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

The Church Is a Bridge, Buckling and Swaying

Amici,

The Catholic Church is like a bridge.

Imagine a huge chasm, vast, overwhelming, terrifying. It reaches so far down you can't see the bottom, just swirling mist, but you hear thunder and crashing sounds of avalanches, and a roaring of great waters. The Church is like a one-arc bridge leaping across the chasm in a single bound.

The only way across the abyss is this arcing bridge. Yet many people don't want to take the bridge because the chasm is so vast and threatening, and the bridge looks so small in comparison. These folk stay on the near side of the chasm, shivering. Eventually, they wander away. Others cross the bridge easily enough, though they are laden with a lot of baggage. But as they get part way across, and the bridge's arc rises, they start to become unhinged. Some, terrified, run back to the near side, carrying their baggage. Others start shouting and dancing and quivering and shaking. They begin to open their luggage and take out all sort of shocking things; they shout obscenities and engage deviant acts – until, in groups or singly, they literally jump off the bridge, screaming. Still another crowd scoffs and laughs. They stand on the near side, hooting and scowling, and say, "Fools! That's not really a bridge at all. It's a fake bridge. Never was a bridge. Leads nowhere. Everyone, everyone who walks that bridge, the good or the bad or the in-between, end up in the chasm below." This crowd then walks away, noses in the air, though a few remain to mock. 

Then there's a group that marches across together, organized. They sing religious songs and recite prayers, and do not carry much in terms of luggage. They've been going over this bridge for a very long time. Yet about 60 years ago some of them added a new lane to the bridge. Those taking this new lane didn't pray very much, and spent a lot of time on the near side drinking coffee and tea and eating donuts, and attending psychology lectures. When they do cross, now and then, they drag along a lot of fancy, trendy, colorful baggage. Lately, their leaders DRIVE across the bridge, in big, weighty electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are very heavy compared to internal-combustion engine cars. They put a LOT of weight on any bridge, road, or car garage. AND these big bosses carry with them a lot of crazies in outlandish costumes, making a lot of noise, and committing all sorts of carnal acts in the process. It as though they were sort of on a parade route, a demented Mardi Gras. The bridge, especially the novo lane they use, is buckling. It's cracking. It emits all sort of squeaks and groans and snapping sounds. Finally the biggest electric vehicle of all starts across, driven by a very fat man in white, who orders the other lane closed to traffic (though many ignore his order). His heavyweight transport is carrying the most outlandish characters yet seen. The bridge begins to seriously wobble.

Will the bridge fall? Will it snap? Or only the novo lane, obviously the weakest? Will it become a single-file bridge? Stay tuned. But as you step back from the bridge you notice a plaque bolted on the near-side entrance. It reads: "Founded by the Holy Ghost on the First Pentecost Sunday. The Gates of Hell will not prevail against it. -Signed Jesus Christ, Sovereign King." It's a bit tarnished, and the mocking crowd papered over it at one point. The perverts then splashed it with gaudy paint. But it is still there, still legible, for those to see who can.

         AnP

Playwright David Mamet tells us about how Christianity came to be...

Amici,

The Muslims smell blood in the water. Like sharks, they're beginning to swim around Israel in ever closer circles.

And the USA are about at war with the world. Should Israel go into Gaza to wipe out Hamas (remember, an organization that certain Israelis helped in some way to form), it will potentially be like Stalingrad, a fighting step-by-step through a pile of ruins. House to house, and of course, civilians will be killed. As Col. Macgregor says, no soldier will try to ask first, "Excuse me, are you a Hamas terrorist or...?" No one can expect soldiers to do that. It would be a repeat of trying to figure out who was a Viet Cong guerilla and who a Vietnamese peasant. And as for the Jihadi Muslims, the two million Gazans are already dead, martyrs for Allah. The men among them will get to spend Eternity in carnal relations with the legendary 72 virgins per Muslim man, while their women can look on from the sidelines.

Since the U.S. is stitched cheek by jowl to Israel – well, the Obama/Biden Regine is cheek by jowl with Iran, insanely enough – the Americans will get dragged into whatever war develops. It all depends on what Israel does, but nothing stays the same forever, as the old saying goes. And Israel is badly, badly divided in many ways, a large segment of the population was enraged about the government's attempt to reign in their out-of-control supreme court. Many reservists were not showing up for duty, and air force pilots wouldn't fly. So no wonder the Muslims scented blood in the water, all right. They're now in it for the kill. (And the American's pending collapse will be icing on their cake.) Ironically, Israel has lasted about as long as the Crusader states in the same exact region. A bitter irony, indeed, for them, and for us Catholics with long memories.

Meanwhile, we must seemingly blindly follow the Biden Regime into war, but I don't think they're going to war for Israel. And anyway, Israel, so loved by evangelical Christians in America, loathes Christians. A controversial statemet? Yes, but let's see the celebrated American Jew David Mamet has to say in his essay about it. 

I read it. “Very intense” is one way to describe it. Mamet's angry and he doesn't "hold back". No doubt he, too, senses this is a critical time for Israel, and its survival is at stake. First, Mamet clearly points out how the Democrats in the USA have betrayed Jews in various way, and that’s all too true, in various ways. Especially about that evil man, FDR. But then the playwright points out that the American Jews tended to vote in a block for Democrats. There's an old joke that Jews live like Episcopalians yet vote like Puerto Ricans. Somehow – like the American Negroes – the Democrats keep Jews "down on the plantation" too.

Mamet and Christianity

Mamet also writes of Christianity that “Christianity came into being with the destruction of the Jewish State — the adherents were Jews whose Temple and culture had been destroyed. Every new religion, in its foundation myths, slanders its parent faith.”

Lovely. Let's get this straight. So Christianity, founded on a myth, only exists because the Romans destroyed the Temple and murdered up to a million Jews (some historians estimate that high a number for the 70 A.D. war, and a like number later with the later Bar Kochba revolt, when the Romans renamed the region "Palestine") and scattered the rest, and some of these traumatized survivors formed the first the Christian Jews? Most Christians of that first generation were indeed Jews. St Luke is the only Gentile writer of the New Testament (though some claim he was a Hellenized Jew). But nothing supernatural about the origin of Christianity occurred, Mamet seems to say; they only became Christians because they were depressed that the Temple was destroyed, so they made up the Jesus Myth. Nice. And remember as you contemplate that bit of insight that Mamet is a famous playwright and not supposedly some ignorant yahoo.

Mamet also writes: “Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.”

• Well, well. Sadly, the “blood libel” has indeed been around for ages, and it is a great evil. Mamet left off that many Medieval people blamed Jews for the Black Death, by the way. And Muslims hate Jews for a host of reasons, and certainly slander them. When they're not killing them.

So, to sum up, the Jewish leaders of Christ's day didn’t kill Christ. (Maybe it was the Buddhists?) I suppose the Romans did the deed just for the heck of it. Pontius Pilot got up that morning and said, "I'm feeling bad today. Go round up some harmless Jewish dreamer and crucify him for me. I'll feel better." "But hey, boss, we got Barabbas. We can crucify him. He's a murderer!" "Naw, an innocent day dreamer is who I want to see crucified today."

And Christians have been slandering Jews ever since? In fact, Mamet quotes St John's Gospel, 8:44: “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Ouch. But curiously enough, gee whiz, Mamet the playwright doesn't bother to stage the scene. So, allow me to do so. 

• Jesus of Nazareth is brought the "woman caught in the act of adultery" at the beginning of St. John 8. 
• He says His famous, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." 
• So the whole trap they had set blew up in the Pharisees' faces. I suppose Mamet would say that whole scene didn't actually occur. Part of that Christian mythology, dontcha know? 
• Then Our Lord says, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

The Pharisees immediately dispute His self-witness, and assert that "Your witness is not true." So Our Lord Christ goes into long conversation where after much give and take, they insist “Abraham is our father.” (In St Matthew 3:9 the Jews are saying the same thing, "Abraham is our father" so often that St John the Baptist shouts out, "God could raise up children to Abraham from these very stones!") In St John's Gospel scene, Jesus tells them no, they are not Abraham's children for were they Abraham's descendants, "You would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. Abraham did not do this." 

By this time they're really angry, not least because He obviously knows they plan to kill him (oh, right; it wasn't the Jews!) and they say, “We were not born of fornication; we have one Father—God.” Notice how they've moved from Abraham to God? We're now up to verses 42 and 43, and Our Lord says, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word." It is then with verse 44 that He begins the speech Mamet quoted. 

This dramatic scene builds and builds, and is excellent dialogue. It would be fantastic on a stage. Doesn't the playwright notice that? In any event, the whole confrontation goes on until they say, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?” Jesus answers them with his famous “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” That's it for the Jews He has been speaking with. Without ever uttering it themselves, they know the Sacred Tetragrammaton, the "I Am Who Am." This unemployed wanderer Who performs endless miracles is claiming to be God Himself, so they take up stones to stone him with, and He disappears from the Temple.

Now, wouldn't that make a fantastic drama on the stage, Mr. Playwright? Oh, yeah, it's mythology. Um, but still...

A Revelation

Perhaps an article like this gives insight for those who might be interested into the intractable separation between Judaism and Christianity. They are non-negotiable. No middle ground can be reached except to go their separate ways, a lot like Abraham and Lot. The average Christian has no idea of how Jews loathe Christians who take their religion seriously. It is widely taught by Jews that a gentile who obeys the Noahide covenant might have some share in the afterlife, but a Christian who tries to convert a Jew will go to the deepest part of Hell for eternity. A wise rabbi, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, famously said “Christianity is Judaism for Gentiles” But his was a rare wisdom, and sorely missed in these times.

But I digress. Armageddon does that to me.

God bless them and have mercy on all of us. 

The Jewish people, or Biblically speaking, the People Israel (St. Paul seems to see a difference), have a major role to play in the End Times. Fr. Mawdsley discusses that with Kennedy Hall here. "ISRAEL: Biblical prophecy of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity with Fr. Mawdsley". This second is a new one: "Jesus is no Zionist. Neither is Moses." Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss is a revelation, and Brother Nathaniel in a clip from his: "Why I Left Judaism", is priceless.

Fr Mawdsley going to get himself banned from YouTube, no matter how pro-Jewish he otherwise is. The other day he had one where he showed video clips of an altar they erected somewhere in Jerusalem (IIRC) where newly reconstituted Levitical priests offered the carcass of a freshly slain lamb up in the fire. The lamb had been butchered somewhere else, but it was a pathetic – truly the word for it – sight. Skinned carcass. Guys in robes awkwardly leaning toward fire. THAT's the religion religious Jews want to bring back?

Most Jews are not "religious observant". I read a Times of Israel article recently about just how religious Israeli Jews actually are. Most Jews in the U.S., which some say has 51 percent of the world's Jews, are not "religious" either. Note this doesn't necessarily mean they're atheists, just not that into God. Being Jewish without God can great if no Muslims are around. Fun festivals, a strong identity, lots of connections. But to really believe it...? Those poor kids at the music festival had a huge statue of the Buddha there. Isn't that like setting up a pillar to Baal or an Asherah? Does anyone besides the religious observant in Israel know about false idols? Do they ever wonder, "Gee, maybe...?"

Asking for a friend, as they say.

           AnP

Christianity, Freedom, the American government and our current free-fall

Friends,

America is a mess, and the American Republic is just about dead. Why? I think it is, to an essential decree, because the anti-God or simply "No God Need Apply" embodied in the 1787 U.S. Constitution has finally born the fruits its policy was always destined to bear.

In any political discussion à la the U.S., "freedom" or "liberty" is central. It is said whereas English literature is about honor and French literature is about love, American literature is about freedom. The Declaration of Independence is famous for this line: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Yet the right to life American courts have denied for over half a century. It has been denied because Americans, both citizens and supposedly the government, worship not the God of Christianity, but "Liberty". 

Yet what is liberty? Are we at liberty to murder unborn children? Or are we at liberty to molest born children, or castrate and spade children? Or for that matter, run wild in the streets? Flash mob rob stores? Parade naked down streets or as in San Francisco, stand on sidewalks openly doing the most obscene things with our private parts? (Not to mention filling those streets with manure and urine.) If homosexuals are allowed to legally marry under the U.S. 1787 Constitution, something so absolutely NOT in that document that nothing could be more obvious, then why not? "Liberty" triumphs over everything else, including Truth. And this is because we think of liberty as the no-holds-barred, purely narcissistic "Pursuit of Happiness". The worship not of God but of Self. Actually, Jefferson's use of that latter "Pursuit" phrase actually means the pursuit of virtue, for traditionally, to be virtuous is to achieve true happiness. But very, very few seem to know this today. Today, the "Pursuit of Happiness" means doing whatever one damn (literally) well please it means, regardless of the consequences. 

Now, I should mention that the Catholic idea of "freedom" is not the big box store model. A big box store might offer 20 or 30 choices of canned peas, for example, and one is supposed to have greater liberty of choice in such an environment than one would have in a mom and pop store with two or three pea choices. But Christian Freedom means we are free to choose what God wants for us, what He made us for, the why of our existence. Instead of being forced to do what He wants, God wants us to chose it freely, of our own will, conforming His will to ours. It is like a gasoline engine being said to be "free" to run on gasoline, and not kerosene, or diesel, or airplane fuel or whiskey. A gas engine running on any of the latter is not "free". It will destroy itself. A human being choosing against God is not "free", but enslaved, and will destroy himself. Clearly, this is different in its essentials from the 18th century ideals of the Founders about "Liberty", and definitely not what modern narcissistic people mean by being "free" and pursuing their self-centered" happiness".

And Christianity in the U.S.? Today, Christian "freedom" sounds like how Christians survive in Muslim countries: i.e. underground, hidden away, being Christian out of sight. One might argue that the Faith starts in the home, and on a personal level, it does. Yet then too, Christianity has always been, or tried to be, a public religion, proclaiming Christ and Him Crucified "in season and out of season". Whenever they could, Christians became very much influencers on secular government, monarchical or democratic, imperial or republican, and acted as the conscience of the secular state, establishing what are called concordats with states demanding the right of public worship and the right to influence law, culture, and government decisions. There's been a separation of Church and State since the religion's Founder said "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but to God what is God's." The Byzantine Empire and the Reformation German princes and Henry VIII did the Church no favor by making it a department of state. But God's portion has always included public worship and (dare I say it?) freedom to influence the secular state. 

Since the U.S. Constitution of 1787 didn't mention God at all, however, and formally stated the U.S. would have no "religious test" (Article VI, Clause 3*), slowly but surely, God has been driven from the American public square, until post WWII, when God got removed from pretty much all things governmental, much to the strengthening of the godless, and thus lawless, "Deep State". Jack Kennedy in 1960 actually publicly affirmed his religion (he really didn't have any) would not affect his governing. But just what IS that, actually? Hell demanding its influence be not challenged, is what.

Unfortunately, God is not allowed to illuminate anything in DC, the federal government "state". Especially in the "Ape of the Church" that is the official Vatican II Church in DC. Totally lawless, on many levels. President Trump is finding that out, and through him we can all recognize how insane things have become. Actually, NO courts should exist in DC, or any trials, because it is a one-party "statelet", fully "woke" and Communist. It's the nightmarish model of what Democrats and RINOs and all the innumerable narcissists want to turn the whole country into. No one in Washington, D.C. is "free" at all. And that's the reality planned for all of us.

* Most Americans, or the Remnant possessing some rudimentary education, think of the First Amendment to the Constitution about "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...". This prohibited a national Church, such as the European countries had at that time. It also "freed" or gave "liberty" to people about religion, thus allowing the U.S. to be a "religious country". But actually, it served to remove the new Government from religious "checks and balances". There would be no moral counterweight to the government, except the easily manipulated or ignored "will of the people". It really existed to prohibit the government from being influenced in any official way by any Church whatsoever, atomizing the religion to each individual as a private, personal thing, only. None of the citizens had thereafter a collective moral outlet, except via voting. This clause in the Amendment was especially needed to preserve American chattel slavery, but also saved the government from being challenged legally by Churches over how it treated American Indians (breaking treaties with them at will, forcing them off their land, denying them the old English Common Law "Castle doctrine"), and so on. In short, it made "the Church" utterly irrelevant to the State. And, eventually, to most Christians.

        AnP

A bizarre conversation with a quasi-Leftist – and the natures of all Leftist evil

Friends,

As operation Steadfast Noon roars on across Europe, ending on October 30, with nuclear war staggering along the rim of Hell, and as I see the Dutch government trying to feed Dutch children worms and insects, this abomination in perhaps the richest agricultural nation in Europe, I happened to find myself in a conversation about Hershel Walker's senatorial campaign with a middle-age Leftist who insists she's not all that Left.

No disconnect exists here...

Maybe, pounded our insane reality, I am losing my own mind, to speak to such people. Or maybe it is quite apropos. She loathes Trump, Republicans, all that, but on other issues, especially about many aspects of European and Hungarian life, she's not too bad. It is as though she was some sort of bipolar answering machine.

But I have tired of her harping on Hershel Walker. Nothing that man says or does serves. He's a right bastard to her mainly because she insists he is a hypocrite. (Plainly, she also thinks he is a stupid "field hand" and not a "house Negro," as Warnock seems to be to her) It's not that Walker has arranged abortions or did whatever mayhem. It's that precisely because he's changed his mind on all that – he's just a hypocrite and a hypocrite stands infinitely worse than a guy actually currently promoting abortions of children of his own race, as Warnock does.

She'd rather vote for Warnock, the evil Moloch preacher than Walker, the reformed non-politician. And she accuses me of hypocrisy because I support Walker for senator. So, finally I wrote:

Two candidates for senator: both Black, both have records of promoting abortion, etc., but one has changed and the other stays on the all-things-Left side, including supporting the slaughter of Black unborns.

You are OK with murder...of infants? Black ones?

Meanwhile the social progressives/Democrats/even-mild-middle Leftists that Warnock belongs to are OK with money-hungry doctors cutting off teenage girls' breasts and gentiles off of teenage boys, and you say the Repubs are bad?!?!?

Bottom Line: the Nature of Leftism considered

My friends, being a Leftist isn't about clear thinking, reason, rationality, OR morality.

It IS about seeing the world, human life, our place in existence in a very different way than the rest of us do, which stands based on 1000's of years recorded human experience.

A naturalist or traditional natural "conservative" accepts life as it is: men are men, women are women, we all have but a few years, if blessed, to do and achieve what we want to, so long as our goals fit into the eternal verities.

Eternal verities. The Left rejects eternal verities as it teaches we are the product of evolution. One of verities is we must work in life, for work defines us. A man builds his own life and not boss about others on how they live their lives, and to achieve this, we create laws that remain necessarily based on the wisdom of the ages and specifically the ancient Jewish, then more profound traditional Christian, understanding of morality. Long, long before the UFO query, "Are we alone", man knew he was most definitely NOT alone.

The Left says we ARE alone, and thus there's no one to hear you scream when they come for you.

A Leftist truly lives in a "Twilight Zone". His thought devolves down from that hedonist Rousseau, on through the Satanist (and he was) Marx's fevered economics (Chesterton said "Economic Determinism is like saying, because we have feet, we only walk around on them to find shoes for them."). Then, it got bifurcated into political systems of repression, parties-that-rule-all, especially your life. It takes over countries and kills 100s of millions. Whether Black Communism, the racist sort of the Nazi or the modern Black Lives Matter kind, or the Red Communism of the Soviet and Chinese Communist Party kind, or the "Watermelon" kind, that uses ecological concerns (green) to cover their real goals (red all through).

And bizarrely through all this menage of madness: one MUST obey authority. One MUST obey the Party. One has no will of one's own, and can never disagree or change one's mind. (This woman I refer to is, in a small way, an excellent example of this.) As Tulsi Gabbard found when she went against the Democrats' warmongering. And that very thing lay behind Trump's betrayal by the RINOs, as well. This coming war is coming now for a reason.

What is it all for?

And why all this blood? Why all this soul control? For aping the Christian doctrine of charity. See Matthew 5:42 and 25:35-40; Communism, Marxism, Socialism, whatever you call it, takes Christian charity and turns it into murder and civilizational destruction. It is, definitely, a Christian heresy, and when the Church was religious, it dealt with it like that, up to St. Pius X and Pius XI; afterward, increasingly, it treated Leftism as a political or social movement as Pius XII treated Nazism, and has today almost succumbed to it.

Many things distinguish Leftism, but perhaps unreality is the most profoundly horrifying. And the most ridiculous. It's all so ridiculously stupid, and yet it has killed over 100 million people in the 20th century and is ruining the lives of 100s more.

• 70 years ago, this was the urgent world-saving scenario for which people needed to die:
  
• "What! You are taking my cows for the 'greater good' and "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs? Go to Hell! Leave them alone!" The Left's answer back then was:
• Bang-bang, you're dead.
  
• Today, the urgent world-saving scenario stands on the non-existent "climate change": 
• "What! You're taking my fertilizer and starving us to stop global warming? And instead, you're making my kids eat bugs! Go to Hell!"
  
• What do you think the Left's "solution" will be?
  

None of this is rational. It is no more "scientific" than the Voodoo about Covid.

For example; as I note to the Leftist lady above: doctors, physicians, prestigious medical schools, are crazily, diabolically mutilating children for life. The psychology behind it is vomitingly awful, the worse kind of pseudo-"science" – but definitely the metaphysics is non-existent. You cannot change a man into a woman biologically or psychologically any more than you can change the shape of the soul, for it is the soul that what gives the body form, and when the soul departs, the physical body thus returns to its chemical parts.

Very, very few, vanishingly few, doctors – almost no lawyers or politicians – even know what metaphysics is. The Supreme Court in general and certainly in the latter half of the 20th century, constituted the least informed or curious group of attorney's in history. Medicine has become the same. The Roe v. Wade decision was a howler of nonsense, it constituted an ersatz group compilation, and the history of it, and the sources, have to be read to be believed. 

When you read this shocking history that reveals Roe's farrago of idiocy, you'll be tempted to despair. Justice Harry Blackmun was clueless. He asked his modern and expensively, elite school trained daughters what they thought of abortion. (Guess what their answer was.) He "wrote" the opinion with hacks and abortion partisans; he consulted no embryologists, no geneticists. He could have polled a dozen each, but "consulted" these deadbeats who happened to be in his orbit.

• For this? 45-50 million babies murdered? The Demon Moloch again worshiped throughout the world. The moral fiber of the nation turned into mud and the Democratic Party impaled on the hellish contradiction. Insanity. We suffered through half a century of hell because this group of mental imbeciles mashed together the Roe opinion?

Aye, here's the rub...

Ah, but you see, however the Left connives to get a stooge like Blackmun to give them straw, they bake nearly imperishable bricks of evil out of it with which to wage their "Long March Through the Institutions", their "war of position" through Western Culture, in order to gut it for their eventual triumph. Saul Alinsky wrote about the method, and Cloward-Piven explained it in detail. It is the same method the Ogre Bergoglio uses to destroy the Church, as Cardinal Mueller explains. In fact, it is what the Frankfurter Schule Communist intellectuals back in the 1920s ginned up.

And it has so profoundly infected people like the one above with whom I sometimes correspond, an "iron curtain" of the human mind as impenetrable as walls of Barad-dûr.

   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.

Was Vatican II Our Equivalent of the Black Death and the Rite of St. Gregory the Great?

Amici,

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you. For the occasion, a couple of religious thoughts.

The Great Pestilence ('Black Death' is a 19th century title for it)

Look at the last 70+ years in the following way...

The 1950s were as the decades between the death of Aquinas (1274) and the year 1346, when "the great pestilence" appeared in Europe. Vatican II and the grim "Spirit of Vatican II" were the Black Death sweeping through the Church, and we are shell-shocked survivors, walking among the unburied corpses, the untended fields, the abandoned churches, the desolate monastic houses (as then, so now: entire monasteries emptied: during the Black Death by physical plague, during this last 70 years, by spiritual plague). We wander about, stunned, trying to make sense of the utter tragedy of it all.

During the Great Plague of the 1340s, that's when the second half of the Hail Mary was added, remember. We need to pray both halves now as we wander about among the ruins, thankful for both surviving the pandemic and for God allowing us to keep the Faith.

The TLM

Modernist like to say the change from the TLM to the Novus Ordo was no big deal, that something like it happened when Greek was dropped from the Roman rite at some point after Constantine. And of course some argue the TLM should be called the rite of St. Gregory the Great, famous for issuing decrees and rules for it, but it predates St. Gregory the Great (d. 604).

Whatever the form of the very earliest liturgies, the major population centers soon generated early liturgies that "took hold" over entire regions. Antioch is a prime example, with "the Queen of the East" influencing liturgies toward the East and down into Syria proper, and Westward as far away as Milan and Gaul. The Egyptian liturgy of Alexandria soon influenced liturgies throughout Egypt and down into Ethiopia, etc. Later, the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom from Constantinople would inspire all the Slavic Orthodox liturgies. But Rome, at that early date still the actual imperial capital of the united empire and its major population center, would have developed its own liturgy, and the TLM has and austerity about it, an "Old Roman" reserve and seriousness not found in the other major liturgies, such as the Antiochan, which was in the Greek language, for certain, from the git-go. So Rome's liturgically must have went its own way for a while, its character colored by the old Roman spirit of duty and stoicism. After all, for a couple of hundred years after Peter and Paul, Roman Christians basked in martyrdom of the two great saints, and in the prestige of Rome's bishops (such as the first Clement), with all those early popes being martyred or exiled.

But that unique Roman character of the TLM must have been there from the first, and that in turns strongly suggests the Latin language was intimately involved. Language is essential to culture, and a bulwark against foreign influences. Heidegger said language was "the house of being". If the Roman liturgy had been entirely or even mostly in Greek for a couple of hundred years, as is usually alleged, why then the old Roman gravitas in the Roman liturgy? Rome's liturgy exhibits an inherent sobriety and austerity when compared to the lavishness of the others. And if you think about it, although Imperial Rome had a large Greek-speaking population, and although "Magna Graecia" was just to the south of it (Naples, etc.), the Eternal City also was home to hordes of people from Gaul (by Sts. Paul and Peter's time, as it had been conquered by Caesar not so long before) and Hispania, not to mention the Latin (or Berger-speaking) North African coast! Note how St. Augustine, born in 354 A.D., was both (probably) a Berber speaker from youth, and the greatest prose stylist Latin ever produced – yet he knew no Greek. And in that mix, as Christianity spread from Baptized Jews (like Peter and Paul) into the non-Jewish population, it attracted folks of all ranks, but probably mostly the lower classes, who either spoke Greek because they were Greek slaves and/or hailed from Southern Italy, or Latin, because they were from everywhere else. Latin was the lingua franca of the Western Empire, a land of many tongues.

So, in short, I have little patience with the idea that Greek was the language of the liturgy in Rome until Constantine. Of course after Constantine, the Eternal City steadily became less important, and soon began to lose its large population. The grain-bearing fleets setting sail from Egypt were redirected to Constantinople, remember, after Constantine the Great. And yet, fascinatingly, Rome's liturgy at that time began to spread everywhere in the Western Empire. Eventually it replaced the Antiochan-derived liturgies (the Gallic Rite, the Mozarabic Rite, and (sadly for me) the Celtic Rite.

So, know it predates St. Gregory the Great. By a lot. FWIW

An Préachán

The Heresy of Modernism, and Catholic Progressivism, Explained

As the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church slides ever deeper into chaos, and Cardinal Burke and Bishop Schneider enjoin us to fast, it might be helpful to review just what "Modernism" (in theology) is and why it is so deadly to the Christian Faith.

Christianity, as with Judaism and Islam, the three monotheistic "Abrahamic Faiths, are "revealed religions". With sundry variations, all three believe God has revealed them – their truths, form, worship, etc. – from on high. God has reached down to us, as it were, dumping in our laps the totality of His Revelation for us. We can accept it and "deal with it", struggle with it, be like Job or Israel (God renamed Jacob "Israel" or "He Who Wrestles with God) or we can reject it and go elsewhere, but the one thing we can't do is modify it, change it around, develop and "evolve" it. 

Revelation teaches us that God is Eternal, indeed, totally outside of time. He's complete in Himself, pure Act. No Potential exists in God. He's the Absolute Being God of the great philosophers and that God of Aristotle and Co. is clearly the God of ancient Semitic Revelation. "Jesus Christ yesterday, today, and for ever," as it says in Hebrews 13:8). And long before that, from Psalm 90: "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God!" And of course the all-time great: 'God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'" (Exodus 3:14) [It is often said that that verse is the most astounding line ever penned; but the second is like it: "Before Abraham was, I am." (St. John 8:48-49)]

Now, Modernism, ginned up by German Protestants back in the mid-19th century, when Charlie Darwin was scribbling away, is all based on the idea of Evolution. When Darwin was writing up his theory of Natural Selection (an oxymoron, since unless "nature" is a deity of some kind, it can't possibly "select" or "chose" or filter, or decide, or judge anything), he wasn't some lonely genius who came up with Evolution all on his own, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus: his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (what a name!) worked up, I've read, an Evolution theory similar to his grandson's. "Evolution", as it were, was just in the air, sort of like the American Chestnut blight.

Evolution was an idea the 18th century Age of Reason / Enlightenment "Philosophes" (like Erasmus Darwin) promoted to explain existence. And thus when Darwin rushed his Origin of Species into print (to beat publication of Alfred Russel Wallace's evolution book), many Materialists of all stripes were "waiting to pounce" as it were, and defend the theory against thick and thin. Darwin was going to provide their "kill shot" to religion, their "white plague". Therefore, it is no surprise that grumpy, grim, dour, depressed and depressing German theologians, direct descendants of Martin Luther, were only too ready to apply Evolution to God.

Thus, the basic, underlying idea of Modernism, and therefore of Progressive Protestantism and Progressive Catholicism, is Evolution, specifically that our understanding of God evolves, and so the Bible isn't Revelation revealed to the Sacred Authors (who wrote in their own words in their own style what God inspired them to inerrantly write), but instead it is something we've conjured up on our own, something we "evolved" over the centuries. So, too, the Church "evolves" not under the infallible, inerrant guide of the Most Holy Ghost, directing the popes and the bishops in Communion with him to guard and preseve the Doctrine of Faith, but rather the Church is in constant evolution itself. (It's sort of like taking the Church doctrine that it is in perpetual need of moral and spiritual renewal and reformation – small r's to both of those, of course – and applying it to its basic doctrines and most fundatmental dogmas.

And finally, Modernism – not in so many words, not up front and in 72-type, not until it is ready to pounce – teaches that God Himself evolves! That is, of course, if He even exists Himself, which many Modernist mavens doubt. But then, an evolving God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, nor is He the God of Exodus 3:14.

And that right there is the entire enchillada. These two fundamental ideas, that God is Absolute Being, who reveals Himself through Divinely given Revelation, Who is "everlasting unto everlasting", or contrary, that God, and our understanding of Him, and we ourselves, naturally, are continually evolving – these are absolute opposites and utterly incompatible. 

Oil and water don't mix. These two foundational ideas about God (and us) are mutually antagonistic, like matter and anti-matter would be. They cannot exist in a single individual, let alone a Church. And of course this is what we see happening. As Modernism took over – and is taking over – Protestant demoninations, groups break off of the mainline denominations, desperate to cling to what they understand Revelation to be; meanwhile, the Modernists continually advance, just like the Chestnut Blight. Unstoppable. Remorseless. Murderous. 

In the Catholic Church, then, we're facing the same problem Protestants are. Our "mainline" Church is being eaten alive from within, as with maggots or termites, and those who reject Modernism find themselves ever the more curtailed, the more restricted, the more hounded. 

Now, also, Modernism as evolution explains the perverted sex abuse scandals. That's because if our understanding of God evolves, etc., then most certainly our morality evolves as well. And so it is that grotesque parodies of healthy, spiritual courtship and marriage fall to pieces because each individual who is tempted to carnal sins says at some point to himself (even if he's a priest, after all, because he's a Modernist), "Well, maybe prohibitions against physical intimacy were upheld in the past, but that was then; this is today!" Or "Maybe homosexuality was forbidden ages ago but we've advanced so far in our understanding, that now we realize the importance of "love" and its manifestation in this manner." 

And so on and so forth. It is no great space from the acceptance of that sort of thinking – mere rationalization, of course – to the most obscene, bizarre, and perveted acts.

Modernism. Absolutely deadly to Revealed Religion. Oh, it may seem interesting the those of weak faith; it may seem even to be dynamic, bold, imaginative. THAT'S HOW IT ATTRACTS SO MANY! A theologian no longer needs to wrestle with the Deposit of Faith in Modernism, but he can actually reinvent it! How dynamic! How challenging! How worthy of an otherwise pointless academic make-work job!

And of course the Laity: they, too, no longer need to be "Israel", "He Who Wrestles with God", as God renamed Jacob. Oh, no. No need for Job, either! Job just didn't understand. His understanding didn't evolve enough. Now none of us has to be either Israel OR Job! 

Modernism. It is absolute σκύβαλα. (See Philippians 3:8.) Absolute. And it is spiritual Cryphonectria parasitica, Chestnut tree blight. If you believe nothing else I ever write, trust me in this: if you are naturally inclined, or are somehow persuaded to think, the following: "Yeah, we are evolving with religion, and it does make religion more dynamic and attractive!" or "Unless we change with the times, keep up, keep abreast, embrace Aggiornamento to evolve to meet the current needs of the 'Pilgrim (in this usage: Evolving) People of God'..." – If you ever go that route, it won't be long before your Faith has wilted and fled and you are an atheist, even if consciously you suppose yourself to still be a believer. 

Modernism. Revealed religion's kryptonite. Absolute Cryphonectria parasitica-laden σκύβαλα. 

And it is the most dominating idea in Jorge Bergoglio's mind, and the mind of all "Progs" everywhere. 

(If nothing else, after all, it at least offers the excuse they stand on as they pull the Church down on their – and our – heads.)

An P

Were the Crusades a Shame upon the Church?

A friend wrote me the other day about the Crusades: 

The crusades are a shame upon the church, correct?  

I wrote back:

The Crusades were an effort to save Byzantium from destruction at the hands to the Muslims, and are not a shame upon the Church. Islam attacked, conquered, raped and pillaged its way across the central nations of the Christian world for 700 years before we finally “fought back” (if you don’t count Byzantium’s endless wars against Islam and Charles Martel and the Reconquista of Spain!). We are, have been since Islam’s inception, in a life-and-death struggle with Islam. They will never relent till they’ve destroy Christianity (and Judaism too, for that matter). 

An Préachán

Sociologically speaking -- the Lincoln Memorial Incident: Culture War is Religious War

Excellent insight in this article by Rod Dreher. Well worth everyone's attention. (Hightlights are my own, of course.) We all need to understand -- very clearly -- what is afoot here, and prepare ourselves for the coming Societal Meltdown.

The incident at the Lincoln memorial, sociologically speaking...an excerpt:

Connerton does not, as I recall, address Christian anti-Semitism, but taking his insights and applying them to the statement from the historian, one can see why the persistence of the Jewish people was such an intolerable thorn in the side of Christians, who came up with a rationale for persecuting them. The anonymous historian above talks about how the Jews’ rejection of Jesus was taken by medieval Christian persecutors as a defilement of what they (the Christians) found holy. Therefore, violent acts against the Jews — who were a living denial that Jesus Christ was the Son of God — were considered expressions of self-defense, and of restoring the right social order.

Seen in that light, you begin to understand why the MAGA hats atop the heads of white Christian boys who had been in town for a pro-life rally became a condensed symbol of defilement of all that secular liberals hold sacred. Why didn’t the liberals in media and on social media rage against the Black Israelite cult, which was caught on film being openly and viciously racist and anti-gay? Because progressivism today is a supersessionist movement that is a reaction to Christianity and what they construe as “whiteness.” As hateful as they are, the Black Israelites do not inspire the same contempt within the mind of the progressive, not only because as blacks, they are favored victims in the progressive pantheon, but also because secular progressivism considers itself an antagonist to Christianity. This is true:

…[Tweet about “It’s not Christian to be Christian.”]

Put another way, in the dynamics of the crude supersessionist mindset, to be a Christian requires hating Jews — not non-Christians, but Jews. To be a secular liberal is to hate Christians — not non-liberals, but Christians. Because in both cases, the “new religion” came out of the “old religion,” and the son must kill the father to rule.

Was there anyone who had less power in medieval Christendom than Jews? The less power they had, the more they had to be hated (in this logic). Similarly, as the power and presence of traditional Christians fades, expect the attacks on us to increase in frequency and viciousness. There must be as little social presence and cultural memory of us left as possible. If there is no shared memory of us, and our religion, then we cannot be part of the social order. This, by the way, is why drafters of the 2004 European Union constitution wanted the document to indicate that Europe went from Rome to the Enlightenment, with barely a mention of Christianity.

What we are dealing with here, in sight of the Lincoln Memorial, is what Connerton calls political theology. The political theology of the ancien régime was expressed symbolically by the archbishop placing the crown on the head of the king, showing the connection between the sacred and the ruler. This is why the revolutionaries decapitated Louis XVI: one ritual had to be negated by a counter-ritual.

It makes sense that Nathan Phillips, the Indian provocateur, went after the MAGA hat confrontation with his fellow protesters to the Catholic basilica in Washington, and tried to invade the sacred space during mass. It would have been an act of sacrilege, and therefore one of political theology. Under secular liberalism — a social order that includes many Catholic leaders (see Darel Paul’s excellent piece today on “Our Therapeutic Bishops”) — people like Nathan Phillips are the bearers of the new “sacred” order.

Expect more of this. Culture war is, at bottom, religious war, because sociologically speaking, culture derives from cult, a system of religious veneration and devotion. This is why the facts emerging from the clash at the Lincoln Memorial — facts that negated the initial progressive reading of the event — did not change the minds of progressive devotees. This is not a matter of facts and reason. They wanted a martyr — a witness to the evil of their enemies — and they manufactured one. They’re still doing it.

A comment by Andrew Sullivan:

To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.

How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question.

Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Christianity, Judaism, and Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part I

Here's a take on Original Sin and Christianity/Judaism that many of you are probably not familiar with. But today, on the Traditional and proper Feast of Christ the King, it is good to recall just how He is Lord of History and our True King -- not only of Heaven, but our Earth, our present, miserable, confused, and lost (even in so many persons in the Church itself, even Christ's Vicar!) as it seems to be. 

God, the Lord of Hosts, Creator and Sustainer of all that is, is following a program He's put in place that is still running. It's the same program from Adam and Eve down to today. This is crucially important. The Lord doesn't run about changing things to fit the circumstances of the day. He's Christ the King, the Lord of History and He is in control. That's important to remember -- and believe -- after a horror such as the purely evil, vile, and obscene Pittsburgh Massacre.

So:

The first Covenant the Lord made with all Creation when He "rested" on the Seventh Day. The next Covenant He made with Adam and Eve, that through Eve's seed He would raise up a Savior who would crush the serpent's head, even though the serpent (Satan) would bit the heel of the seed -- Christians of all stripes take that to be a prophecy of the Passion and Crucifixion. The second Covenant He made with Noah, and so on. Seven Covenants in all, the last being the New Covenant (here Christians deviate from Judaism, obviously).

To be "saved" one needs to have this inheritance, to be in the inheritance of blessing, THE blessing God gave to Abraham (the red-haired "Great Father", to whom God granted this via a close series of three special Abrahamic covenants), and as was then passed down through Isaac ("Laughter") to Isaac's second son, Jacob ("Heel") whom the Lord renamed "Israel" ("He who struggles with El", or God). To be "saved", this long-running program has it, one indeed has to be of the People Israel, through whom salvation is solely available.


What Jesus, (Yeshu'a, Joshua, meaning: "Yahweh is salvation") did was to arrange for the adoption into the divine Sonship of non-Jews, into this Abrahamic Covenant. Through His Incarnation, and then Crucifixion and Resurrection, Our Lord Christ made this adoption into the Abrahamic Covenant possible through changing our nature. This is the belief of the Christian Orthodoxies (Western Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism, the various Eastern Orthodoxies, and then the "Oriental" Orthodox -- Armenian, Coptic), all of whom have the same system of Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacraments. (Ahem, some of the Churches get along with each other better than with others, but their actual theological differences are minor compared with Protestantism.)


What they have in common is that they're the Churches of the Real Presence, i.e., that God is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. Being baptized allows one to partake of the other Sacraments, esp that of the Holy Eucharist. It is the Most Holy Eucharist that is the New Covenant, the New Testament (and not the 27 books of the Christian Bible -- they only contain the story of the New Testament. And when we have taken the Holy Eucharist, we are changed in our nature because we receive the Incarnate God. And we not only have the Body and Blood of God in our arteries, but His Human Nature too. Jesus got His Human Nature from his Mother, as all Jews inherit the blessings Israel received from his father Isaac, through their mothers, from Sarah on down.


Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly our Mother, literally, because Our Lord is Incarnate through her and via the Holy Eucharist, we take on His Nature. We're "new creations in Christ" as St. Paul says so often, and in so many ways. In other words, all Christians who are "Orthodox" and participate in the Holy Eucharist are adopted into Israel, and all thus receive the Covenant blessing and salvation inherent in that. It's the same program it has always been, in other words.


Now, traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the fourth Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant (fourth from Adam and Eve, fifth from the Seventh Day Covenant with Creation), was cancelled, or abrogated, or made defunct, and that it was replaced by the New Covenant. That would change the number of the Seven Covenants, of course, and also it is not necessary, because each Covenant is transformed by the Covenant made after it. Expanded, uplifted, transfigured. We understand Noah's Covenant in a new light via the Abrahamic Covenant, and we see the Mosaic Covenant transformed and heightened by the Davidic Covenant (that the Kingship of Israel would never pass from David's House). Just as Our Lord was Transfigured on the Mount, and for the first time, Peter, James, and John -- who thought they knew him -- beheld Him as He is, so the Mosaic Covenant was transfigured from eating a lamb without blemish or broken bones into the Lamb of God Himself.


Now, as these transformations and uplifts in Covenants occur, one does have to keep up. Think of all of Noah's descendants who weren't descended from Abraham through Sarah. Or think of all those Israelites who rejected the Davidic kings and started their own "Kingdom of Israel" in Samaria and Galilee -- the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel". All cut off from the Covenants after inheriting them directly. Similarly, those Jews who didn't come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth cut themselves off from the fulfilled Covenants. I personally think "God will sort it" in His own way, because so many Jews have been faithful to Him (as they understood it) throughout the millennia, and I think so because God is always faithful -- always -- and because the Lord God is the Reader of Hearts. He is Judge, too, the Absolute Judge, an essential part of His Divine Kingship. But the true and certain road of Salvation comes through the Church He set up, which is the New Israel, the Synagogue of God.

 N.B. When looked at this way, one can immediately see the cause for conflict between Jews and Christians. Jews resented the idea that non-Jews could suddenly be incorporated into the Jewish people, while not "going all the way" with Temple Worship and Kosher laws, and so on -- not to mention all these non-Jews being, well, not descended from Abraham! Christians resented the Jews saying, "Whoa! You're not part of the ancient Covenant!" So the fight began. In contrast to the Churches of the Real Presence, Protestantism, is the "Churches of the Real Absence" (i.e., all Protestant Churches deny -- in their founding documents -- the ancient Real Presence teaching), have a very different understanding of how Salvation works, and 500 years of that have driven this teaching I've just outlined out of the popular imagination, knowledge, etc,.

An Préachán