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• TRADITIONIS CUSTODES

Ethnic Diversity and the Latin Mass

 Joseph Shaw, PhDOctober 11, 20210 Comments

In a recent article in the Illinois Times, Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia, is quoted as follows, of a specific Traditional Mass location:

It’s not an accident that all of these Catholics at the old Mass are white, because one of the things that happened after Vatican II was an ‘inculturation’ of the liturgy. …The Latin Mass is white and European by its definition, because it’s a product of the Catholic Church of the 16th century. So, this is creating serious problems because it is never limited to the liturgy only, but it is always the first step to saying Vatican II was a disaster.

I would far rather ignore these childish accusations, but I fear that if they are repeated frequently enough without rebuttal they will become established as part of the liberal narrative about the Traditional Latin Mass. But in order to shoe-horn the movement for the ancient Mass into the role of the bad guys in some racially-charged political confrontation, Faggioli needs to distort the past and ignore the present. Let’s start with the past.

Faggioli claims that the Mass as experienced in celebrations of the pre-Vatican II liturgical books is the “product” of 16th century Europe. Were it so, it would come from a milieu with completely different cultural and political concerns from those of current American politics, but let that pass, because the claim is false, as Faggioli must be aware. Readers can compare the first printed missal, of 1474, with 16th-century and later examples right up to 1962 to satisfy themselves that no major changes were made in the 16th century. Nor was it new in 1474: that was simply a printed version of what the Franciscans had been using since the 13th century, a version of the Roman Missal for use outside Rome. The last significant changes to the Roman Missal took place between 9th and the 12th century—things like the Preparatory Prayers and Last Gospel, and the development of Low Mass—but it was substantially complete in the 8th century, and its central components were in place long before that. The Canon of the Mass dates, scholars tell us, from the 4th century.

The 4th century is not even Medieval: it is late Antiquity. Before the Muslims conquered North Africa three centuries later it would be anachronistic to contrast “European” with “non-European” culture, since the Mediterranean was not the dividing line between different cultures, but a conduit connecting a region of strongly interconnected cultures, which contrasted with the more remote hinterland in any direction: Germany in the north, Persia to the east, and the Sahara to the south. The ancient Roman Mass was a product of Jewish and Roman religious culture in this Mediterranean world, and it was closely aligned with the liturgical tradition of what the Romans called North Africa (as opposed to Egypt). The liturgy of other parts of the Roman Empire—Greece, Egypt, the Levant, France and Spain—had their own lines of development, but each influenced and were influenced by the others.

When the reformers started pulling things out of the Missal in the 1960s, they sometimes claimed that these things were “late” or “medieval.” They lacked the brass neck to claim they were “16th century”: they had more intellectual self-respect than Faggioli. In some cases they were correct, but in other cases what they removed went back much earlier. The ancient cycle of Sunday Gospels, for example, entirely lost in 1969, provided the subject matter of sermons by Pope Gregory the Great in the year 490. The ancient orations, which the reformers of the 1960s didn’t like because they talked about penance, sin, and grace, reflect the world of the Church’s great African theologians, St Augustine of Hippo and St Cyprian of Carthage.

What of the reformed Mass? When, and by whom, was this created? It may come as a shock to Faggioli to discover this, but it was produced overwhelmingly by a small group of European liturgical experts, closely aligned in age, education, and attitudes. Notoriously, only a few of them were pastors; even fewer had experience of pastoral work outside Europe and North America. What they destroyed was something which had formed the Catholic culture, not just of Europe, but of Latin America, Africa, India, and China.

To a Catholic in Shanghai, in Goa, in Mexico City, or in Cape Town, the ancient Mass is their ancient Mass. It is the Mass which marked the life events of their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. It is the Mass which evangelised their countries, often in the distant past, just as it evangelised England, Germany and Ireland in the early Middle Ages. It is this Mass which inspired their native saints and martyrs. It is this Mass which formed the backdrop to the authentic Catholic customs and art of which they are justly proud, from the wonderful baroque architecture of Catholic Latin America, to the exquisite devotional art of Catholic China.

Faggioli and his gang are determined to deprive them of this Mass, on the basis that he, and a handful of white American and European self-appointed liturgical experts, know better than they what is good for them. Sadly, since bishops all over the world are educated in Rome, a tiny clique of European liberals have outsized influence over what happens in other continents.

The International Una Voce Federation has members and contacts in the Philippines, in Malaysia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, all over Latin America, and in a number of locations in Africa, and I know, because I have corresponded with them, that the reason that the ancient Mass is more available in the good ol’ USA than in these places is not because no one wants it there, but because getting permission for it there has been extremely difficult, even under Summorum Pontificum. The bishops have been given the idea, by the likes of Andrea Grillo from his perch in Rome’s Sant’Anselmo university, that the traditional Mass is not part of the officially approved programme. Sometimes from ambition, sometimes from loyalty to the Holy See, and frequently from a feeling that this is the path of least resistance, many bishops in Africa, Asia, and Latin America stifle the traditional Mass in an exercise of clerical power which in any other context Faggioli would be the first to condemn as clericalism. Traditionis Custodes has encouraged them to go even further, as we have seen with the complete suppression of the Traditional Mass in Costa Rica.

To be fair, there are also practical constraints to the development of the Traditional Mass in those places, similar to those in America but biting more sharply. The limited education in Latin of many of the clergy (contrary, be it noted, to the requirements of Canon Law); limitations on resources of time and places where the Mass can be said; lack of money for the support of dedicated clergy, from (for example) the Traditional priestly institutes. Like Americans, Africans are willing to travel for up to two hours, if necessary, to get to Church: but if you are doing that on foot, this gives you a range of about ten miles, rather than more than 100 in a comfortable American car. Making provision for the Traditional Mass in this context is an entirely different ball-game from making provision for it in the rich world.

Despite all these difficulties, however, there are many points of light in the gloom: places where the faithful flock to attend the ancient Mass, and where they experience the same increases in personal devotion and vocations associated with the Traditional Mass in Europe and America. The Traditional Priestly institutes have apostolates in several African countries, and in parts of Latin America. The Apostolic Administration of Campos, an entire parallel traditional diocese in communion with the Holy See, is located in Brazil. The SSPX, thanks no doubt to the extensive missionary experience of Archbishop Lefebvre, have made Africa a priority in their work and have been present in multiple countries for up to fifty years.

This wide appeal of the Traditional Mass is also reflected in congregations in Europe and America which are consistently more diverse in race, sex, and age than local Novus Ordo celebrations. This is a widely noted phenomenon yet I notice that it finds no mention in the Illinois article. If Faggioli wants to make a claim to the contrary, he needs to provide some proper research to overturn the anecdotal evidence provided by traditionalists.

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I could leave it there, but I would like to take this brief analysis a little deeper. What exactly is it about the Traditional Mass which made it such a successful tool in the evangelisation of such contrasting cultures as Confucian China, Animist Africa, and the very varied cultures of Latin America? And where does the alternative model of worship, found in the Novus Ordo Missae, come from?

The contrast between the two Missals can be described in many ways, but a useful one in this context is between a rite focused on symbol and ritual, and one which, though it still retains these, shifts the emphasis towards verbal communication and spontaneity. A liturgy celebrated in a language most of the congregation does not understand, and partly silently, is clearly not relying very heavily on verbal communication to get its point across. It uses instead symbols and ritual, dramatic and repeated representations of the truths of faith and of the specific meaning of the rites through dramatic images: washing, genuflecting, incensing, kissing, and so on. The reform of the liturgy drastically cut down on these symbols, and compensated by giving the worshipper a great quantity of information through words, spoken aloud, in a vernacular language, some of it made up on the spot by the celebrant.

Now consider the religious culture of the countries outside Europe which the Church has evangelised in recent centuries, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These are, in their own ways, ritual cultures. Their native, non-Christian spirituality is expressed through symbols and ceremonies. The people who wanted to shift Catholic worship from a ritual to a verbal event certainly weren’t inspired by native American or African shamans, Japanese Shintoism, or the sacred texts and rituals of Hinduism.

Instead, they were responding to something quite different: a critique of the traditional Catholic liturgy mounted by modern Europeans. The thinkers of the Enlightenment and their intellectual successors liked to pour scorn on elaborate ritual, silent prayer and the use of sacred languages, as obscurantist. They wanted things to be aloud, visible, simple, and easy to understand: a set of propositions which could be set out, analysed, and if necessary defended. They looked at the Catholic liturgy and saw something primitive and barbarous. When they encountered the religious traditions of non-European cultures, they thought these were even worse.

The reform of the Catholic liturgy was done as a concession to this critique. This is not controversial: in saying this I am not making a hurtful accusation, but simply stating a fact which was acknowledged by the reformers themselves. At the time, and since, many Catholics have defended this concession as absolutely required if the Church is to gain a hearing in the modern world, by which they mean the world of European culture influenced decisively by Enlightenment ideas. I leave that argument to others to make. What is undeniable is that this project produced a liturgy not at all desired by Europeans less influenced by the Enlightenment, both by those without a modern, rationalist education, and by those critical of the Enlightenment project, such as the many intellectuals, writers, musicians, and artists, who signed petitions to save the traditional Mass.

It should be even more obvious that this new liturgy was light-years more distant from the authentic spiritual traditions of non-European cultures than the old liturgy had been. Yes, it is true that the reformed Mass is more flexible, and allows the insertion of non-Christian religious elements, and this has created the endless debate about syncretism (bad) vs. inculturation (good) which no-one seems able to resolve. This does not change the reality that the reformed Mass is in itself something completely alien to the religious instincts of almost all non-Christian religions, which are able to find specifically Christian expression in the ancient Mass.

I have written about the relationship between the ancient Mass and the Enlightenment here; and on the affinities of the ancient Mass with the religious culture of Africa, of China, and of the Islamic world. I have done a podcast interview with an anthropologist on the relationship between the ancient Catholic liturgy and the spirituality of the native people of the Amazon region. I have also written about its connection with the spirituality of the post-Enlightenment West: the New Age. We are now living in a time when Enlightenment thinkers and their ideas are being increasingly criticised for being euro-centric, for prioritising a specific model of rationality over all others, and even for being implicitly racist. And you know what? There is a grain of truth in this critique. But Faggioli needs to beware: if you try to use it against the Traditional Mass, it is going to blow up in your face.

Painting: “The First Mass in Wyoming” by Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs. 2020 oil on canvas. Used with permission. 

Joseph Shaw, PhD

Dr Joseph Shaw has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he also gained a first degree in Politics and Philosophy and a graduate Diploma in Theology. He has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and has edited The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form(Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Una Voce International. He teaches Philosophy at Oxford University and lives nearby with his wife and nine children.www.lmschairman.org

The Left Got What It Wanted

So Now What?

There is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches—because its claws tear all of us as well.

By Victor Davis Hanson

October 10, 2021

What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?

Then

No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, someday, in theory, could possibly commit.

Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a military coup. 

The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40 million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own investigation. 

Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate. 

No one worried about the weaponization of government. So, we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok (about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments. 

Two of them followed. Neither was conducted by a special counsel. There was no array of witnesses, no prosecutorial report. Much less were there formal charges of a specific high crime or misdemeanor, or bribery or treason, as specified by the Constitution. 

In the end, both farces ended in trials—but not before the Left had established lots of baleful precedents. Impeachment is now simply a tool to embarrass a president in his first term when he has lost the House. A Senate trial could hound an innocent president, even as a private citizen out of office. And a chief justice need not preside over the Senate trial. If and when Joe Biden loses the House, the Left should applaud any attempt to impeach him—given it established the new model of opposition.

Of the January 6 debacle, we were not told that it was a riot involving lawbreakers who would be punished. Instead, we were lied to that it was an “armed insurrection,” a “coup,” and “a rebellion” of massive proportions. 

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. In Animal Farm fashion, there were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

It mattered nothing that “armed” in the case of January 6 meant that no firearms were used or even found among the protestors. No one was charged with conspiracy, insurrection, or racketeering. But many were placed in solitary confinement without specific charges being filed—to the utter delight of liberal groups like the ACLU and human rights organizations.

The FBI—recently known mostly for spreading Hillary Clinton’s campaign collusion hoax—found no premeditated grand plot. The remaining media narratives were also untrue: Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick was not murdered but died tragically of a stroke the next day. Five persons were not “killed.” Four who died were Trump supporters. Only one of the five deaths occurred at the hand of a known other—a 14-year military veteran, unarmed, 110-pound female Ashli Babbitt. She was fatally shot while attempting to enter through a window of the Capitol by a law-enforcement officer—to the frequent approbation of the left-wing commentariat. The officer’s name was hidden for months from the public—something conspicuously uncharacteristic in other cases where law enforcement officers are involved in shooting unarmed suspects. 

Videos surrounding the entire melee still have been repressed. They likely will never be released. That infamous day remains in dire contrast to the prior 120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. 

Yet current Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. And the architect of the “1619 Project” reassured Americans that crimes against property like arson and looting are not really violence per se. The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality. There are now good riots and bad ones, and noble sustained silence about a noble officer who lethally shoots an unarmed suspect, and noble immediate outing of an ignoble officer who lethally shoots an unarmed suspect.

These were merely the main media distortions and fixations over the last four years. We forget the daily craziness such as a president’s calls to foreign heads of state routinely leaked or the FBI director passing on confidential memos of private presidential conversations to the liberal press, or the “whistleblower” who was not a whistleblower as much as a Democratic operative. The media nadir came when the press bellowed that Trump had overfed a fish.

An array of retired four-stars damned their president as Hitlerian, Mussolini-like, and deserving an early exit from office. Their superior morality naturally excused them from abiding by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. 

The New York Times falsely identified a minor Trump Administration bureaucrat (“anonymous”) as a major conservative truth-teller—once he thrilled the media by lying that a large, morally superior, inside cabal was devoted to obstructing the implementation of a president’s orders. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to an active FBI lawyer bragged of joining the “Resistance,” with plenty of conspiratorial retro-accusations that the 2016 election was “rigged.”

All that was a warm-up for the plague year in which Donald Trump was blamed for every COVID death. His medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci was deified, due largely to his coy opposition to the president he was supposed to serve. 

Both the current president and vice president had, less than a year ago, urged Americans not to be vaccinated, given their own reluctance to take a “Trump” vaccine. At least the anti-vaxxers had consistent opposition to the experimental inoculations; in contrast, the anti-Trumper anti-vaxxers merely saw sabotaging the 2020 vaccination program as necessary to be in a position to claim it as their own in 2021.

Now

What did all that madness achieve? Mostly, the first election in U.S. history in which over 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day. Strangely, with such an avalanche of ballots, the usual error rate of absentee balloting dived from around 2-4 percent to 0.2-0.4 percent. You see, when we suddenly must count tens of millions more paper ballots then it becomes easier, not harder, to spot errors.

So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory. 

The nation was done with the demonized Trump and now the Left controlled the presidency, and both houses of Congress. Somnolent Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton pledged to heal the nation as he overturned his predecessor’s supposedly disastrous policies and went on a rampage of slandering his opponents. If Donald Trump was once damned as non-compos mentis, the same media and academic accusers kept mum as Biden shuffled, fell, went mute, slurred words, and went off on angry, disjointed, and incoherent riffs.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record: the greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past.

And again, what was all that Pavlovian nihilism to achieve? 

Within eight months the following was finalized: Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama. 

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause. 

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists. Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts. China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular. 

At home, gas prices have soared. Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink. The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century. A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes and the incorrect idea that the United States was, is, and always will be a kind and humane place.

More will likely have died each day from COVID by year’s end during the Biden first 12 months than during Trump’s last 12 months. That statistic perhaps might have been meaningless had Biden himself not demagogued the idea that a president is strangely responsible for all pandemic deaths on his watch. 

But then again, Biden had warped the pandemic narrative only after he had inherited the Trump vaccination program (17 million vaccinated by Inauguration Day). Biden was wrongly and prematurely convinced that vaxxes were a permanent prophylaxis to any sort of COVID variants that would simply disappear once he took office. Depending on the occasion, Biden claims none, or just 4 million, were vaxxed until he took office, as truth and fantasies waft through his cloudy cognition.

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective nonenforcement of existing laws: Worse, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism. 

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists,” or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive? Was General Milley suffering from the very “white rage” he sought to ferret out?

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding. 

What did the Left leave as the proper model for conservatives now to deal with Biden? 

Impeach him when he loses the House? Get a special counsel, lavish said counsel with $40 million, a dream team of right-wing lawyers, and 22 months to find real Chinese collusion? 

Start seeding a conservative version of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman and an “anonymous” whistleblower inside the Biden octopus? 

Get retired four-star generals on TV to swear Biden is a Chinese “asset,” or have them retweet the idea of sending Biden supporters to China, or swear that he is a fascist? Bring back Woodward and Bernstein to find out whether Biden, Inc. ever paid taxes on all that Chinese and Ukrainian cash? 

Call in the ubiquitous Dr. Bandy X. Lee from Yale to administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to prove that Biden can distinguish a camel from an elephant or a train from a bike or count backwards from five? 

Will the Right prod General Mark Milley’s replacement to collude with soon-to-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy and call the Russians to warn them that Biden is demented, democracy is “messy,” Kamala Harris is crazy, and thus Moscow might need a warning from us about any Biden preemptive aggression?

And what of the people who voted for this change and the media that empowered it? In the latest Quinnipiac poll, known for its liberal affinities, Biden now earns a 38 percent approval rating. We should add a few extra negative points given media bias. Do they suffer buyer’s remorse or angst that they were lied to by the hard Left that Joe Biden was cognizant and not a mere vessel for a two-year push for overt socialism?

Meanwhile the media is reduced to explaining why an undocumented activist has an understandable right to chase a liberal Democratic senator into a public restroom, hector her, and then video her as she enters a stall to relieve herself and then post the grotesqueness on the internet—a felony in the state of the Arizona, though just part of the “process” for the president of the United States.

We could call the above insanity nemesis for woke hubris. Or maybe it is karma, “payback’s a bitch,” or “what goes around comes around.” But there is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches—because its claws tear all of us as well.

    “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us, too.” —Pope Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops of the World, July 7, 2007. This was a letter of clarification which Benedict wrote to explain why he had issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum on that same day, 14 years ago (link)    ”The response of Catholics to this draconian and unjust motu proprio (Traditionis custodes) has been much thoughtful analysis, but also an outpouring of prayer. And already, in only three months, the truth is being revealed.” —a commenter named “Sonny’s mom” at this link; it is the 17th comment down    ***        Letter #131, 2021, Monday, October 11: The story behind Traditionis custodes     Feast of Pope John XXIII    ***    Today’s letter contains a fascinating story (here in English, and here, in Italian) by American Catholic journalist and writer Diane Montagna.    This may be the most important story of the year for Catholics, the Catholic Church, and this papacy, and for this reason, Montagna, an old friend, is to be applauded for her work.    ***    It is a story of what seem clearly to be distortions and manipulations at the highest levels of the Vatican, covered up until now, revealed by Montagna on the basis of solid documentary evidence.    Montagna’s report should be read by all Catholics, especially by those on the “progressive” side, because it reveals why Catholics on the “conservative” side feel abused and deceived by recent decisions of Pope Francis on liturgical matters of profound importance to their spiritual lives.    Such Catholics feel deceived because, if what Montagna reports is true — and it seems to be true — they have, in fact, been deceived.    The consultative process leading to the issuing of Traditionis custodes was presented by the Vatican as fair and above board.    But this research shows that the process was, in fact, not fair, transparent and above board.    The process, this research shows, was tendentious, opaque, unfair.    Pope Francis himself was, it seems, manipulated, in order that he might give his signature to a document in which the facts of the matter were not represented to him in an accurate way.    Pope Francis needs to be told about this research by Montagna.    ***     The essence of the story    By a very careful reading of unpublished Vatican documents that Montagna managed to obtain in recent months, she has been able to show convincingly that, when Pope Francis signed the July 16 decree Traditionis custodes to suppress the celebration of the Mass in the old Tridentine rite, he had not been fully and honestly informed by his advisors about the results of surveys that had been done throughout the world on the pros and cons of continuing to follow the “compromise solution” in liturgical proposed by Pope Benedict XVIin his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum of July 7, 2007.     In that 2007 solution, Benedict affirmed that the old liturgy was profoundly holy and worthy to be celebrated perpetually as the “extraordinary form” of the liturgy of the Church, and that all priests were free to celebrate Mass in that form, because it is essentially good.    But in his July 16, 2021 decree Traditionis custodes, Pope Francissaid that the results of surveys taken by the Vatican around the world had shown that the “Benedict solution” was not working very well, that it was causing problems and divisions, and that, therefore, he had decided to suppress the old liturgy.    Francis wrote in Traditionis custodes: “In line with the initiative of my Venerable Predecessor Benedict XVI to invite the bishops to assess the application of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum three years after its publication, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith carried out a detailed consultation of the bishops in 2020. The results have been carefully considered in the light of experience that has matured during these years. At this time, having considered the wishes expressed by the episcopate and having heard the opinion of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I now desire, with this Apostolic Letter, to press on ever more in the constant search for ecclesial communion.”    So Francis says the results of the 2020 consultation of the world’s bishops were “carefully considered.”    Also on July 16, Francis wrote in an accompanying explaining his thinking in Traditionis custodes: “With the passage of thirteen years, I instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to circulate a questionnaire to the Bishops regarding the implementation of the Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. The responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene. Regrettably, the pastoral objective of my Predecessors, who had intended ‘to do everything possible to ensure that all those who truly possessed the desire for unity would find it possible to remain in this unity or to rediscover it anew,’ [12] has often been seriously disregarded. An opportunity offered by St. John Paul II and, with even greater magnanimity, by Benedict XVI, intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities, was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”    So Francis says the responses to the questionnaire sent out to the bishops “reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”    Thus it seems clear that Francis did in fact decide to issue Traditionis custodes on the basis of the results of this survey as they were reported to him, results that “saddened” him because they focused on the “disunity” that his advisors told him was being caused by the love of the old liturgy.    ***    Now what Montagna has shown is that Pope Francis was likely himself deceived, and that the surveys he refers to do not show the problems and divisions that Francis tells us he was advised they do show.    The bottom line here is this: Montagna shows that the reasons put forward for the decree Traditionis custodes are reasons without a solid basis in fact, baseless reasons.    This casts grave doubt on the credibility and, indeed, the validity of this document.        It suggests that, if Pope Francis had known of the evidence Montagna has uncovered, he would have recognized that his own advisors had not served him well, and would not have issued Traditionis custodes.    Based on this analysis of the actual data by Montagna, Traditionis custodes should seemingly now be seen as a document conceived, drafted and promulgated based on manipulated, or misinterpreted, data.    And, if this is the case, Francis might rightly declare Traditionis custodes to have been vitiated from the very moment of the decision to prepare and issue it, and so a document he might rightly declare null and void, and withdraw.    Here below is the complete text of the Montagna investigation of the seeming manipulation behind Traditionis custodes.    ***    First, a letter on this story    I received the following letter on this story from Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, an expert on the Church’s liturgy, a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College in California and of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.:    October 8, 2021    Dear Robert,    I was present when Diane gave this talk at the CIC (Catholic Identity Conference) in Pittsburgh last weekend (October 2 and 3). To describe the room of 700+ as electrified would be an understatement. (…) This exposure of shameless mendacity marks a new low-point in the three years since the McCarrick revelations. It is all of a piece, an entirely consistent record in which the occasional sops thrown to Catholic believers serve as distractions from the real business at hand, which is laying the groundwork for the suppression of all the elements distinctive of Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council, and indeed, of anything Catholic that survived the Council, such as John Paul II’s pellucid moral theology and Benedict XVI’s rich liturgical theology.    You may quote any of the above. By the way, I’ve known Diane for over twenty years. She was a student in my courses at the International Theological Institute (in Austria) in the early 2000s. She became a close personal friend of my wife and me, and then the goddaughter of our daughter. Her integrity is pristine and rigorous. She would never report any of this without having the actual CDF report in her hands and verified from trustworthy Vatican sources.    —Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski  Editor’s Note by Remnant Editor Michael Matt: This talk, delivered at the Catholic Identity Conference on October 3, 2021, has been edited by the author for print. —MJM    Translations:     Italian    French    ***    The Hidden Story behind Traditionis Custodes (link)    by Diane Montagna (photo left)    “Nothing is hidden that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light” (Lk 8:17).    [Note: Everything below is by Diane Montagna; the sections which follow the large red quotation marks are callouts from her article.]    Sometimes things are not as they seem. And sometimes, there are two “realities”: one that is officially given by those in power, and one that we then discover to be the truth.    When, on July 16, 2021, Pope Francis promulgated Traditionis Custodes, restricting the traditional Latin Mass, he said that according to the results of a recent Vatican consultation of bishops, the norms of his predecessors Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, had been exploited by some who attend the traditional Latin Mass to sow dissent from the Second Vatican Council.     In the apostolic letter, Pope Francis writes in regard to the survey of bishops:    “In line with the initiative of my Venerable Predecessor Benedict XVI to invite the bishops to assess the application of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum three years after its publication, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith carried out a detailed consultation of the bishops in 2020. The results have been carefully considered in the light of experience that has matured during these years.”    He continues:    “Having considered the wishes expressed by the episcopate and having heard the opinion of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I now desire, with this Apostolic Letter, to press on ever more in the constant search for ecclesial communion. Therefore, I have considered it appropriate to establish the following:”    Pope Francis then proceeds to outline the new restrictions to the Traditional Latin Mass.“The article I published in the Remnant on June 1, 2021, which described what was in the first and third drafts, was given to Pope Benedict XVI. One reliable source told me afterward that the pope emeritus was “shocked.” It is therefore difficult to believe that he was consulted in any meaningful way.    Along with the decree, Pope Francis also issued an accompanying letter, addressed to the bishops of the world. He introduced it by noting that, as Benedict XVI had done with Summorum Pontificum in 2007, he too wished to explain the “motives that prompted [his] decision” to restrict the Traditional Latin Mass.    First among them, he says, are the results of the survey sent to bishops worldwide by the CDF. Pope Francis explains:      “I instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to circulate a questionnaire to the Bishops regarding the implementation of the Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. The responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me and persuades me of the need to intervene. Regrettably, the pastoral objective of my Predecessors, who had intended ‘to do everything possible to ensure that all those who truly possessed the desire for unity would find it possible to remain in this unity or to rediscover it anew’, has often been seriously disregarded. An opportunity offered by St. John Paul II and, with even greater magnanimity, by Benedict XVI, intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities, was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”“According to Pope Francis, then, the consultation of bishops played a fundamental role in his decision to severely restrict the traditional Mass.    Based on these results, Pope Francis concludes that:    “In defense of the unity of the Body of Christ, I am constrained to revoke the faculty granted by my Predecessors. The distorted use that has been made of this faculty is contrary to the intentions that led to granting the freedom to celebrate the Mass with the Missale Romanum of 1962.”    Further on in the accompanying letter, yet another reference is made to the results of the questionnaire. Pope Francis says:    “Responding to your requests, I take the firm decision to abrogate all the norms, instructions, permissions and customs that precede the present Motu proprio, and declare that the liturgical books promulgated by the saintly Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, constitute the unique [unica] expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.”    According to Pope Francis, then, the consultation of bishops played a fundamental role in his decision to severely restrict the traditional Mass. As he said himself, the results so “preoccupied and saddened” him, that they “persuaded” him to “intervene.” And he ordered that the decree take immediate effect.    Following the promulgation of Traditionis Custodes, considerable speculation was therefore swirling about the survey, but the Vatican has not published its results.    “Would it make sense to think that Traditionis Custodes was just the result of the consultation with the world’s bishops, when we now know that in late January 2020, a plenary session of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith took place, where three cardinals were already laying the groundwork for the July 16, 2021 Motu Proprio?    A CDF superior speaks out    Four days later, on July 20, 2021, a Catholic News Service interview appeared in the National Catholic Reporter and America Magazine, in which CDF superior, Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, who serves an adjunct secretary in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, voiced his support for the official narrative set forth by Pope Francis. DiNoia insisted that the Pope’s accompanying letter “fearlessly hits the nail on the head: the traditional Latin Mass movement has hijacked the initiatives of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI to its own ends.”    Questions Arise    But does Traditionis Custodes truly reflect what the real situation is? Was the survey on which Pope Francis said he based his decision a fair consultation of the world’s bishops? Would this consultation be considered fair if some of the content of Traditionis Custodes had already been suggested during a plenary meeting of the CDF, at the end of January 2020, that gave way to a consultation that was meant to justify the decisions reached in Traditionis Custodes? Could it be called fair if it came to light that there was a second, parallel report created within the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which was completed before all the responses from bishops had been received by the CDF? And could it be called fair if Traditionis Custodes did not accurately represent the main, detailed report prepared for Pope Francis by the CDF’s fourth section, i.e. the former Ecclesia Dei? Many people, in fact, knew that this report was being prepared.    Let’s examine what has now come to light about each of these three questions.    The 2020 Plenary Session    To our first question: Would it make sense to think that Traditionis Custodes was just the result of the consultation with the world’s bishops, when we now know that in late January 2020, a plenary session of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith took place, where three cardinals were already laying the groundwork for the July 16, 2021 Motu Proprio?    On the afternoon of January 29, 2020, a plenary session meeting was held to discuss the fourth section of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, what was formerly known as the Pontifical Ecclesia Dei Commission, at which the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, SJ, was not present due to illness.    Before going on, I should say that it is widely thought that Cardinal Ladaria was “reluctant” to publish Traditionis Custodes. He is said to be a good man, is extremely discreet, but will not ultimately go against the Holy Father’s wishes.    In Cardinal Ladaria’s absence, the assembly was chaired by CDF secretary, Archbishop Giacomo Morandi. Morandi, some of you may remember, was appointed to the CDF as undersecretary in 2015 before three officials were removed under Cardinal Müller. When Cardinal Müller was “ousted” in 2017, and Cardinal Ladaria was appointed Prefect, Morandi was promoted to secretary.    “One cardinal expressed some alarm that close to 13,000 young people had registered for the Chartres pilgrimage. He said we need to get to the bottom of why these young people are attracted to the traditional Mass.    Also present at the January 29, 2020 plenary session were other members of the CDF, including Vatican Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin; Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation for the Bishops; Italian Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education; Cardinal Beniamino Stella, then-Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, American Cardinals Sean Patrick O’Malley and Donald Wuerl; Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization; Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who serves as an adjunct secretary for the CDF; French Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, French Archbishop Roland Minnerath, and others. The Pope would not have been at this sort of meeting.    According to reliable sources, Cardinal Parolin, Cardinal Ouellet and Cardinal Versaldi were leading the discussion and piloting it in a definite direction.    To give you a taste of what was said, one cardinal—who is considered more of an “acolyte” than a gang leader—expressed some alarm that close to 13,000 young people had registered for the Chartres pilgrimage. He said we need to get to the bottom of why these young people are attracted to the traditional Mass and explained to the others present that many of these young people have “psychological and sociological problems.” The cardinal in question has a background in canon law and psychology, so his remarks about “psychological problems” would have carried more weight, especially with bishops and cardinals who are not familiar with the traditional Latin Mass or Latin Mass circles.    Another cardinal said that from the little experience he had, “these groups don’t accept change” and they “participate without concelebrating.”     The CDF should therefore ask for a “concrete sign of communion, of the recognition of the validity of the Mass of Paul VI,” he insisted, adding that “we can’t go on like this.”     He seconded the concern that these groups attract young people and asked that concrete ways be found to demonstrate that these people are in the Church.    “The message [from the bishops] was basically to leave Summorum Pontificum alone, and to continue with a prudent and careful application.    An Italian archbishop said he agreed the CDF shouldn’t resume discussions with the SSPX, because “there’s no dialogue with the deaf.” He lamented that Pope Francis had given concessions to the SSPX in the Year of Mercy but was getting nothing in return.    The hour and a half meeting wrapped up with the following quote: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”    Despite the variety of observations offered at this plenary session—which again, lasted an hour and a half—there was only one conclusion that came out in the final proposals offered to the Holy Father. What was it?     To carefully study the eventual transfer of competence over the Ecclesia Dei Institutes and the other matters handled by the Fourth Section, to other Vatican dicasteries who deal with related matters: the Congregation for Divine Worship, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (also known as the Congregation for Religious), and the Congregation for Clergy.    “Some bishops would have spoken of a need for more Latin. Instead, as we see in Traditionis Custodes, the opposite is being decreed.    In articles 6 and 7 of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francissets forth these norms:    Art. 6.: Institutes of consecrated life and Societies of apostolic life, erected by the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, fall under the competence of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies for Apostolic Life.    Art. 7: The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, for matters of their particular competence, exercise the authority of the Holy See with respect to the observance of these provisions.    Keep in mind that the questionnaire was sent out five months later, in May 2020. It is not known who wrote the questions.    So it seems the ball had already been set rolling at the plenary session in late January 2020.    A Second Parallel Report    Now to our second question: Could it be called fair if it came to light that there was a second, parallel report created within the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s doctrinal section, which was completed even before all the responses from bishops had been received by the CDF?    Reliable sources have confirmed that while the main report was being prepared, CDF superiors commissioned a second report in order to be sure that the main report reflected the feedback of the bishops.     The Congregation allegedly had to be sure that the main report didn’t just come to the usual conclusions, e.g. that the traditional Mass is a positive element in the life of the Church, etc., etc., etc.     The second report was therefore billed as a sort of second opinion, a check on the main report. CDF superiors therefore commissioned an official within the doctrinal section to write his own report.    It’s important to keep in mind that the responses would have been coming in by post or email, or through the nunciatures or episcopal conferences.    To review the timeline of how things unfolded: The plenary session referred to above was held in January 2020. The questionnaire was sent out the following May. The bishops were given until October 2020 to respond, but as with things Roman, responses continued to come in until January 2021 and all of them were received, reviewed, and considered for the main report.    “Some bishops said they wished they had a greater presence of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass in their seminary and among younger priests.    Concerning the second, parallel report, it is not known if the official assigned the task of writing it was told to come to certain conclusions.    What is certain is that the second parallel report, which to my knowledge was commissioned around November 2020, was handed in before Christmas.     However, at this point, the CDF was still receiving and processing responses to the survey, and did so until January 2021.     So the second report was surely incomplete, and also likely superficial, given how quickly it was completed, the volume of material to be analyzed, and the fact that material was being received in four or five languages.    So two reports were prepared.     Was the one that best suited a certain agenda chosen as the basis of Traditionis Custodes? Or did those in charge—realizing that the material coming into the CDF would not reflect or justify what those pushing for restrictions wanted to prove—commission the second report and complete it in a matter of less than one month so that a sort of parallel text could be offered to the Holy Father?    It is unknown if Pope Francis read the second report, or if he received it before or after the main report. It’s been kept very quiet.    But what is coming to light, and we will look at this matter next, is that Traditionis Custodes does not reflect the premises or conclusions of the main detailed report.     So the question is: does it reflect the premises and conclusions of another report? Could this be the second report? Or could it perhaps not reflect the conclusions of any report but have been crafted otherwise.    “Some bishops had negative comments, but reliable sources say that neither the responses, nor the main report, were predominantly negative.    The Main Report    Now to our third question: Could it be called fair if Traditionis Custodes did not accurately represent the main, detailed report prepared for Pope Francis by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?    Earlier I referenced an interview that featured CDF adjunct secretary, Archbishop Augustine Di Noia, and was published on July 20, 2021, just four days after the promulgation of Traditionis Custodes.    Insisting that he was speaking “as a theologian,” and not as a CDF official, Archbishop Di Noia appeared to distance himself from the questionnaire, saying he did not have the results.     He also downplayed the importance of the consultation, saying the Pope’s “rationale for the abrogation of all previous provisions in this area is not based on the results of the questionnaire but only occasioned by them.” A rather odd formulation, given Pope Francis’s own explanation of his motives.    The article is presented as the summary of an email correspondence or call, so perhaps Archbishop Di Noia didn’t have the report on his desk when he was holding the phone or responding by email. But as a superior of the CDF, it’s impossible, it’s inconceivable that he didn’t at least have access to that report, which was drafted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. You don’t have to be an Einstein to figure this out.    Could a person say, “As a theologian, I don’t have the results” when, as a CDF superior you would have received an advance copy and been present when the draft report was reviewed? The executive summary was seen in draft form by some in the CDF.    “The premises and conclusions of Traditionis Custodes are not the same as the detailed main report produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.    As an aside, the article also claims that Pope Francis “likely either consulted with or at least gave advance copies of the document to retired Pope Benedict.”         I have been told that the article I published in The Remnanton June 1, 2021, six weeks before Traditionis Custodes was promulgated, and which described what was in the first and third drafts, was given to Pope Benedict XVI. One reliable source told me afterward that the pope emeritus was “shocked.” It is therefore difficult to believe that he was consulted in any meaningful way.    Was Pope Francis given the main report?     Sources say that during an audience with CDF Prefect Cardinal Ladaria, Pope Francis literally snatched the working copy of the report from his hands, saying he wanted it immediately because he was curious about it. Whether Pope Francis actually read the main report is unknown.    Contents of the Main Report in Light of the Consultation    To my knowledge, the main report was very thorough and was broken down into several sections. One part was very analytical, offering analysis diocese by diocese, country by country, region by region, continent by continent, with pie charts and graphs. Another part was a summary where all the argumentation was presented, along with recommendations and trends. And to my knowledge, one part of the report contained quotations taken from the responses that came from the individual dioceses. This collection of quotations would have been included to give the Holy Father a well-rounded sampling of what the bishops said.    I had reported in June that only a third of the world’s bishops responded to the survey. One might argue that this is not a bad representation, given that one would not necessarily expect a response from many countries, e.g., where the Byzantine or other Eastern liturgies are celebrated.    In those regions where the traditional Mass is more widespread (i.e., France, the US, and England) the situation is very favorable. The CDF received a 65-75 percent response from these countries, and of that percentage more than 50 percent were favorable. This would have been reflected in the main report.    The executive summary would have also reflected that there is a lot of fruit being born from the traditional Mass.    “Some have suggested that an implementing instruction of Traditionis Custodes could be forthcoming, perhaps by Christmas, but this is still unknown.    What would a reasonable person have taken away from the main report? That a reasonable majority of bishops, using different words and in different ways, basically were sending the message: “Summorum Pontificum is fine. Don’t touch it.” It would certainly not have been 80 percent who said this in this way.     But over 35 percent of the bishops would have said, “Don’t touch anything, leave everything as it is.” On top of this, another percentage of bishops would have said: “Basically don’t touch it, but there would be one or two things I’d suggest, like a bishop having a bit more control.”     Even some of the bishops who gave the most positive responses to the questionnaire made these sorts of comments or suggestions.    All told, then, more than 60 percent to two-thirds of bishops would have been on board with staying the course, perhaps with some slight modifications. The message was basically to leave Summorum Pontificum alone, and to continue with a prudent and careful application.    The main report spoke of areas where there’s room for improvement, such as more training in seminaries. Some bishops spoke of the need for more training in Extraordinary Form, and for the need for good liturgy in general. Some bishops would have spoken of a need for more Latin. Instead, as we see in Traditionis Custodes, the opposite is being decreed.    To my knowledge, what really happened is that all that was ancillary in the main report has been projected as a major problem and has been expanded, magnified and hugely taken out of proportion. Take the problem of unity. This lack of unity, from what the bishops said, came from both directions, not just from traditional groups.    Some bishops—although they do not celebrate the traditional Mass themselves—said they are happy that the faithful have somewhere to go. They say that apart from the crazies that one can find in traditional circles—and equally, if not more, elsewhere—usually these groups are made up of young married couples with many children. They pray, they help the parish and diocese financially, they are involved in the parish and diocesan life very actively. They are well formed and appreciate good music. Very positive comments.    Again, regarding seminary formation, some bishops said they wished they had a greater presence of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass in their seminary and among younger priests, but they cannot do more than they are currently doing, because the older priests, especially those who lived the transition from before to after Vatican II, would create havoc in the diocese.     These older priests would see something in which they have been highly involved, and which was presented to them as a kind of victory, swept away by the younger priests and a supportive bishop, who is more supportive of tradition than of the object of their victory.     This sort of response, though a small percent, was not confined to one geographical location.        “Individual diocesan priests should continue offering private Masses, since the 1962 Missal has not been abrogated.    Interestingly, in Asia, some bishops said they have a problem with the Latin language, because it comes from a different region, which is completely understandable.     They effectively told the CDF: We would be very happy if someone from Rome would come and teach our priests, so that they could offer the Extraordinary Form. In our seminary, we don’t have it because the priests don’t know Latin and don’t know how to offer it. We would be happy to have it because it increases prayer and devotion. But all of this vanished and received no mention at all in Traditionis Custodes.    Obviously some bishops had negative comments, but reliable sources say that neither the responses, nor the main report, were predominantly negative.    The truly tragic situation, I am told, is in Italy. In many dioceses apart from places like Rome, Milan, Naples and Genoa, and perhaps a few others, Summorum Pontificum has barely, if at all, been implemented. And yet many bishops, who have no practical knowledge of Summorum Pontificum’simplementation, responded in ideological terms, saying (and I paraphrase): “This cannot be. It does not reflect Vatican II.”    There is even reason to believe that some of the Italian bishops were coached in their responses. Italy has nearly 200 bishops representing very different backgrounds. They come from different geographical locations, seminaries and universities, and experiences of priestly formation. Yet many of them in their response used the same phrase, “return to the pre-Summorum Pontificum” regime. In Italian, the phrase is: “Tornare al regime precedente di Summorum Pontificum.”     This is somewhat odd, especially when even bishops who don’t have any real presence of the Extraordinary Form in their diocese incorporate it into their response.    A further point: In the article mentioned earlier, Archbishop Di Noia claimed that “the thing has gotten totally out of control and become a movement, especially in the U.S., France and England.” (Actually, these are not countries where the traditional Latin Mass is “out of control” but simply widespread.) But since Traditionis Custodes provides means to take control of this “out of control” situation, according to Di Noia, one would think that the American, French and English bishops would have immediately applied it with the strongest possible interpretation. Presumably, they would have taken advantage of the fact that it was immediately applicable, but that hasn’t happened, so where’s the “out of control”?    This was reflected in the bishops’ responses after the promulgation of Traditionis Custodes. The first reaction was often to decree that everything would continue as is, until there is time to study, discuss, etc.     Where bishops already opposed the Extraordinary Form, they decided to be more holy than the Pope and to ban it.     But most bishops said they would guarantee the pastoral care of those attached to the traditional Latin Mass. This was in line with the way bishops expressed themselves in their responses to the survey. In fact, when these decrees came out, they reflected the tone that the bishop had used when he responded.    The key point, as you will have likely gathered by now, is that the premises and conclusions of Traditionis Custodes are not the same as those presented in the detailed main report produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.     Traditionis Custodes was not consistent with what the main report recommended or revealed.     As one source said, “What they are really interested in doing is cancelling the Old Mass, because they hate it.”    ***    [Editor’s Note: Here below, Montagna gives quotations from the unpublished text of the surveys of the world’s bishops. So, beneath the title “Negative assessments about the attitude of certain faithful,” the words Montagna writes, though not in quotes, are evidently words taken from the surveys themselves, which she was able to obtain and read.]    As I mentioned earlier, to my knowledge, one part of the report contained quotations taken from the responses that came in from the individual dioceses.    These were meant to provide the Holy Father with a representative sampling of responses, and were broken down into various categories.    These included: “negative evaluations about the attitude of certain faithful”; “on the isolation of the community”; a very brief section “on the irrelevance of the EF for the people”; “on the need and/or pastoral fittingness of the EF”; “on those whom the EF attracts”; a considerable section of quotations on “the value of the EF for the peace and unity of the Church”; “on the liturgical theological and catechetical value of the EF”; “on the historic value of the EF”; “on the influence of the EF on the OF”; “on the influence of the EF on seminaries and/or houses of formation”; and a long final section of “proposals for the future.”    One can see from the quotations included that the findings were not sugar-coated.    Let’s consider just a few of them from the various categories (EF=Extraordinary Form; OF=Ordinary Form):    Negative assessments about the attitude of certain faithful    In a negative sense, [the EF] can foster a feeling of superiority among the faithful, but since this rite is more widely used, that feeling has diminished (A Bishop of England, response to question 3).    I see no negative aspects to the use of EF as such. When there are negative aspects, they are due to the negative attitudes of those who have strong opinions in one direction or another with respect to this celebratory form. When it is ideology, and not the pastoral good of the Church, that guides discernment about the use of the EF, then comes conflict and division. I repeat: this is something extrinsic to the use of the Mass itself (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 3).    There may be a tendency among some of the faithful to see this [the EF] as the only “true” Mass, but I think this comes from the fact that these people have been seen as “odd,” or marginalized. If you try to “regularize” it as much as possible, then these people feel cared for and guided pastorally, and they can be very faithful and loyal (A Bishop of England, response to question 3).    The aspects [of the EF] in themselves are only positive: it is a great gift for all to be able to know and attend the celebration in the extraordinary form. The negative aspects are only present to the extent that these celebrations are celebrated and/or attended by unbalanced or ideologized people (A Bishop of Italy, response to question 3).    The division and discord do not come from the use of the EF, but from people’s perception of those who attend. People are attributed motivations and tendencies that are not true at all (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 3).    On the irrelevance of the EF for the people    Sometimes the form has been applied not for the good of souls, but to pander to the personal tastes of the presbyter (A Bishop of Italy, response to question 4).    On the necessity and/or pastoral convenience of the EF    The current offer of Masses and celebrations in the EF meets the pastoral needs of the faithful. Initial conflicts about the establishment of Masses in the EF have been peacefully resolved in recent years (Joint Report of the German Bishops’ Conference, response to question 1).    The EF gives those faithful a context for growing in holiness through a Eucharistic celebration that deepens their communion with Christ and with others in a way that corresponds to their sensibilities. A similar statement can be made about others who grow spiritually and ecclesially through more contemporary forms of celebration (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 3).    The attraction exerted by the EF is as much a reaction to a less-than-satisfactory celebration of the OF as it is a specific desire for a Latin liturgy (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 9).    On those the EF attracts    This movement attracts many young families who are comfortable with this liturgy and in the activities that are offered around it. I think such diversity is good in the Church, and that the dwindling number of practitioners should not generate at all costs a uniformity of proposals. This liturgical form is nourishing for many. There is a sense of the sacred that is pleasing and that orients one toward God (A Bishop of France, response to question 3).    We have observed that these families attend many of the diocesan youth and vocational events in a far greater proportion than any other group (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 9).    EF Masses in our diocese attract quite a few devoted families. While some of the parents do “home-schooling,” others put their children in local Catholic schools. These families embrace many of the principles promoted by Vatican II, including the need to cultivate the domestic Church and the universal call to holiness (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 3).    A significant number of fervent young people feel nurtured – not exclusively – by EF. The peaceful presence of the EF allows some young people (moreover, typical of their generation) who feel a call to the priesthood to trust the Diocese (A Bishop of France, response to question 8).    On the value of the EF for the peace and unity of the Church    The EF, under the prudent leadership of the Ordinary, has allowed more Catholics to be able to pray according to their desire, and has dispelled the conflicts of before. Its quiet presence should not be disturbed (A Bishop of England, response to question 9).    The most positive aspect of the use of the EF is that there is now no longer any “clan” claiming the “true Mass.” The Eucharistic mystery has been freed of a very damaging ideological split. This has been to the great advantage of the perception of the unity of the Church realized around the Eucharist (A Bishop of France, response to question 3).    I would see it as a benefit to the whole Church if the Holy See continued to support faithful Catholics who are attached to the EF of the Roman Rite. Even in general terms, fostering genuine differences in thought and expression is a benefit to the universal Church. Having a section devoted to it in the CDF is helpful, when liturgical developments or clarifications are needed. In keeping with universal norms, our Archdiocese has also undertaken to establish a dialogue with local and national leaders of the FSSPX. I believe this positive step was facilitated by the existence of Summorum Pontificum and the communities it fostered (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 9).    I believe that many of those who had felt separated from the Church and had gone to extra-ecclesial communities felt welcomed back into the structure of the Church because of Summorum Pontificum (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 3).    On the liturgical, theological, and catechetical value of the EF    I myself have celebrated presbyteral ordinations in the EF when it is not my usual form, and I have been able to appreciate its richness, beauty, and liturgical depth (A Bishop of France, response to question 3).    It would not be difficult to say that if they were polled, nearly 100% of those who attend the EF believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, while drastically lower numbers have been shown for Catholics who go predominantly to the OF (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 3).    On the influence of the EF on the OF    Although the EF is not widely followed, it does influence the OF in a very healthy direction, which I would summarize as “toward greater devotion [reverence]” (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 9).    The OF and EF represent two different understandings of the Eucharist, Ecclesiology, the baptismal priesthood, and the sacrament of Orders (just to mention the most obvious theological differences). To attempt to adopt elements of the EF would only be to send inconsistent signals to the faithful (A Bishop of Japan, response to question 5).    Two parish priests who learned the EF subsequently introduced ad orientem celebration for some or all of their Masses, which was well received by their faithful, who were well catechized in advance. In addition, for some of our priests, there has been greater care of the consecrated host, both through the reintroduction and customary use of the communion plate and through greater care by the priest himself at the altar (A Bishop in the Caribbean, response to question 5).    Proposals and/or perspectives for the future    The practice [of the MPSP] followed so far has proven its worth, and for pastoral reasons, it should not be changed (Joint Report of the German Bishops’ Conference, response to question 9).    I fear that without the EF, many souls would leave the Church (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 3).    Ecclesial movements [such as those linked to the EF] have great potential to renew the Church (…). At the same time, ecclesial movements can also wander off and on their own, creating almost a parallel Church and falling into an elitist attitude that sees only them as “true Catholics.” This happens when they are left alone. In other words, they can only renew the Church if the hierarchy involves itself with them, allowing them to develop according to the Spirit but also maintaining communion with the Church. When members of these movements feel challenged or ignored by their pastors, then they withdraw and become resentful, but when they feel that their pastors are among them and guiding them, then they become valuable means of evangelization (A Bishop of the United States, response to question 9).    I think this is the best approach to use about the use of EF: the school of Gamaliel: “If this activity is of human origin, it will be destroyed, but if it comes from God, you will not be able to defeat them; do not find yourselves fighting against God” (Acts 5:38-39) (idem).    Ask priests who celebrate in the EF to learn to celebrate in the OF and to do so in large gatherings around the bishop, and also to be able to render service in parishes (A Bishop of France, response to question 9).    I must state, in good conscience, that a rethinking of the choices made is more necessary and urgent than ever (A Bishop of Italy, response to question 9).    I have the impression that any explicit intervention could cause more harm than good: if the line of the Motu proprio is confirmed, the perplexed reactions of the clergy will find new intensity; if the line of the Motu proprio is denied, the reactions of dissent and resentment of the lovers of the ancient rite will find new intensity (A Bishop of Italy, answer to question 9).    I do not believe that it is appropriate to abrogate it or limit it with new norms, so as not to create contrasts and further conflicts, leading to the feeling of a lack of respect for minorities and their sensitivities (A Bishop of Italy, response to question 9).    Conclusion    What’s next? It’s hard to tell. Some have suggested that an implementing instruction of Traditionis Custodes could be forthcoming, perhaps by Christmas, but this is still unknown.    We have grown used to the Holy See supporting the liturgical peace of the Church, but we can no longer take that for granted. In conclusion, and by way of advice:Priests, stable groups, and individuals should refrain from any correspondence with the Holy See. Those attached to the traditional Latin Mass should also avoid giving the impression that they are “warriors” in their diocese or parish, who are always protesting or unhappy. The goal must be to not lose the traditional Latin Mass as a normal form of prayer. And, as children of the heavenly Father, we must pray for the hierarchy. This is our duty.Individual diocesan priests should continue offering private Masses, since the 1962 Missal has not been abrogated.Bishops whom the Holy Father has entrusted with the task of guarding tradition should truly evaluate whether the implementation of Traditionis Custodes would bring true spiritual benefits to their flock. Bishops might realize that what inspired the Holy Father is totally different from the situation in their own diocese and act accordingly.    Today is the 450th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and commemorates the victory of the Holy League (an alliance of Catholic States commissioned to defeat the Turks) over the fleet of the Ottoman Empire.    It was the largest naval battle in Western history since classical antiquity.    St. Pope Pius V (1504-1572), who commissioned the Holy League, put as much emphasis on the power of Rosary as he did on the Holy League.    He is also known for his role in the Council of Trent, for codifying the Rosary, and for promulgating the 1570 Missale Romanum with the papal bull, Quo Primum.    With this bull, the saintly pope sought to ensure that no one could ever change the Mass.    At the Battle of Lepanto, the only thing standing between Europe and its certain destruction were the men of Christendom willing to answer the call of the Church, and their readiness to pray the Rosary in defense of Catholic Europe.    May such men arise today in defending the traditional Roman liturgy, and may Our Lady have the victory!    [End, analysis by Diana Montagna, Traditionis Custodes: Separating Fact from Fiction]

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Renowned Catholic Historian: According to Archbishop Vigano “many parts of the Catholic World” think Francis is “an Anti-Pope”

October 07, 2021

Dr. Edmund Mazza… on EWTN Live with Fr. Mitch Pacwa in conjunction with Mazza’s July 2015 Conference at New York University commemorating the 750th anniversary of the birth of Dante Alighieri. In 2012 Mazza organized “Mary, Sign of Faith: An International Symposium” in Rome. 

Renowned Catholic historian Dr. Edmund Mazza, a former full professor of history at Azuza Pacific University, said that according to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano “many parts of the Catholic world” think Francis is “an anti-pope”:

And you know you and I are not the only people to actually start thinking like this. Six months ago, his eminence, his excellency, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the speaker at your recent conference… He had something very interesting to say.

In an interview with radio Spada, he said “From many parts of the Catholic world, especially in the conservative milieu, we hear it said that Benedict XVI is the true Pope and that Bergolio is an anti-pope.” And he says something important. He says this opinion is based on the one hand, on the belief that his renunciation is invalid due to the way it was formulated, due to the pressure exerted by external forces, or the distinction between munus, office and papal ministerium or ministry. And on the other hand, the fact that a group of progressive cardinals is said to have tried to have their own candidate elected at the conclave of 2013, in violation of the norms of the apostolic constitution, Universi Dominici Gregis, of John Paul II. And then he finishes by saying beyond the plausibility of these arguments, which is confirmed, could invalidate Bergolio’s election. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/10/exclusive-transcription-is-benedict-xvi.html  and https://www.patrickcoffin.media/is-benedict-xvi-still-the-pope/]

Note: About Edmund J. Mazza

Edmund J. Mazza is [a former] Professor of History at Azusa Pacific University in Los Angeles where he [taught] Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance and Reformation History. Dr. Mazza has contributed chapters on these subjects for Cognella Press’s forthcoming, A History of the Premodern World. Dr. Mazza is also the author of the brand new book The Scholastics and the Jews, Coexistence and Conversion and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance.  

Mazza and his wife were… guests on EWTN Live with Fr. Mitch Pacwa in conjunction with Mazza’s July 2015 Conference at New York University commemorating the 750th anniversary of the birth of Dante Alighieri. In 2012 Mazza organized “Mary, Sign of Faith: An International Symposium” in Rome. In 2010 he was selected for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Aristotle on Truth and Meaning” at San Diego State University. Dr. Mazza is the author of several articles in the online journal Catholic World Report. Mazza’s research has taken him from the Vatican’s Secret Archives to the lost tomb of St. Francis Xavier in Malaysia. He is a frequent guest on AM 930 Immaculate Heart Radio’s “Terry & Jesse Show.” Dr. Mazza often speaks at the Sacred Heart Chapel in Covina. His DVDs and CDs on Church History are available from Lighthouse Catholic Media/St. Joseph Communications.[https://www.stthomasmore.net/event-2509968]

^{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. 

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Socci: Even Francis contradicted Team Francis when he admitted Benedict was Emeritus Pope & “has not Abandoned the Office of Peter” 

October 10, 2021

Antonio Socci in his book presents the case that when Benedict XVI’s personal secretary Georg Ganswein said:

“He [Benedict] has not abandoned the office of Peter.”

And thus according to Benedict’s closest collaborator Ganswein became a pope emeritus which has never existed except for retired bishops who still held the munus or office of bishop.

An unexpected thing happened when Team Francis went into “damage control” and denied there could be a emeritus “to the office of Peter.”

Unexpectedly, Francis at some point in time contradicted the “ultra-Bergoglians” assertion that that there couldn’t be a emeritus “to the office of Peter.”

Socci’s book says after Ganswein made the above statement in 2016 the “ultra-Bergoglian website Vatican Insider” went into “damage control” by interviewing Team Francis canonist Monsignor Giuseppe Sciacca who said emeritus “regards only the ‘episcopal office'” and “‘cannot be applied to the office of the Pontiff.'”

The book quotes Francis contradicting the Bergoglians or Team Francis by saying:

“Benedict… has opened the door of popes emeriti.”

Socci explains the predicament that Team Francis is in:

“The dilemma which the Bergoglians find themselves in is without solution: if, in fact, they recognize the title of ‘pope emeritus,’ they must recognize that Benedict XVI is still pope; but if they deny this title and contest the declared intention of the ‘resignation’ (which was not a resignation of munus , but only of the active ministry), it means that they would have to hold that the resignation is invalid, because doubtful and partial.”
(The Secret of Benedict XVI, Pages 92-94)

^{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. Pray an Our Father now for America. 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.SHARE

Archbishop Exhorts the Italian People to Resist the Planetary Nightmare

Here is the English Translation of Vigano’s Address to the Italian People on October 9, 2021 Gathered in Rome and throughout Italy:

You have gathered today in Rome, in Piazza del Popolo, and in many other squares in Italy, as hundreds of thousands of people around the world manifest their opposition to the establishment of a global tyranny. Millions of citizens of every nation, in the deafening silence of the media, have been shouting their own “No!” For months: No to pandemic madness, No to lockdowns, curfews, the imposition of vaccinations, No to health passports, to the blackmail of a totalitarian power enslaved by the elite.

Almost two years have passed since the beginning of this planetary nightmare. We entered a labyrinth step by step. At the beginning it was the masks indoors; then came the lockdowns with self-certifications; then the curfew… remember? Each time, faced with an abuse that might seem justified by the emergency, we have accepted to let ourselves be deprived of a bit of freedom. Step by step. They prevented us from going to church, leaving the house, working, going to school, visiting loved ones and even dying relatives in the hospital. Step by step. At a certain time of the evening, in our streets, we saw only the riders for the Amazon and JustEat deliveries: new victims of the Great Reset, new slaves of the System, together with many small entrepreneurs, owners of shops, bars and restaurants, forced into bankruptcy by absurd, illegitimate and counterproductive rules. Not to mention the psychological breakdown that has affected many of us, from the youngest to the oldest: some deprived of any social contact, the others confined in the RSA without treatment, condemned to die by a ministerial protocol. Step by step, we got used to the idea that a Technical-Scientific Committee could decide – so at least we were told – that the virus circulated only after 6 pm, or that it hit standing and not sitting patrons in bars, that it infected in churches or museums but not on commuter trains or buses full of students. Step by step, they made us believe that a seasonal flu like any other Coronavirus could kill thousands of people, without however telling us that general practitioners and hospital wards had been forbidden to administer treatment, waiting for the disease to worsen. They did not tell us that Covid, on the recommendation of the health authority, had to be treated as a lung disease, while it was of circulatory origin; they did not tell us that autopsies had been prohibited and that the corpses were cremated, to prevent them from discovering the causes of the disease and understanding how to cure it. But in the meantime they showed us General Figliuolo’s military trucks, loaded with corpses; and they were careful not to explain that those trucks contained a few coffins, accumulated in Bergamo after a period in which the funeral home had been prevented from collecting the bodies and organizing their funerals. But what an impact, on the entire population, confined at home in front of the television, hypnotized by media terrorism, scientifically planned according to the most cynical principles of propaganda! Think of the elderly, far from their loved ones, deprived of any comfort, even spiritual – even priests were forbidden to access to administer Extreme Unction! – forced to suffer this daily hammering, to see their bed neighbor die, to witness the despair of people even more lonely than them. Today we discover that the administration of Propofol, an anesthetic used to induce pharmacological coma, was not only practiced by the Primary of Montichiari arrested for voluntary murder, but was common practice in all hospitals, as confirmed in an interview by the President of the Primaries and as Dr. Rock.

In practice, they are telling us with the utmost tranquility that last year the seriously ill of Covid, before being intubated, were sedated with Propofol, in the knowledge that this would have caused their death. And they tell us so brazenly, because they are evidently convinced that none of us will have anything to object, that no magistrate will open a file, that no journalist will denounce this latest scandal, that no politician will dare to criticize the Prime Minister or the Minister of Health.

Step by step, we have come to see ourselves forced, in order not to lose our job and to be able to carry out normal activities, to present a document – the green pass – which certifies the state of health of contagious and contagious vaccinated and substantially unreliable masks. Because, as you know, the vaccine does not protect against infection and the masks do not guarantee that the result corresponds to reality. For what? For a flu that could be cured – and which in many cases has been cured with documented success, where they left it – but which had to be incurable, in order to legitimize the testing of vaccines in derogation from ordinary rules.

And always in these days – days when the truth seems to come more and more to light – we learn from the statements of some doctors that swabs, on the basis of which they confined us to the house or forced us to ridiculous and exhausting quarantines; the swabs they imposed on us to detect positive cases to use for the famous expert statistics are unreliable. And they tell us today, with impunity, after having ruined the economy, the social fabric, the psychophysical balance of an entire nation. But if those swabs aren’t needed today, they weren’t needed yesterday either; and not only the “conspiracy theorists” said so, but their own inventors, claiming that they had no diagnostic use. But since today masks need to be de-legitimized because they are the only alternative – albeit expensive – to the inoculation of the experimental gene serum, they are magically no longer reliable, whereas before they were by law. A bit like Covid after 6pm.

A little while ago I mentioned the labyrinth into which we have entered. More precisely: a labyrinth in which we found ourselves following those who promised us to get out, knowing full well that it has no exit. With every step we have taken, entering the maze of this labyrinth, we have strayed and lost.

Because this IS a labyrinth. A tangle of pseudoscientific affirmations, of logical contradictions, of apodictic proclamations, of dogmas proclaimed by the new Covid priests, by the pandemic Sanhedrin. There is nothing consequential and rational in what we are told, and it is precisely in believing that what they tell us makes sense, that we go further and further into the labyrinth. “Let’s get vaccinated to save the frail and the elderly who cannot be vaccinated,” they told us, while vaccinating the frail and the elderly. “Let’s get vaccinated to be able to take off the masks and start living again,” and shortly after we discovered that not only should we have to wear the masks, but that one dose of serum was no longer enough, and not even two, and perhaps not even three. Meanwhile, the frail and the elderly die of Covid even after the double dose, and if they survive it is because in hospitals – deny me, if you can – for some time the patients of Covid have been given azithromycin, making it appear as a cure against intestinal parasites but knowing full well that it is used against the virus. In order not to undermine the credibility of vaccines, certainly not for the health of patients.

We have to get out of this maze, dear friends. But we cannot get out of it by simply protesting against the green pass, which is only the most recent tool of repression, and certainly not the last. Of course: the green pass is a legal aberration, a hateful blackmail, a proof of the pretext of the pandemic alarm; but if alsorevoking the green pass, there would remain the absurdity of considering a curable virus deadly that has not caused more deaths than those of the past few years; the absurdity of wearing masks that are not only useless – by the very admission of the “experts” – but which, on the contrary, cause serious lung diseases and brain pathologies; the absurdity of considering a “vaccine” as a drug that does not serve to give immunity and that proves to have such serious side effects, to overcome the deaths of all vaccines in the last ten years in just a few months of administration; the absurdity of letting us inoculate an experimental drug that acts on our DNA, making us genetically modified organisms; the absurdity of following directions and protocols that seem written by sorcerers and not by conscientious doctors, given the series of counter-orders that have now reached the pathetic. The absurdity of seriously and calmly refuting statements so scandalous and false that they do not deserve an answer. Draghi’s: “Whoever gets vaccinated is saved, whoever doesn’t get vaccinated dies” is a lie; to say “The vaccinated do not die from Covid” is false, just as it is false to say that Covid is a deadly disease, since it becomes such only if it is not treated. And it is false that there are no treatments, because those much discredited treatments are now used by the European authorities for preventive purposes on the Afghan refugees we welcomed a few weeks ago. It is all false. False data on deaths from Covid. False reliability of the swabs. False efficacy and non-dangerousness of vaccines. False admissions in intensive care. False “non-correlation” of “sudden illness” affecting the vaccinated. False news alerts, false services of entertainment programs in which the usual “experts” and virostar intervene, false the predictions of statisticians.Let’s get out of the maze! We reject the media narrative, perhaps deciding to turn off the television, which today has turned into an infernal tabernacle. Let’s break the logical short circuit of those who demand our consent even when they lie shamelessly. And to get out of the labyrinth, dear friends, it is necessary to look at things with a look that is not limited to single facts, but sees them all in a broader framework, in which the pandemic is a social engineering tool artfully provoked with the aim to take us to the green pass, to total control, to the limitation of natural and constitutional freedoms in the name of a Great Reset that none of us want, that no one has ever asked us to vote, which concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a ‘elite – that of the “philanthrocapitalists” like Gates and Soros – and who consider the rest of humanity as a reservoir of slaves and customers, to whom to give that minimum of money – created out of nothing and which weighs on them as a debt – that it serves to allow them to buy the goods that this elite produces; goods produced with cheap labor, of course, forced to do everything to survive. While he prepares to sell us air, water and sunlight, perhaps under the pretext of the green emergency and under the pressure of Greta Thunberg’s ridiculous Fridays for Future.

We leave the labyrinth, recognizing that there is a problem of authority: civil authority that does not pursue the common good of citizens, and religious authority that has not only stopped caring for the eternal salvation of the faithful, but delivers them into the jaws of an infernal dragon. We get out of the labyrinth by learning to use critical judgment, not to be deceived by those with a record of such abuses, lies and crimes, so as not to let us assume that they will behave differently with us. We leave the labyrinth realizing that a world war is underway, fought not with real weapons, but with unconventional weapons, such as censorship of information, the enslavement of doctors, the complicity of politicians, magistrates and law enforcement agencies; a war that leaves innocent victims in its path, that destroys society, that affects people in the soul even before the body, that has been declared against everything that recalls our civilization, our culture, our faith, the our values. A war between light and darkness, between good and evil.We must recognize that, if we have come to this point, we owe it in large part to our infidelity, to letting others decide for God what is right and what is not, to allowing that in the name of tolerance allowed the violation of natural law and the degeneration of Christian morality, the murder of children in the womb, the killing of the sick and the elderly, and the corruption of children and young people.

What is happening today is the poisoned fruit of decades of dissolution, of rebellion against the Law of the Lord, of sins and vices that cry out for vengeance in the sight of God. Providence shows us how the world can become, when it abandons the Lordship of Jesus Christ and places under the bondage of Satan.

Mine are not apocalyptic words – as some say – but a severe warning, as a Pastor, to return to God, to recognize that where Christ the King and Mary Queen do not reign, the cruel and ruthless tyranny of the devil reigns, which promises universal brotherhood, while he wants only your destruction on earth and your eternal damnation.

Jesus Christ is King and Lord of History, in His hands are the fates and destinies of each of us, of the States and of the Holy Church. He will not allow us to succumb to the onslaught of the enemy of mankind. Return, let us all return to him, with the trust of the prodigal son who humbly asks his father to forgive him and to welcome him back into his home. Let us go back to being Christians, proud of our Faith and of the civilization that Religion has built up in the course of two thousand years of history. Let’s go back to defending in civil and political commitment those non-negotiable values that today we see denied and trampled on. But above all – I beg you, I implore you – let us go back to living in the Grace of God, to frequent the Sacraments, to practice the virtues, to be Christians consistent with the promises of Baptism, authentic witnesses of Christ.

To get out of the labyrinth, it is necessary to retrace the path taken backwards: our “Ariadne’s thread” is the defense of the family, of the social and religious fabric of the nation, of our culture which is inescapably Christian, Catholic and Roman.

We Italians are not racists! In the name of Charity that over the centuries has represented one of the pride of Christian Europe, we can welcome those who are persecuted and proscribed by their country, but we cannot be responsible for the exploitation of millions of migrants, under the pretext of hospitality. We know that their immigration to Europe was planned by the elite to destroy our civil, cultural and religious identity; it serves the elite to create social chaos, to introduce underpaid labor, to foment wars among the poor and to deprive the countries they come from of their young people.

To get out of the labyrinth, we must resist with courage and firmness, as our fathers were able to oppose the dictatorships of the last century. Civil disobedience, coordination of protest actions, contacts with the movements of other states, union in an anti-globalist alliance that ensures help and support against the authorities subservient to the system. A serene resistance, nourished by the awareness that the world envisaged by the Great Reset is not our world, since it is founded on an ideology of death, on an anti-human and anti-Christic thought, and which is based only on the strength of weapons or on blackmail towards those who cannot rebel.

They forget, these wretched servants of the New Order, that theirs is a utopia, indeed a hellish dystopia, which is repugnant to all of us precisely because it does not consider that we are not made of electromagnetic circuits, but of flesh and blood, of passions, of affections , of acts of heroism and generosity. Because we are human, made in the image and likeness of God, endowed with intelligence and free will. But this, the demons cannot understand: for this they will fail miserably.

And so that this day on which you publicly and courageously manifest your opposition to the impending tyranny does not remain sterile and devoid of supernatural light, I invite you all to recite with me the words that the Lord has taught us. Let us do it with fervor, with an impulse of charity, invoking the protection of Our Lord and His Most Holy Mother on all of us, on our families, on our homeland and on the whole world:

Our Father, who art in heaven …

OCTOBER 10, 2021

Archbishop Exhorts the Italian People to Resist the Planetary Nightmare

Here is the English Translation of Vigano’s Address to the Italian People on October 9, 2021 Gathered in Rome and throughout Italy:

You have gathered today in Rome, in Piazza del Popolo, and in many other squares in Italy, as hundreds of thousands of people around the world manifest their opposition to the establishment of a global tyranny. Millions of citizens of every nation, in the deafening silence of the media, have been shouting their own “No!” For months: No to pandemic madness, No to lockdowns, curfews, the imposition of vaccinations, No to health passports, to the blackmail of a totalitarian power enslaved by the elite.

Almost two years have passed since the beginning of this planetary nightmare. We entered a labyrinth step by step. At the beginning it was the masks indoors; then came the lockdowns with self-certifications; then the curfew… remember? Each time, faced with an abuse that might seem justified by the emergency, we have accepted to let ourselves be deprived of a bit of freedom. Step by step. They prevented us from going to church, leaving the house, working, going to school, visiting loved ones and even dying relatives in the hospital. Step by step. At a certain time of the evening, in our streets, we saw only the riders for the Amazon and JustEat deliveries: new victims of the Great Reset, new slaves of the System, together with many small entrepreneurs, owners of shops, bars and restaurants, forced into bankruptcy by absurd, illegitimate and counterproductive rules. Not to mention the psychological breakdown that has affected many of us, from the youngest to the oldest: some deprived of any social contact, the others confined in the RSA without treatment, condemned to die by a ministerial protocol. Step by step, we got used to the idea that a Technical-Scientific Committee could decide – so at least we were told – that the virus circulated only after 6 pm, or that it hit standing and not sitting patrons in bars, that it infected in churches or museums but not on commuter trains or buses full of students. Step by step, they made us believe that a seasonal flu like any other Coronavirus could kill thousands of people, without however telling us that general practitioners and hospital wards had been forbidden to administer treatment, waiting for the disease to worsen. They did not tell us that Covid, on the recommendation of the health authority, had to be treated as a lung disease, while it was of circulatory origin; they did not tell us that autopsies had been prohibited and that the corpses were cremated, to prevent them from discovering the causes of the disease and understanding how to cure it. But in the meantime they showed us General Figliuolo’s military trucks, loaded with corpses; and they were careful not to explain that those trucks contained a few coffins, accumulated in Bergamo after a period in which the funeral home had been prevented from collecting the bodies and organizing their funerals. But what an impact, on the entire population, confined at home in front of the television, hypnotized by media terrorism, scientifically planned according to the most cynical principles of propaganda! Think of the elderly, far from their loved ones, deprived of any comfort, even spiritual – even priests were forbidden to access to administer Extreme Unction! – forced to suffer this daily hammering, to see their bed neighbor die, to witness the despair of people even more lonely than them. Today we discover that the administration of Propofol, an anesthetic used to induce pharmacological coma, was not only practiced by the Primary of Montichiari arrested for voluntary murder, but was common practice in all hospitals, as confirmed in an interview by the President of the Primaries and as Dr. Rock.

In practice, they are telling us with the utmost tranquility that last year the seriously ill of Covid, before being intubated, were sedated with Propofol, in the knowledge that this would have caused their death. And they tell us so brazenly, because they are evidently convinced that none of us will have anything to object, that no magistrate will open a file, that no journalist will denounce this latest scandal, that no politician will dare to criticize the Prime Minister or the Minister of Health.

Step by step, we have come to see ourselves forced, in order not to lose our job and to be able to carry out normal activities, to present a document – the green pass – which certifies the state of health of contagious and contagious vaccinated and substantially unreliable masks. Because, as you know, the vaccine does not protect against infection and the masks do not guarantee that the result corresponds to reality. For what? For a flu that could be cured – and which in many cases has been cured with documented success, where they left it – but which had to be incurable, in order to legitimize the testing of vaccines in derogation from ordinary rules.

And always in these days – days when the truth seems to come more and more to light – we learn from the statements of some doctors that swabs, on the basis of which they confined us to the house or forced us to ridiculous and exhausting quarantines; the swabs they imposed on us to detect positive cases to use for the famous expert statistics are unreliable. And they tell us today, with impunity, after having ruined the economy, the social fabric, the psychophysical balance of an entire nation. But if those swabs aren’t needed today, they weren’t needed yesterday either; and not only the “conspiracy theorists” said so, but their own inventors, claiming that they had no diagnostic use. But since today masks need to be de-legitimized because they are the only alternative – albeit expensive – to the inoculation of the experimental gene serum, they are magically no longer reliable, whereas before they were by law. A bit like Covid after 6pm.

A little while ago I mentioned the labyrinth into which we have entered. More precisely: a labyrinth in which we found ourselves following those who promised us to get out, knowing full well that it has no exit. With every step we have taken, entering the maze of this labyrinth, we have strayed and lost.

Because this IS a labyrinth. A tangle of pseudoscientific affirmations, of logical contradictions, of apodictic proclamations, of dogmas proclaimed by the new Covid priests, by the pandemic Sanhedrin. There is nothing consequential and rational in what we are told, and it is precisely in believing that what they tell us makes sense, that we go further and further into the labyrinth. “Let’s get vaccinated to save the frail and the elderly who cannot be vaccinated,” they told us, while vaccinating the frail and the elderly. “Let’s get vaccinated to be able to take off the masks and start living again,” and shortly after we discovered that not only should we have to wear the masks, but that one dose of serum was no longer enough, and not even two, and perhaps not even three. Meanwhile, the frail and the elderly die of Covid even after the double dose, and if they survive it is because in hospitals – deny me, if you can – for some time the patients of Covid have been given azithromycin, making it appear as a cure against intestinal parasites but knowing full well that it is used against the virus. In order not to undermine the credibility of vaccines, certainly not for the health of patients.

We have to get out of this maze, dear friends. But we cannot get out of it by simply protesting against the green pass, which is only the most recent tool of repression, and certainly not the last. Of course: the green pass is a legal aberration, a hateful blackmail, a proof of the pretext of the pandemic alarm; but if alsorevoking the green pass, there would remain the absurdity of considering a curable virus deadly that has not caused more deaths than those of the past few years; the absurdity of wearing masks that are not only useless – by the very admission of the “experts” – but which, on the contrary, cause serious lung diseases and brain pathologies; the absurdity of considering a “vaccine” as a drug that does not serve to give immunity and that proves to have such serious side effects, to overcome the deaths of all vaccines in the last ten years in just a few months of administration; the absurdity of letting us inoculate an experimental drug that acts on our DNA, making us genetically modified organisms; the absurdity of following directions and protocols that seem written by sorcerers and not by conscientious doctors, given the series of counter-orders that have now reached the pathetic. The absurdity of seriously and calmly refuting statements so scandalous and false that they do not deserve an answer. Draghi’s: “Whoever gets vaccinated is saved, whoever doesn’t get vaccinated dies” is a lie; to say “The vaccinated do not die from Covid” is false, just as it is false to say that Covid is a deadly disease, since it becomes such only if it is not treated. And it is false that there are no treatments, because those much discredited treatments are now used by the European authorities for preventive purposes on the Afghan refugees we welcomed a few weeks ago. It is all false. False data on deaths from Covid. False reliability of the swabs. False efficacy and non-dangerousness of vaccines. False admissions in intensive care. False “non-correlation” of “sudden illness” affecting the vaccinated. False news alerts, false services of entertainment programs in which the usual “experts” and virostar intervene, false the predictions of statisticians.Let’s get out of the maze! We reject the media narrative, perhaps deciding to turn off the television, which today has turned into an infernal tabernacle. Let’s break the logical short circuit of those who demand our consent even when they lie shamelessly. And to get out of the labyrinth, dear friends, it is necessary to look at things with a look that is not limited to single facts, but sees them all in a broader framework, in which the pandemic is a social engineering tool artfully provoked with the aim to take us to the green pass, to total control, to the limitation of natural and constitutional freedoms in the name of a Great Reset that none of us want, that no one has ever asked us to vote, which concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a ‘elite – that of the “philanthrocapitalists” like Gates and Soros – and who consider the rest of humanity as a reservoir of slaves and customers, to whom to give that minimum of money – created out of nothing and which weighs on them as a debt – that it serves to allow them to buy the goods that this elite produces; goods produced with cheap labor, of course, forced to do everything to survive. While he prepares to sell us air, water and sunlight, perhaps under the pretext of the green emergency and under the pressure of Greta Thunberg’s ridiculous Fridays for Future.

We leave the labyrinth, recognizing that there is a problem of authority: civil authority that does not pursue the common good of citizens, and religious authority that has not only stopped caring for the eternal salvation of the faithful, but delivers them into the jaws of an infernal dragon. We get out of the labyrinth by learning to use critical judgment, not to be deceived by those with a record of such abuses, lies and crimes, so as not to let us assume that they will behave differently with us. We leave the labyrinth realizing that a world war is underway, fought not with real weapons, but with unconventional weapons, such as censorship of information, the enslavement of doctors, the complicity of politicians, magistrates and law enforcement agencies; a war that leaves innocent victims in its path, that destroys society, that affects people in the soul even before the body, that has been declared against everything that recalls our civilization, our culture, our faith, the our values. A war between light and darkness, between good and evil.We must recognize that, if we have come to this point, we owe it in large part to our infidelity, to letting others decide for God what is right and what is not, to allowing that in the name of tolerance allowed the violation of natural law and the degeneration of Christian morality, the murder of children in the womb, the killing of the sick and the elderly, and the corruption of children and young people.

What is happening today is the poisoned fruit of decades of dissolution, of rebellion against the Law of the Lord, of sins and vices that cry out for vengeance in the sight of God. Providence shows us how the world can become, when it abandons the Lordship of Jesus Christ and places under the bondage of Satan.

Mine are not apocalyptic words – as some say – but a severe warning, as a Pastor, to return to God, to recognize that where Christ the King and Mary Queen do not reign, the cruel and ruthless tyranny of the devil reigns, which promises universal brotherhood, while he wants only your destruction on earth and your eternal damnation.

Jesus Christ is King and Lord of History, in His hands are the fates and destinies of each of us, of the States and of the Holy Church. He will not allow us to succumb to the onslaught of the enemy of mankind. Return, let us all return to him, with the trust of the prodigal son who humbly asks his father to forgive him and to welcome him back into his home. Let us go back to being Christians, proud of our Faith and of the civilization that Religion has built up in the course of two thousand years of history. Let’s go back to defending in civil and political commitment those non-negotiable values that today we see denied and trampled on. But above all – I beg you, I implore you – let us go back to living in the Grace of God, to frequent the Sacraments, to practice the virtues, to be Christians consistent with the promises of Baptism, authentic witnesses of Christ.

To get out of the labyrinth, it is necessary to retrace the path taken backwards: our “Ariadne’s thread” is the defense of the family, of the social and religious fabric of the nation, of our culture which is inescapably Christian, Catholic and Roman.

We Italians are not racists! In the name of Charity that over the centuries has represented one of the pride of Christian Europe, we can welcome those who are persecuted and proscribed by their country, but we cannot be responsible for the exploitation of millions of migrants, under the pretext of hospitality. We know that their immigration to Europe was planned by the elite to destroy our civil, cultural and religious identity; it serves the elite to create social chaos, to introduce underpaid labor, to foment wars among the poor and to deprive the countries they come from of their young people.

To get out of the labyrinth, we must resist with courage and firmness, as our fathers were able to oppose the dictatorships of the last century. Civil disobedience, coordination of protest actions, contacts with the movements of other states, union in an anti-globalist alliance that ensures help and support against the authorities subservient to the system. A serene resistance, nourished by the awareness that the world envisaged by the Great Reset is not our world, since it is founded on an ideology of death, on an anti-human and anti-Christic thought, and which is based only on the strength of weapons or on blackmail towards those who cannot rebel.

They forget, these wretched servants of the New Order, that theirs is a utopia, indeed a hellish dystopia, which is repugnant to all of us precisely because it does not consider that we are not made of electromagnetic circuits, but of flesh and blood, of passions, of affections , of acts of heroism and generosity. Because we are human, made in the image and likeness of God, endowed with intelligence and free will. But this, the demons cannot understand: for this they will fail miserably.

And so that this day on which you publicly and courageously manifest your opposition to the impending tyranny does not remain sterile and devoid of supernatural light, I invite you all to recite with me the words that the Lord has taught us. Let us do it with fervor, with an impulse of charity, invoking the protection of Our Lord and His Most Holy Mother on all of us, on our families, on our homeland and on the whole world:

Our Father, who art in heaven …

OCTOBER 10, 2021

OnePeterFive

Rebuilding Catholic Culture. Restoring Catholic Tradition.

• REGINALD GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE
• SPIRITUAL READING

Garrigou-Lagrange: The One Thing Necessary

 1P5 EditorOctober 8, 20210 Comments

From The Three Ages of the Interior Life

By Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.https://73e1f3f72fa46977f355bd74bd72ea50.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

—

As everyone can easily understand, the interior life is an elevated form of intimate conversation which everyone has with himself as soon as he is alone, even in the tumult of a great city. From the moment he ceases to converse with his fellow men, man converses interiorly with himself about what preoccupies him most. This conversation varies greatly according to the different ages of life; that of an old man is not that of a youth. It also varies greatly according as a man is good or bad.

As soon as a man seriously seeks truth and goodness, this intimate conversation with himself tends to become conversation with God. Little by little, instead of seeking himself in everything, instead of tending more or less consciously to make himself a center, man tends to seek God in everything, and to substitute for egoism love of God and of souls in Him. This constitutes the interior life. No sincere man will have any difficulty in recognizing it. The one thing necessary which Jesus spoke of to Martha and Mary consists in hearing the word of God and living by it.

The interior life thus conceived is something far more profound and more necessary in us than intellectual life or the cultivation of the sciences, than artistic or literary life, than social or political life. Unfortunately, some great scholars, mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers have no interior life, so to speak, but devote themselves to the study of their science as if God did not exist. In their moments of solitude they have no intimate conversation with Him. Their life appears to be in certain respects the search for the true and the good in a more or less definite and restricted domain, but it is so tainted with self-love and intellectual pride that we may legitimately question whether it will bear fruit for eternity. Many artists, literary men, and statesmen never rise above this level of purely human activity which is, in short, quite exterior. Do the depths of their souls live by God? It would seem not.

This shows that the interior life, or the life of the soul with God, well deserves to be called the one thing necessary, since by it we tend to our last end and assure our salvation. This last must not be too widely separated from progressive sanctification, for it is the very way of salvation.

There are those who seem to think that it is sufficient to be saved and that it is not necessary to be a saint. It is clearly not necessary to be a saint who performs miracles and whose sanctity is officially recognized by the Church. To be saved, we must take the way of salvation, which is identical with that of sanctity. There will be only saints in heaven, whether they enter there immediately after death or after purification in purgatory. No one enters heaven unless he has that sanctity which consists in perfect purity of soul. Every sin though it should be venial, must be effaced, and the punishment due to sin must be borne or remitted, in order that a soul may enjoy forever the vision of God, see Him as He sees Himself, and love Him as He loves Himself. Should a soul enter heaven before the total remission of its sins, it could not remain there and it would cast itself into purgatory to be purified.

The interior life of a just man who tends toward God and who already lives by Him is indeed the one thing necessary. To be a saint, neither intellectual culture nor great exterior activity is a requisite; it suffices that we live profoundly by God. This truth is evident in the saints of the early Church; several of those saints were poor people, even slaves. It is evident also in St. Francis, St. Benedict Joseph Labre, in the Cure of Ars, and many others. They all had a deep understanding of these words of our Savior: “For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?” If people sacrifice so many things to save the life of the body, which must ultimately die, what should we not sacrifice to save the life of our soul, which is to last forever? Ought not man to love his soul more than his body? “Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul?” our Lord adds. “One thing is necessary,” He tells us. To save our soul, one thing alone is necessary: to hear the word of God and to live by it. Therein lies the best part, which will not be taken away from a faithful soul even though it should lose everything else.

The Three Ages of the Interior Life (2 vols.)

Original French edition © The Dominican Province, France.

English translation © Baronius Press Ltd

Reprinted with permission.

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

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“Covidism is a RELIGION” & Newsweek: “Sweden, Norway Lifting COVID Restrictions… ‘Sweden Status: FREE. Norway Status: FREE. Denmark Status: FREE. Scandinavia has become a Beacon of Freedom to the World'”

October 09, 2021

Does ANYONE at this point not understand that Covidism is a RELIGION??? Anyone? Bueller?

NEW – NY Governor Hochul proclaims, “The vaccine comes from God” and asks those present in the megachurch congregation, “I need you to be my apostles.”pic.twitter.com/naPWVWX0nk

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) September 27, 2021 – Ann Barnhardt

Newsweek reported “Sweden, Norway Lifting COVID Restrictions Spark Reactions as Pundits Want End to Mandates”:

The decision by Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to lift COVID-related restrictions has gained mixed reactions on social media amid a push to end vaccine and mask mandates in the U.S.

The move to scrap out COVID-related restrictions in all three countries prompted some criticism against the measures in the U.S.

[… ]

In an op-ed for The Washington Times Johnson said: “The advent of vaccine mandates is exacerbating social divisions and will only increase the pandemic harms.”

“We are relentlessly told by the COVID-19 gods—federal agencies, mainstream media, and social media—that they alone represent science, and any other interpretation of data or opinion is labeled dangerous misinformation,” he said. “This attitude contradicts what we’ve generally been told regarding any serious medical diagnosis: ‘Always try to get a second or even third opinion.'”

Sweden status: FREE.
Norway status: FREE.
Denmark status: FREE.

 Scandinavia has become a beacon of freedom to the world🇸🇪🇳🇴🇩🇰

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) September 30, 2021

Sweden was the latest to join the list of countries removing COVID-related restrictions. On Wednesday, the country lifted its remaining pandemic restrictions, including capacity limits at gatherings and events, according to Euronews. Recommendations to work from home were also scrapped.

Meanwhile, Norway on Saturday began moving to “normal everyday life” but with increased emergency preparedness, the Norwegian government said. The country lifted all its domestic restrictions except for requiring people to self-quarantine in case they have COVID symptoms.[https://www.newsweek.com/sweden-norway-lifting-covid-restrictions-spark-reactions-pundits-want-end-mandates-1634916]

^{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. 

Dear Fellow Patriot,Identify the things you care about, then protect them.” Where do you draw the line? America’s Attorney General Merrick Garland just mobilized the FBI to begin targeting concerned parents at school board meetings, claiming they are potentially violent domestic terrorists.  Let’s get this straight: The left indoctrinates and sexualizes our children in public school (government school). Blue states are now also supporting mandated vaccinations for children to attend school. And at the same time, they are making it as hard as possible in blue states to homeschool or seek other educational alternatives like charter or private schooling.  DonateParents are starting to activate, and what does our “federal” government do? Sends the FBI to intimidate us all from speaking out about what’s happening to America’s children.  The future is going to be rough: the federal regime in power will begin weaponizing law enforcement and their bureaucracy against parents who refuse to submit their children to this, just wait and see.  With that being understood, do you have a plan for what you’ll do? Where do you draw the line?  hope for your own sake, and for your family’s sake, that you all seriously consider detaching from our federal government. The two steps you should consider are: 1. Get your family to a deep red state with leaders and people who understand the federalist system and state/ local power. The state should also be able to end its financial dependency on the federal government.  2. Get your children out of government school. More to come on how this can be achieved. I hope I planted a little seed in your head for now.Donate We are used to being outnumbered, outspent, and outcast by media tyrants. But there’s good news. We’ve got them outmaneuvered. We’re smarter with how, where, and on what we spend. Furthermore, we have one advantage that the anti-freedom factions simply don’t: our message is one of truth– and you cannot keep inquisitive, open minds from discovering the truth. By now you’ve likely heard that roughly 60% of college students would choose socialism for the future of our country. But did you also know that around 70% of college students said they would not want to see their taxes rise? What this reveals is that the younger generation has some gross misunderstandings about what socialism really is and what it results in. And this is no accident. This is deliberate. So often socialism is “taught” in such a way so as not to reveal its insidious nature… Students are not encouraged to confront the reality that it has been a catastrophic failure across human history. Conversely, no economic system has lifted more people out of poverty and so greatly expanded the average life expectancy than capitalism. If forced to compete in a free marketplace of ideas, the socialist argument would disintegrate against pressure and scrutiny from superior ideologies. That’s EXACTLY why the Left has embraced censorship and intimidation tactics. It is a desperate attempt to keep the truth from emerging. They cannot beat our ideas in a fair fight, so they cheat. It’s as simple as that. Our mission at YAAS is to expose the inherent dangers of socialism– to change young minds by giving them the side of the story we can no longer trust legacy media to provide. Through our hard work and dedication, our team has amassed a following of hundreds of thousands of viewers across all our social media. And we’re just getting started. We aim to reach millions of young Americans and equip them with the facts they need to defeat the shoddy, emotional arguments we always see from the Left. But we can only realize this dream with help from supporters like YOU! I am writing to you today to ask if you will please consider contributing $500, $200, $50, or whatever you can afford to Young Americans Against Socialism. Know that every single dollar goes a long way. Your generous contribution will empower us with the tools needed to expand our base and empower the next generation of leaders with knowledge. If you can help with a donation, please click the button below.Let’s send an irrefutable message of strength to these dishonest media moguls! We don’t have to match them dollar-for-dollar to be effective. But our fight is happening right NOW and the Left is both organized and mobilized in their campaign to spread the tenets of socialism across every facet of American life. You can rest assured that they will not stand around waiting for our next move. Every day, their stranglehold over the marketplace of ideas tightens. When we’re censored for sharing the truth, it’s not just an attack on us. It’s an attack on the foundation of our nation and the West. Whether this is your first time donating, or you’ve already lent your time and treasure to the cause, there has never been a better time than right now to get involved in this fight. Can I count on you to stand with us now when we need it more than ever? Thank you for your consideration. We are so grateful to have allies like you on our side.