Posted on July 30, 2021 by abyssum
    Top to bottom:     (1) Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, in former times (before he was in hiding). I spoke to the archbishop this afternoon on the telephone. He told me he is meditating on the question of the liturgy, and has in mind to write a reflection on the latest developments (that is, on the July 16 decree Traditionis custodes [“Of the tradition the guardians”]) in the near future, to be published “in a matter of days.” He said he is in good health and good spirits.    (2) the first page of the missal of the old Mass, Latin on the left, English on the right.     The words at the bottom of the first page are from Psalm 42, composed by King David about 1,000 years before Christ (c. 1,000 B.C.).     The use of the Psalms of King David as prayers in the “old Mass” (many of these Psalm-based prayers do not appear in the “new Mass,” promulgated in 1969 by Pope Paul VI) is one of the reasons I have always argued that the prayers of the “old Mass” not only seem but are “more ancient” than those of the “new Mass” (when the replacement prayers were written in the 1960s, the Psalm-based prayers are 3,000 years(!) older), “more regal,” “more Davidic,” “more majestic,” “more poetic,” “more dramatic,” and generally “more Hebraic” or “more Judaic” than the prayers of the “new Mass.”     One might say that this is the first thing one notices about the difference between the two liturgies, on the very first page of the missal, in the first 15 seconds of the Mass.    In other words, from the very outset of the old Mass, we are with King David, next to King David, speaking alongside of King David — the very human yet God-centered ancestor of the King of Israel to come — as David speaks poetically about the grave difficulties he confronts:     Here is what David (I mean, the priest), says at the bottom of p. 1:    Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta:    ab homine iniquo et doloroso eripe me:    quia tu es Deus meus, et fortitudo mea.    English translation    Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy:    deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man:    for you are my God, and my strength.    ***    (3) Pope Francis in front of the Marian icon Salus Populi Romani, attributed to St. Luke, in the Basilica of St. Mary Major, the icon that is considered the protection of the people of Rome from all harm    (4) again Archbishop Viganò, in public in Munich on January 18, 2020, a year and a half ago, dressed to be inconspicuous    (5) the first “Zero issue” of Inside the Vatican magazine, which expressed the purpose of the magazine. After 28 years, we are still publishing, and still encouraging the Church’s leaders to carry out the mission Jesus asked Peter to carry out: “Feed my lambs.” (To subscribe, click here. Subscriptions are very important to us to allow us to continue publishing… We are still looking for 1,000 new subscribers; we have gotten almost 100 in recent days…)        =======================    Special note: A friend, Richard Duplantis, has a website where he sells beautiful liturgical supplies. I urge readers interested in such items to consider him: https://southernliturgicals.com/ — “Where art and beauty embrace the sacred.”
    ====================        Letter #74, 2021, Thursday, July 29: Archbishop Viganò on the present crisis    ”Never as in this era have we seen that the destiny of the whole world, and in particular of Europe and Western nations, is irremediably marked by all these elements which are a prelude to its fall and its ruin.” —Archbishop Viganò, in a July 17 address via video to a conference in Venice    ”But what today we see taking place before our eyes constitutes the essence of an insane and infernal project, ontologically doomed to failure, and it is not just a decline, as has happened many times throughout history to many empires now buried under the ashes and rubble of time, it is the end of an age that has rebelled against the first principle of the universe, against the nature of things, against the ultimate goal of man. An age that has rebelled against God, that has presumed to be able to overrule and overthrow Him, which has claimed and still demands today to be able to blaspheme Him, to eliminate Him, not only from the present and the future, but also from the past.” —Viganò, in the same July 17 address    ***    A few days ago, on Saturday, July 17 — the day after Pope Francis issued Traditionis custodes on July 16 — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò gave an address in Italian via video link to a conference meeting in Venice, Italy.    Viganò’s essential message: that the entire Christian culture of the West is “on the verge of ruin” due to “apostasy” and the “cancel culture” movement, which regards the Christian faith as in some sense an evil “superstructure” of beliefs and customs which must be rejected by modern society as it builds a “post-Christian” future.    Viganò, as one would expect, opposes this “cancellation,” as he believes the Christian faith offers humanity a path toward blessedness, toward meaning, toward love and justice in society.    Therefore, Viganò is committing every effort to try to “sound a warning” to the Church and to the world, that the path now being proposed to humanity will not lead to blessedness and happiness, but rather to frustration and misery.    He is saying: “Let us change course, now.”    Here below is the full text of his address. The text was published earlier this week, on July 26, by Lifesitenews. Note: if you go to this link, you can see the archbishop delivering the speech in Italian, with subtitle in English, so you can follow the entire speech: link to speech with subtitles in English.    Note: the actual date when Viganò wrote and signed the text was July 16, Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, the same day that Pope Francisreleased his decree on the liturgy.    Here is a link to the original video, where the archbishop spoke in Italian, along with the text in Italian.    ***        Viganò: The West is on the verge of ruin due to ‘apostasy,’ ‘cancel culture’    Monday, July 26, 2021    By Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò    Opening speech for the Venice Document conference.    Dear friends,    Praised be Jesus Christ.    This conference has the privilege of being based in a city with a glorious past, in which its rulers were able to apply with wisdom the good government of every temporal reign that finds its inspirational and informant principles in religion.    The “Serenissima” Republic [that is, Venice] unified all the positive aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, in a system intended and conceived to favor the practice of religion, the honest welfare of its citizens, the development of arts and crafts, the promotion of trades and of cultural exchanges, the careful management of public affairs and the prudent administration of justice.    As long as Venice was observant of its high vocation it thrived in all fields.     When the last of its Doges (governors) allowed himself to be bribed by Freemasonry and by the false philosophy of the Enlightenment movement, it sank in a few years, condemned to be invaded, plundered and stripped of its treasures.    From the story of the Serenissima we can draw a great lesson for the present times and a severe warning for the fate of our country and of nations in general.     What indicates the forfeiture of an empire is the betrayal of ideals that made it great, the perversion of authority, the corruption of power, the resignation of the people.    Never as in this era have we seen that the destiny of the whole world, and in particular of Europe and Western nations, is irremediably marked by all these elements which are a prelude to its fall and its ruin.    The betrayal of ideals, of culture, of civilization, of knowledge, and of the arts finds its cause in the apostasy of faith, in having rejected two millennia of Christianity and in wanting to remove even the historical memory of it with the “cancel culture.”    What was shaped in the Christian era from the martyrs’ blood, from the confessors’ testimony, from the teaching of the doctors of the Church, from the Magisterium of the popes and from a whole system of industrious charity that permeated every area of ​​life is today rejected with the annoyed embarrassment of those bound in power.    The perversion of authority has meant that the rulers, both in the civil and in the religious sphere, fail to fulfill the purpose for which it exists, deviating from the common good so that, after having rejected the divine right of the sovereigns and claimed the popular origin of power of the republican state, in the name of alleged human and citizen rights, the new revolutionary political class has proved ready to sell itself to the highest bidder, rebellious to God and those it claims to represent.    The amazing promises of democracy, freedom, and popular sovereignty have been broken in the absence of civic morality, a sense of duty or a spirit of service.     Born as a social application of the revolutionary principles inspired by Freemasonry, the notion of the “modern state” has proved to be another colossal deception against the masses from which the consolation of a divine justice that would moderate the excesses of the tyrant has also been snatched.     This is the wicked cry of the “Crucifige” (condemnation) perpetuated in time.    After 200 years we understand how that fraud was hatched to make the masses believe that they can determine, on the basis of the mere numerical majority, what is good and what is bad regardless of the natural law and the commandments of which the Lord is the wise author.    This impious tower of Babel shows the collapse of its foundations just at the moment when it seems most powerful and destructive, and this is a source of hope for us.    The idol of equality is also collapsing, a blasphemous denial of the individuality and uniqueness of every man in the name of a flattening down where diversity is regarded with suspicion, autonomy of judgment is stigmatized as antisocial, intellectual skills are a fault, professional excellence is a threat, and the sense of duty is a hateful obstacle.    In this gray prison without tangible bars, freedom of expression is recognized only to sin, vice, crime, ignorance and ugliness, because what is unique in every man, what makes him special, what elevates him above the shapeless mass is an intolerable demonstration of the omnipotence of God, of the infinite wisdom of his creation, of the power of his grace, of the matchless beauty of his work.    The myth of false science also collapses, rebellious as its inspirer to the harmony of the divine cosmos.     The humble search for the rules that govern creation has been replaced by the Luciferian presumption of demonstrating on the one hand the non-existence of God and his uselessness for the salvation of humanity, and on the other the insane divinization of the man who considers himself master of the world while he can only be its guardian, according to the eternal rules established by the Creator.     Where the wise awareness of one’s own fragility had allowed great discoveries for the good of humanity, today the pride of reason gives birth to monsters thirsty for power and money, even at the cost of decimating the world population.    The false ideologies of liberalism and communism collapse, already languishing with enormous political, social and economic disasters and today, united and allied as ghosts of themselves in the crazy project of the new world order.     The prophetic words of the Popes on these plagues of the nations are confirmed by the observation that both were two sides of the same coin, the coin of inequality under the guise of equity, and the coin of impoverishment of peoples under the species of the just distribution of wealth, of enrichment of the few with the promise of greater opportunities for the many.    The political parties also collapse, as does the alleged opposition between right and left, children of the Revolution and both instrumental to the exercise of power.     Having renounced the ideals that still inspired them, at least nominally, until the last few decades of the twentieth century, the parties have transformed into companies, ending up creating an unbridgeable gap between the agenda that wants them and the real needs of citizens.     In the absence of inspiring principles and non-negotiable values, those parties have turned to their new masters, to those who finance them, to those who decide their candidates and orient them to action, impose their choices and, if the rhetoric attributed to the sovereign people the power to appoint whoever represented them in parliaments and recognized the highest expression of democracy in the vote, today those who govern look with suspicion and annoyance on those who would like to oust and drive them out just with the vote.    The illusion collapses that there can be a justice where the laws of the states are not inspired by the common good but by the maintenance of a corrupt power and the dissolution of the social state, and where the law of God is banned by the courts, injustice is in force, honesty is punished, crime and misdemeanor are rewarded.     Where justice is not administered in the name of God, magistrates can legislate against the good by making themselves enemies of those they should protect and accomplices of those they should condemn.    The deception of freedom of information collapses, showing the desolating multitude of servants and courtiers ready to silence the truth, to censor reality, to subvert the criteria of objective judgment in the name of partisan interest, the desire to enrich themselves, the intoxication of an ephemeral visibility.     But if the journalist, the editor, and the essayist no longer have an immutable principle that inspires them that finds in the living and true God the infallible parameter for understanding and interpreting what is transient, freedom becomes license, subservience to power becomes the rule and falsehood becomes the universal norm.    A whole world of untruths collapses, of deceptions, dishonesty, horrors and ugliness, that for over two centuries has imposed on us everything that is anti-human, anti-divine and anti-Christic as a model.     It is the kingdom of the antichrist where transhumanism challenges heaven and nature, in the eternal cry of the enemy, “Non serviam” (I will not serve).     But what today we see taking place before our eyes constitutes the essence of an insane and infernal project, ontologically doomed to failure, and it is not just a decline, as has happened many times throughout history to many empires now buried under the ashes and rubble of time, it is the end of an age that has rebelled against the first principle of the universe, against the nature of things, against the ultimate goal of man. An age that has rebelled against God, that has presumed to be able to overrule and overthrow Him, which has claimed and still demands today to be able to blaspheme Him, to eliminate Him, not only from the present and the future, but also from the past.     An era shaped by the servants of the enemy of God and of mankind from Masonic sects, from power lobbies subservient to evil.    You might think that this is a decidedly apocalyptic vision of the present and of what awaits us, a vision of the last times, in which the few who remain faithful to good will be banished, persecuted and killed, just as our Lord was persecuted and killed, and the countless host of martyrs at the beginning of the Christian era.     In the face of this madness the responses of human ideologies are not enough, just as a gaze devoid of transcendence is not enough.    The epithet of “apocalyptic” that is addressed to us by those who also attribute to us the label of “denier” or “conspiracy theorist”, denotes an earthly vision in which redemption represents one option among many, together with Marxism or other philosophies. But what should I preach as a bishop, if not Jesus Christ and Himself crucified?    ***    But my words on this occasion do not want to be words of despair nor instill fear for the future that seems to be preparing for us.     It is true, this rebellious world and enslaved to the devil, especially in those who govern it with power and money, is waging war on us and is preparing for a fierce and ruthless battle, while he intends to gather around himself as many allies as possible, even among those who prefer not to fight, out of fear or interest.     To each of them he promises a reward, assures a reward that repays their enslavement to the cause or at least the abstention from fighting on the opposite side. Promises of success, of wealth, of power that have always enticed and corrupted many throughout history.    There are always 30 silver pieces ready for the traitor, and what is more significant is that while the enemy openly declares his hostility, those who should be our allies and even our generals persist in ignoring it, denying it, laying down their arms in the face of the looming threat.     In the name of a senseless pacifism, they undermine true peace, which is tranquility of order and not cowardly and rebellious surrender to those who want to destroy us.    In this, as I said earlier, the true perversion of authority consists. Having failed in the purpose for which there exists, with the complicity of the so-called moderates, of the lukewarm, that Our Lord will vomit from his mouth.    Allow me to urge you not to give up, not to let yourselves be seduced by those who, driven by the desire not to see their role as alleged mediators in the perpetuation of a corrupt and corrupting system compromised, insist on not wanting to recognize the gravity of the present situation and de-legitimize anyone who denounces it as a “conspiracy theorist”.    If there is a concrete threat to the salvation of individuals and of mankind, if there is a mind behind this articulated and organized project, if the action of those who put it into practice is clearly aimed at doing evil, reason and faith urge us to discover their authors, to denounce their purposes, to prevent their execution because, if in the face of this threat we remain inert and indeed we try to deny it, we would become accomplices and co-operators of evil and we would fail in our duty of truth and charity towards our brothers.    But if it is true that there is indisputably this threat that hangs over the good, the honest, the people who still remain faithful to Our Lord, it is also true that this threat, by its very nature, is destined for the most blatant and devastating defeat because it does not call into question only men, but God himself, the entire celestial court, the hosts of angels and saints, and all creation.    Yes, even nature, the marvelous work of God, rebels against this violence and between the final victory of good, which is most certain, and this present of darkness we stand with our choices and will allow God to count his good servants.    Let us not think that during this epochal conflict we must only organize ourselves with human means; let us not be convinced that the impressive power of our enemy is reason enough to let us be defeated and annihilated.     Dear brothers and sisters, we are not alone, precisely because this is a war against the majesty of God, He will not refuse to take the field alongside us, leaving us alone to fight against an adversary who dared to challenge none other than the Almighty, the Lord of hosts lined up in battle, at whose name the foundations of the universe tremble.    Rather, let’s place ourselves at his side, under the glorious banner of the cross, very certain of an unimaginable victory, of a reward that makes all the riches of the earth pale.     Because the prize we are entitled to is immortal and eternal, the glory of heaven, eternal bliss, endless life and the presence of the Holy Trinity.     A reward that in the realization of the purpose for which we were created – to give glory to God – recomposes the disorder of sin in the economy of redemption.    The weapons that we must sharpen in this time to be ready for the battle that looms are living in the grace of God, the frequency of the sacraments, faithfulness to the immutable “depositum fidei“, prayer, especially the Holy Rosary, constant exercise of the virtues, the practice of penance and fasting, and corporal and spiritual works of charity, to win our distant or lukewarm brothers for God.    Let’s listen to the Apostle’s admonition: “Put on the armor of God so that you can withstand the wicked day and remain standing after passing all the tests. Stand firm, gird your waist with truth, put on the breastplate of righteousness and having as footwear on your feet the zeal to spread the gospel of peace. Always hold the shield of faith in your hand, with which you can extinguish all the fiery darts of the evil one. Take also the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, that is, the word of God.”    These words, which St. Paul addresses to the faithful of the city of Ephesus, are also and above all valid for us in this time when we must understand that our battle is not against creatures made of blood and flesh but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of evil who live in the celestial regions.    This event in Venice was desired by its organizers as a moment of reflection and a founding act of a movement of spiritual and social rebirth.     A spiritual call to arms, so to speak, in which to count and get to know each other but above all to give courageous witness to that faith which alone is a necessary and indispensable premise for the peace and prosperity of our dear homeland.    I said it, I say it now, and I repeat it, “Pax Christi in Regno Christi.” [“The peace of Christ in the reign of Christ.”]    Just as in celebrating the victory of Lepanto over the Turks, the Venetian Senate paid public honors to the Virgin Queen of Victories, to whom it recognized the merit of the defeat of the enemy of Christianity, so today we must have the courage to rediscover in the Gospel of Christ and in fidelity to his commandments the founding element of every action, personal and collective, social and ecclesial that wants to aspire to success and be blessed by God.    The ruins of the anti-human and anti-Christic society that has smeared the last centuries of history are a severe warning to those who delude themselves into building a house without placing it under the protection of the Lord:    “Nisi Dominus ædificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui ædificant eam. Nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam” (Psalm 126:1). [“Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”]    This house, this city can only be reborn and resurrected if that divine King and that omnipotent Queen reign there by grace, they who were the true Sovereigns of the glorious Republic of Venice, before whom the Doge and the Magistrates are depicted on their knees, a devoted testimony of the Christian religious and social order.    May this awareness of yours be the engine of all your and our future actions.    To all of you, and to all those who will know how to gather under the insignia of Christ and the Virgin, I wholeheartedly impart my paternal Blessing:    In nomine + Patris, et + Filii, et Spiritus + Sancti. Amen.    + Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

About abyssum

I am a retired Roman Catholic Bishop, Bishop Emeritus of Corpus Christi, Texas
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