If it seems like Chaos is upon us, that's because "Normalcy" is a mirage......

Amici,

Chaos is upon us, or the Great Tribulation itself – at least its opening salvos.

Our faith is being tested, daily it seems, and most cruelly by the unbelievers, especially those apostates in the Church who occupy the "seat of Moses". (Matt 23:2-3) So, under their relentless barrage, will we keep the Faith? It is a lot like being confronted with a dire medical diagnosis, isn't it? "You must have this operation or else." By the choices we make, we get to see what we're made of. And whom we trust.

Our commitment to truth, even whether we care that truth exists or want to know it, is being tested. We endure a culture built on objective truth from the teaching of Socrates to Aristotle on down, yet the elite of our civilization deny objective truth with a vehemence. To find it, like panning for gold, we have to wash away the dirt our selfish, narcissistic culture buries it with to find the gold nuggets of truth. Tolstoy says as much somewhere: you get truth by washing away all that isn't truth. And against this desire for truth is the desire for what Warren G. Harding coined as "normalcy", the normal state of things, its usual condition.

The radicals trying to change utterly both Church and State: they hate what we are, hate our identity and our traditions. They hate what we've taken for granted, our "normalcy." (They loathe their own bodies and mutilate them, and murder babies.) They don't know Christ or the spiritual freedom we've inherited from Western Christendom, nor the later political freedom our ancestors bequeathed to us. They want to overthrow everything for a murderous utopia of abject slavery, and they labor like orcs did for Sauron to achieve that. 

We "orthodox" want to believe in the world we were brought up in, however, that the World-the-Way-It-Was was good, with both Church and State looking out for us, wanting us to live to our full potential, whether in religion or the secular world. But washing away the detritus by panning it away, as though panning for gold, we now see that the world isn't like that. Not at all.

This hurts. We resist the conclusions. Looking back over my religious life, and reflecting on various Catholic people and relatives whom I knew, as I also contemplate the worship the Church provided for me since Vatican II, I can see how this mess we are in today is the logical conclusion of the lies they were fed back in the 1960s and '70s. As they disinherited me from 2,000 years of Western Liturgy, so they cut off my political inheritance. 

At the time, even as a kid or a young adult, I picked up on some of the Modernist falsehoods, some of the idiocy of what the Vatican II Church was promoting in my elders. Of course, now in hindsight, I see how our situation today had to play out. It is obvious now, but was not so then.

The secular world parallels that. Today, across the news spectrum, chaos is breaking out everywhere – not just in the Church. Those of us who pine for normalcy are told we can't have it, that it is bad, racist or sexist or killing the planet. That the human race is evil, and killing the planet. The lies are so thick they smother us entirely. Many secular governments, such as in the UK and France and Germany and Spain, show they loathe their own actual people and want to replace them with hordes of Muslim foreigners, people who have absolutely NO "mystic chords of memory" in these nations' living, historical culture. Replacement populations are being brought in and historical nations are being garroted to death. We are seeing it  happen.

It's insane. And pure evil. But we are watching it in "real time". Simone Weil says somewhere that Christianity is the religion for slaves, that "slaves can't help belonging to it", and of course, Islam exists because it is a slavers' religion, established to justify Muslim enslavement of all peoples. Is the Christian world therefore doomed to be enslaved and throttled to death by the Muslim Herrenvolk?

I usually write about the absolutely disgusting state of the official Catholic Church and the antics of its official "pope". We so want the Church to be "normal" that we are willing, just as with my relatives back in the '60s and '70s, to look away from the flagrant apostasy we see all around us. 

But again, all the evil Bergoglio and his imps engage in is replicated in secular governments and in culture – consider the absolutely putrid opening of the Paris Olympics and then the fact that men beating up women is now an official Olympic sport. All that, and "Pope" Bergoglio didn't condemn it till the Muslim ruler of Turkey shamed him into issuing a weak statement. A world upside down.

In secular governments, England is falling to armed mobs (i.e. armed with knives rather than guns) of Muslim men while the British government uses its police to make war on white (i.e. native) Britons. Such has been going on in France for some time, and all the western European countries. We knew this would come. Islam is relentless, has always been. What we didn't know is that our own governments are relentless in trying to replace us. They clearly in no way represent the actual people of their nations. Equally clear is the fact that the governmental mechanisms for representing what the people want; i.e. voting, the courts, constitutions, are completely broken or compromised. This too, was inevitable, for "government based on consent of the governed" has no Divine backstop or safeguard, and is too easily manipulated.

The U.S. mirrors this: the tens of millions of illegal immigrants are not quite yet roving across the land in large armed mobs. They're in smaller units so far, but the UK treatment is coming. The illegals such as they are are murdering and raping and thieving on a grand scale with incredible brutality as it is, while of course the FBI keeps saying the "extreme Right" and/or "Christian nationalists" are the great danger they must crack down on. The American government spouts this hogwash because the American people are armed to the teeth, and bloodshed on a national scale is quite likely. So they now, today, try to head that off by calling patriots racists, etc.

But that's nothing in comparison to the U.S. "Deep State" – the entrenched bureaucratic rulers of the Intelligence Community agencies and the military-industrial complex – who have conspired to assassinate Donald Trump while staging a coup d'état against the brain-dead Joe Biden figurehead. They're now trying to promote a complete simpleton and a most unrepentant Magdalene as a viable candidate. It is obscene, on a number of levels. However, their obvious assassination attempt on Trump failed, purely by chance – or Divine Will – and things are not quite as desperate as they would otherwise have been.

Dire, indeed, but not hopeless, not yet.

I've waited a while now before reflecting on the attempted assassination of President Trump, and everything I see is the usual "smoke and mirrors". Silly, grandstanding Congressional hearings that achieve nothing; they amount to a modern version of the infamous Warren Report the federal government issued after John F. Kennedy's assassination. The Kennedy assassination parallels the Trump attempt in many ways.  

Americans should be old hands at assassinations by now. But once again, the federal investigative agencies do their usual cover-ups, and Congress lets them get away with it. The American people are helpless before the all-conquering bureaucracy. The will of the people doesn't count to those forces of Mordor. Their overturn/coup d'état of Richard Nixon's popular vote blowout victory in November, 1972, was the bookend to Kennedy's assassination, which they prefigured with as much brazenness as they murdered Robert F. Kennedy four years earlier, on June 5, 1968.

A little time offers a lot of depth-perception. IF ONE IS WILLING TO LOOK AT IT. Nothing has been "normal" in American or world politics since November 1963. In fact, it is our willful desire for normalcy that they use against us.

These political murders the government officially "sorted" except no one believed the official results (except the gullible, such as those who believed an untested gene-therapy "vaccination" was necessary for a non-existent pandemic). The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, just two months after his inauguration, never raised too many queries, but as in all these assassinations – except Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968 –  a "disaffected" young white male loser perpetrated the crime. (King's assassin was 40 years old in 1968.)

If you reflect on all these assassination for any length of time, you surely must ask yourselves – how could we not see all this? After all, in his farewell address as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned his fellow citizens of the "military-industrial complex". He apparently had originally written "military-industrial-Intelligence complex". We've had one assassination after another, and certainly one major coup-d'état, in fact more than one if you consider the Iran-Contra Affair during Reagan's second term and then the endless caterwaul they vomited on Trump's first term, which included the ridiculous "Russia Collusion Hoax" and what, three impeachments? It's our hopeless desire for normalcy that blinds us, but we must let go of that mirage and get down in the steam and pan away the dirt to see the truth of what we are up against.

Both in Church and State, one thing is very true: with every passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that we are living in the most desperate times any of us have experienced or imagined. And in such an overwhelming confrontation, Faith will be tested and prayer is our most potent weapon. Prayer, the Sacraments, and what sacrifices we can make. May God have mercy on us. God always wins in the end. We must not fail the test while we wait for that victory.

AnP

We Want Satan, and We Ain't Waitin'! Ohio and Kentucky's vote

Friends,

Vox populum: We want Satan and we ain't waitin'!

The notion of collective punishment revisited. 

Regarding the November 7 election: If I still resided in Ohio, I'd leave. 

God was not exactly mocked in this latest election – more like utterly ignored. And note this wasn't the case of some idiot judge somewhere who had absolutely no idea of embryology, genetics, or even metaphysics and natural law. This involved instead a majority vote of the Ohio demos for the devotees of Moloch, a.k.a. Satan, to damn all and sundry in the entire state.

That's mob rule, a.k.a. "democracy". Kinda like Original Sin. Everyone gets to be damned, you see? Unless God is particularly merciful on Judgment Day. And unless we bend over backwards to earn that mercy through prayer, fasting, and good works. No "cheap grace" this round. No Lutheran snow on a dunghill or Calvin's pre-predestination warm glow inside. The Ohio vote bore a collective out-and-proud affirmation that "We want Satan and we ain't waitin'!"

The forces of evil won in Ohio on November 7 via popular vote. They even voted in "recreational marijuana use". 24th state to do so. Great. Get stoned so you cannot notice Hell opening for you.

1. In the American context, the old way of putting this was vox populum, vox Dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. I.e. final authority, the ultimate judge. Public opinion, solely, is God.
2. To which Ohioan General Sherman wryly commented, "Vox populum, vox humbug." ("Humbug" being a 19th century version of something much sharper today.) 
3. They want to damn us with collective guilt, much like Israel is applying to the Gazans. Most Gazans probably strongly support Hamas, but whether they do or not, the Israelis are applying collective punishment. Truly, the wages of sin is death. Romans 6:23
4. Democracy implies as we benefit collectively from the actions of the majority, so the actions of the majority can damn us collectively.

Lot and Sodom

Let me solemnly assure you that Lot was saved from Sodom SOLELY because Abraham was his uncle. That's it. But a damnation resulted anyway, because Lot had chosen to live in Sodom. He had a free choice. Could have separated from Abraham and then lived most anywhere. But nope, the dope chose Sodom, which archaeology has clearly identified in Jordan northeast of the Dead Sea: a site called Tell el-Hamman. (See the videos of Dr. Steven Collins.) Collective punishment followed Lot. So, Lot's wife looked back and died and later in a cave his daughters committed unspeakable (and unthinkable) sin with him to found two bastardized "nations" of imbeciles. One daughter turned out to be the mother of what would become Moab, a hopeless pagan enemy of Israel (yet God saw to it that the nation of Moab eventually produced after many generations one Ruth, who became an ancestress of Our Lord.) What happened to Lot after that, though? Vanished from history. In inexpressible shame.

Kentucky meanwhile voted to keep its Democrat governor, who will take the first opportunity to lock the people down and force them to wear masks in the next fraudulent "plandemic". Democrats have never left off being slave masters. He'll support the national Democrats in stopping next year's election (don't think for a moment that that isn't coming!) I thought Kentuckians were smarter than that. Was I ever wrong. 

What about the Church?

I've read where the bishops of Ohio didn't campaign too diligently against the referendum. When have American bishops ever? 

1. The bishops are Siamese Twins with the Democrat Party, and today live off the largess of the Federal government paying them to manage all the illegal hordes (er, excuse me: "refugees") flooding the nation. 
2. They could have stopped abortion in its tracks back in 1973 by excommunicating any politician, starting with Ted Kennedy, who promoted abortion. 
3. Don't bishops know they have supernatural power? 
4. Don't they know exorcists can make demons scream and howl just by showing the devils a photo of the local bishop? 
5. Regarding Soros and all those financing this pro-Abort vote, the bishops could at least recite at Holy Mass the "cursing" psalms of 68:20-29 (Psalm 69 in the Jewish Masoretic/Protestant numbering) and 108/109, and others. 
6. So, they did little or nothing? Whether true or not, we needed a Fr. Altman in every parish and seated on every bishop's cathedra. Instead, they cancel him.
7. The FBI and Deep State will shut the Church down anyway; might as well go down fighting.

And please believe me when I say that Fr James Altman was and is quite right that a Catholic cannot vote for a Democrat. Democrats have not only gone full abortionist, they've gone full communist. (Someone recently wrote that if you don't believe that, look up the Democrat's national website and then look up the Communist Party USA's website and try to find any differences.)

• Being part of a "democratic" governance makes each of us responsible for what happens, and certainly a Catholic who votes for a Democrat (or a pro-Abortion "RINO") has put a millstone around their neck, one they don't usually feel, though deep down I think they know what they've done.
  
• God knows exactly what they've done and will confront them with it when it is too late for them to "change their mind" because in Eternity, one experiences the "Boundless Now" as Boethius described it, and it is too late to change one's damnation.

The Secular Explanation

In terms of secular politics, the general consensus is that "Big Money" from outside of the state bought the vote for abortion in Ohio. No doubt. Many George Soros types exist, and as Elon Musk says, Soros clearly hates humanity. Butchering babies is as inhuman as it gets. (He definitely needs a psalm read against him.) But Ohioans have to be so utterly heartless as to not care, for surely they now ALL know what abortion is and what it does. Therefore they tar all Ohioans as pro-Aborts by association: Ohio, the place where abortion RULES. And now where parents cannot stop their children from mutilating themselves.

As I say, because we can vote, when the vote is for evil, we all get tarred with that sticky sulfur-stinking offal. Myself, as well. Of course, I had requested an absentee ballot and my county Board of Elections sent it to me and I marked it to turn down the proposal, but as noted, the vote was widely in favor of adopting the amendment. Naturally, the sacraments will wash off the carrion, but we have to be ever more scrupulous in our spiritual lives because now all Hell (literally) has us in its armpit until the Tribulation – which I think has begun – runs its course.

Truly, in the words of St. Paul, we need to work out our salvation in fear and trembling. Philippians 2:12-13

I think I shall listen to Tallis. Lamentations of Jeremiah.

  An Préachán

Clouds of the Tribulation Deepen: one early nebula's tale

Clouds of the Tribulation Deepen (Part I)

And it is appropriate they're turning empurpled-black-crumply on their way to true obsidian now, at Pentecost. 

Today's cloud: one of the first mare's tail of Tribulation that appeared on the horizon post-Vatican II was the "new Pentecost" umbra.

How long have the "Spirit of Vatican II" imps and hobgoblins boasted about "a new Pentecost" for the Church? They openly blasphemed the first (and only) Pentecost in doing so, but that notion never seemed to occur to them. (Logic need not apply to Modernists.) Even John Paul II openly said we needed a new Pentecost, or that a new one was coming. "Just wait! It's almost here! Almost around the corner! I hear it coming!"   

Surely that was in itself a running joke in the Orders of Hell, from the Hyper-Hellions through the nooks and crannies of the diabolical labyrinth to even Hell's bottom feeders, the Scamps and Pucks, howling their cackling crack-ups and cartwheeling in their obscene antics at the august figures in the Holy Church blaspheming the One Guy you do not want to blaspheme: the Holy Ghost Himself.

Pentecost: The Holy Ghost's Big Day

He's actually my favorite Person in the Most Holy Trinity. Closest to us, naturally, as close as our breath.

Recall Deuteronomy 30:14

"14 But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it." (The "do it" refers to keeping God's Law that Moses has just revealed to the Israelites. 

I prefer the older language versions, like this one:

"14 But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayst do it."

But what is in our hearts and our mouths? That sounds very much like breath! And of course the Latin for breath is Spiritus. (Spiritus: of respiration, and of the wind: the Latin for the Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruah). Modern synonyms for the noun are psyche and soul. The Orthodox mesh their Jesus Prayer to their breathing. And of course, when "the spirit departs" the last breath has been breathed. The Holy Ghost has taken it. Your lively little self has then become a corpse, a clay-like mannequin of what you were, ready for shoveling under the turf.

Death. Judgement. Heaven. Hell. (Remember those, oh mortal? Ever hear of those, Bergi?)

So we have life itself and both great aid and great intimacy with the Third Person, that Sacred Wind blowing through Jerusalem's Upper Room on the First (and only) Pentecost, though we don't think about Him very often. Indeed, for some time now, we openly trash Him out. "Hey, you, Bird! Your charism ran dry, so get with it and do it again, this time in polyester and "We are the Church"-type hymnody. ("We are the Church" is sung here. If you can listen to more than the first stanza of this putridity, well, words fail. Sooner than listen again to that Novus Ordo horror, I myself would rather be eaten alive by unseen demons in the streets of Damascus as was that legendary infamous Kitab al-Azif author Abdul Alhazred!)

I'm very thankful, then, for this important feast, the "Birthday of the Church" as some call it. It seems, what with Bergoglio's latest antics (like appointing the evil bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego to the level of cardinal, for example, a huge cloud in itself), that the clouds rush together in a mordant maelstrom of mounting malignity, straight from Hell.

More clouds to come!

    An Préachán

 

ad

Revelation, the Apocalypse as Understood by Catholics

 Amici,

With all that is happening, one can be excused for thinking we are living in the End Times. Many are showing a renewed, or first-time, interested into my favorite book in the entire Bible, The Apocalypse, The Book of Revelation. 

Traditionally, or I mean at least since the Protestant Revolution and more specifically since the first half of the nineteenth century, there have been four schools of thought about the prophecies (everything post chapter 4) in this book.

The Futurist school was originally held by the Church Fathers, and it asserts that everything after chapter 4 is to occur in the future, and the Apocalypse is literally an unveiling of that future. The the Historicist school, however, teaches the propheices have happened progressively, i.e., being fulfilled throughout church history, so while Revelation does predice the future, in a way it is essentially fulfilled throughout church history and not some future tribulation. (The later is a popular notion right now, for obvious reasons.)

Perhaps the simplest school, the Preterist, is a theory teaches that the events have passed already, with the prophencies fulfilled in the first century (i.e., the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, the dispersion of the Jews, and so on). N.B. Preterist being a fancy word in English for "past tense".

Finally, the fourth general notion is the Idealist school of thought: that the Apocalypse is about a symbolic fight between good and evil, a sort of allegory, and that the Bbook of Revelation should be taken as a purely symbolic explanation of our personal and collective battles raging on the plains of our souls.

It's the Futurist school that discusses and expect the “Great Tribulation” (of various lengths of time, some say for up to seven years) immediately prior to the Second Coming of Christ. This view in Protestant circles is the classically ‘Dispensational’ school, with sub-schools adhereing to "Pre-Trib" notions and others "Post-Trib". (Then, too, there are the Dispensationalists who are "premillennialists", i.e., they assert there will be a future, literal 1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ on Earth, from Revelation 20:6, involving the "new heavens and the new earth" as in Revelation 21. Catholics and the Orthodox are "amill", and one could go on but it is a "rabbit hole" pretty much!)

Not all futurists accept such views, of course, and it is obviously complicated. For example, some argue for "the Rapture" (developed by the Protestant John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) in the first half of the 1900s,  and the famous seals that are opened are then representative of all history. Also believed by many is that that upon Christ’s return the Davidic kingdom of Israel will be established for a period of 1,000 years – the Millennium – through which Our Lord will govern the world, after which follows the final judgement and the eternal state.

Well, amici, obviously, one could go on and on; many angles and schools of thought have cropped up over the centuries. Catholics have traditionally had various views at various times about the Apocalypse (as noted, for example, about the Church Fathers being Futurists, essentially). It depends on the circumstances. Basically, the underlyingi truth of it all is that the Book of Revelation describes (in some detail) the Heavenly Liturgy. 

"Liturgy" is a Greek word that originally meant a citystate-wide party celebrating some deity. The Panathenaea (Ancient Greek: Παναθήναια, "pan-Athenian festival"), was one such. So the early Christians used that word to refer to the religious worship they engaged in. The Liturgy was festive, a worship involving sacrifice (worship always involves sacrifice, and worship of Yahweh always involved blood sacrifice, except the one time in Genesis, when mysterious priest-king Melchizedek offered bread and wine in Genesis 14:18 – this is obviously what is called a "typology" of the Holy Eucharist), and it was free. (In the citystates, the rich had a lottery and whoever "won" it had to pay for the liturgy!) 

So the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse (the unveiling) is an unveiling to Christians on Earth of the Heavenly Liturgy. Now, the Liturgy on Earth is considered to be directly related to the Eternal Liturgy in Heaven, its mirror, as it were, with only a veil between them, and the Liturgy is "the control room of Heaven" as one author put it. And the past, present, and future are all decided upon via the events of the Heavenly Liturgy. That's because the Heavenly Liturgy is outside of time, outside of our "space-time continuum". And that is the ultimate solution to all the various schools of thought regarding the Apocalypse.

N.B.

And as a side note, this is why traditionally, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was "done up" in so grand a fashion (and still is in the Orthodox World): because it is a literal participation in the glorious, sumptous, miraculous and incredible Litury of Heaven. Turning the Mass into a Protestant service is antithetical to the entire Catholic idea of "Liturgy". 

So that's the background to see the "prophecies" of the Heaven Liturgy, they're not foreshadowing future events, but they are our past, present, and future as seen from Eternity.

An Préachán