "internal exile in Gorky". (He was in effect a prisoner on the inside looking out.)
  

Now, how does this all relate to Bishop Schneider's advice? I would maintain that his planned "resistance" is a type of, or will be seen by most as, a type of dithering. And what's more, it will be seen as a type of cognitive dissonance, a dithering by "extremist cranks." But it gets worse. By the time anything truly big happens, like a new pope, the Church will be prostrate. Absolutely prostrate. A total wreck. Too many people, waiting for years, will have just given up. Vote "with their feet" as they've been doing for 50 years now. The Reconquista of the Church would be like taking Spain back from Muslim devastation, an endeavor lasting hundreds of years, or more like taking half the world back from simply unimaginable Mongol slaughter of one-third of the human race.

And who could trust the Church not to do it all over again? Once burned, twice shy. If orthodox prelates let us down for 50 years, especially in the last decade, how can we trust them to not let us down yet again? To not "blow with the wind"?

"Need brooks no delay, but late is better than never." True. And that seems all we can pray for at the moment, barring something truly titanic, like a nuclear war or a large asteroid. Or the Second Coming. God's will be done. Prayer can change things, of course, even from the cataombs. Deus vult!

           AnP

About Bishop Michael Burbridge and the TLM procession in Washington this Saturday, September 9, 2023

Amici, 

LifesiteNews has an excellent report on this weekend's Traditional Latin Mass pilgrimage in D.C. protesting against the Bergoglian restrictions on the TLM. 

Arlington's bishop, Michael Burbridge, curried favor with Bergoglio by reducing the Latin Mass locations from 21 down to just three (parishes, with five alternative locations hither and yon). Of course, the Gay Blade archbishop of D.C. decimated the TLM in the District.

Burbridge could have shown courage. He caved. He could have shown his Faith in the face of the papal lions in the circus maximus that the Church has become. Instead, he burned a pinch of incense to Bergi. My guess, and it is just a guess, is that Burbridge didn't do worse than he did simply because so many TLM's existed in his diocese in the first place. We must not pull punches. What Burgoglio did was illegal AND immoral, and utterly ANTI-Catholic. As Kennedy Hall reports, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre wrote, "Tradition IS the Deposit of Faith", and its obvious today that the Vatican II Church is in the process of "cancelling" that Deposit. It is what all the Bergoglian excesses are about, plainly.

But what had Burbridge refused, making arguments against this draconian rule – and there are a host of arguments against it – what was the worse that could happen? Bergoglio "dismiss" him? Oh, the terror! (/sarc) So what? Burbridge could have taken it to the Church's judicial system and tied it all up for years. It could have been a true cause célèbre. It could have been a turning point. Instead, crickets.

I just pray Bishop Strickland fights when "Bergi" dismisses him, which is almost certain to happen. Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres should have refused to be stampeded back in May 2022, but he caved to the Bergoglian idol. Bishops wear purple to remind them of their possible (and increasingly probable) martyrdom. We've no better a "bishops' bench" than the English had when Fat 'Arry broke in with Rome. They only had one bishop, St. John Fisher, stand up for Christ. We have Bishop Strickland.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

A final observation about the TLM pilgrimage: it is happening the a high-profile venue, in the national capital. It will get Bergoglio's attention. He loathes American Catholics in general and Traditionalist (i.e. Deposit of Faith) Catholics in particular. The recently published interview he had with Jesuits in Portugal is a classic "eye-opener" in that regard.

        AnP

Abortion, the Jewel in Satan's Crown, and the Novus Ordo Mass

Friends,

Abortion is the jewel in Satan's Crown. It's a "twofer". It damns the people involved in it and it kills a human being in the womb. Why, why do we allow it at all? In the U.S.A., that murder rate since 1973, comes to about 65 million dead babies now. 

Think of that. It's nearly unbelievable. But it is true.

If nothing else, abortion conveniently saves the demons from having to temp yet another human to go to Hell. (In the U.S. as noted, 65 million fewer temptations.) But it also spreads, metastasizes cancer-like, a thick, nearly impenetrable damnation through the human societies that tolerate it. It damns from the people immediately involved all the way through to legislators and judges who give it their (dare I say it) "blessings". 

Background

The human condition in the Western World was going from bad to worse previous to the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. U. S. Supreme Court decisions going back the 1950s, such as the 1957 Roth v the United States, began to give pornography a leg up in the culture wars, and the following year's, One, Inc. v. Olesen, is considered "landmark" in the ascent of homosexuality's rule over us. One ignorant Supreme Court justice's idiot comment about pornography, "I know it when I see it" (in 1964's Jacobellis v. Ohio) conclusively demonstrated that America's highest lawyers were moral numbskulls. 

Note: It was Justice Potter Stewart who wrote, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...". Dead Justice Stewart, porn, like propaganda, is easily defined. They have no ambiguity. "Art" ambiguous, with more than one possible meaning, thus causing one to think, to ponder, to wonder. Propaganda exists to indoctrinate. Porn exists solely to titillate, however, to arouse the carnal appetites, and for no other reason. 

Today we see many of the nation's lawyers are amoral mountebanks, or simply Communist apparatchiks. The Roe v Wade decision conclusively proved they were utterly, wholly, metaphysically ignorant, as well. And I remember seeing a talk show, Peter Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge, in fact, wherein the late Justice Antonin Scalia said that natural law had absolutely no place in Supreme Court decisions!

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

All the flooding Sexual Revolution guano of the later '50s and all of the '60s culminated in abortion being given carte blanc in the U.S. Satan's jewel in the crown had been a long time being excavated and then polished, but with its enthronement, "everything went to Hell". The Church, the modern Church, the Vatican II Church was then fully born. The new, awful liturgy was enacted at the beginning of Advent in 1970. Can it be a coincidence that abortion followed exactly three years later, in January 1973?

As Fr. James Mawdsley so aptly put it, the Holy Mass suffered a horrible "transgender mutilation". That's what the Novus Ordo Mass is, a transgender mutilation of the ancient, God-grown Traditional Latin Mass, a liturgy God began founding before He created the world, and which was foreshadowed and planned and shaped for throughout the Old Testament. Now we are so far down the well that we have an anti-pope charlatan promoting (ceaselessly, desperately), what Fulton Sheen called, "The Ape of the Church", our Vatican II anti-Church. Its a "Church" where the Holy Spirit speaks, but only through committees staffed by Communist cronies of the "pope".

As for myself, I cannot help but think the Novus Ordo Mass paved they way and steam-rolled the pavement once it was embraced, of abortion. Just one example: In the old Mass, the TLM, the priest makes the Sign of the Cross 70 times, many of those at the altar over the unconsecrated and then the consecrated Host, and using the Consecrated Host. That has to carve a profound mark on the priest's soul. Wouldn't such a priest be more likely to be willing to embrace the Cross for the sake of the unborn, then, as opposed to a Novus Ordo priest, whose talky, relatively signless Mass exists to "reaffirm" and "soothe" and "accompany" his congregation? 

Every time one sins, one gives Satan a bit of authority over the sinner. Grievous, mortal sin gives Satan pretty much absolute authority. Notice how Confession is required to break it but notice how Confession isn't stressed any more? (A lot of Confessions in the Vatican II Church are held like psychological counseling sessions, face to face with the priest, etc.) How sin itself isn't stressed from the pulpit? A priest giving hell-fire and brimstone sermons will be "cancelled" if he persists.

 

Is it any wonder Satan's Jewel in the Crown shines so brightly?

 An Préachán

Note on Bishop Fernandes of Columbus, Ohio

 Hi everyone.

I came across this Comment at Fr. Z's blog about Bishop Fernandes, the new ordinary of the Columbus diocese. I'm posting the opening lines of the Comment here below. Find the article to which the comment is attached here. It is a good bit longer and is an uplifting bit of news about the new bishop.

James Straight says:

8 June 2023 at 10:11 PM

The Most Reverend Earl K. Fernandes, ordained and installed as the Bishop of Columbus just 1 year and 8 days ago is currently in the middle of leading 11 Eucharistic Processions in the Diocese in 10 days, from June 2nd through the 11th. (That is just the ones the Bishop is taking part in.)

AnP again: Good news about Bishop Fernandes. Those of you residing in and near Columbus can fill us in, if you want, on your own experiences of this event, and of Fernandes. He seems to have inherited the Columbus-closing-up-parishes plan from the previous bishop, a classically Vat II clueless Bergoglian loser. And of course, Bergoglio's Vatican would "sack" Fernandes if he tried to expand the TLM beyond where it is. Bergoglio might sack him anyway, if Bergi survives much longer.

Pray accordingly.

AnP

Requiem for a country church, and for the larger Novus Ordo Church

Friends,

I have been reading about Columbus, Ohio diocese parish closings. So much for the new bishop. He's keeping the previous bishop's plan of closing up the diocese, and dioceses are closing up and withering away across the country. And the world. One of those Columbus diocese closings is St. Bernards, a very rural, down-in-the-hills church. I write of it more below.

So, naturally, I ask:

Why don't they close up the entire Church? I'm serious. Close it up and let it blow away. They tried that during the Covid fraud, after all. Finish the job, then. Go on, go on. Close it down. That would, after all, please a lot of people.

It goes back before the Covid scamdemic, of course. The Modernists in the Church during the 1950s staged Vatican II to implement their destruction schemes, schemes they were cooking up in secret since St. Pius X tried to squash them in the early 1900s. The Modernists had merely "gone to ground"  and laid their plans. By post-WWII, they were ready. At Vatican II they took a very healthy Church: wealthy in liturgy and money, strong in its piety and its financials, timeless in dogma, filled to the brim with parishioners, and they utterly trashed it out in what, 50 years? 

Except for the TLM sector, the Church is bankrupt liturgically, with the Novus Ordo driving people out – or more precisely, boring them out of their wits – and bankrupt financially. And you know of course that's why Bergoglio sold the Chinese Catholics to the CCP, for a lot of cashola. And I assume the Church is also in hock to important Jews, who still collectively have extraordinary influence and control of the much of the banking sector most everywhere, as they do the Entertainment world and Academia and the Law (and I'm not talking about Orthodox Jews, whom the more secular types marginalize – Jews are as factionlized as Protestants). Something Trad Catholic apologists never mention is this angle. No one wants automatically be labeled an antisemite.

So sure, Communists/Socialists/sexual deviants galore, you name them, hate the Church. But then Jews as well loathe the Traditional Latin Mass because it is uncompromising about fully using Scripture, and (what today would be deemed) the "antisemitism" of St. John and St. Paul. For an example of the latter, see 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16; I guarantee you'll not find that in the Novus Order three-year cycle! It is not in the interest of any of these powerful players to see all that come back. The Catholic Church dying out and Protestantized into pieces and factions is no threat to anyone but a Catholic Church returning to its glory days is anathema to them all.  

In requiem: I always loved St. Bernard's. It is chock-full of statues! Just chock-full. It was so lovely and "exotic" a church, down there in Corning. Built by Italian immigrants who bent over backwards to make it a gem. I used to drive my mother down to Athens for lunch and then we'd come back through the hills, and always stopped at St. Bernard's and it was always unlocked. It was built for the TLM and had that liturgy been offered there for the last 50 years, Corning would be full of Catholics and producing Catholic vocations. That's just what the TLM inspires, true Catholicism. And lot of important civilizational players do not what to see that Church return.

What are they going to do with all the statues? The windows? Have a bonfire?

Here's a list of Columbus diocese closings:

https://catholicreview.org/columbus-diocese-closes-15-parishes-amid-initiative-to-move-from-maintenance-to-mission/

Slated to close in the city of Columbus are St. Anthony of Padua, Corpus Christi, Holy Rosary/St. John, Parroquia Santa Cruz, St. Ladislas, St. Matthias, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal and St. Philip the Apostle.

Also closing will be St. Bernard Church in Corning, the Church of Atonement in Crooksville, St. Francis de Sales in Newcomerstown, St. Mark Church in Lancaster, St. Mary Church in Groveport, St. Mary Church in Bremen and SS. Peter and Paul Church in Glenmont.

St. Anthony of Padua School in Columbus Grove and SS. Peter and Paul School in Wellston also will close.

Meself again:

Honestly, why don't they just close up the whole Vatican II Church. Put the dying carcass out of its misery. Or give these churches to the various Latin Mass groups – oh, wait, can't do that because of the anti-pope Bergoglio and his peeps and Modernist minions.

Bergoglio is working overtime to destroy the Catholic Faith. If anyone can't see that, what else can be said? What does "Bergi" have to do? Declare a Holy Duality instead of a Trinity? Add Muhammad to the calendar of saints? What? So, just close it all up now and save him the trouble.

I can testify to St. Mark's in Lancaster. Cement block building (unless they replaced that structure at some point) where the Masses were hyper (for the area) Novus Ordo fiascos. I remember the "sign of peace" taking 10 minutes as they shouting across the room, walked about shaking hands, all that. Just a joke. But the congregation were the poorer types, as well, or working folk at what remained of Anchor Hocking glass, the town's big factory. St. Bernadette's across town on the eastern side (and very hard to get to roadwise if you didn't live nearby) was for the doctors and lawyers in town. The elites. Brutally Novus Ordo in expensive design and material, it offered Masses but with all that money around, it ain't gonna get closed. We know where the bread is buttered, do we not?

Such is the ecclesiastical world in 2023.

         AnP

Benedict and the TLM; the Pivot has come

Amici,

The "mild" Vatican II Reformer, Joseph Ratzinger, has now passed on to Judgment, and while we can and should pray for him, we cannot be presumptuous one way another or about that Judgment. Certain types of Protestants, and now no few "Catholics", seem to think one's eternal Salvation is "in the bag", not apparently realizing they're wallowing in the Sin of Presumption. The Anti-Pope Bergoglio has plainly said no one can really live up to God's Commandments anyway, so "chill out." Very Protestant, old Bergi is. Luther and Co. should welcome him, if that is how that his own judgment turns out.

Benedict's Greatest Deed

Focusing historically and theologically, however, on one issue, Benedict XVI has forever garnered a pivotal place in ecclesiastical history because of his "freeing" the Traditional Latin Mass. It was the major achievement of his reign and I have no doubt the cause of his downfall. So to note his passing, I would like to bring up what his Summorum Pontificum of July 2007 effected in the Church, or more precisely, what it began to recognize as the Holy Ghost's actions were already bringing about. For now that Ratzinger has died, a major turning point, a true pivot, has been reached.

Hindsight has to reveal to anyone not blinded by Modernist bias that, despite the Official Church doing what it could to suppress the TLM, the Holy Ghost wanted it back. For despite what the spiritually dead, the spiritually deaf, or simply the spiritually stupid insist upon, the record since 1970 shows God wants the Traditional Latin Mass restored. The Church of 2023 bears little resemblance to what it was before 1963. Bringing it back is the strongest – and certainly most Catholic – movement in the Church today. Whatever Pope Benny's true intent, whether he recognized the whole "Vatican II Shtick" was up (something John Paul II could not do), or whether he actually thought that the old Mass could live side-by-side in a happy, symbiotic relationship with the new, both "enriching" the other in a "mutual enrichment" for a goodly length of time – whatever he thought, Benedict certainly did God's will in freeing, or trying to free, the TLM from the clutches of the Modernist hierarchy.

That Modernist hierarchy was enraged, and they got rid of Pope Ratzinger. Fourteen years after Summorum Pontificum, they promulgated its opposite, Traditionis Custodes (best translated literally as "Jailers of Tradition") on 16 July 2021. And they've since worked to undo Summorum Pontificum in more ways with ever more rulings.

For an important article about what damage the Modernist Anti-Catholics have done to the TLM laity and the clergy, review this article at Rorate. The interviewee makes the interesting point that Bergoglio and Traditionis Custodes haven't laid a glove on the growing SSPX and have a spotty record harassing what had been the "Ecclesia Dei" communities (FSSP, ICKSP). What havoc and devastation it has produced are in the regular diocesan priests who have tried to learn and offer the TLM. A very interesting article.

And regarding Benedict and his TLM efforts, it is remarkable how the TLM took off in regular parishes. It would not stay "sidelined" in specialist shops wherein the Modernists clearly hoped to exile it. Average, everyday clergy and laity wanted it, do want it today, and no matter how hard Bergoglio and the Modernist unbelievers try now, all the Mass-closing antics are the detritus of impotent fools and knaves, the shouting of a mob about to be dispersed by God's will. We must prepare. Bergoglio will unleash all Hell on the Church now that Joseph Ratzinger is dead, from many directions, and no one can pretend Bergoglio has the best interests of the Church at heart. Yet when the storm has subsided, the TLM will be welcomed by Catholics as the standard of quiet, holy sanity in worship. It will be welcomed as the most Catholic form of worship. That's the significant pivot that will occur to the multitude of "Survivor Catholics". 

It is an incarnation of the Crucifixion: even as the Devil thought he had defeated Christ by casting down the ancient liturgy, even as he thought he had triumphed, it turned out to be the opposite of what he had thought. If crucifying Christ didn't work, crucifying His liturgy won't, either.

Pray, and hope.

  An Préachán

Psalm 146 of the Douay-Rheims: verse 9:

Who giveth to beasts their food: and to the young ravens that call upon Him.

What Bergoglio wants to kill: "The liturgy is a glimpse ... of God at prayer."

Amici,

Bergoglio and his merry band of Teddy McCarrick's slimey "sons" (some of the worst are now cardinals) are ratcheting up their antics, as reported by LifeSiteNews, and others. As John Henry Weston says, they certainly seem intent on creating a false Church on myriad levels. See John Henry here for details, with Liz Yore. 

I think it is time to pause and consider just what Bergoglio's antics are clearly intended to destroy. What is he out to kill? Today, I'll focus on the liturgy.

"The liturgy of the Mass is more than the proclamation of the teaching Christ. It is a great "Ecce homo": it exhibits and points to the silent Christ. It is infinitely more than the prayer of the faithful. It gives us a glimpse of something absolutely unthinkable: God at prayer."

So writes Martin Mosebach in his The Heresy of Formlessness; the Roman Liturgy and It's Enemy, page 74, in the chapter 'Liturgy is Art'.

I'm pretty sure none of you have thought of the Traditional Latin Mass as "God at prayer", yet it is a genius insight. Mosebach, throughout this collection of essays, explains how one doesn't "understand" the Mass, how one is not supposed to. The whole central point of the Novus Ordo Mass, i.e. something that could be understood by everyone, is utterly non-Catholic, and non-worshiping.

Our Lord Christ Himeslf set the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as our earthly experience of the Incarnate God, made Present to us on the Altar of Sacrifice. I would dare to tender the hope that most Christians understand Heaven to be the Beatific Vision, one's eternal contemplation of God in His Presence. The Mass is our foretaste of that, our first step into Eternity. So of course it cannot be flat, mediocre, prosaic, humdrum, banal – by definition it cannot be a liturgy designed to be "understood" anymore than one can "understand" God.

The Mass of the Ages does something more than teach: it allows one to contemplate God's Incarnate Presence under the form of bread and wine, understanding as an act of faith the miracle of the Mass, personally experiencing within it the Real Presence of God consecrated at the altar of sacrifice, Himself, Christ, offered perpetually in sacrifice unto God, the eternal sacrifice we read of in Revelation, the slain Lamb coming forward. (Rev 5:6ff; Revelation describes the Heavenly Liturgy, and so of course most modern people have no clue about its mysteries. Martin Luther wanted to excise it entirely from the New Testament.)

We'll be eternally contemplating the Incarnation and the Sacrifice the Incarnation consummated on earth 2,000 years ago, always filled with more comprehension in ever more Beatific Vision – and our own roles in that Incarnation – for by His Incarnation into the human race, God enabled the human race to be incarnated into God. Theosis, the Greeks call it. Scott Hahn somewhere described it as the "nuclear pile" of the Faith. This eternal Mystery will never be completely within our understanding.

And as one just does not "understand" this most Divine Mystery, one doesn't "understand" the Divine Mysteries in general. The one book in the New Testament (or the Old) that carries the title "Revelation", the Apocalypse, is the single most mysterious of all the holy library, after all, is it not? And mystery stands at the heart of all learning, and certainly all love. A young couple in love want to find out all there is to know and experience about each other, but if that wish ever seems to encompass them, should no mystery of one another remain, what happens to them? And a work of art, painting, sculpture, or literature piece we completely "understand" becomes a work of art we're not likely to keep thinking about, pondering, or want to see again. "Familiarity breeds contempt." In fact, it is an axiom that art is different from pornography in that pornography "leaves nothing to the imagination". And the same is true of propaganda. Nothing is more boring than either porn or propaganda (unless you become addicted to them, as many are addicted to Covid-19 "fear porn").

Mosebach returns to pondering art as that which intrigues us, moves us in ways we don't fully grasp. Great art has a soul, he says, and the Mass is the greatest art, begun when the Divine Master, after the Passover meal had been eaten, picked up a piece of bread and said, "Take this, this  is my body which will be given for you."

"When he utters the words 'This is my body,' should he not take a piece of the Paschal Lamb from the table (considering his impending sacrificial death as the Lamb of God), rather than a piece of bread? No, because the bread that has become the body of Christ fits in perfectly with what Jesus says, by way of preparation for Holy Thursday, about the grain of wheat; it also recalls the prayer in the Our Father concerning our daily bread and the warning that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from God. Here, then, we have the bread that, at the same time, 'was the Word of God.' ... Is there not, however something of the Greek artists' ability to transform and elevate nature in the way Jesus chooses to elevate a piece of bread to the level of the real sacrificial flesh of the God-man? At the same time, of course, there is a crucial different between him and the Greek artist: the artist created his work 'after nature,' through contemplation and study, whereas Christ created the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass in anticipation of his very real execution, with all its attendant horrors. We could say that with his intuition and foreknowledge – for the meal of Holy Thursday is permeated with premonitions – he was painting a picture of his death, giving an artistic form to the pains of his execution, a form that perfectly and unmistakably manifested its profoundest core, that is, the love sacrifice that nourishes and redeems. (Page 71)

(See why I say you should read Mosebach?)

In all the squabbles over the Roman Catholic Church's liturgy since Vatican II, I think Moseback gets to the heart of the matter best, and with the fewest yet best-chosen words. A successful novelist, Mosebach's writing is superb.

But then, who will listen? The Second Vatican Council, in fact, called for some liturgical changes to be made only after great deliberation, and actually mandated Latin to be largely retained, along with Gregorian Chant being encouraged. Has the mainstream Church obeyed those strictures? Almost none of the things one pictures in one's mind about the Novus Ordo pastiche was actually requested at the Second Vatican Council. The Council "Fathers" did not vote for the total destruction-remake of the Mass that the Concilium committee on the Liturgy wrought. They did not vote for a Mass in the vernacular, especially a vernacular than everyone, from children to theologians to blue-collar working men to matronly ladies, all "understood" to the point of boredom. I always wondered why, what with the rich history of English, its means of expression, massive vocabulary – not to mention the literary variety between national English languages – the Church reduced whole of the Anglophone world to one single English vernacular, and a pathetic, flat, mumbling one at that. The reason was they did so by design. Their goal surely had been to turn off, alienate, cold-shoulder as great a number as possible.

Now, while it might be charitable to not try to think Bugnini and his crew were actually working against the Catholic Church by attacking and crashing the most Catholic thing in existence, the Mass, to view them as misguided idealists with "good intentions", it is much easier and I believe much closer to the truth to see all the disastrous changes after the actual Council to be the results of an anti-Catholic "war of position", a "long march" through Catholic institutions to bring them down.

If there is truth in such an assertion, it is easy to see how it started in the later 19th century via the Modernists, those clergy and theologians who rejected as passé the Church's traditional teaching. But then later, by the mid-20th century, Communists got involved, as Bella Dodd famously revealed after her conversion to the Church. Bergoglio and his henchmen are the last, desperate stand of an old guard, literally old men who either are wholly on board with anti-Christian Communism and Modernism, or are aged dupes who have never understood their "fellow-traveler" status.

And certainly their desperate endeavors to kill off the Traditional Latin Mass seems insane. Bergoglio has publicly stated he thinks Latin Mass devotees are either all old people themselves (the opposite is true) or they're mentally ill. (Yes, he's said that.) The one part of the Church that's actually Catholic, they want to drive out of the Church. That CANNOT be an accident. How could Bergoglio and his McCarrick deviants possibly go all Herman Melville on the young faith-filled families of the TLM? To go, as Melville had it, "...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." The Mass of the Ages is Bergoglio's Moby Dick.

It is just bizarre. And it is crazed obsession like that which is truly not understandable.

Read Martin Mosebach. You'll apprehend a great deal more about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass than by reading even the best intentioned theologians.

An Préachán

Notes:

This Novus Ordo new order Mass was created by the Concilium, a bureaucratic body inaugurated to implement ideas in the Vatican II document on the Mass called Sacrosanctum Concilium. The Concilium worked from the Council's end to the 1970 unveiling of the Novus Ordo Mass. But in truth, the huge committee that the Concilium consisted of was merely window dressing. Hannibal ("Grace of Ba'al") Bugnini, the Concilium's secretary, and his closest associates, did almost all the new liturgy's creation, and they got Pope Paul VI approve most of what they recommended. (Bugnini would tell Paul VI that the Concilium wanted X, and when the pope said, "Surely they can't want that!" Bugnini would say, "Oh, yes, they all agree." Then he would tell the larger Concilium that the pope wanted X, and when they said "He can't possibly want that!" Bugnini would say, "Oh, he's adamant on it!" See Psalm 101:7 for judgement on liars. ) Thus, via such deceits, "The Bug" created a new liturgy altogether. It is only connected to the old Mass, the Traditional Latin Mass, the Mass of the Ages (best title for it) by their own fevered fiats – by their saying it was connected. In reality, it was a new rite entirely.

        AnP

Psalm 146 of the Douay-Rheims: verse 9:

Who giveth to beasts their food: and to the young ravens that call upon Him.