AN OVERVIEW OF WHERE WE HAVE BEEN, WHERE WE ARE AT NOW, AND WHERE WE ARE GOING IN THE NEAR FUTURE

The Division of Opinion on Archbishop Vigano

BY TED FLYNN / APRIL 28, 2022

 The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. – George Orwell

In every generation there seems to be one clergyman who ignites the passions in people.  With that passion the response is usually stridently differing opinions. It is often explosive around that individual because the rhetoric around them is so controversial. It really isn’t that dissimilar to a polarizing politician or pope. There is often little neutrality when the person’s name comes up. That man today is arguably Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.

Previously there have been churchmen like Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979). The firebrand had a weekly national radio broadcast that reached an estimated 30 million listeners in the 1930’s which operated under an organization called The National Union of Social Justice. This was no small audience when one estimates the population of the United States in 1930 was just 123 million people. As a man of his time, union and labor issues were at the forefront of the culture wars in the 1930’s, and he was at the center of social and religious thought for many people.

Another priest creating controversy toward the back end of the twentieth century was Father Malachi Martin (1921-1999). A man with academic credentials like few before or since, he was born in Ballylongford, Ireland in 1921, and was ordained in 1954 as a Jesuit. Up until his death, Martin was a lightening rod for many of the same reasons as Arch. Vigano is today. Depending on your world view, you either liked or disliked Father Martin. Towards the end of his life, he was arguably the most controversial priest in the world due to his writings. His book Hostage to the Devil—the Possession and Exorcism of five Contemporary Americans (1976) detailed the inner forces at work during an exorcism. His book The Jesuits—The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church (1987) was more controversial. It was clear to the reader that the Jesuits, as an order of men who had done enormous good for the Church and the world in previous generations, had lost their way, and he provided data points to back up his claim.  Martin’s last two major works more resemble the controversial issues of Arch. Vigano today. Martin’s book The Keys of this Blood: The Struggle for World Domination between Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Capitalist West (1990). Martin’s view was that there were three entities seeking to control the world stage through very dissimilar ideologies and methods; the Roman Catholic Church, Communism, and capitalism.  In 1996, Martin published Windswept House—A Vatican Novel. This was a work of historical fiction on the internal yet secretive methods to control the New World Order by a global elite network of like-minded people. The protagonist is a priest by the name of Father Gladstone from Galveston, Texas who the pope commissions to penetrate the cabal of men seeking to control the world through secret organizations. The punch line in the book is when the reigning pope asks the young priest, “to find out if it is organized.” In the end Gladstone finds out evil is deliberate and organized. Martin had a general theme in many of his books that the Vatican was totally compromised and corrupt, and infiltrated by Freemasonry. His view was there were many good men in the Church, but also some very evil men in very high positions exerting great influence. His view was that the root of the problem was Freemasonry which had penetrated deep into the interior of the Church, and corrupted it at the highest levels. Martin opined it was not redeemable other than by a supernatural spiritual event because the corruption was so widespread. Martin was a sincere believer in Garabandal, as we spoke of it at length on several occasions.

Upon Martin’s death, there was a contemporaneous voice like Martin in the same era, Father Nicholas Gruner. The torch of most controversial priest may have passed to Fr. Gruner (1942-2015) of the Fatima Apostolate when Father Martin passed.  Father Gruner died of a heart attack in 2015. Father Gruner was a humble and quiet man who never believed the Consecration of Russia was done as asked by the Blessed Mother. Father Gruner’s voice was global due to an enormous mailing list of devoted people with publications providing data on the internal dissent in the Vatican blocking the Consecration. He often said there were many high ranking prelates working against the Consecration, continually discrediting and refuting his views. His contention was the Consecration had not been done as asked, thus the world went through the pain we have seen. Father Gruner believed if the request had been fulfilled as asked, the world would have been spared much of the agony was saw in the Twentieth Century caused by Russia spreading its errors throughout the world. Father Gruner said, mentioning Russia by name with all bishops of the world was essential for its fulfillment. He died never believing it was done as asked. There are many other clergy like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre of the SSPX that have been controversial, but the point of this article is not to provide an exhaustive list of clergy in the center of the world storm.   

Enter Archbishop Vigano. Carlo Maria Vigano was born in 1941 in Varese, Italy, and was ordained a priest in 1968. His chosen motto for his priesthood is, “I know Him in who I believed” (2 Timothy 1:12). Vigano today is the new lightening rod of controversy with a worldwide audience. Like any man who becomes an Archbishop, he previously had many administrative positions worldwide. He was appointed Apostolic Nuncio (2011-2016) to the United States by Benedict XVI, and he personally asked Pope Benedict to be removed from consideration for the position. Benedict insisted he accept the position which he did. Upon arrival in the United States, he saw enormous corruption in the senior ranking clergy most notably Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (ordained in 1958), at that time wearing the red hat as the primate of Washington, D.C.; a very powerful diocese with access to political power just a few miles away from the Capitol dome. Vigano was in contact with Pope Benedict over the corruption of what he was seeing and began to expose the story. In the end Cardinal McCarrick was laicized over serious allegations of sexual abuse. Vigano said what was happening in the United States was epidemic with many in the hierarchy and clerical ranks who were complicit in such illicit conduct. A colossal system of patronage through networks shielded ranking clergy to continue their nefarious agenda thus enabling their activity to perpetually continue. Dissent of priests with valid concerns have been crushed by bishops abusing the vow of obedience, in essence making an abusive bishop a medieval tyrant over a fiefdom. As a result, few priests ever dissent in public lest they lose their faculty or outright removal from ministry. Many good clergy have been bludgeoned through obedience. 

Archbishop Vigano like Father Malachi Martin, was an insider who was knowledgeable of many of the stories that were being covered up by many senior ranking clergy, and wrote with great eloquence on many subjects at the center of political, social, economic, and church thought.  Most importantly, he could articulate with authority the perpetrators of the agenda.  He has been fearless in exposing the truth for the long-standing integrity of the Magisterium. Vigano said he was going to have to answer to God at judgment if he didn’t expose the truth as he saw it.  

Archbishop Vigano today is one of the very few Archbishops or Cardinals speaking with clarity on the plans and intent of the New World Order and Freemasonry in the Church, and the auto demolition of the Church from within. He sees the big picture, evil agenda, where globalists which to bring mankind, and is vocal about it. He sees the institutional rot in the body politic of the Deep State and the Deep Church. A close second speaking openly is Bishop A. Schneider, however, he is more focused on the Church rather than the wider issues geo politically. For this reason, there is so much controversy around what Vigano says. The divide over Vigano is that many cannot make the leap to his level of knowledge, and see the interior machinations of a secret agenda that is not public to the average person in the pew. Many think Arch. Vigano is swimming out of his lane, and another “conspiracy theorist.” He is anything but. Arch. Vigano is one of the few ranking prelates hacking at the roots of evil versus the tens of thousands hacking at the branches of evil. He is a modern-day John the Baptist crying in the wilderness speaking truth to power. Arch. Vigano is speaking at the institutional level of the rot and corruption around us to people of faith totally unaware of who the enemy actually is. He has awakened many from their slumber as he is so articulate. This lack of knowledge among the faithful has caused a profound confusion and lack of discipline in the world.    

If the last few years have shown us anything, it is no longer a conspiracy theory to speak on many subjects. The facts are all out in the open for all to see if people wish to look. The globalists are no longer hiding their plans. Vigano is rattling conventional Catholic thinking and some dyed in the wool Catholics find what he says too much to handle. In the prolife arena, there can be a march in Washington, D.C., where there are over one million people in the streets in protest as there was when Vice President Mike Pence addressed the March for Life rally, yet the very next day, no abortion centers were closed. A logical question must be asked, “are the methods being used effectuating change”? Arch. Vigano names the entities operating in the shadows funding and promoting these organizations.

The lies and deception have been so great by communists, some believers never saw what was coming because they didn’t believe what was happening in our culture. Many have simply failed to believe that anyone could have such an evil agenda to destroy our way of life and depopulate the earth. Many were unaware that there was an evil agenda coordinated and planned by The Deep State and Freemasonry to restructure the world in their image absent of a Divine Being. The diabolical head of freemasonry is Lucifer himself. He is the mastermind.  

My people perish for lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6).

Some believers and people of good-will have been asleep for several generations, and do not fully understand that evil never sleeps. Evil has a goal “to kill, destroy, and steal” (John 10:10). Usually, a person only has to be in another’s company for a very brief time before they both see where the other stands with their world view. The violent disruption we are witnessing in the culture is that Heaven is exposing evil as wheat is separated from the chaff. The lack of speaking up when error and immorality were being promoted and taught primarily in schools has caught up with us. We didn’t just arrive here overnight. It has been a gradual decline year after year with passive people ignoring the cultural decline looking to get along, to go along, and their silence has been consent. The end goal of the globalists is to silence all dissent, and with the cooperation of big tech and big government, both maniacally destructive, we are far down that road.

We are witnessing such madness it is hard to put it into words that are descriptive enough of the events taking place in our world. Many who call themselves democrats, socialists, or progressives are not that: they have become outright pagan. Their actions are no different from Moloch offering up child sacrifice to pagan gods in ancient days. When a party that is ruling the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, passes legislation allowing the mutilation of a child by promoting transgenderism and refuses to pass legislation requiring life-giving measures to infants born alive after a failed abortion, that is not progressive, it is pagan. The narrative needs to be stated for exactly what it is. Arch. Vigano is clear on where the blame lies.

To think that a person can be fired for calling a man “confused” while masquerading as a woman shows how far off course we are morally as a nation. Today, it is the sane person who is punished. It is a mass psychosis funded by Deep State government and multinational business that is intentionally indoctrinating youth even down to the kindergarten levels of school. If anyone cannot see by now that there is a virulent ruthless evil agenda by an organized global cabal (Deep State) to overthrow the country’s core beliefs through radical ideologies, they are not seeing straight — or worse in denial of it. We are presently watching a brilliantly executed overthrow of western Christian values by trained atheistic Marxists. We are living chapter one of the book of Romans where St. Paul addressed a pagan people about their personal traits and conduct. St. Paul gives many descriptions of their behavior that look like modern day America. This is another indicator of how morally depraved and reprobate America has become. Some people cannot see the truth because they have darkened intellects, and their actions are an attempt to justify their vile beliefs and habits. Nothing is more heinous and evil than the intentional corruption of the young. At this point, the blessings of God have been removed from our country due to grievous sin. As a nation we are no longer under His “hedge of protection” (Job1:10). However, there are many God-fearing believers and patriots, but many of our leaders are evil. Our nation generally accepts fraud no matter the industry or genre.

The left and an evil cabal of people, that is now called the Deep State, along with the Deep Church of all denominations, with heavy infiltration by secret societies, have been relentlessly chipping away at our way of life for decades. They perpetuate their ideology through like-minded people promoting colleagues into positions of authority from within all types of organizations, so they may subordinate dissent from their agenda. In this respect evil is organized, and Heaven has a lot to say on the organizations promoting this diabolical plan. It is an ideology of godless people where its fruits are chaos in the streets. It is the rotten fruit of Satan’s I will not serve (non serviam). It is the mentality of a person who wishes to resist the grace of God. It is the battle of the ages, Satan v. God, good v. evil. Through millennia it plays out in the streets always in the same way. To achieve the globalist goal, God in every form must first be removed from the public square. Christian education and thought has always been in their sights, and they removed it from education first, because it is the single biggest impediment to the execution of their agenda. The brainwashing and indoctrination in government schools (public) begins earlier and earlier, as youth are now the primary target.    

The term the Great Reset is about restructuring the world in a new image of the global elites to totally control the affairs of people, and ultimately give us all a social credit score and put us in a digital cage. The United Nations, the World Economic Forum, secret societies, the world’s largest banks, managed funds larger than the GDP of most all nations on earth, governments, tech giants, multi and transnational corporations are working in unison, and could pull the switch any day to create a dystopian nightmare for citizenry of the world that is barely believable. If a nation bucks the community of nations by stepping out of bounds with independent practices, they will be cut off from trade and bank funds, sanctioned, vilified, and excommunicated and treated as an outcast. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, Yemen, Somalia, and other countries have experienced it. Not that they have all had honorable intentions, but it does show if any nation sings off key from the global consensus, there are consequences. The globalists have a simple but powerful formula. If a country will not be under globalist-approved central bank control, it will be invaded and dissolved as a country. Being in unity with the community of nations is the preeminent and primary rule for sovereign survival today. The push for climate change and green energy is a large part of the globalist plan to institute carbon credits and force digital technology surveillance for all people of the world.

Technology and government are in lockstep on the methodology and the programs to implement the Great Reset. The plan was hatched decades ago. To turn a phrase, there is a new sheriff in town. They want to rule on their terms—by any means necessary. If you disagree, they will cancel you, and thus crush you into obscurity, poverty, and oblivion. There will be one winner and one loser in this fight. There are people in control now that believe the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Christianity are obsolete and have no place in the modern world. They believe these institutions have failed us because they are outdated and have been a colossal failure, and their goal is to destroy them by any means. The invasion on the southern border should show that clearly. People speak of the democrats not having a plan to stop millions of migrants illegally crossing.  From the beginning, their plan was an open border and they lied for decades to a gullible public. Western Civilization is intentionally being deconstructed in real time. It is on such a scale few can even believe it is thinkable, never mind happening.

There is also a concerted effort to redefine marriage and family with a pagan godless agenda as well. Moral relativism over the years has allowed the venomous cancerous destruction of families at the legislative level. Sister Lucy of Fatima told Cardinal Carlo Caffara, that Satan’s final attack would be on marriage and the family. In addition, we have a group of people brainwashed to call every action racist, thus their manic push for Critical Race Theory (CRT) to indoctrinate youth, to become global citizens and servants of the state. It is the old Malthusian doctrine that there are too many people in the world. At the very root of this thinking is the concept of sustainable development: thus the need to depopulate by limiting growth. What better way than a virus to lockdown the world and instill fear among the people, and take away basic human rights. The idea goes back a long way, but in the year 1972 Dennis and Donella Meadows (Club of Rome) published a book called Limits to Growth. Its premise was continued population growth requires exponential quantities of resources in a world with a finite supply and is not sustainable. Their book gained enormous traction in academia and beyond, and in many ways launched the environmental movement that has in time been hijacked and mutated into much more radical programs.

As we progress into the near future, at some point there will be no neutrality on many more subjects than we presently see.  Man is being winnowed. We are presently in the mother of all battles. This is a battle for all the marbles and how we will move into the future. You will either be in or out depending on your response to government dictates. Tough decisions will need to be made by families. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). We are strangers living in a strange land. Navigating in these times for a believer will be difficult, so sticking to the fundamentals of the faith for peace of soul will become paramount to maintain the mental stability and equilibrium to function. Yes, there is great hope, and we need to stand on the promises and not wobble. Jesus was not “a reed shaken by the wind,” and neither should we be.

Archbishop Vigano is speaking such profound truth it has rattled many, therefore his views are often dismissed as extreme. Heaven, with each passing day is exposing lies to the light. 

                                            Jesus I Trust in You

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Cardinal Burke needs to take the advice of St. Catherine who is not only one of the greatest saints in history, but a Doctor of the Church.

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

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St. Catherine’s Advice to Cdl. Burke: Do Correction even if it brings Schism 

Sigrid Undset - Catherine of Siena compares justice combined with mercy wit…

Nobel prize-winning Sigrid Undset wrote of  St. Catherine of Sienna:

“This was Catherine’s explanation of the uncanny ability she had to see to the very bottom of the souls of others… the sins of good people appeared to her as a stain on their beauty, when she met people who lived in mortal sin, she became aware of a smell so awful that she needed all her self-control not to show how unwell she felt” [Catherine of Siena: Undset, Sigrid … amazon.com]

St. Catherine of Sienna was in the same situation that Cardinal Raymond Burke is now.

Catherine knew what Cld. Burke knows which is that if God’s will is done, in terms of speaking the truth and reforming the Church, there will be a schism.

He fears that if he does God’s will and issues the correction to Francis that there will be a schism.

The Cardinal needs to take the advice of St. Catherine who is not only one of the greatest saints in history, but a Doctor of the Church.

Do God’s will no matter the consequences. Do God’s will even if it brings about a schism.

She knew that if she did God’s will and got the French Pope Gregory XI to leave the French court of Avignon and return to Rome that there would be a schism.

Catherine knew that as long as Gregory stayed in France that would be no “reform” of “the morals of the clergy” and that the corrupt inner circle of the papacy would get more corrupt leading to the loss of more souls.

In Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset’s biography “Catherine of Sienna,” Undset reports:

“Catherine replied: ‘Who knows God’s will so well as your Holiness, for have you not bound yourself by a vow—‘ Greatly shaken, Gregory stared at the young woman. He had made a vow that he would return to to Rome if he were chosen to be Pope— it was while he was still cardinal. But he had not told a living soul. From that moment he knew he would leave Avignon.” (Page 210)

Undset’s biography shows the saint knew that her getting the Pope to leave Avignon would bring about a schism:

“Catherine replied… ‘When the Pope really begins to reform the morals of the clergy they will rebel and split the Church.’ No, there would be no new heresy, there would be schism. And she said to Raimondo and his friends that they would live to see this horror.” (Page 194-195)

“Catherine had foreseen the schism. When she received the news of it, she must have known that her longing to throw herself into the tumult of battle would soon be fulfilled… she had still much to do here on earth. Because she knew the time was approaching when she should depart from this life.” (Page 259)

St. Catherine reveal to Cardinal Burke that he will soon be departing from this life to meet the Living God. He must do God’s will and not fear a schism.

Pray that the Cardinal correct Francis so more souls are not lost.

St. Catherine we ask you to pray that Cardinal Burke correct Francis.

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia. 

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html 

 –  LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”

–  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes: 

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html

– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020: 
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”: 
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Cardinal Burke needs to take the advice of St. Catherine who is not only one of the greatest saints in history, but a Doctor of the Church.

Human nature is constant, despite radical changes in technology, social systems, and physical landscapes. That bleak reality should remind us that the veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep. We saw that in 1936-1939, and what followed from it in World War II. And now, in 2022, we have awakened again out of our complacency—with a deep foreboding of what will soon follow in war after Ukraine.

Our Spanish Civil War?

Deep and brutal strife in 1930s Spain was a prelude to the barbarity of World War II. Now with the war in Ukraine, we’re reminded that the veneer of civilization is very thin.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

April 24, 2022

From 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.

The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles. 

Dictatorships in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and autocratic Portugal poured millions of dollars in military aid and money for Franco’s efforts to seize power. In turn, the Soviet Union often matched that aid with shipments to various communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Popular Front forces. 

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

The relatively new regime of Nazi Germany sent to Spain hundreds of tanks and “volunteer” troops, pilots, dive bombers, and transport planes of the Condor Legion. 

But Germany’s intervention was not always quite what it seemed. Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own. 

The Soviet Union ostensibly countered fascist supply chains. But Joseph Stalin had even more strings attached to his aid. He systematically favored communist recipients and harassed and often eliminated their socialist and anarchist allies in the Popular Front. 

Stranger still, even before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939, Hitler and Stalin were already secretly aiding each other’s rearmament in their shared hatred of Western European democracies. It would take years of research to fathom all of the subtexts and agendas behind the great powers’ interventions in the Spanish Civil war.

The same labyrinth of plots and twists will likely prove true in the present Ukrainian war. Ostensibly NATO and the EU are staunch Ukrainian allies. But powerful German interests remain worried about their tenuous energy supply lines from Russia and are not so ready to cut off all trade with Putin.  

China seems all in as a Russian benefactor. But it is sending mixed diplomatic signals as it weighs lucrative gas and oil deals with an increasingly isolated Putin against endangering its profitable mercantile trading with the West. Before the war, plenty of Ukrainians from its majority Russian-speaking borderlands were playing both sides during the ongoing turmoil. As with the Spanish Civil War, Ukraine ostensibly is a war between elected governments and autocracies–but with deal-making and intrigue on both sides. 

The relatively young League of Nations never could broker peace in Spain. It had earlier failed in Manchuria to stop Japanese aggression, and it never stopped the brutal Italian occupation of Ethiopia. So by 1936, the league remained mostly a shrill megaphone, without any power to stop either fascist or communist aggression. 

Instead, ad hoc alliances sprung up during the war to enforce nonintervention among individual nations. But their declarations, sanctions, boycotts, and embargoes were likewise mostly soon bypassed by both Germany and the Soviet Union.  

In other words, an anemic League was not all that much different from an impotent United Nations that has been utterly ineffective in offering any solution to Ukraine.  

Similarly, the West may boast of its unprecedented tough sanctions against Russia. But in truth, governments that control the majority of the planet’s population—especially the nearly 3 billion people of China and India—are still trading freely with Russia to guarantee their oil and gas supplies. In 1936 sanctions did not stop the immediate killing, and they likely will not either in 2022. 

Franco was roundly condemned by the Western democracies and his supporters were sanctioned, but his efforts were not materially altered. That, too, may sound familiar when we compare the idealism of anti-Russian sanctions versus the reality of the considerable wherewithal at Putin’s disposal.

Spain soon became a romantic cause for international brigades. Idealist Westerners flocked to help the Republicans, while the Nationalists were often secretly sent “volunteers” from their fascist supporters. Yet, for all the idealist rhetoric, foreign fighters played a minor role in the war’s outcome. 

Novelists like George Orwell (Homage to Catalina), Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bells Toll), and Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) portrayed the misplaced idealism of the international brigades, the often-cynical use of them by their hosts and third-party nations, and the chaotic changing alliances within Spain itself. 

Similarly, we hear sensationalized reports about Europeans and Americans pouring in to fight for Ukraine. Darker stories abound about Syrians, Chechens, and private mercenary killers that Vladimir Putin has hired or impressed. But more likely, as in the Spanish Civil War, such foreigners will play a relatively insignificant role in the outcome.  

Political ideologies certainly had sparked European wars, from antiquity to the Napoleonic era. More often, however, conflicts were fought over disputed lands, religion, natural resources, race and ethnicity, nationalism, and competition for continental influence. 

Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II was propagandized during World War I as an anti-democratic monster. But the war itself was not so much ideological as it was a great-power European rivalry, particularly over how to handle the rising “German problem.” 

The Spanish Civil War was a different 20th-century ideological struggle for the future of the contours of Europe. Both the Popular and National Fronts symbolized growing extremism that the democracies were ill-equipped to contain. 

Indeed, Western European democracies appeared weak in comparison to the zeal of communists, anarchists, and radical socialists, especially when empowered by the new communist Soviet superpower. Similarly, Franco saw Europe’s future more in line with the increasingly influential and often popular fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, albeit with his Catholic monarchist twist. By 1936 leftist and rightist ideologues were battling in every Spanish town, as violence broke out even among families and friends. 

Ukraine likewise is not just a Russian power grab as we saw in Ossetia and earlier in Eastern Ukrainian and Crimea. This time around, Russian propaganda has masked its war of aggression under the banner of Western traditionalism—autocracy, orthodox Christianity, conservative social mores, the preservation of traditions, the power of reactionary Mother Russia—versus the supposed “decadent” democracies. 

The democracies see Putin as the new evil incarnation of fascism, whose bleak view of Europe’s future would mark a return to the dark days of the 1930s. Whether true or not, “freedom” and “democracy” versus “tyranny” and “fascism” are now the ostensible fault lines in Ukraine. These ideological catalysts are mostly unlike what drove recent conflicts of tribalism, religion, and ethnicity in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, or Rwanda. 

Ukraine is also offering a supposed preview of what the next war will be, in the manner that novel close air support for armor thrusts occasionally characterized the Nazi role in Spain. By September 1939, those tactics were applied to Poland. Monoplanes bombing towns and blasting pathways for tanks replaced the trench warfare of World War I as Germany unleashed its now honed blitzkriegs throughout Europe.

Small, skilled Ukrainian teams with Javelin and Stinger missiles destroyed multimillion-dollar helicopters and armored vehicles. Cheap, armed drones are now ubiquitous on both sides. Do these relatively inexpensive arsenals presage a more decentralized brand of warfare, where handheld weapons take out relatively sophisticated tanks and helicopters? Are we back to the superiority of quantity over quality in weapons of war? 

Perhaps, but whether armor and artillery prove vestigial weapons and tactics remains to be seen as the theater is now shifting to the rolling wide-open plains of Eastern Ukraine. 

Before Ukraine—as before the Spanish Civil War—there were lingering Western pretensions that certain “rules of war” always formally exempted civilians. These assumptions supposedly precluded the deliberate slaughter of civilians or the bombing of residential centers into oblivion.  

Often contemporary Western leaders talked of 19th- or 20th-century wartime values as passé in our more enlightened and evolved 21st century.

In World War I, the filth and disease of the trenches in Western Europe, in peripheral theaters in Italy, Russia, and the Middle East, had cost 20 million lives. But postwar utopians in the 1930s still believed that civilians had not been deliberately targeted in World War I, whose greatest percentage of dead remained largely soldiers. 

Spain shattered such illusions. Both fascists and communists murdered innocents. They executed neutrals on the spot. The fascists bombed cities without strategic rationales. Picasso’s famous oil painting “Guernica” of the German bombing of a Basque town of mostly women and children became instantly emblematic of a novel form of 20th-century war. So the barbarity of the Spanish Civil War offered a glimpse of World War II to come when the vast majority of the 65 million dead would prove to be civilians.  

Before Ukraine, few, if any, recent leaders of a major nuclear nation had ever seriously threatened to use nuclear weapons against either his enemies on the battlefield or those who sent help to them—not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in the wider Middle East. Now Vladimir Putin not only brags about his nuclear arsenal and tests long-range missiles but boasts about his right to use any weapon he chooses to defeat Ukraine and its suppliers.

Ukraine, like Spain, has awoken us from our false sense of security that has grown since the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, soldiers in war sometimes do deliberately flatten apartment buildings and shoot civilians en masse—whether in 1936 or 2022. And some leaders now view nuclear bombs as more or less deadlier conventional weapons.

Human nature is constant, despite radical changes in technology, social systems, and physical landscapes. That bleak reality should remind us that the veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep. We saw that in 1936-1939, and what followed from it in World War II. And now, in 2022, we have awakened again out of our complacency—with a deep foreboding of what will soon follow in war after Ukraine.

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Our Spanish Civil War?

Deep and brutal strife in 1930s Spain was a prelude to the barbarity of World War II. Now with the war in Ukraine, we’re reminded that the veneer of civilization is very thin.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

April 24, 2022

From 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.

The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles. 

Dictatorships in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and autocratic Portugal poured millions of dollars in military aid and money for Franco’s efforts to seize power. In turn, the Soviet Union often matched that aid with shipments to various communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Popular Front forces. 

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

The relatively new regime of Nazi Germany sent to Spain hundreds of tanks and “volunteer” troops, pilots, dive bombers, and transport planes of the Condor Legion. 

But Germany’s intervention was not always quite what it seemed. Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own. 

The Soviet Union ostensibly countered fascist supply chains. But Joseph Stalin had even more strings attached to his aid. He systematically favored communist recipients and harassed and often eliminated their socialist and anarchist allies in the Popular Front. 

Stranger still, even before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939, Hitler and Stalin were already secretly aiding each other’s rearmament in their shared hatred of Western European democracies. It would take years of research to fathom all of the subtexts and agendas behind the great powers’ interventions in the Spanish Civil war.

The same labyrinth of plots and twists will likely prove true in the present Ukrainian war. Ostensibly NATO and the EU are staunch Ukrainian allies. But powerful German interests remain worried about their tenuous energy supply lines from Russia and are not so ready to cut off all trade with Putin.  

China seems all in as a Russian benefactor. But it is sending mixed diplomatic signals as it weighs lucrative gas and oil deals with an increasingly isolated Putin against endangering its profitable mercantile trading with the West. Before the war, plenty of Ukrainians from its majority Russian-speaking borderlands were playing both sides during the ongoing turmoil. As with the Spanish Civil War, Ukraine ostensibly is a war between elected governments and autocracies–but with deal-making and intrigue on both sides. 

The relatively young League of Nations never could broker peace in Spain. It had earlier failed in Manchuria to stop Japanese aggression, and it never stopped the brutal Italian occupation of Ethiopia. So by 1936, the league remained mostly a shrill megaphone, without any power to stop either fascist or communist aggression. 

Instead, ad hoc alliances sprung up during the war to enforce nonintervention among individual nations. But their declarations, sanctions, boycotts, and embargoes were likewise mostly soon bypassed by both Germany and the Soviet Union.  

In other words, an anemic League was not all that much different from an impotent United Nations that has been utterly ineffective in offering any solution to Ukraine.  

Similarly, the West may boast of its unprecedented tough sanctions against Russia. But in truth, governments that control the majority of the planet’s population—especially the nearly 3 billion people of China and India—are still trading freely with Russia to guarantee their oil and gas supplies. In 1936 sanctions did not stop the immediate killing, and they likely will not either in 2022. 

Franco was roundly condemned by the Western democracies and his supporters were sanctioned, but his efforts were not materially altered. That, too, may sound familiar when we compare the idealism of anti-Russian sanctions versus the reality of the considerable wherewithal at Putin’s disposal.

Spain soon became a romantic cause for international brigades. Idealist Westerners flocked to help the Republicans, while the Nationalists were often secretly sent “volunteers” from their fascist supporters. Yet, for all the idealist rhetoric, foreign fighters played a minor role in the war’s outcome. 

Novelists like George Orwell (Homage to Catalina), Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bells Toll), and Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) portrayed the misplaced idealism of the international brigades, the often-cynical use of them by their hosts and third-party nations, and the chaotic changing alliances within Spain itself. 

Similarly, we hear sensationalized reports about Europeans and Americans pouring in to fight for Ukraine. Darker stories abound about Syrians, Chechens, and private mercenary killers that Vladimir Putin has hired or impressed. But more likely, as in the Spanish Civil War, such foreigners will play a relatively insignificant role in the outcome.  

Political ideologies certainly had sparked European wars, from antiquity to the Napoleonic era. More often, however, conflicts were fought over disputed lands, religion, natural resources, race and ethnicity, nationalism, and competition for continental influence. 

Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II was propagandized during World War I as an anti-democratic monster. But the war itself was not so much ideological as it was a great-power European rivalry, particularly over how to handle the rising “German problem.” 

The Spanish Civil War was a different 20th-century ideological struggle for the future of the contours of Europe. Both the Popular and National Fronts symbolized growing extremism that the democracies were ill-equipped to contain. 

Indeed, Western European democracies appeared weak in comparison to the zeal of communists, anarchists, and radical socialists, especially when empowered by the new communist Soviet superpower. Similarly, Franco saw Europe’s future more in line with the increasingly influential and often popular fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, albeit with his Catholic monarchist twist. By 1936 leftist and rightist ideologues were battling in every Spanish town, as violence broke out even among families and friends. 

Ukraine likewise is not just a Russian power grab as we saw in Ossetia and earlier in Eastern Ukrainian and Crimea. This time around, Russian propaganda has masked its war of aggression under the banner of Western traditionalism—autocracy, orthodox Christianity, conservative social mores, the preservation of traditions, the power of reactionary Mother Russia—versus the supposed “decadent” democracies. 

The democracies see Putin as the new evil incarnation of fascism, whose bleak view of Europe’s future would mark a return to the dark days of the 1930s. Whether true or not, “freedom” and “democracy” versus “tyranny” and “fascism” are now the ostensible fault lines in Ukraine. These ideological catalysts are mostly unlike what drove recent conflicts of tribalism, religion, and ethnicity in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, or Rwanda. 

Ukraine is also offering a supposed preview of what the next war will be, in the manner that novel close air support for armor thrusts occasionally characterized the Nazi role in Spain. By September 1939, those tactics were applied to Poland. Monoplanes bombing towns and blasting pathways for tanks replaced the trench warfare of World War I as Germany unleashed its now honed blitzkriegs throughout Europe.

Small, skilled Ukrainian teams with Javelin and Stinger missiles destroyed multimillion-dollar helicopters and armored vehicles. Cheap, armed drones are now ubiquitous on both sides. Do these relatively inexpensive arsenals presage a more decentralized brand of warfare, where handheld weapons take out relatively sophisticated tanks and helicopters? Are we back to the superiority of quantity over quality in weapons of war? 

Perhaps, but whether armor and artillery prove vestigial weapons and tactics remains to be seen as the theater is now shifting to the rolling wide-open plains of Eastern Ukraine. 

Before Ukraine—as before the Spanish Civil War—there were lingering Western pretensions that certain “rules of war” always formally exempted civilians. These assumptions supposedly precluded the deliberate slaughter of civilians or the bombing of residential centers into oblivion.  

Often contemporary Western leaders talked of 19th- or 20th-century wartime values as passé in our more enlightened and evolved 21st century.

In World War I, the filth and disease of the trenches in Western Europe, in peripheral theaters in Italy, Russia, and the Middle East, had cost 20 million lives. But postwar utopians in the 1930s still believed that civilians had not been deliberately targeted in World War I, whose greatest percentage of dead remained largely soldiers. 

Spain shattered such illusions. Both fascists and communists murdered innocents. They executed neutrals on the spot. The fascists bombed cities without strategic rationales. Picasso’s famous oil painting “Guernica” of the German bombing of a Basque town of mostly women and children became instantly emblematic of a novel form of 20th-century war. So the barbarity of the Spanish Civil War offered a glimpse of World War II to come when the vast majority of the 65 million dead would prove to be civilians.  

Before Ukraine, few, if any, recent leaders of a major nuclear nation had ever seriously threatened to use nuclear weapons against either his enemies on the battlefield or those who sent help to them—not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in the wider Middle East. Now Vladimir Putin not only brags about his nuclear arsenal and tests long-range missiles but boasts about his right to use any weapon he chooses to defeat Ukraine and its suppliers.

Ukraine, like Spain, has awoken us from our false sense of security that has grown since the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, soldiers in war sometimes do deliberately flatten apartment buildings and shoot civilians en masse—whether in 1936 or 2022. And some leaders now view nuclear bombs as more or less deadlier conventional weapons.

Human nature is constant, despite radical changes in technology, social systems, and physical landscapes. That bleak reality should remind us that the veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep. We saw that in 1936-1939, and what followed from it in World War II. And now, in 2022, we have awakened again out of our complacency—with a deep foreboding of what will soon follow in war after Ukraine.

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FRIEND OR FOE?

Venom of Disdain

By Judie Brown

Venom, a toxin or poison that can kill or maim, can be contracted from a snake bite. But C.S. Lewis reminds us that there are other ways to be poisoned, including the “evil enchantment of worldliness.” Indeed, when anyone properly considers the disdain so many feel toward the vulnerable, it is easy to see that there is far too much of that kind of venom infecting our world today and too little of the antidote that is readily available if one is humble enough to seek it.

We write, of course, of the love and compassion of Christ—a love and compassion that are readily available to anyone who sincerely desires them. The problem is that too many folks not only do not seek Christ but engage in despicable acts that reject Him and His goodness.

Think about, for instance, the headline that reads “The Toxicity of America’s Restrictive Abortion Laws.” What these few words imply is heartless, for the writer is telling us that efforts to curtail or end the taking of the lives of innocent babies are toxic. This is so because, according to the author of the article, the act of abortion is actually noting but a “divisive political issue.”

In those three words one reads and sees the venom of disdain. The humanity of the baby, not to mention direct assaults that kill her, are totally lost, and what remains is hatred of truth.

This is exemplified in the case of the woman who killed her own baby. At the age of 26, Lizelle Herrera chose to take the life of her preborn child by self-induced abortion. Though Herrera was initially charged with murder, a Texas judge dismissed the allegation. According to reports, “A woman who ends her own pregnancy cannot be charged with a crime under Texas law.”

Even though Herrera killed her preborn baby, her attorneys successfully argued that her act did not meet the “standard for criminal charges.” And this is where the battle becomes very challenging for those of us who strive to defend the innocent. You see, whether Herrera killed her baby or paid someone else to do so, the human being who died is just as dead.

But according to one article, this case does not have to do with the actual act of aborting one’s child but rather with which pro-life organization is “calling the shots.” Lost in such absurd statements is, once again, the actual fact that a baby is not any less a baby because of someone else’s words or what a group happens to say about her.

In my mind, the most outrageous venom could be the headline from MS. online that reads “The Threat of Crisis Pregnancy Centers Will Escalate in a Post-Roe U.S.”

You just can’t make that up! Writer Carrie Baker is serious, opining to her readers that the pro-life centers are actual “fake abortion clinics” that “aggressively promote the deceit that abortion is dangerous.” She claims that if the Supreme Court does overturn Roe v. Wade, these pro-life centers will become tools for the state to surveil expectant mothers and enforce abortion bans. In other words, they will be volunteer pregnancy cops!

If this sort of maniacal rhetoric is not the very essence of the venom of disdain, then we do not know what is.

It is time to take a step back and vow that no matter what the Supreme Court does or does not do this summer, we pro-life Americans will continue to love them both, offering expectant mothers and their babies the very best that is possible for human beings to share with one another.

In this way, the venom of disdain will shrivel and fade away.

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GOD BLESS THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE FOR CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS RIGHTS


Fighting Anti-Catholicism Is What We Do
April 29, 2022
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the fallout from our dispute with Marjorie Taylor Greene:
We are delighted with all the kind comments we have received from Catholics, clergy and lay alike, about our denunciation of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Anyone who says the Catholic Church, or its leadership, is run by Satan is a bigot.
But we have our critics, too. There are those who hate the Catholic Church and therefore object to our comments about her. I am not interested in addressing these people—they are haters. I am interested in addressing those who don’t seem to know what we do.
Our primary mission is to combat anti-Catholicism. Secondly, we are strongly committed to religious liberty. These twin issues cover most of what we do. As a sociologist, I also write about issues that bear on the contours of our culture. After all, the Catholic Church does not exist independent of the dominant culture. Indeed, it is very much a part of it. This explains why we track the cultural currents of the day: they are bound to affect the Church.
We are not a wing of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, and we certainly are not in business to serve either of them. If we go after Democrats more than Republicans—and we do—it is because secularists tend to be Democrats and the more militant among them tend to be anti-Catholic.
We are not a wing of the Catholic hierarchy. We are quite independent of them. To be sure, we are not some renegade Catholic organization—we are listed in the Official Catholic Directory as a bona fide Catholic entity. Just as the bishops don’t tell us what to do, we don’t tell the bishops what to do. We have neither the authority nor the will to do so. We know our place.
We do not go after critics of the Catholic Church who are upset with a particular public policy that it embraces. They have every right to do so. We only get involved when criticism spills into invective, into boilerplate, taking shots below the belt. We also object to those who make sweeping condemnations of the clergy, blaming all priests and bishops for the miscreant behavior of some. Those are the marks of a bigot.
It must also be said that we object to non-Catholics criticizing the doctrinal prerogatives of the Church: they have no more business doing so than Catholics have a right to criticize the internal strictures of another religion. Fairly criticizing the Church for its position on abortion is one thing; criticizing its teaching on priestly celibacy is another.
Most Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Protestants are good people. But there are some within each group that are intolerant of Catholicism. Among the first two, it is the militant secularists within their ranks that are a problem; among the latter two, it is their extreme interpretation of their religion that is the problem.
Angry ex-Catholics and militant secularists within the Jewish community are consumed with hostility over the Church’s sexual ethics. Practicing Catholics and observant Jews are not the problem—it is those who have lost their way.
When radical Muslims lash out at Catholics, it is usually the result of some twisted understanding of their own religion. Similarly, there is a strain of anti-Catholicism among Protestants, more commonly exhibited by extremists within the evangelical community.
Marjorie Taylor Greene belongs to two of these groups: she is an angry ex-Catholic and an extreme evangelical.
We do not give Republican pro-life politicians a break when they make patently anti-Catholic remarks and refuse to apologize. We denounce them. We don’t cut corners for them because to do so would violate our mission. It is up to Republicans to get bigots like Greene into line—don’t ever expect us to give anti-Catholics a break, no matter what their voting record is.
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HAIL TO THE CHIEF JUSTCE / HELL TO THE CHIEF JUSTICE. IT IS HIS CHOICE.

Ed Whelan <ewhelan@eppc.org> 

Doubting the Chief Justice?

By ED WHELAN

April 27, 2022

In its strong lead editorial today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board reiterates its call for the Supreme Court to use the pending case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade and thus allow abortion law to “sort itself out democratically.” In the course of its argument, the WSJ speculates that Chief Justice Roberts might instead be trying “to find a middle way” and to “to pull another Justice to his side,” and thus prevent a majority ruling that would overturn Roe.

I remain hopeful that the WSJ’s speculation is unsound. It’s one thing for the Chief to have explored the possibility of a “middle way” at oral argument. It would be quite another thing for him to pretend to have found a path that doesn’t exist. In my judgment, the WSJ is far too generous in suggesting that such a path “might be explainable with some legal dexterity”—unless, that is, dexterity is a gentle euphemism for rank sophistry.

As my own WSJ op-ed pointed out on the day of oral argument in Dobbs, the Chief’s actual record—including the principles that he has spelled out on when bad precedent should be overruled and his broader jurisprudential commitment to deference to the political branches—dictates that he should vote to overturn Roe. So do his proper concerns for the Court’s institutional legitimacy:

The immediate aftermath of the overruling of Roe might well be messy and contentious. But unless concerns over the court’s legitimacy are mere camouflage for the court’s self-aggrandizement, a sound institutionalism must also respect the legitimacy of the state legislatures that our Constitution leaves with primary authority over abortion policy.

By contrast, if the Chief were to concoct an implausible middle way, he would discredit himself and invite endless bullying. Even worse, if he were somehow to pull a justice away from a 5-justice majority that is ready to overturn Roe, he would, as the WSJ points out, merely “prolong the Court’s abortion agony.”

There will be no better occasion than Dobbs to inter Roe. Let’s hope that the Chief proves all his doubters wrong.

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Is it possible that Cardinal Eijk, Socci and Dr. Mazza said that Francis may be Acting in the Spirit of the Antichrist? or “Are [we] not at the Time of the Antichrist”?

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Is it possible that Cardinal Eijk, Socci and Dr. Mazza said that Francis may be Acting in the Spirit of the Antichrist? or “Are [we] not at the Time of the Antichrist”?

The Antichrist (Paperback) | Book Culture
Who is the Antichrist? Can someone use facts while giving their opinion? -  Quora

Justina said…

Mr. O’Reilly, I–as someone who leans heavily BiP myself but who tries to be proactive about seeking the truth in this (as in every) matter and adjusting my opinions accordingly–want to thank you for your straightforward and evenhanded response to Dr. Mazza. In the context of a combox I can only ask about a couple small things you have asserted. Nevertheless, your clarifications would be appreciated.

1. Your argument seems to boil down to, “take things at face value, until we know any different.”. Yet how will we ever know any different, unless we stop taking things at face value? In marriage cases before a tribunal, there is a presumption of validity; sacraments are, so to speak, innocent until proven guilty. The same does not hold true for offices. As Mr. Martinez has explained carefully on this blog, “a doubtful Pope is no Pope.”. If we know there are reasons to believe UDG has been violated (NN notwithstanding), then intellectual honesty obliges us to consider Bergoglio a cardinal only, until competent ecclesial authority says otherwise.

2. Your comments about Ratzinger not returning to the private sphere strike me the same way Dr. Mazza’s “Supreme Pontiff” distinctions strike you–as “much ado about nothing.”. If all Joseph Ratzinger meant was that he never gets to live in personal obscurity any more, this wouldn’t account for the oft-rehashed anomalies of wearing white, residing in the Vatican, etc. In fact your interpretation is counterfactual, inasmuch as BXVI is now a far more “private” person–cut off from interviewers, friends, ability to move about freely–than he would have been had he returned to his former way of life as other resigned popes have done and as you say is all he ever meant to do. If the BiP position has some flies in its ointment, the “Pope Emeritus” problem remains one in yours.

Please continue commenting here and elsewhere, as well as posting important information on your own blog. For my part I strongly disagree with the ad hominem remarks directed towards you by Brother Bugnolo. Still, I believe your own analysis stops short in several ways, and I for one would like to hear how you wrestle with this issue all the way through.

9:22 AM

In Their Hearts said…

Concerning Benedict’s resignation let’s set the record straight:

1. We are not at the time of the antichrist! Why? Precisely because with the Consecration and conversion of Russia, the world will experience “an era of peace,” promised by Our Lady at Fatima.

2. Revelations and prophecies in Sacred Scripture are NOT always given chronologically, at least in a clear fashion. All one has to do is read the Commentary of St. Thomas on 2 Thess. 2. There St. Thomas divides the two events mentioned by St. Paul, the Mystery of Iniquity, i.e., the “revolt” or as it is sometimes translated the “falling away,” and the coming of the antichrist, the man of sin, the son of perdition with a space of time between them–most likely the period of peace promised by Our Lady.  

3. Benedict chooses his words very carefully, but HE DID NOT choose the future tense to say that “the See WILL be vacant.” He used the subjunctive which has specific uses but basically it represents not a fact but an idea. It was not a mistake, nor was he hiding anything; he was testing the Cardinals for their knowledge of Latin! Although I give a technical explanation with the translation in my Treatise what Benedict ultimately says is that “a conclave is needing to be called PROVIDED the see is vacant. No one has shown where this is wrong–they can’t because I very carefully document what I say. Hence IN NO WAY can it be said that Benedict was splitting the Petrine Office from the Roman See, PRECISELY AND ESPECIALLY SINCE HE WAS DETERMINED TO REMAIN IN THE VATICAN!!!

4. Benedict publicly stated that his renunciation was made freely and was valid. For any attempt to say that he made an error one HAS AN OBLIGATION TO SHOW EITHER THAT BENEDICT WAS STUPID OR THAT HE INTENDED TO LIE; or as the rage in some quarters has it, Benedict intentionally “pulled the wool over the eyes” of those dressed in sheep’s clothing. But this must be proved as well!!!

5. Benedict demonstrated that it is the Pope, to whom St. Paul was referring, who was holding back the mystery of iniquity which was active from the time of St. Paul, so when Benedict “stepped aside,” he did so “that he may be revealed in his time.” Benedict was in a way “taken out of the way,” but he did it in a way that preserved the Indefectibility of the Church, by remaining the true Pope whereby the enemy of the Church was only a figurehead,” or if you will is an anti-Pope.” The Church had been filled with apostates to the extent that NO POPE could expose of get rid of them, not even if he were regarded as a most saintly Pope. They had to be allowed to expose themselves.

10:21 AM

Steven O’Reilly said…

Justina,

Thanks for your comments. Regarding your two major points:

1. I do believe we have to accept Bergoglio as the presumptive pope, but at the same time be cognizant of errors. I don’t believe my argument boils down to “take things at face value, until we know any different.” I haven’t sat by and simply watched. On my blog I’ve explored and discussed various theories which I would like an imperfect council to explore, including what Bergoglio’s Jesuit vows meant for his ability to *accept* his election; whether Bergoglio is a heretic *before* the conclave, whether Bergoglio is a formal/material heretic as pope, and various potential UDG violations. For example, my articles on the “Influential italian gentleman”, whose identity I hypothesize in the articles and wherein spell out the potential UDG violation. But, even while we pursue avenues of investigation, we must recognize the limits of the evidence to make or reach ‘dogmatic’ conclusions, such as “Benedict *is* still pope” as some do. There may yet be some theory to explain “Francis”…but I am convinced it will not be BiP for the reasons presented on my blog. 

2. As to flies in the BiP ointment…there are many. Are there any in the anti-BiP argument? I don’t believe so. I have long admitted that Benedict should have gone off into some remote monastery never to be seen nor heard from again. His style of dress, and address, etc., are certainly unfortunate. But, ultimately, they are all just ornaments of a resigned pope. He could dress like a cowboy…but it wouldn’t make him one. Put lipstick on a pig..it’s still a pig. He is an ex-pope, “former pope”, in fact, by his own explicit admission. Even the title “emeritus” signifies he is NOT what he was, i.e., he is no longer “the pope”. I have my theory as to why he chose these things, but it is speculative.

Now even if we admit, arguendo, things that Ganswein, or even Benedict said, *might* be construed in a BiP way, what BiP-ers fail to admit or see the possibility of, is that these statements can also be construed in a natural, simpler, and non-controversial way as well…a way that does not make Benedict a heretic, or someone who changed the nature of the papacy without first warning us it was possible(!) (e.g., see my points on Ganswein, and the BXVI’s last audience in my rebuttal of Dr. Mazza’s thesis). 

Regards.

Steve – The Catholic Monitor [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/06/are-socci-and-mazza-saying-that-francis.html]

On May 7, 2018, Netherlands Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk apparently implied that Francis may be acting in the spirit of the Antichrist. Eijk said:

“Observing that the bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith… I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

‘The Church’s ultimate trial

Before Christ’s second coming… will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of religious deception… apostasy from the truth.'” (National Catholic Register, “Cardinal Eijk: Pope Francis Needed to Give Clarity on Intercommunion,” May 7, 2017)

Moreover, Dr. Ed Mazza in his argument that Pope Benedict XVI relinquished the power of the Bishop of Rome while remaining the pope (the Successor of Peter) is mirroring and quoting Antonio Socci’s “opposition to the advance of the Antichrist” thesis.

Mazz quotes a July 27, 2017 article of attorney Chris Ferrara in which the lawyer quotes Socci.

He appears to be saying Benedict XVI  by relinquishing the power of the Bishop of Rome while remaining the pope may have brought about the biblical prophecy involving the Greek word “Katechon” from St. Paul’s 2 Thessalonians 2:7 that means the restrainer who holds back the spirit of the Antichrist has stopped restraining. Mazza read the article as follows:

“The always insightful and often surprising Antonio Socci has just published a piece (translation mine) concerning a little-known but immensely explosive essay by the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, given one month after Benedict XVI’s mysterious renunciation of ‘the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter… in such a way, that… the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant…’”

Alluding to the title of the book Attack on Ratzinger, written three years before Benedict’s “resignation,” Socci suggests that the attack on Benedict XVI, the “rejected rock” (of Peter), which culminated in his abdication, is part of “the final attack on the Catholic Church by the antichristian powers and ideologies of this world.” 

“Cacciari, Socci continues, calls the Church over which Benedict presided the Kathécon, a Greek word which appears in Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, meaning the great sign of opposition to the advance of the Antichrist, which has the power to ‘put the brakes’ on that advance. Cacciari maintains that Pope Benedict renounced the ‘ministry of the Bishop of Rome’ because he was convinced that ‘he could no longer succeed in containing the powers of Antichrist within the Catholic Church. As Saint Augustine said, antichrists are in each of us. This is a key to the decision by Ratzinger, if we want to view it in all its seriousness. His decision is of one piece with the crisis of politics, of the power that brakes [the advance of Antichrist].’”

“Socci concludes that with Benedict’s renunciation, it would appear that ‘the Church as Kathécon, that is, as the power that arrests [the Antichrist’s advance], was totally dissolved. Giving the impression of being recruited as a draft horse for the chariot of the Antichrist’s power.’ This situation, says Socci: 

‘signals that we live in a ‘grandiose,’ that is, apocalyptic, time.'”
((Taylor Marshall Show, “Is Pope Benedict XVI still (but Francis is Bishop of Rome?) Mazza Thesis Revisited,” starting at 1;29:29 and “Socci Drops Another Payload, “by Christopher A. Ferrara, July 26, 2017: http://motheofgod.com/threads/bxvi-could-no-longer-contain-the-antichrist.11007/)

Furthermore, on the last page of his book “The Secret of Benedict XV,” Socci’s “careful analysis” of the lack of Benedict XVI’s “resignation… validity” brings him to the conclusion that we must:

“United to Pope Benedict.”

In Twitter on July 26, Socci wrote:

“Bergoglio… is dismantling the Catholic Church.”

The world renowned Fatima expert Socci at the end of the book revealed that a little known “document” quotes Fatima Seer Jacinta Marto “speaking about”:

“[T]he ‘end of the world’ if people ‘do not do penance and change their lives.'”
(The Secret of Benedict XVI, Page 152) 

Are Cardinal Eijk, Socci and Mazza saying that Francis may be acting in the spirit of the Antichrist?

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as for the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of the Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of the Mary. 
  

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia. 

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

 –  LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”

–  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes: 

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html

– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020: 
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”: 
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.SHARESHAREComment

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Having non-doctors perform abortions places women’s lives in danger, yet that is permitted in many states.


Champions Of Women Destroy Their Rights
April 25, 2022
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on who is working against women’s rights today:
It is not the misogynists who are working hard to destroy the rights of women these days, it is those who fancy themselves as their greatest champions. They are not only placing women in danger, they are allowing men to eviscerate their hard-won freedoms, all in the name of women’s rights.
Having non-doctors perform abortions places women’s lives in danger, yet that is permitted in many states. They are not trained to deal with problems such as hemorrhaging, infection, uterine perforation, heart attacks, strokes, etc. By contrast, we don’t allow dental assistants to do many things that dentists are trained to do (e.g., root canals)—and these procedures are a whole lot less dangerous than performing an abortion—so why do we cut corners for pregnant women?
There are 15 states, plus the District of Columbia, that allow non-physicians to perform an abortion: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginian, and D.C.
Only two of the 16—Montana and West Virginia—voted for Trump. All of the others are known for championing women’s rights. But not when it comes to safeguarding their health.
Another measure of women’s rights is whether women, and women alone, are permitted to compete in women’s sports. We don’t allow adults to compete with children in sports—that would mean the end of Little League—yet it is fashionable in some places to allow men to participate in women’s sports.
Allowing males to compete against females in girls and women’s sports is the surest way to destroy women’s rights in athletics. Moreover, allowing men to share the same showers and locker rooms compromises the privacy rights of women.
Yet only two of the 15 states that allow non-doctors to perform abortions has a ban on males from competing in women’s sports (Montana and West Virginia); D.C. is with the majority. The others either mandate that men can compete—California, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington—or allow them to do so. Lawmakers in four states (Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois and Maine) introduced legislation to ban men, but they failed.
It should also be known that the Women’s Sports Foundation, the National Organization for Women, Ms. Magazine and female athletes such as Billie Jean King, Megan Rapinoe and Candace Parker have all taken the side of biological men against women.
We have long known that single men are the greatest advocates of abortion-on-demand (they get what they want minus the baggage), and now they don’t have to worry about a shortage of abortion doctors to finish the job—midwives can do it. Better yet, they can crash women’s sports and walk away as champions, thanks to those who champion women’s rights.
For these guys, it just doesn’t get any better than this.
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New Life in Christ: a Paschal Meditation

 Peter Kwasniewski, PhD April 20, 2022 

Photo: the blessing of the water for Baptism at Easter Vigil. By Allison Girone

“This is my body, which is given for you . . . This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Lk 22:19-20). Of ecstasy—that is, standing outside oneself or going out of oneself—Our Lord Jesus Christ is the supreme model: He pours out his very life for us and to us, that we might be healed, rescued, glorified in Him. He gives, that we might receive; we receive, that we might give in return, yielding ourselves to Him, pouring out our life into the Heart of Christ, to be borne with Him in love to the Almighty Father. The Paschal Mystery of passion, death, descent, resurrection, ascension.

Martin Luther is famous for saying that Christ “shields” the sinner, hiding his wickedness from God’s wrathful gaze. For Luther, justification means not becoming righteous oneself, but hiding behind the justice or righteousness of Christ—a view the Council of Trent roundly condemns, not because it is too bold a claim, but because it is a far too meager one. The problem with Luther is that he vastly underestimates the strength and glory of the salvation Christ accomplished for us and brings about in us at every moment of our Christian discipleship, beginning in time with our baptism and extending to eternity. For Christ to shield the sinner extrinsically would be a far too feeble expression of His greatness, an embarrassing exhibition of inability to reach into man and transform him into a living image of Himself.

Our Lord, being under no such constraints, takes the sinner into His Heart, a burning furnace of love, and purifies the sinner there, teaching him to be love as He is incarnate love. He places him deep within the wound so that he can become this wound, can make his being into a wound and through it pour himself out as Christ offered Himself up to the Father and for us. Christ does not want to shield us, as though He were putting us behind His back so that the Father could not see who was really there (a puerile anthropomorphism, whatever else may be said). No, Christ wants to embrace the sinner as the father embraces the prodigal son, so that the sinner may be converted by His touch—the flow of evil may stop and the disease be healed, like the hemorrhaging of the woman who touched the Lord’s garment. He wants to stop man’s useless and senseless bleeding from the wounds of sin, and make him bleed love instead, bleed himself into the chalice which is the Heart of Christ, Who is Himself resting in the bosom of the Father from whom He eternally comes.

Here we stand in awe before the mystical circulation of the Trinitarian life: the life which is in the Father is the life received by the Word, the life which is in the Word returns to the Father, and in this eternal reciprocal giving and receiving is breathed forth the Spirit of Love. By drawing the Christian into the depths of His Heart, Christ introduces him into this circulation and gives him an internal orientation to the Father—not an external juridical relationship of criminal to judge or serf to lord, but the intimate relationship of son to father. For this return of the prodigal son, not only to celebrate it but to bring it about, One who is infinitely more precious than a fatted calf has been offered up: the only-begotten Son in whom the Father is well pleased, who offered Himself upon the cross as the Word made flesh. Because the Word was made flesh, man can pass through the courts of the temple of His human nature, the outer court of His body and the inner court of His soul, into the tabernacle of divinity, the Holy of Holies. The Incarnation is, to speak metaphorically, the opening in the side of God through which exiled mankind may return to the Father.

Thus we are no longer bondservants or enemies of God, but are made His sons by adoption,[1]which is to say that we really enter through the gate of the Heart of Jesus: our adoption is nothing less than our incorporation into the divine humanity of Christ, our being led into the kingdom of heaven through Him, who as God IS the kingdom of heaven. He is the narrow way to heaven, the face-to-face truth in which we rest, the endlessly gushing wellspring of life (cf. Jn 14:6).

Our Lord is not hiding the sinner but healing him; not obscuring him so that divine justice will overlook his wickedness but revealing him openly before the Father, stripped of his evil and shame, restored to the glory of Adam as he came from the Father through the Word, glorified because he has been taken into the embrace of the Son, Who, as we chant in the Gloria, is “in the glory of the Father.”[2] The embrace of the Son is more than an external contact; it draws the whole man into the Heart through the side, the reverse direction of Eve being taken from Adam. Just as a companion fit for Adam was drawn from his side, so now, the fallen person is drawn back into the one Companion who is fit for him, because he came into being through the Word. In the same way, human lovers whose love is divinized by the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity reunite in a common return to this Heart.

Thus, what Luther failed to see is that the Incarnation is not a mere “event” which brought about a change in the objective relationship between craven debtors and cosmic creditor, but a pattern, a living paradigm for mankind, according to which man would be, and is, changed into a subject of divine life. In Christ, man is given divine life: “My body is given up for you, my blood is poured out for you.” God so loved the world that He sent His only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may have, really and truly take possession of, everlasting life. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him (cf. Jn 3:16-17). Salvation is everlasting life, and everlasting life is union with God, in His fiery holiness. In being “saved,” a man is not merely rescued or pardoned; he is made alive by sharing in the life of Christ, so that he comes to rest in the Father, in the merciful and beatifying gaze of the Father: “You are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s”  (1 Cor 3:23).

This, then, is what it means to “put on Christ” (Gal 3:27). The sinner does not put on Christ as though putting on a garment, for doing so would leave him no better off than sinful Adam, who tried to hide his nakedness for shame of what he had become. Adam’s garments were skin deep, they were skins that hid but did not heal (cf. Gen 3:21), and what he put on over himself, like a shield or barrier, was the unmistakable sign that he would now be cut off from the intimate communion of trust, honesty, and surrender that befits one who is innocent, just, and utterly in love with the beloved. Anyone who must wear a garment has something to hide, something which cannot bear the light or must be protected.

The sinner puts on Christ by becoming one with Christ in the transformative mystery of baptism, through which he is brought forth in the Word as a newborn child purged of sin and replete with the grace of divine loveliness, with all spiritual beauty.

To put on Christ is to be pulled out of oneself and taken up by Him, since in His divine personhood—which is also the personhood of the humanity of Christ—the Word is pure ecstasy. When we take upon ourselves the image of the Son, we are taken up in the inwardness of the Son, who is the Image of the Father. We become living icons, reflecting our Maker with a new intensity, and we find the meaning of ourselves in the one of whom we are the image.

Characters in search of an author. Icons in search of their archetype. Images straining for the original. Heliotropes stretching towards the light. The author is waiting, summoning, drawing with a firm and gentle hand. The archetype radiates with inward brightness, Light from Light.

“Thou hast said, ‘Seek ye my face.’ My heart says to thee, ‘Thy face, O Lord, do I seek.’ Hide not thy face from me” (Ps 27:8-9).

[1] See my article “Are We God’s Sons and Daughters?

[2] Fallen man must return in the other direction, through the Word to the Father. As Christ is the exemplar of Adam, so too man is renewed in the image of this exemplary Adam and becomes an innocent man in the garden of heaven.

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Peter Kwasniewski, PhD

Peter Kwasniewski, PhD

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and The Catholic University of America who taught at the International Theological Institute in Austria, the Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austria Program, and Wyoming Catholic College, which he helped establish in 2006. Today he is a full-time writer and speaker on traditional Catholicism whose work appears online at, among others, OnePeterFiveNew Liturgical MovementLifeSiteNewsThe Remnant, and Catholic Family News. He has published thirteen books, including Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass (Angelico, 2020), The Ecstasy of Love in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Emmaus, 2021), and Are Canonizations Infallible? Revisiting a Disputed Question (Arouca, 2021). His work has been translated into at least eighteen languages. Visit his website at www.peterkwasniewski.com.

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AMERICA THESE PAST FOURTEEN MONTHS RESEMBLES A DYSTOPIA: The Biden administration shifts the blame for it by blaming others for its self-created mess or by seeking distractions. Now it is faulting gun owners for the crime wave it fostered, supposed “white supremacists” for the racial tensions it fanned, and Putin, whom it appeased.

______________________________________________

How America Became

 La La Land

Nothing seems to be working.

And no one seems to care.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

April 20, 2022

America these last 14 months resembles a dystopia. It is becoming partly the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, partly the poet Homer’s land of the Lotus-Eaters.

Nothing seems to be working. And no one in control seems to care. 

The once secure border of 2020 vanished. Two-million people have crossed the southern border illegally in the last twelve months. Millions more are on the way. 

The Biden Administration unilaterally and simply destroyed existing immigration law. 

What followed was surreal. The administration claimed COVID was again on the horizon. So it justified forcing American citizens to keep wearing masks in public buildings and transportation. But at the same time, it waived all such requirements for illegal entrants.

Citizens who obeyed our laws had to mask up; foreign nationals who broke them did not need to take such precautions. 

Biden blasted as near-criminals mounted border guards who used long reins to steady their horses. When investigations cleared them of wrongdoing, he went mute. This administration apparently sees its own American law enforcement at the border as criminals, and non-Americans who break our laws as their moral superiors.

Biden then concocted the perfect recipe for bringing back the inflation of the 1970s.

Print more money. Run up multitrillion-dollar annual deficits. Borrow trillions on top of a $30 trillion national debt. Send generous checks to workers for staying home. Shrug at historic disruptions of the supply chain. 

When reminded that his deliberate policies are the classic roads to inflation, Biden went fetal and ignored the warnings. Or he lashed out and blamed anyone and anything for his own suicidal agendas. 

First, we heard inflation was transitory. Then it was a mere concern of the elite. Then it was only a matter of exercise equipment being in short supply. Then it was solely because of Vladimir Putin. Then, somehow, it was also the result of Donald Trump. Then it was an organic phenomenon that presidents had little power to stop.

America was energy independent until the arrival of the Biden Administration. On the orders of his Green New Deal masters, Biden immediately began canceling federal oil and gas leases. He stopped new pipelines. He jawboned against the private financing of fossil-fuel production.

Biden was hellbent on his way to fulfilling his campaign promises of eliminating the use of natural gas and oil on his watch. 

Then prices soared and the public grew irate. In response, still more incoherence followed. 

The Biden Administration would not reverse its destructive energy policies. But as it floundered in desperation, Biden begged American enemies Iran, Russia, and Venezuela to pump more oil on our behalf. In vain, it beseeched Saudi Arabia to produce more of the hated icky stuff that we had in abundance but would not fully produce ourselves. 

Biden tapped the strategic petroleum reserve. Yet the existential peril was not war or natural catastrophe but Biden himself and his far more dangerous policies.

Abroad, we looked at the relatively manageable situation in Afghanistan and simply fled. The terrorist Taliban quickly took over and restored its medieval rule. 

The administration abandoned a $1 billion embassy and dumped a $300 million refitted airbase at Bagram. Over $70 billion in military supplies and weapons were left for Taliban terrorists. 

Thousands of refugees were airlifted, unchecked, into the United States. Meanwhile, hundreds of known translators and helpers of the U.S. military were left behind. 

As public outrage grew, in typical Biden fashion, he blamed the Afghanistan debacle on his generals. Then he blamed Trump. Then he denied that he had ever claimed the war was going well. 

In the end, the public was told the humiliating flight was a near-perfect logistical evacuation, as if America should be proud of being better at running away than it is at fighting. 

What explains an America that suddenly no longer works? 

First, all of these problems are self-induced. They did not exist until Biden birthed them for ideological or political reasons. Apparently, his administration wanted a changing, more favorable electorate and demography at any cost. 

Perhaps Biden was privately happy that cash-short commuters had to burn less gasoline. Maybe the more he printed money, the more he would be rewarded politically.

Second, Biden has no solutions to these self-created problems because of the ideological restraints the Left has imposed on him.

The administration fears the anger of the hard Left more than the furor of the American people. So it will not change, preferring to be politically correct and a failure than to be ideologically incorrect and successful. 

Third, when people object, this administration answers either by blaming others for its self-created mess or by seeking distractions. Now it is faulting gun owners for the crime wave it fostered, supposed “white supremacists” for the racial tensions it fanned, and Putin, whom it appeased.

The common denominator? Biden knows that he inherited a stable, prosperous America and has nearly ruined it. 

And he knows the American people know that too.

___________________________________________________

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