We shall go into the house of the Lord (Psalm 121)

We shall go into the house of the Lord (Psalm 121)

Fr. José Miguel Marqués Campo  August 20, 2021  

As a priest of the Archdiocese of Oviedo in Asturias, Spain, I have been very blessed to have been offering the Traditional Roman Mass in my home diocese since 2008. When ordained on Pentecost 1996, my hope of being able to celebrate the Vetus Ordo, even once before taking leave of this vale of tears, was rather more wishful thinking at the time.

But here I am, celebrating every Sunday and preceptive Holy-day for nearly thirteen years now. And will continue to do so, though having had to switch over from the Oviedo parish of late to a nearby XVII century chapel, which already is proving to be of inadequate size…

True enough, almost exclusively Low Mass, though for a time enjoying a organist allowing for some parts a Sung Mass. But never had I been graced to celebrate a Solemn High Mass with deacon and subdeacon… that is until this past 24 July 2021.

Providentially, the First Annual Traditional Latin Mass Pilgrimage of Our Lady of Christendom took place in my home province and diocese, on 24-25-26 July 2021. Several hundreds of faithful took part, mainly young families with their children, and young people, though to be sure, there were participants of all ages. The route covered going from the regional capital of Oviedo, eastwards towards Cangas de Onís (the early medieval capital of the Kingdom of Asturias) and finally at Covadonga, all in all slightly more than 90 kilometres, making a daily effort of some 30 kilometres or so.

Covadonga is of enormous historical importance for Western Civilisation for it was precisely here, where in A.D. 718—722, the Christians of a Roman-Visigoth Spain valiantly defended themselves in what would prove to be the very first Crusade, from the Moorish invaders of the Iberian peninsula, under King Pelagius / El Rey Don Pelayo (+737).

This began the epic, nearly eight-century long Reconquista, which ended in 1492 when Their Catholic Majesties, Isabel I of Castile (+1504) and Fernando II of Aragón (+1516), took the last Moorish bastion: Granada, in southeastern Spain.

So it was no mere coincidence that the Spanish chapter of Our Lady of Christendom organises the Annual Traditional Latin Mass Pilgrimages to always take place in the province of Asturias. The hope is a rekindling of a spiritual and social Reconquista of the Realm. And God knows how we need that everywhere.

But, oh yes, the Vatican knows about these Traditional Latin Mass Pilgrimages worldwide, obviously the most widely known and participated, the Paris—Chartres Pilgrimages around Pentecost, and the Pilgrimages to Our Lady of Luján in Argentina.

And I was informed that the Vatican also knew about another such Traditional Latin Mass Pilgrimage that was being planned in Spain, specifically in the province of Asturias—with all the historical significance of the timely assistance of Our Lady at Covadonga with the Reconquista, and also around the feast day of the Apostle St. James the Greater, Patron Saint of Spain (25 July).

In other words, far too many “traditional Spanish Catholic” references for hosting—my goodness!—yet another Traditional Latin Mass Pilgrimage, yes, the ones with all those young “rigids” taking part! “Rigids”, alas, but that’s what Francis obsessively calls traditional Catholics, otherwise and also known as Catholics (aka Catholics).

And of all “rigid” peoples everywhere, Spanish “rigids” at that! What, with the reputation we nasty Spaniards have, for instance the so-called “Black Legend”, i.e., a Protestant name for the Evangelisation of the Americas, India, Japan, and the Philippines! And of course, the much maligned—but still Holy—Spanish Inquisition!

So yes, the Vatican was quite aware of what was going to take place here… and the Vatican—seemingly—was not pleased. At all. What a surprise, eh? Who knows, maybe it influenced an earlier publication of Traditionis Custodes, a document that was confected in malice and will live in infamy.

For indeed, this evil Motu Proprio certainly did influence our Pilgrimage. Made public on 16 July 2021, feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, in other words, barely just one week before, and with an unprecedented absence of vacatio legis, that is, without any time whatsoever between its official publication and before its ludicrous norms come into effect. This prompted the Archbishop of Oviedo, who I was informed was rather pleased at hosting the Pilgrimage, and who was planning to assist at the Solemn High Mass I was to celebrate in the Cathedral of Oviedo the morning of 24 July, to back-track.

Specifically, it meant a sudden and unexpected banning of all High Masses that had been planned months before: in the Cathedral of Oviedo, in a Marian Sanctuary en route, and finally, in the Basilica of Our Lady of Covadonga, the major Marian Sanctuary of the Archdiocese, dating back to the early VIII century.

I would insist that the kind reader pause right now and follow St. Ignatius of Loyola’s recommendation of imagining the scene, and ponder, very seriously, the practical implications of Traditionis Custodes on our Pilgrimage: an extraordinary group of young Spanish Catholics, along with some Spanish diocesan priests, organise a Catholic pilgrimage, under the patronage of Our Lady, St. Joseph, and St. James the Greater. To take place in the summer, publicly recognised as Catholic in every conceivable manner by even the local bishop where the pilgrimage was going to take place. A Catholic pilgrimage convoked to pray for Spain, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Pope, and for the evangelisation and restoration of the social order of Christ the King to society… being denied the celebration of Mass inside diocesan churches. Please re-read this paragraph… and then please re-read it a third time to let it proverbially sink in…

Never mind for now the historically irreconcilable liturgical wars between the Vetus Ordovs. the Novus Ordo that Francis has seen fit to make ever so painfully clear now… thanks be to God! The hard fact of the matter is rather striking, is it not? A fully Catholic pilgrimage, and recognised as such by ecclesiastical authority, was suddenly being denied celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, not only in cathedrals and basilicas, but likewise denied in parish churches and chapels, along the way. Temples that when built and consecrated, were so according to the corresponding form of the Roman Rite of the Ages to be celebrated therein, thereafter.

All this diabolical madness, utterly inconceivable before Vatican II, is happening for real in our day, thanks to the untimely publication of Traditionis Custodes, if indeed the local diocesan dispositions did go far beyond Francis’ already hateful restrictions. That nefarious document only mentions prohibiting the Traditional Latin Mass inside parish churches, which is already outrageously bad. It does not mention cathedrals, basilicas, chapels or sanctuaries. But that matters not when the sheer evil spirit which permeates the Motu Proprio and the accompanying letter to the bishops… is made clear enough to those who are to “collegially” regulate the liturgy in the dioceses, according to the iron fist of its author, of course.

Thankfully for the Pilgrimage’s sake, the Archbishop did authorise celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass in the diocese, though only in open, rural areas along the route. And also in the Cathedral of Oviedo, the opening ceremony of the blessing of an image of Our Lady of Covadonga that was to be carried in procession throughout, in addition to the Holy Hours inside parish churches en route after the open area Solemn High Masses, and the closing Holy Hour and Consecration to Our Lady at the Basilica of Covadonga.

And so, instead of the planned early Solemn High Mass in the Cathedral of Oviedo on 24 July, it was re-scheduled for that evening and re-located to a pleasant rural setting next to the parish church in El Remedio (literally, The Remedy), near the town of Nava. I was particularly impressed with the organisers’ ability to adapt to the new conditions imposed upon us by Francis’ utter lack of pastoral charity. Everything was set up with remarkable diligence and enthusiasm. The main altar was so exquisitely prepared, proving with stark clarity how in even the most modest of conditions, any Traditional Latin Mass altar setup on a Pilgrimage will outdo any modern Novus Ordo constructs.

From the golden Roman chasuble I wore and matching Roman dalmatics for the deacon and subdeacon, and our traditional Spanish birretas, to the choir chanting the Mass propers with the help of a portable organ, from the veritable army of perfectly coordinated young boys and other young male adult altar servers, from the young and experienced master of ceremonies, the intense and inspiring sermon given by the designated priest, to the most pious assistance of the multiple hundreds of pilgrims, it was all supernaturally superb.

That evening we celebrated with all solemnity the Votive Mass of St. Joseph. A Spanish priest of the Fraternity of St. Peter officiated as deacon, while a Colombian seminarian of the Institute of the Good Shepherd (studying in Paris), officiated as subdeacon. They were most kind and helpful to me. The subdeacon chanted the Epistle, the deacon chanted the Gospel and later the second Confiteor before Holy Communion, naturally all in Latin, and the Epistle and Gospel were likewise read in a good Spanish translation by the priest giving the rousing sermon. The other sung parts of the Mass, i.e., the Collect, the Preface, etc., correspond to the celebrant, and I was enthralled at taking part in such liturgical beauty.

The solemn rite of the Roman Mass is an overwhelming and overtaking wonder of chant, intensely meaningful silence, contemplation, adoration, and prayer. I was deeply awed and moved by all the details of great liturgical reverence. What impressed me particularly is the deacon kissing each liturgical object and the celebrant’s hand, every time liturgical objects, i.e., the thurible, the paten, the chalice, etc., are exchanged between the deacon and the priest-celebrant. Even the birretas when the three of us are seated. Earlier in the High Mass, the subdeacon and the deacon, likewise kneel before the celebrant, who places his right hand over the Epistle and Gospel lectionary, respectively, and having his hand kissed.

Far from all this being a form of hierarchical hyper-clericalism, it is rather a humbling experience for the priest, during the Offertory, to have his consecrated hand kissed by the deacon, and each liturgical object, back and forth. It is most moving, I can assure you, dear reader. It is a most beautiful expression of liturgical piety and gratefulness for Our Lord’s mercy at his priestly Sacrifice on the Cross, being made truly, substantially, and really present in the Sacrament appearing in the priest-celebrant’s hands.

I was so absorbed and swept away by the aura of sheer liturgical beauty that surrounded and enveloped us, I can honestly, truthfully, and wholeheartedly say that I did not miss our medieval Gothic Cathedral at all. We were celebrating, you see, in a natural Cathedral, among the arches of the trees. And it was all very beautiful.

I daresay Francis would have been quite pleased being among us that evening. Oh no, not that Francis, not the Francis who would have all this Catholic supernatural and natural beauty violently taken away from us Catholics forever and ever.

I am referring to that other Francis, the medieval Saint from Assisi, the one graced with the stigmata, the one who went off on the Crusades, and the one who had an endearing relationship with God’s beautiful creation, the flora and the fauna. The Francis whose saintly life was one of strict evangelical humbleness and poverty, but the same who would spare nothing for splendid vestments, gloriously chanted Latin liturgy with golden chalices and patens, and the sweet smell of prayerful incense rising upwards towards Heaven, while imploring God’s redemptive mercy descending towards us in this vale of tears.

It is true, then, that the local diocesan restrictions, while being far more restrictive than Francis’ infamous Motu Proprio, certainly were in accord with its evil spirit. It should not catch any Catholic unawares by now that Francis absolutely despises the Roman Mass of the Ages, and most definitely wants to eradicate its celebration from the face of the earth. He will not succeed, of course, because he cannot ultimately succeed, for it is folly to fight against God and expect to win. But Modernists will stop at nothing to push through their prideful and diabolically misguided will, based on ideological prejudices.

But Francis claims, ironically enough, ideological manipulation of the Traditional Roman Rite, which he further claims puts at risk the unity of the Church. So what does he do with a strike of a pen? He graciously, mercifully, and compassionately shows no pastoral empathy, closeness or consideration whatsoever, and putting all priests and all faithful under suspicion—if not guilty as charged—of being “rigid” and quasi-schismatic, he for all practical purposes abrogates in his own fashion the Old Mass, and dictates harsh norms for its gradual elimination and eventual assimilation to the New Mass. Or else.

Was it not Francis who once infamously said on a return flight from Rio de Janeiro to Rome, that who was he to judge a homosexual who was sincerely looking for God? But alas, the same thought does not enter his mind that who is he, then, to judge Catholics who are sincerely looking for God in the Traditional Roman Rite?

Remember that “rigid” is just his word for being merely Catholic. So, you’ve managed to remain Catholic after Vatican II’s renewal wasteland that Francis says hasn’t really been put into effect yet? Deo gratias! Good for you, but… you get deprived of “rigid” Catholic liturgy, you see, because Francis says it’s very, very, bad for you and for the Church. Well, the “Church” he runs, anyway. He knows better than two millennia of Catholic Tradition, and not just in liturgical worship.

He will not recognise, however, that it’s rather the Novus Ordo a 50+ year consented anthropocentric ideological playground for all sorts of sorry spectacles. From the now classic felt banner, clown, puppet, and balloon Masses, to liberation theology Masses, to gender ideology and pro-LGTBI Masses, to pop music-sounding guitar youth Masses, to rock band Masses, to liturgical dance Masses (sometimes with incense bowls), to indigenous peoples’ Masses, why, even to pagan idol worship Masses! All are welcome, come one and all!

You see, if it was already a sad state of affairs all these years since 2013, for Catholics to endure Francis’ give us this day our daily heresy, or our daily apostasy, or our daily blasphemy, or our daily irreverence—or more recently—an occasional dose of idolatry (which has caught on in some places, by the way), with Traditionis Custodes an all-out total war has been declared, and with all vehemence and recklessness. It is now impossible to merely ignore Francis and the Modernists running the show. Now, with more than just words, they have made a bold move to severely restrict, marginalise, and eventually stomp out all remaining vestiges of the Roman Mass of the Ages, and of course, the Catholic faith and life that go along with it.

There is now no other viable option but to resist, withstand, and overcome the onslaught. Surely, this must be God’s will to thoroughly wake us up from a false sense of liturgical and pre- and post-conciliar peace we may have been experiencing as an illusion under Benedict XVI’s tenuous Summorum Pontificum. That Motu Proprio is no more, Francis dixit, and likewise gone with the wind is the so-called hermeneutic of continuity: God has seen to it to clear things up for us, rather strikingly at that.

With Traditionis Custodes, the Modernists in charge are actually going after “the Mass”, literally persecuting the Mass everywhere it is being celebrated. It’s the postconciliar version of the Romans persecuting Christians. They’re going after the Mass I celebrate here, and the Mass every priest is celebrating the world over. To be sure, it’s not the first time this is happening. This war of restriction and prohibition of the Traditional Latin Mass has been going on since late 1969, when the Novus Ordo Missæ came into effect.

Francis, however, very nearly did eradicate the Traditional Latin Mass on 16 July 2021, albeit if only in his spiteful screed, with Traditionis Custodes. If he actually did not as yet, it was because God prevented it in his providence. But dare I say, not a divine providence which excludes us, the victims of such reckless prejudice, from cooperating with grace, and simply lament, obey, and hope for a better day.

We should remember that the document as published is not the first draft, since it has been widely reported that previous versions were far harsher in its treatment of the Traditional Latin Mass. In other words, Traditionis Custodes, as evidently horrendous as it is, is a merely highly “decaffeinated” version of Francis’ contempt for genuine Catholic liturgical worship. Worth keeping in mind moving forward…

The viciousness of Traditionis Custodes regarding its norms against the true Roman Mass were further made worse because of their immediate effect upon publication, something that never or very rarely ever happens in any ecclesial or even civil legislation. That fact alone is more than enough proof that this Motu Proprio was conceived in sheer hatred and unbridled contempt for the Traditional Latin Mass, the Immemorial Roman Rite, the Mass of the Ages, or otherwise known as “the Mass.”

But God is good. And with the intercession of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and the Apostle St. James the Greater, the organisers of the Pilgrimage undertook the enormous task of logistical adaptation. In those crucial days between the 16th and the 24th, there really was a looming threat of cancellation. I admit to being exceedingly upset at the unhappy prospect, and consistently encouraged the organisers to NOT cancel the Pilgrimage, no matter what, and that I, as I’m quite sure any other of the 24 priests going along, would be more than willing to celebrate a Solemn High Mass in one of our beautiful forests along the Pilgrimage route.

And so it was that in that crucial week between the 16th and the 24th of July, the Pilgrimage was providentially spared. Francis’ ideological dream of a Church that goes out to the peripheries was a paradox: it was, rather, Catholics of all ages that came from the peripheries. Truth be told, mostly beautiful young families with their young children. Vibrant adolescents and young adults in abundance.

Portable tent-chapels were set up en route to allow each priest the celebration of Holy Mass, in addition to the beautiful main altar setups for the celebration of the Solemn High Masses in rural settings. This meant an enormous logistical effort, complicated of course by the sudden banning of Mass in diocesan churches, thanks to Francis’ pastoral concern for the sheep who just happen to not smell the way he wants.

This is such a stark contrast regarding his insistence on “pastors smelling like the sheep.” What Francis really means—with Traditionis Custodes he has made this brutally clear—is that if the sheep don’t smell like the pastor, the pastor will beat them, kick them, and disperse them, prior to their eventual assimilation to the Novus Ordo, or face annihilation. And here I was thinking rather more along the lines of the pastor having the bonus odor Christi, the good odour of Christ, or the sweet smell of sanctity, but I digress…

Specifically, all this preparation meant providing sufficient chasubles and other vestments, Crucifixes, candelabra, sacral prayers, and altar Missals. To assist at all private Masses, not to mention at the High Masses, there was absolutely no shortage whatsoever of pious altar boys and servers, each with cassock and surplice. Priests gave spiritual talks and were readily available for Confession. The Holy Rosary was prayed and following each Solemn High Mass, there was a Holy Hour with Exposition and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Now this (after Vatican II, mind you!) you might call a new springtime and new Pentecost.

There was so many young people who by their age never knew the Vetus Ordo in its prime and thus could not possibly be nostalgic for the rite of their youth… because they are young now and have come to know and love the Traditional Latin Mass now. And why should they not? If its beauty and perfection over uncounted centuries captivated the hearts, souls, and minds of uncounted generations of Catholics—many of them saints and martyrs—why should this genuinely Catholic rite not continue to do so in our time?

The Roman Mass of the Ages is the rite of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, after all, no matter the embarrassingly ridiculous claim Francis makes in his Motu Proprio, i.e., that the Vetus Ordo is not the lex orandi of the Church… today. By that he specifically means that since Vatican II, the Traditional Latin Mass is likewise not the lex credendi nor the lex vivendi of the Church… today. A clear example of wayward legal positivism that it so intrinsically harmful to the Church, that it cannot have any credibility, other than to resist it in every way possible.

How in God’s holy name, pray tell, can the perennial and proper Roman Rite of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, no longer be the law of liturgical prayer, and thus no longer be the law of belief, and therefore no longer be the law of Catholic life?

Very decisive questions that must be asked, dear reader, and likewise must be answered. For this is not a matter of mere rites and rubrics, however important these are. No, what is really at stake here is no less than the Catholic faith and Catholic life that are expressed in liturgical rites.

Anyone who has heard a competent choir chant the Gregorian Mass Propers or glorious Sacred Renaissance Polyphony Mass Propers—an all-boys’ choir has a certain angelic quality about it—singing, for example, Tomás Luis de Victoria’s (Ávila 1548—1611 Madrid) intensely moving Improperia for Good Friday, cannot but be deeply stirred in the very depths of his or her soul to repentance, and gratefulness for Christ’s mercy on the Cross.

Or Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s (c. 1525—1594 Rome) flowing Alleluias for the Mass Dum complerentur of Pentecost that literally sweeps one away with vibrant Eastertide joy, or Thomas Tallis’ (Kent 1505—1585 Greenwich) particular style of overlapping voices that seem to compete with each other in securing a rhapsody of polyphonic beauty, knows what I mean.

When you carefully consider that all genuinely Roman Catholic music was “inspired” and that it was specifically composed for the Roman Mass of the Ages, always respecting the liturgical texts of celebration and Catholic belief, Francis would seemingly have all this patrimony of sacred music be ruthlessly taken away as well. If as he puts it, the Traditional Roman Rite is no longer the law of liturgical prayer, it implies likewise his despise for the authentic Roman Catholic sacred music of the Ages, intrinsically attached to that Traditional Roman Rite.

And let’s be perfectly honest, shall we? Along with all traditional Latin-rite liturgical patrimony of objects, art, architecture, vestments, literally everything and anything that can even remotely remind us of what the Holy Roman Catholic Church is, worships, does, prays, lives, and believes.

Alter the rites, and you change belief. If you no longer liturgically worship like Catholics, you will no longer believe what Catholics believe. And you will no longer live like believing Catholics. Tell me how you worship and I will tell you what you believe. And I will tell you what life you will lead. It always works this way. Nobody in their right Catholic mind cannot but believe that the conciliar liturgical revolutionaries knew this so well.

True enough, this has been told time and time again since Vatican Council II, and certainly not without strong reasons. If you, dear reader, have as yet not given serious thought to what I have just written, please do so now, if you have had the patience to read this far. It may well be something entirely new to you, and, God willing, may open your eyes to finally let you understand what traditionalists have really been fighting for since Vatican II.

The great English Catholic professor and inspired author, J.R.R. Tolkien (Bloemfontein 1892—1973 Bournemouth), assures us with the theological virtue of hope, even amidst the darkest of times, the ultimate victory.

In his literary masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, towards the end of the third and final part, we have the halfling Hobbits Frodo Baggins, heavily burdened with the malice of carrying the Dark Lord Sauron’s One Ring in order to cast it into the fire of Mount Doom, from whence it was forged, and his deeply committed friend and servant, Samwise Gamgee, in the Land of Mordor, a terrible wasteland of decay and ruin. Sound familiar?

One night, with an exhausted Frodo asleep, Sam gazed at the utter desolation they were in, and pondering the utter hopelessness of their quest and predicament, lifted his eyes upwards towards the heavens.

In closing, here is one of my favourite passages in the story, and one of Tolkien’s sublime Catholic intuitions, even implicitly Marian. Perhaps Tolkien was himself inspired by St. Bernard’s reference to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary as a guiding star. It is taken from The Return of the King, Book VI. Chapter 2. The Land of Shadow. May Catholics everywhere be likewise inspired and consoled by it… and Her.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach…

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

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The Root of the Culture War 

September 05, 2021

By Richard P. Salbato


The writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche gave birth to a Culture War that has effected every part of human society. It is a war between husbands and wives, parents and children, parents and schools, Churches and governments, science and religion, and created the entire mess of the 20th Century. This is the thinking that produced two world wars, created Hitler, created the thinking of Karl Marx, gave birth to Psychiatry, destroyed the American School System, produced the woman’s lib movement, produced abortion on demand, made people their own gods, and took the moral law out of governments. It produced an American Movie Industry that would rather sell immorality than make money, an industry that stopped making things like “The Ten Commandments”, “Ben Hur”, “Shirley Temple”, “Pinocchio”, “Joan of Ark”, etc. that had moral messages and made a great amount of money and started making movies about homosexuals, single moms, fiction, or any deviant behavior that they could think of and they did it even if it did not make money. Modern technology has saved them from bankruptcy by great graphics when in fact there is no story at all, like “Star Wars” or “The Matrix”.  



Instigated by liberal elites who manipulated—and were manipulated by—the so-called “youth movement” of the 1960s, this cultural decadence has become evident in ways that are now all too familiar. The deterioration of art and music; the popularization of pornography; the collapse of the family and consequent social disintegration; the radicalization of academia, law, and politics; legislation for divorce on demand, abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia; racial politics; and the decline of religion under multiple assaults from feminism and political correctness. The revolution has been both deliberate and successful, and has transformed our society into something no one could have imagined fifty years earlier. 



The Catholic Church can be a major opponent of the nihilism of modern liberal culture. Pope John Paul II has been attempting to lead an intellectual and spiritual reinvigoration, but there is resistance within the Church. Modern liberal culture has made inroads with some of the Catholic hierarchy as well as the laity. It remains to be seen whether intellectual orthodoxy can stand firm against the currents of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. The absence of an orthodox Catholic voice in society was of vital importance in allowing the cultural collapse of the 1960s. 





The cultural war is an international phenomenon and the courts have the power of judicial review to strike down statues or accept them. They have taken one side in the culture war — the side of the intellectual elite, those people who think they have a superior attitude in life and that those of us lower down the social ladder should be coerced into accepting their views.



We have been loosing this Culture War for the last 100 years but what makes me want to write about it now is that something happened that makes me think we can now turn this war around and win it. And that is the success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”. What has happened to the people who have seen this movie gives me hope that the 100 year war can be won. But to win this war we must understand it, we must see the enemy in our own distorted thinking, we must see the enemy in the books we read, the movies we see, the teaching at school, in almost everything secular today. Our Lady of Fatima said that Communism would spread its errors throughout the world. Those errors are the first modern atheist thinking born of the writings of Nietzsche.



Life of Friedrich Nietzsche



Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844. His father died when he was 4 year old. Most of his family were Lutheran ministers. He was raized by his mother, Franziska (1826-1897), his paternal grandmother, Erdmuthe, his father’s two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie, and his younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (1846-1935) – all women.



Momentous for Nietzsche in 1865 was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer’s atheistic and turbulent vision of the world, The World as Will and Representation, a work which criticized materialist metaphysical theories from the standpoint of Kant’s critique of metaphysics in general. In 1867, he met the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer 



Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, his studies in classical philology, his inspiration from Wagner, his reading of Lange, and his frustration with the contemporary German culture, coalesced in his first book — The Birth of Tragedy (1872) — which was published when he was 28. Wagner showered the book with unqualified praise. Nietzsche met Paul Rée, who, while living in close company with Nietzsche, would write On the Origin of Moral Feelings.



In 1876, at age 32, Nietzsche made an unsuccessful marriage proposal to a Dutch piano student in Geneva named Mathilde Trampedach. During this time, His ailing health, which led to migraine headaches, eyesight problems and vomiting, necessitated his resignation from the university in June, 1879. 



On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou Salomé, a twenty-one-year-old Russian woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love with her, and offered his hand in marriage. She declined, and the future of Nietzsche’s friendship with her and Paul Rée appears to have suffered as a consequence. In the years to follow, Salomé would become an associate of Sigmund Freud, and would write with psychological insight of her association with Nietzsche. 



On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. That Nietzsche had an extraordinarily sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of medications is well-documented as a more general fact. After a brief hospitalization in Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic, and in March 1890 his mother took him back home to Naumburg, where he lived under her care for the next seven years. After his mother’s death in 1897, his sister Elisabeth — having previously returned home from Paraguay, where she had been working with her husband Bernhard Förster to establish an Aryan, anti-Semitic German colony called “New Germany” (“Nueva Germania”) — assumed responsibility for Nietzsche’s welfare. On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as he approached his 56th year, apparently of pneumonia in combination with a stroke. 



The Influence of Nietzsche



Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was notoriously unread and un-influential during his own lifetime, and his works suffered considerable distortion in the hands of his sister Elisabeth, who managed his literary estate and twisted his philosophy into a set of ideas supporting Hitler and Nazism (Hitler had Thus Spoke Zarathustra issued to every soldier in the German army). By far his most often quoted utterance–seldom understood–is “God is dead,” which placed his thought beyond the pale for many readers. 



But Nietzsche’s influence has been much richer and varied than these simple stereotypes suggest. It is not surprising that an author who embraced such contradictions should have influenced thinkers of an extraordinary variety. 



Philosophy



The only philosopher to feel his influence while he could be aware of it was the Danish critic and philosopher Georg Brandes (1842-1927), who in the late 1880s developed a philosophy which he called “aristocratic radicalism” inspired by Nietzsche’s notion of the “overman.” Nietzsche’s insistence that the decay of religion (the “death of God”) requires that humanity take responsibility for setting its own moral standards inspired existentialists from Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) to Albert Camus (1913-1960). 



Nietzsche’s relativism has had a powerful influence on two of the most important modern French Deconstructionist philosophers, Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984). 



Theologians



Oddly enough, he has also been a powerful influence on certain theologians, notably Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who developed an Existentialist, human-centered theology which tried to salvage elements of traditional faith while drawing on rationalism. Thomas Altizer (b.1927) created a sensation (and found himself on the cover of Time) in the 1960s by helping to create the oxymoronically named “death of God theology” together with a number of other theologians who argued for religion without God. Their constant use of Nietzsche’s catch phrase is a reminder of their indebtedness to him. Although the direct influence of this school hardly lasted out the decade, other theologians used Nietzsche’s thought as well, notably embracing his idea that human values should be based not on denial (“thou shalt not”) but on affirmation (“thou shalt”). The Jewish theologian Martin Buber (1878-1965)–also a great influence on Christian theology–translated part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Polish. He read Nietzsche’s works very early, beginning in 1892. His emphasis on process in theology resembles some of Nietzsche’s ideas. 



Although he did not draw directly on Nietzsche’s work, the notions of “creative evolution” espoused by Henri Bergson (1859-1941) had a powerful influence on the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1885-1957), who combined his studies under Bergson with his reading of Nietzsche to produce a version of what is known as “process theology” which is most readily studied in the little book The Saviors of God and is also expressed in his most popular novel, Zorba the Greek. According to Kazantzakis, God is the result of whatever the most energetic and heroic people value and create. This is clearly very similar to Nietzsche’s ideas about the sources of religion. Nietzsche’s notion of heroes as creators is at the heart of Kazantzakis’ philosophy. 



Psychology 



The two grandfathers of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961), both had a deep admiration for Nietzsche and credited him with many insights into the human character. 



Alfred Adler (1870-1937) developed an “individual psychology” which argues that each individual strives for what he called “superiority,” but is more commonly referred to today as “self-realization” or “self-actualization,” and which was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s notions of striving and self-creation. The entire “human potential movement” and humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, etc.) owes a great debt to this line of thought. Even pop psychologists of “self-esteem” preach a gospel little different from that of Zarathustra. The ruthless, self-assertive “objectivism” of Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is difficult to imagine without the influence of Nietzsche. 



Fiction 



Besides Kanzantzakis, many novelists have drawn on Nietzsche. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) wrote repeatedly about him and his characters are often engaged in struggles to define their ideas in a world in which old philosophies are decaying, like Nietzsche, torn between romanticism and rationalism (notably in The Magic Mountain). Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) similarly explored the necessity for the individuals to overcome their social training and traditional ideas to seek their own way (Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game). Many other famous writers influenced by Nietzsche include André Malraux (1901-1976), André Gide (1869-1951), and Knut Hamsun (1859-1952). 



Poetry 



Given the poetic style in which he wrote, it is not surprising that numerous poets have been drawn to Nietzsche, including Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). He, like many writers influenced by Nietzsche, rejected the kind of traditional Christian dualism which sorts existence into good and evil with the physical and earthly being regarded as a source of evil and goodness identified with pure spirit and the life after death. His celebration of mortal life as a sort of religion is extremely Nietzschean. He was also became lover of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a woman who ten years earlier Nietzsche loved unrequitedly. 



Among many others, one can find strong Nietzschean themes in the works of Beat Generation poets such as Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) and Gary Snyder (b. 1930), who were drawn to the vitalistic, anti-dualistic themes also earlier expressed in the English and American traditions by William Blake and Walt Whitman. Blake, Whitman and Nietzsche form a sort of triumvirate whose influence runs through large swaths of modern literature in their rejection of dualism and embrace of the body as good. Like many other poets, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) combined an admiration for Blake with interest in Nietzsche. 



Drama 



George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) expressed his version of Nietzsche’s struggle for power in his play Man and Superman, and more than one character in the plays of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is under Nietzsche’s spell. 



Influential ideas 



If there are few names from the second half of the 20th century cited above that you recognize, it is not because Nietzsche’s influence has dwindled. Rather it so pervades modern culture that many who have never read him are influenced by his thought indirectly. Consider the following ideas circulating in American culture today, all of them traceable at least in part to Nietzsche, although many of them are much simpler than similar ideas held by him: 



· The goal of life should be to find yourself. True maturity means discovering or creating an identity for yourself. 



· The highest virtue is to be true to yourself (consider these song titles from a generation ago: “I Gotta Be Me,” “I Did It My Way”). 



· When you fall ill, your body is trying to tell you something; listen to the wisdom of your body. 



· People who hate their bodies or are in tension with them need to learn how to accept and integrate their physical selves with their minds instead of seeing them as in tension with each other. The mind and body make up a single whole. 



· Athletes, musicians, etc. especially need to become so attuned to their bodies that their skills proceed spontaneously from the knowledge stored in their muscles and are not frustrated by an excess of conscious rational thought. (The influence of Zen Buddhism on this sort of thinking is also very strong.) 



· Sexuality is not the opposite of virtue, but a natural gift that needs to be developed and integrated into a healthy, rounded life. 



· Many people suffer from impaired self-esteem; they need to work on being proud of themselves. 



· Knowledge and strength are greater virtues than humility and submission. 



· Overcoming feelings of guilt is an important step to mental health. 



· You can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself. 



· Life is short; experience it as intensely as you can or it is wasted. 



· People’s values are shaped by the cultures they live in; as society changes we need changed values. 



· Challenge yourself; don’t live passively. 



It is notable that none of these ideas flows from the traditional Judeo-Christian culture which dominated Europe for a thousand years. Many of them have their roots in Romanticism, with Nietzsche merely articulating impulses that others shared; but he is a major transmitter of them to the modern world. 



Nietzsche’s Writings



The following are Nietzsche’s own words on different subjects taken from some of his books. This is the thinking that produced two world wars, created Hitler, created the thinking of Carl Marx, gave birth to Psychiatry, destroyed the American School System, produced the woman’s lib movement, produced abortion on demand, made people their own gods, and took the moral law out of governments.  



The following are all quotes from Nietzsche’s books.



Philosophy



How I understand the philosopher — as a terrible explosive, endangering everything… 



Those who boast so mightily of the scientifically of their metaphysics should receive no answer; 



Even today many educated people think that the victory of Christianity over Greek philosophy is a proof of the superior truth of the former – although in this case it was only the coarser and more violent that conquered the more spiritual and delicate. So far as superior truth is concerned, it is enough to observe that the awakening sciences have allied themselves point by point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but point by point rejected Christianity. 



If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason… The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him… Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed the finer intellect. 



When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God’s son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed – whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions – is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross — how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed? 



Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. 



A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape–I mean one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding continually. 



All the world still believes in the authorship of the “Holy Spirit” or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for “edification.”… 


Paul thought up the idea and Calvin rethought it, that for innumerable people damnation has been decreed from eternity, and that this beautiful world plan was instituted to reveal the glory of God: heaven and hell and humanity are thus supposed to exist – to satisfy the vanity of God! What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up first, or second. Paul has remained Saul after all – the persecutor of God. 



Christianity’s Nature – If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit —  



The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse origin, and that is why it is so capable of proselytizing. 



Christianity possesses the hunters instinct for all those who can by one means or another be brought to despair – of which only a portion of mankind is capable. It is constantly on their track, it lies in wait for them. 



Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. 



In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God – today one indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.- When in former times one had refuted the ‘proofs of the existence of God’ put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep. 



But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation – all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration. 



Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it has first to burden the heart so as afterwards to be able to lighten it. Consequently it shall perish. 



After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. 



There are no facts, only interpretations. 



Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. 



Every word is a prejudice. 



Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things. 



Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.  



It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. 



Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins. 



What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.


We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all



What are man’s truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors. 



The reasons for which ‘this’ world has been characterized as ‘apparent’ are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable. 



Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses… But when will we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, s.109, 



We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live – by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error. 



Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith… include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.  



How did logic come into existence in man’s head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer. Those, for example, who did not know how to find often enough what is “equal” as regards both nourishment and hostile animals–those, in other words, who subsumed things too slowly and cautiously–were favored with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar instances that they must be equal. The dominant tendency, however, to treat as equal what is merely similar–an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal–is what first created any basis for logic.



In order that the concept of substance could originate–which is indispensible for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it–it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything “in flux.” At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency–to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just– had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.



Cause and effect, such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there are an infinite number of processes which elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.



To renounce belief in one’s ego, to deny one’s own “reality” — what a triumph! not merely over the senses, over appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation and cruelty against reason — a voluptuous pleasure that reaches its height when the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason declares: “there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!”


Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this — what would that mean but to castrate the intellect? 



Morality



Nevertheless. — however credit and debit balances may stand: at its present state as a specific individual science the awakening of moral observation has become necessary, and mankind can no longer be spared the cruel sight of the moral dissecting table and its knives and forceps… the older philosophy… has, with paltry evasions, always avoided investigation of the origin and history of the moral sensations. With what consequences is now very clearly apparent, since it has been demonstrated in many instances how the errors of the greatest philosophers usually have their point of departure in a false explanation of certain human actions and sensations; …a false ethics is erected, religion and mythological monsters are then in turn called to buttress it, and the shadow of these dismal spirits in the end falls even across physics and the entire perception of the world. 



Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful – but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid. 



Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; – history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men! 



What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit – the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again. 



To admit a belief merely because it is a custom – but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! – And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality? 



… hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good – a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! – As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many of them have not yet been discovered. 



It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best – and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful. 



Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief – akin to a bad conscience – of the great thinkers. 



All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers. 



Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal? 



Mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with them; mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads. 



You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass. 



The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying ‘the ego is always hateful’; the most childish is the even more celebrated ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’. — In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun. 



Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him! 



It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind! 



Consider the following signs of those states of society which are necessary from time to time and which are designated with the word “corruption.” As soon as corruption sets in anywhere superstition becomes rank. and the previous common faith of a people becomes pale and powerless against it. For superstition is second-order free spirit: those who surrender to it choose certain forms and formulas that they find congenial and permit themselves some freedom of choice.



Fourth, when “morals decay” those men emerge whom one calls tyrants: they are the precursors and as it were the precocious harbingers of individuals… In these ages bribery and treason reach their peak, for the love of the newly discovered ego is much more powerful now than the love of the old, used-up “fatherland”… Individuals–being truly in-and-for-themselves– care, as is well known, more for the moment than do their opposites, the herd men… The times of corruption are those when the apples fall from the tree: I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of new states and communities. Corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people.



The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness – which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason. Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments… Thus the virtuous intellects are needed – oh, let me use the most unambiguous word – what is needed is virtuous stupidity, stolid metronomes for the slow spirit, to make sure that the faithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance… We others are the exception and the danger – and we need eternally to be opposed. – Well, there actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule. 



Suppose nothing else were “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other “reality” besides the reality of our drives–for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the question whether this “given” would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world?… 



In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so)… The question is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do–and at bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself–then we have to make the experiment of positing causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. “Will,” of course, can affect only “will”–and not “matter” (not “nerves,” for example). In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever “effects” are recognized–and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will. 

Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will–namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it… then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as–will to power. The world viewed from inside… it would be “will to power” and nothing else. 



In order to sustain the theory of a mechanistic world, therefore, we always have to stipulate to what extent we are employing two fictions: the concept of motion (taken from our sense language) and the concept of the atom (=unity, deriving from our psychical “experience”): the mechanistic theory presupposes a sense prejudice and a psychological prejudice… 



The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as “moved”) –so as to be calculable– thus causal unities are invented, “things” (atoms) whose effect remains constant (–transference of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom)… 


If we eliminate these additions, no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their “effect” upon the same. The will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos –the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge– 



My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (–its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. 



[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body… will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant – not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power… ‘Exploitation’… belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second. from Nietzsche’s The Wanderer and his Shadow,s. 323



My philosophy brings the triumphant idea of which all other modes of thought will ultimately perish. It is the great cultivating idea: the races that cannot bear it stand condemned; those who find it the greatest benefit are chosen to rule.



I want to teach the idea that gives many the right to erase themselves – the great cultivating idea..



Everything becomes and recurs eternally – escape is impossible! – Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!)… 



To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain ( pain conceived as a tool, as the father of pleasure…); the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the “will”; abolition of “knowledge-in-itself.” 



Greatest elevation of the consciousness of strength in man, as he creates the overman. from The Will to Power, 



“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?


All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…


Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.


Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth…


What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.


The hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.’


The hour when you say, ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’


The hour when you say, ‘What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’ 



“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.


Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.


Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring



Marriages contracted from love (so-called love-matches) have error for their father and need for their mother. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2008/09/nietzsche-root-of-culture-war.html]

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. SHARE

A slain Marine’s mother just ended Joe Biden’s Presidency with an epic statement that will make you cry

September 3, 2021

Joe Biden’s failure in Afghanistan directly led to the death of 13 U.S. Marines.

They died in an explosion near the Kabul airport, which Biden had announced he was abandoning.

And a slain Marine’s mother just ended Joe Biden’s Presidency with an epic statement that will make you cry.https://lockerdome.com/lad/13678839645549670?pubid=ld-1716-3522&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Frightnewswire.com&rid=&width=640

Joe Biden’s failed Afghanistan withdrawal will forever be a stain on the history of the United States. 

He handed billions of dollars in weapons to terrorists, and then gave up on rescuing Americans stuck in the city that was then run by the same terrorists he just armed. 

While his surrender surely infuriates all proud Americans, it especially stings for Shana Chappell, the mother of Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, one of those U.S. Marines killed by a Taliban suicide bomber near the Kabul airport.

And when Chappell was given the chance to meet with Biden at an event to honor her 20-year-old son, she wasn’t impressed.https://lockerdome.com/lad/13678841155499110?pubid=ld-8976-4742&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Frightnewswire.com&rid=&width=640

In fact, she was disgusted, and took to her Facebook page to make her anger known. 

She posted about how Biden refused to listen to her story, and instead kept interrupting to talk about his own son, Beau, who died of cancer in 2015. 

“[Y]ou tried to interrupt me and give me your own sob story and i had to tell you ‘that this isn’t about you so don’t make it about you!!!’” Chappell wrote.https://lockerdome.com/lad/14230595806901350?pubid=ld-7945-558&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Frightnewswire.com&rid=&width=640

“U then rolled your f***ing eyes in your head like you were annoyed with me and i let you know that the only reason i was talking to you was out of respect for my son . . .” she wrote.

Chappell went on to state that Biden turned away and threw his hands up as she continued to speak to him.

“U turned to walk away and i let you know my sons blood was on your hands and you threw your hand up behind you as you walked away from me like you were saying ‘ok whatever!!!’” she added.https://lockerdome.com/lad/14230597383959654?pubid=ld-667-5472&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Frightnewswire.com&rid=&width=640

She also spoke about how Biden continually checked his watch during the ceremony.

“What the f*** was so important that you had to keep looking at your watch????” she asked. “You are nobody special Biden!!! America Hates you!!!!!”

After making her post, Chappell had her account limited on Facebook, and she was completely banned from Instagram, another social media website owned by Facebook. 

Her ban remained in place for multiple days, until it was reinstated following intense uproar. 

“We express our deepest condolences to Ms. Chappell and her family,” said an Instagram spokeswoman. “Her tribute to her heroic son does not violate any of our policies. While the post was not removed, her account was incorrectly deleted and we have since restored it.”

She clearly ripped Biden a new one, and was completely justified in doing so.

OnePeterFive

Rebuilding Catholic Culture. Restoring Catholic Tradition.

• TRADITIONIS CUSTODES

New Papal Interview Contains Revealing Remarks on Traditionis Custodes

 Matt GaspersSeptember 3, 20210 Comments

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• 49

In a lengthy new interview with COPE, a Spanish radio station, Pope Francis fields questions on a wide range of topics,[1] including his Apostolic Letter Traditionis Custodes (July 16, 2021) that effectively abolished Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2007) and severely restricts access to the Traditional Latin Mass for priests and laity alike.

During the interview, conducted sometime this past weekend (Aug. 28-29) according to COPE’s summary, journalist and broadcaster Carlos Herrera inquired (Spanish audio available here, 22:13 and following):https://f42cff495ab02cf34e58ad916446e77c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

I don’t know if Pope Francis is a man who likes to bang his fist on the table. Would it be possible that the last blow on the table has been the pontifical document limiting the celebration of the ‘Tridentine Masses’? And I also ask you to explain to my audience what the ‘Tridentine Mass’ is, what is it about the Tridentine Mass that is not mandatory.

Francis, for his part, offered some revealing remarks in response.

“The history of Traditionis Custodes is long,” says Pope Francis, attempting to establish continuity with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI — the former having granted bishops an indult (special permission) to allow the Traditional Mass in their respective dioceses under certain conditions,[2] the latter having acknowledged (much to the chagrin of many bishops, no doubt) that the Traditional Mass “was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.”[3]

“When first St. John Paul II — and later Benedict, more clearly with Summorum Pontificum — gave this possibility,” Francis continues, “of celebrating with the Missal of John XXIII (prior to that of Paul VI, which is post-conciliar) for those who did not feel good with the current liturgy, who had a certain nostalgia… it seemed to me one of the most beautiful and human pastoral things of Benedict XVI, who is a man of exquisite humanity. And so it began.”[4]

“After three years,” he goes on, “[Benedict] said that an evaluation had to be made.[5] An evaluation was made, and it seemed that everything was going well. And it was fine. Ten years passed from that evaluation to the present…and last year we saw with those responsible for Worship and for the Doctrine of the Faith that it was appropriate to make another evaluation of all the bishops of the world.”

Pope Francis offers no explanation as to why “it was appropriate to make another evaluation” in 2020. Neither did Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who stated in his very brief letter to the presidents of episcopal conferences (March 7, 2020) that “His Holiness Pope Francis wishes to be informed about the current application” of Summorum Pontificum. Thus, it was simply Francis’ will “to be informed” that produced the 2020 survey (for purposes which now appear obvious).

After the completed surveys were submitted and “studied,” according to Francis, “the concern that appeared the most was that something that was done to help pastorally those who have lived a previous experience was being transformed into ideology.” In other words, over the past thirteen years the Traditional Latin Mass has gone from being a nostalgic “experience” to an ideological tool — something “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 Francis in his Letter to Bishops accompanying Traditionis Custodes.[6]

“So,” he says, “we had to react with clear norms,” in order “to support and consolidate Summorum Pontificum.” This claim is quite bizarre, in light of Art. 8 of Traditionis Custodes, which states: “Previous norms, instructions, permissions, and customs that do not conform to the provisions of the present Motu Proprio [e.g., those contained in Summorum Pontificum] are abrogated.”

Regarding the composition of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis explains, “I did more or less the outline, I had it studied and I worked, and I worked a lot, with traditionalist people of good sense. And the result,” he says, “was that pastoral care that must be taken, with some good limits.” Needless to say, it would be very interesting to know the identity of those “traditionalist people of good sense” with whom he collaborated.

After mentioning the imperative (according to him) of proclaiming the Scriptures in the vernacular during Mass[7] — “otherwise it would be like laughing at the Word of God” (another bizarre claim) — Francis concludes by making a statement that seems to go beyond his own provisions in Traditionis Custodes about the need for priests to obtain permission to offer the Traditional Mass:

After this motu proprio, a priest who wants to celebrate that is not in the same condition as before — that it was for nostalgia, for desire, etc.— and so he has to ask permission from Rome. A kind of permission for bi-ritualism, which is given only by Rome. [Like] a priest who celebrates in the Eastern Rite and the Latin Rite, he is bi-ritual but with the permission of Rome.

Notice how he says “a priest [no qualification] who wants to celebrate has to ask permission from Rome,” whereas Traditionis Custodes distinguishes between “[p]riests ordained after the publication of” TC (Art. 4) and those “who already celebrate according to the Missale Romanum of 1962” (Art. 5). According to TC, the former “should submit a formal request to the diocesan Bishop who shall consult the Apostolic See before granting this authorization,” whereas the latter “should request from the diocesan Bishop the authorization to continue to enjoy this faculty.” In other words, no “permission from Rome” is necessary for priests who were already offering the Traditional Mass prior to TC. (With all due respect, it appears that Francis needs to re-read his own document.)

Notice, also, the implicit admission on Francis’ part that what Benedict XVI called “two usages of the one Roman rite” (Summorum Pontificum, Art. 1) — namely, the “Extraordinary Form” (Traditional Mass) and “Ordinary Form” (New Mass) — are actually two distinct rites.[8] What else could Francis possibly mean, when he compares the alleged need for permission to offer the Traditional Mass to “bi-ritualism”?[9]

And finally, his last sentence contains a phrase comparable to something out of George Orwell’s fictitious Ministry of Truth: “If you read the letter well and read the Decree well, you will see that it is simply a constructive reordering, with pastoral care and avoiding an excess by those who are not…” (emphasis added).[10]

In reality, Traditionis Custodes and its accompanying letter to bishops is a destructive disordering of what Christopher Ferrara once called the “strong canonical framework” established by Benedict XVI via Summorum Pontificum and subsequent documents that “freely allow[ed] for a widespread and unhindered revival of liturgical tradition” throughout the universal Church.

Let us pray that a future pope will cast Traditionis Custodes into the abyss (along with several other acts of the current Roman Pontiff) and restore liturgical, doctrinal, moral, and spiritual sanity to the Church. May it be so, through the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima!

Reprinted with permission from Catholic Family News.

Photo by Sean Ang on Unsplash.

—

[1] Far too many for this article (see here for a broader summary).

[2] Cf. Congregation for Divine Worship, Quattuor Abhinc Annos (Oct. 3, 1984).

[3] Benedict XVI, Letter to Bishops accompanying Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2021). Furthermore, in Summorum Pontificum Benedict confirmed the right of “any Catholic priest of the Latin rite” to offer the Traditional Mass without the need of obtaining “permission from the Apostolic See or from his own Ordinary” (Art. 2).

[4] While “nostalgia” might be a factor for some, for many (if not most) it is primarily a matter of doctrine (see, for example, the Brief Critical Study of the Novus Ordo Missae, colloquially known as the “Ottaviani Intervention”).

[5] Correction: Benedict actually said, “I invite you, dear Brothers, to send to the Holy See an account of your experiences, three years after this Motu Proprio [Summorum Pontificum] has taken effect. If truly serious difficulties come to light, ways to remedy them can be sought.” (Ibid., emphasis added).

[6] For one who firmly believes that “the liturgical reform is irreversible,” his anxiety about the widespread revival of the Traditional Latin Mass is understandable.

[7] Cf. Traditionis Custodes, Art. 3 § 3.

[8] Paul VI essentially conceded the same, when he referred to “the new rite of the Mass” (Italian, nuovo rito della Messa) during two consecutive Wednesday audiences (Nov. 19 and Nov. 26, 1969), just before the New Order of Mass (again, new) was introduced on Nov. 30, 1969 (First Sunday of Advent) per his Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum (Apr. 3, 1969).

[9] Speaking of “bi-ritualism,” doesn’t this mean that Traditional Roman Rite Catholics should be given their own Patriarch, bishops, dioceses, Code of Canon Law, and sui iuris status — just like the Eastern Catholic Churches?

[10] According to the audio (26:46 and following), Francis paused (“those who are not…”) and Mr. Herrera interjected in order to move on to the next subject.

Matt Gaspers

Matt Gaspers is the Managing Editor of Catholic Family News, a monthly journal and online media apostolate devoted to promoting the traditional Catholic Faith and the precious heritage of Christian civilization. He was asked by John Vennari (1958-2017), longtime Editor of CFN and stalwart defender of the Faith, to carry on CFN’s important work shortly before Mr. Vennari’s passing. In addition to writing for CFN, Mr. Gaspers has also been published by The Fatima Crusader, OnePeterFive, and LifeSiteNews. His study and writing interests include theology, Church history, Fatima, Islam, and the spiritual life. He has spoken at conferences hosted by Catholic Family News and the Fatima Center. He and his wife, together with their children, reside in Colorado.www.catholicfamilynews.org/

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

SEARCH

Flashback: “Coming Victory Over Abortion”?

September 04, 2021

July 31, 2005Below is a email I recieved from Steve Mosher. Please read it because it is important. I don’t want to get into names, but there are some pro-life organizations which I wouldn’t donate a penny. Steve’s PRI is just the opposite, if you could only donate to one pro-life group that is the one.

Fred

Abortion may be legal in America, but more and more Americans are choosing life. This shift in attitude will have a positive demographic effect in the years ahead. As more and more Americans choose life, America is shifting towards the Culture of Life.

Steven W. Mosher
President

The Coming Demographic Victory

Pro-lifers may be on the defensive in the courtroom, but they are winning the battle of the cradle.
The first person to point this out to me was Father Paul Marx. A family sociologist by training, Father had noticed in his travels around the United States that pro-lifers had larger families than the American average. I had observed the same thing. Pro-life events attracted families with four, six, or even eight children. It only made sense, we agreed, that those who respect the sanctity of unborn life would average more children than those who do not. For one thing, their children are at far less risk of being aborted than are the children of pro-aborts.

It was left to crack HLI researcher Brian Clowes to clothe these impressions with statistics. Dr. Clowes concluded from the sketchy survey data then available that there were significant, even striking differences in fertility between the two groups. While those who professed pro-life sentiments far exceeded the American average of two children, those who supported legal abortion fell far short of this figure. Specifically, he found that pro-lifers averaged three children, while pro-aborts averaged one. This is to say, pro-lifers were out reproducing pro-aborts by a margin of three to one.

At the time, in the mid-nineties, the polls showed that Americans were more or less evenly divided on the abortion question. But if we were right, the poll numbers would inexorably shift in a pro-life direction as time passed. Demography is destiny, after all. If the pro-lifers were having three times as many children as the pro-aborts, then the ranks of the pro-lifers would swell while the ranks of the pro-aborts thinned. The pro-abortion movement would have signed its own death warrant.

Pro-lifers, on the other hand, would be busy signing birth certificates.
After a generation, the country would be overwhelmingly pro-life.

The mind is drawn toward pleasant prospects, but is there any hard evidence of such a demographic shift? I am happy to report that there is. A new Gallup poll of teenagers, reported on November 24, 2003 by WorldNetDaily.com, found that 72 percent of those queried believe abortion is morally wrong.

The survey of youth, aged 13 to 17, indicated just 19 percent believe abortion should be legal in all circumstances, compared to 26 percent for adults. About 47 percent of teens said it should be legal under some circumstances, while 55 percent of adults agreed. Most strikingly, about 32 percent of teens thought abortion should never be permitted, while only 17 percent of adults said the same. Religious conviction played a part in these views. Only 12 percent of churchgoing youth thought that abortion is morally acceptable, compared with about 38 percent of non-churchgoing youth. About 40 percent of churchgoing teens believe abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, compared to 26 percent for non-churchgoers.

The Gallup Youth Survey was done through a scientific methodology via the Internet to ensure a representative sample of the U.S. population. The questionnaire was completed by 517 youths. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told Baptist Press that “We’re winning the struggle for hearts and minds. The young people are more conservative than their parents.”
But I believe it would be accurate to say that we are winning the battle
of the cradle. The young people surveyed are, by and large, the sons and
daughters of parents of pro-life sentiments. Like begets like, only in greater number.

The battle is not over yet, however.

The pro-aborts are not going quietly into demographic oblivion. (Do they ever do anything quietly?) While they have largely stopped reproducing themselves biologically, they are continuing to replicate themselves culturally. What do I mean? I mean that the Culture of Death controls MTV and passes its anti-people and anti-baby attitudes along to unsuspecting young viewers. It controls elite institutions of higher education. Tenured abortion radicals are zealous in making new recruits to their anti-life views.

This means that it is not enough to simply welcome more children into the world. People of pro-life sentiments must ensure that their own children_and as many other young people as they can reach_are properly taught the Culture of Life values that they are the product of. They will find their pro-life views under assault as they go on to college, and must be taught to defend them.If this is done, then this country will move sharply in a pro-life direction over the next decade. And the stage will be set to outlaw not merely Partial Birth Abortions, but all abortions.
 [Join with Population Research Institute as we work to make the world safe for families and babies. Make your tax-deductible donation at our secure Website at https://pop.org/donate.cfm%5D
Steve Mosher is the president of Population Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to debunking the myth that the world is overpopulated.

(c) 2003 Population Research Institute.
Permission to reprint granted. Redistribute widely. Credit requested.

Click here for Credit Card and Amazon Order of Fred Martinez’s book “Hidden Axis”:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1410746186/qid=1099936755/sr=11-1/ref

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. 

OnePeterFive

Rebuilding Catholic Culture. Restoring Catholic Tradition

• TRADITIONIS CUSTODES

New Papal Interview Contains Revealing Remarks on Traditionis Custodes

 Matt GaspersSeptember 3, 20210 Comments

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• 43

In a lengthy new interview with COPE, a Spanish radio station, Pope Francis fields questions on a wide range of topics,[1] including his Apostolic Letter Traditionis Custodes (July 16, 2021) that effectively abolished Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2007) and severely restricts access to the Traditional Latin Mass for priests and laity alike.

During the interview, conducted sometime this past weekend (Aug. 28-29) according to COPE’s summary, journalist and broadcaster Carlos Herrera inquired (Spanish audio available here, 22:13 and following):https://f43e446da6295535a89284993cb65e72.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

I don’t know if Pope Francis is a man who likes to bang his fist on the table. Would it be possible that the last blow on the table has been the pontifical document limiting the celebration of the ‘Tridentine Masses’? And I also ask you to explain to my audience what the ‘Tridentine Mass’ is, what is it about the Tridentine Mass that is not mandatory.

Francis, for his part, offered some revealing remarks in response.

“The history of Traditionis Custodes is long,” says Pope Francis, attempting to establish continuity with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI — the former having granted bishops an indult (special permission) to allow the Traditional Mass in their respective dioceses under certain conditions,[2] the latter having acknowledged (much to the chagrin of many bishops, no doubt) that the Traditional Mass “was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.”[3]

“When first St. John Paul II — and later Benedict, more clearly with Summorum Pontificum — gave this possibility,” Francis continues, “of celebrating with the Missal of John XXIII (prior to that of Paul VI, which is post-conciliar) for those who did not feel good with the current liturgy, who had a certain nostalgia… it seemed to me one of the most beautiful and human pastoral things of Benedict XVI, who is a man of exquisite humanity. And so it began.”[4]

“After three years,” he goes on, “[Benedict] said that an evaluation had to be made.[5] An evaluation was made, and it seemed that everything was going well. And it was fine. Ten years passed from that evaluation to the present…and last year we saw with those responsible for Worship and for the Doctrine of the Faith that it was appropriate to make another evaluation of all the bishops of the world.”

Pope Francis offers no explanation as to why “it was appropriate to make another evaluation” in 2020. Neither did Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who stated in his very brief letter to the presidents of episcopal conferences (March 7, 2020) that “His Holiness Pope Francis wishes to be informed about the current application” of Summorum Pontificum. Thus, it was simply Francis’ will “to be informed” that produced the 2020 survey (for purposes which now appear obvious).

After the completed surveys were submitted and “studied,” according to Francis, “the concern that appeared the most was that something that was done to help pastorally those who have lived a previous experience was being transformed into ideology.” In other words, over the past thirteen years the Traditional Latin Mass has gone from being a nostalgic “experience” to an ideological tool — something “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 Francis in his Letter to Bishops accompanying Traditionis Custodes.[6]

“So,” he says, “we had to react with clear norms,” in order “to support and consolidate Summorum Pontificum.” This claim is quite bizarre, in light of Art. 8 of Traditionis Custodes, which states: “Previous norms, instructions, permissions, and customs that do not conform to the provisions of the present Motu Proprio [e.g., those contained in Summorum Pontificum] are abrogated.”

Regarding the composition of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis explains, “I did more or less the outline, I had it studied and I worked, and I worked a lot, with traditionalist people of good sense. And the result,” he says, “was that pastoral care that must be taken, with some good limits.” Needless to say, it would be very interesting to know the identity of those “traditionalist people of good sense” with whom he collaborated.

After mentioning the imperative (according to him) of proclaiming the Scriptures in the vernacular during Mass[7] — “otherwise it would be like laughing at the Word of God” (another bizarre claim) — Francis concludes by making a statement that seems to go beyond his own provisions in Traditionis Custodes about the need for priests to obtain permission to offer the Traditional Mass:

After this motu proprio, a priest who wants to celebrate that is not in the same condition as before — that it was for nostalgia, for desire, etc.— and so he has to ask permission from Rome. A kind of permission for bi-ritualism, which is given only by Rome. [Like] a priest who celebrates in the Eastern Rite and the Latin Rite, he is bi-ritual but with the permission of Rome.

Notice how he says “a priest [no qualification] who wants to celebrate has to ask permission from Rome,” whereas Traditionis Custodes distinguishes between “[p]riests ordained after the publication of” TC (Art. 4) and those “who already celebrate according to the Missale Romanum of 1962” (Art. 5). According to TC, the former “should submit a formal request to the diocesan Bishop who shall consult the Apostolic See before granting this authorization,” whereas the latter “should request from the diocesan Bishop the authorization to continue to enjoy this faculty.” In other words, no “permission from Rome” is necessary for priests who were already offering the Traditional Mass prior to TC. (With all due respect, it appears that Francis needs to re-read his own document.)

Notice, also, the implicit admission on Francis’ part that what Benedict XVI called “two usages of the one Roman rite” (Summorum Pontificum, Art. 1) — namely, the “Extraordinary Form” (Traditional Mass) and “Ordinary Form” (New Mass) — are actually two distinct rites.[8] What else could Francis possibly mean, when he compares the alleged need for permission to offer the Traditional Mass to “bi-ritualism”?[9]

And finally, his last sentence contains a phrase comparable to something out of George Orwell’s fictitious Ministry of Truth: “If you read the letter well and read the Decree well, you will see that it is simply a constructive reordering, with pastoral care and avoiding an excess by those who are not…” (emphasis added).[10]

In reality, Traditionis Custodes and its accompanying letter to bishops is a destructive disordering of what Christopher Ferrara once called the “strong canonical framework” established by Benedict XVI via Summorum Pontificum and subsequent documents that “freely allow[ed] for a widespread and unhindered revival of liturgical tradition” throughout the universal Church.

Let us pray that a future pope will cast Traditionis Custodes into the abyss (along with several other acts of the current Roman Pontiff) and restore liturgical, doctrinal, moral, and spiritual sanity to the Church. May it be so, through the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima!

Reprinted with permission from Catholic Family News.

Photo by Sean Ang on Unsplash.

—

[1] Far too many for this article (see here for a broader summary).

[2] Cf. Congregation for Divine Worship, Quattuor Abhinc Annos (Oct. 3, 1984).

[3] Benedict XVI, Letter to Bishops accompanying Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2021). Furthermore, in Summorum Pontificum Benedict confirmed the right of “any Catholic priest of the Latin rite” to offer the Traditional Mass without the need of obtaining “permission from the Apostolic See or from his own Ordinary” (Art. 2).

[4] While “nostalgia” might be a factor for some, for many (if not most) it is primarily a matter of doctrine (see, for example, the Brief Critical Study of the Novus Ordo Missae, colloquially known as the “Ottaviani Intervention”).

[5] Correction: Benedict actually said, “I invite you, dear Brothers, to send to the Holy See an account of your experiences, three years after this Motu Proprio [Summorum Pontificum] has taken effect. If truly serious difficulties come to light, ways to remedy them can be sought.” (Ibid., emphasis added).

[6] For one who firmly believes that “the liturgical reform is irreversible,” his anxiety about the widespread revival of the Traditional Latin Mass is understandable.

[7] Cf. Traditionis Custodes, Art. 3 § 3.

[8] Paul VI essentially conceded the same, when he referred to “the new rite of the Mass” (Italian, nuovo rito della Messa) during two consecutive Wednesday audiences (Nov. 19 and Nov. 26, 1969), just before the New Order of Mass (again, new) was introduced on Nov. 30, 1969 (First Sunday of Advent) per his Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum (Apr. 3, 1969).

[9] Speaking of “bi-ritualism,” doesn’t this mean that Traditional Roman Rite Catholics should be given their own Patriarch, bishops, dioceses, Code of Canon Law, and sui iuris status — just like the Eastern Catholic Churches?

[10] According to the audio (26:46 and following), Francis paused (“those who are not…”) and Mr. Herrera interjected in order to move on to the next subject.

Matt Gaspers

Matt Gaspers is the Managing Editor of Catholic Family News, a monthly journal and online media apostolate devoted to promoting the traditional Catholic Faith and the precious heritage of Christian civilization. He was asked by John Vennari (1958-2017), longtime Editor of CFN and stalwart defender of the Faith, to carry on CFN’s important work shortly before Mr. Vennari’s passing. In addition to writing for CFN, Mr. Gaspers has also been published by The Fatima Crusader, OnePeterFive, and LifeSiteNews. His study and writing interests include theology, Church history, Fatima, Islam, and the spiritual life. He has spoken at conferences hosted by Catholic Family News and the Fatima Center. He and his wife, together with their children, reside in Colorado.

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Are Francis Catholics like Mark Shea & Francis Pretending to be Pro-Life?

September 04, 2021

The Remnant wrote that Mark Shea “used to pretend that he was pro-life on the abortion issue, but the pretense has worn increasingly thin in recent years.  Shea revels in expressing his detestation of the pro-life movement.” [https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/5512-pro-life-manichaeism-and-the-mark-shea-intellectual-tradition]

Might Shea possibly be mirroring his beloved idol, Francis, in his “pretense”?

Is there evidence that Francis might be pretending to be pro-life while supporting and possibly working with the pro-abortion globalist elite?

An internationally respected investigator and attorney as well as the documented facts gives us the detailed answer below on whom Francis really may be working for:

Francis on September 1, 2016 said he was “gratified that on September 2015 the nations of the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals” which calls for universal access to abortion.

Does this means that Francis is “gratified” about universal access to abortion because he made no qualifying exception to abortion in his endorsement then or to this day?

Does the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals really plan universal access to abortion?

Goal 6 of the United Nations (UN) Substantial Development Goals (SDG) states that nations must:

“Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

The UN Conference in Cairo in 1994 said “abortion (as specified in paragraph 8.25)” is a “basic component of reproductive health care services.”

In simple words, Francis, in a backhanded way, endorsed universal access to abortion.

Internationally known sex abuse expert, investigator and Attorney Elizabeth Yore at the 2016 Fatima conference in Chicago said the Francis endorsement was no surprise.

The Francis approval of the UN plan for universal access to abortion and its population control scheme was planned and orchestrated well in advance by wealthy global elites according to the investigator and attorney.

At the Fatima conference Yore gave a speech that was really a presentation of the enemies battle plans and then she gave a battle cry.

On YouTube you will find her speech called “An Unholy Alliance: the UN, Soros, and the Francis Papacy.”

In her website yorechildren.com and in the complete speech she presents detailed evidence to back up the part of her talk I present below.

All Catholics need to hear her battle cry.

Here is the most important part of her speech (which I hand typed with my two fingers as Tolkien said):

“After spending the last three years investigating and witnessing, first hand, I am convinced this is a intentional and coordinated alliance between the Vatican, the UN and Soros.”

“The radical one world order agenda is hidden and obscured by the false and manufactured climate change movement.”

“Shockingly the movement found and secured its missing power broker: its missing link and its long sought after moral voice. The golden ring of the papacy was won and secured by George Soros through infiltration at the Vatican.”

“Folks take note, they are moving at lightning speed. The mission has been accomplished by the environmental agenda. The new world order is well underway.”

“The global warming globalists secured a perfectly timed and coordinated Vatican Apostolic Exhortation Laudato Si written intentionally in time for the UN vote on the Sustainable Development Goals.”

“Then Pope Francis spoke at the UN general assembly which was timed on the very day the vote occurred and was passed.”

“Francis repeatedly said he hoped his Exhortation would help pass the SDG and Paris treaty. The unthinkable happened: the Paris Climate Treaty passed in December 2015, a mere eight months after Laudato Si.”

“Soros operatives pulled off a miracle with the most popular men on in the world.”

“Who is George Soros? He is anti-God, anti-American and anti-Catholic. Even though he is a billionaire. He lavishly funds Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and countless media outlets.”

“He seeks a one world order world governed by the elites.”

“Make no mistake: this is about tyranny.”

This is megalomaniac who bragged that he considered himself a god. This is George Soros. And he even claimed he was the boss of the pope. That was in the early 2000’s. That has become a fact.”

“Suddenly it appears his prophecy has come true. George Soros operatives are embedded in the Vatican. They have drafted Vatican documents that set up the Soros agenda which mirrors the Francis agenda.”

“Mass immigration which George Soros funds and Black Lives Matter and environmentalism. The gig is up.”

“We are in a death struggle with the secular culture and a global domination of elitists who seek to reduce the worlds population by force, redefine marriage and gender and govern by tyranny.”

“As the photo shows, Pope Francis shared the podium with Jeffery Sachs and expressed his gratitude to the UN for its partnership. Jeffery Sachs was pointed to as the Vatican Academy’s greatest supporter.”

“We now know Soros directed money to influence the USCCB and to coordinate the Vatican through Cardinal Maradiaga.”

“The mortal enemy of the Church has breached the Vatican walls and now is in encampment there.”

“The author Micheal Crichton said that the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fanasy, truth from propaganda.”

“What is the reality about our world and those who wish to control humanity by tyranny, demagoguery, nuanced language and lies.”

“The Left has given the world the sin of the century which is the sin against the child.”

“More children have been willfully killed by adults in the last hundred years than in the whole preceding history of humanity.”

“In the last hundred years, the eradication of the child is promoted by none other than the United Nations and funded by the mega-billionaire George Soros through his many Open Society Foundations.”

“It is a object horror that these two entities are given a prominent role, a sit at the Holy See; that they have infiltrated the Chair of Peter; that they have formed a unholy alliance is beyond imaginable.”

“But it is a reality we can’t deny.”

“The globalist control the media. They own the wealth. They control all the wealthy foundations. And now tragically control the Vatican and its mega-star pope.”

“We can no longer play prevent defense. It is time to go on the offensive.”

“What are we to do?”

This might be the final fight. Or it could be the definitive battle for the freedom of mankind.”

“They have the money. We have the truth. They have the power and influence. We have the truth.”

“They have the powerful United Nations. We have the Blessed Mother. No other weapon do we need.”

This is Holy Mother Church that has been invaded by marauders of death. They are inside the walls. They are issuing edicts and plotting new strategies in the cover of darkness.”

“We must shine the light on them. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. But we must speak up and do battle.”

“I presume everyone here was confirmed. You are soldiers of Christ. Well its time to reenlist. As the dark cloud envelopes the Holy See and our beloved Mother Church. You are Our Lady’s army of advocates.”

“You must understand the cautionary words of C. S. Lewis which mirrors a Chestertonian epic.”

“C. S. Lewis said ‘This is enemy occupied territory. That is what this world is. Christianity is the rightful story that the rightful King has landed. You might say he landed in disguise and is calling us all take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

When you go to church, you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends. That is why the enemy is so anguished to prevent us from going. “

These has all been uncomfortable and terrifying. I know.”

“But I am reminded of St. Therese, the Little Flower. The sweet genteel young saint discovered the words of Our Lord in St. Matthew’s Gospel:

‘I came not to bring peace, but a sword.'”

“In her letter to her beloved sister Celine, the Little Flower wrote:

‘There remains nothing else for us to do, but to fight. When we don’t have the strength, it is then that Jesus fights for us.'”

“At the end of her life, she said, with the voice of a battle worn warrior, ‘I shall die with weapons in my hands.'”

“Our Lady Queen of heaven and earth pray for us.”

 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. SHARESHAREComments

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

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Are Francis Catholics like Mark Shea & Francis Pretending to be Pro-Life?

September 04, 2021

The Remnant wrote that Mark Shea “used to pretend that he was pro-life on the abortion issue, but the pretense has worn increasingly thin in recent years.  Shea revels in expressing his detestation of the pro-life movement.” [https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/5512-pro-life-manichaeism-and-the-mark-shea-intellectual-tradition]

Might Shea possibly be mirroring his beloved idol, Francis, in his “pretense”?

Is there evidence that Francis might be pretending to be pro-life while supporting and possibly working with the pro-abortion globalist elite?

An internationally respected investigator and attorney as well as the documented facts gives us the detailed answer below on whom Francis really may be working for:

Francis on September 1, 2016 said he was “gratified that on September 2015 the nations of the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals” which calls for universal access to abortion.

Does this means that Francis is “gratified” about universal access to abortion because he made no qualifying exception to abortion in his endorsement then or to this day?

Does the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals really plan universal access to abortion?

Goal 6 of the United Nations (UN) Substantial Development Goals (SDG) states that nations must:

“Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

The UN Conference in Cairo in 1994 said “abortion (as specified in paragraph 8.25)” is a “basic component of reproductive health care services.”

In simple words, Francis, in a backhanded way, endorsed universal access to abortion.

Internationally known sex abuse expert, investigator and Attorney Elizabeth Yore at the 2016 Fatima conference in Chicago said the Francis endorsement was no surprise.

The Francis approval of the UN plan for universal access to abortion and its population control scheme was planned and orchestrated well in advance by wealthy global elites according to the investigator and attorney.

At the Fatima conference Yore gave a speech that was really a presentation of the enemies battle plans and then she gave a battle cry.

On YouTube you will find her speech called “An Unholy Alliance: the UN, Soros, and the Francis Papacy.”

In her website yorechildren.com and in the complete speech she presents detailed evidence to back up the part of her talk I present below.

All Catholics need to hear her battle cry.

Here is the most important part of her speech (which I hand typed with my two fingers as Tolkien said):

“After spending the last three years investigating and witnessing, first hand, I am convinced this is a intentional and coordinated alliance between the Vatican, the UN and Soros.”

“The radical one world order agenda is hidden and obscured by the false and manufactured climate change movement.”

“Shockingly the movement found and secured its missing power broker: its missing link and its long sought after moral voice. The golden ring of the papacy was won and secured by George Soros through infiltration at the Vatican.”

“Folks take note, they are moving at lightning speed. The mission has been accomplished by the environmental agenda. The new world order is well underway.”

“The global warming globalists secured a perfectly timed and coordinated Vatican Apostolic Exhortation Laudato Si written intentionally in time for the UN vote on the Sustainable Development Goals.”

“Then Pope Francis spoke at the UN general assembly which was timed on the very day the vote occurred and was passed.”

“Francis repeatedly said he hoped his Exhortation would help pass the SDG and Paris treaty. The unthinkable happened: the Paris Climate Treaty passed in December 2015, a mere eight months after Laudato Si.”

“Soros operatives pulled off a miracle with the most popular men on in the world.”

“Who is George Soros? He is anti-God, anti-American and anti-Catholic. Even though he is a billionaire. He lavishly funds Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and countless media outlets.”

“He seeks a one world order world governed by the elites.”

“Make no mistake: this is about tyranny.”

This is megalomaniac who bragged that he considered himself a god. This is George Soros. And he even claimed he was the boss of the pope. That was in the early 2000’s. That has become a fact.”

“Suddenly it appears his prophecy has come true. George Soros operatives are embedded in the Vatican. They have drafted Vatican documents that set up the Soros agenda which mirrors the Francis agenda.”

“Mass immigration which George Soros funds and Black Lives Matter and environmentalism. The gig is up.”

“We are in a death struggle with the secular culture and a global domination of elitists who seek to reduce the worlds population by force, redefine marriage and gender and govern by tyranny.”

“As the photo shows, Pope Francis shared the podium with Jeffery Sachs and expressed his gratitude to the UN for its partnership. Jeffery Sachs was pointed to as the Vatican Academy’s greatest supporter.”

“We now know Soros directed money to influence the USCCB and to coordinate the Vatican through Cardinal Maradiaga.”

“The mortal enemy of the Church has breached the Vatican walls and now is in encampment there.”

“The author Micheal Crichton said that the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fanasy, truth from propaganda.”

“What is the reality about our world and those who wish to control humanity by tyranny, demagoguery, nuanced language and lies.”

“The Left has given the world the sin of the century which is the sin against the child.”

“More children have been willfully killed by adults in the last hundred years than in the whole preceding history of humanity.”

“In the last hundred years, the eradication of the child is promoted by none other than the United Nations and funded by the mega-billionaire George Soros through his many Open Society Foundations.”

“It is a object horror that these two entities are given a prominent role, a sit at the Holy See; that they have infiltrated the Chair of Peter; that they have formed a unholy alliance is beyond imaginable.”

“But it is a reality we can’t deny.”

“The globalist control the media. They own the wealth. They control all the wealthy foundations. And now tragically control the Vatican and its mega-star pope.”

“We can no longer play prevent defense. It is time to go on the offensive.”

“What are we to do?”

This might be the final fight. Or it could be the definitive battle for the freedom of mankind.”

“They have the money. We have the truth. They have the power and influence. We have the truth.”

“They have the powerful United Nations. We have the Blessed Mother. No other weapon do we need.”

This is Holy Mother Church that has been invaded by marauders of death. They are inside the walls. They are issuing edicts and plotting new strategies in the cover of darkness.”

“We must shine the light on them. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. But we must speak up and do battle.”

“I presume everyone here was confirmed. You are soldiers of Christ. Well its time to reenlist. As the dark cloud envelopes the Holy See and our beloved Mother Church. You are Our Lady’s army of advocates.”

“You must understand the cautionary words of C. S. Lewis which mirrors a Chestertonian epic.”

“C. S. Lewis said ‘This is enemy occupied territory. That is what this world is. Christianity is the rightful story that the rightful King has landed. You might say he landed in disguise and is calling us all take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

When you go to church, you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends. That is why the enemy is so anguished to prevent us from going. “

These has all been uncomfortable and terrifying. I know.”

“But I am reminded of St. Therese, the Little Flower. The sweet genteel young saint discovered the words of Our Lord in St. Matthew’s Gospel:

‘I came not to bring peace, but a sword.'”

“In her letter to her beloved sister Celine, the Little Flower wrote:

‘There remains nothing else for us to do, but to fight. When we don’t have the strength, it is then that Jesus fights for us.'”

“At the end of her life, she said, with the voice of a battle worn warrior, ‘I shall die with weapons in my hands.'”

“Our Lady Queen of heaven and earth pray for us.”

 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. SHARESHAREComments

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

Is Pro-Abort Biden a Catholic in the Same Way Sexual Predator McCarrick is a Catholic?

September 03, 2021

Today, The American Catholic explained the careers of pro-abortion Joe Biden and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick in two paragraphs:

WASHINGTON, DC—President Biden’s open profession of Catholic Faith has been a focus point of his political career.

After news of SCOTUS decision on #TexasAbortionLaw, a reporter asks how @JoeBiden reconciles this with actively pursuing pro-abortion agenda, @PressSecresponds: pic.twitter.com/JCOA2aKxxn

— Bree A Dail (@breeadail) September 3, 2021

This senile crook actually voted for a constitutional amendment banning abortion back in the seventies.  The only thing Joe Biden truly has ever believed in is getting his share of the graft. [https://the-american-catholic.com/2021/09/03/our-devout-catholic-president/]

It appears that Biden is a Catholic in the same way McCarrick is a Catholic. McCarrick even protected pro-abortion Biden:

Sexual predator McCarrick protected the possible sex predator Biden when then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later to be Pope Benedict XVI) wrote that bishops were not to admit to Communion politicians like “gravely sinful” Biden who supports the killing of unborn babies.

McCarrick lied for politicians like Biden by ignoring the important parts of the Ratzinger letter and told bishops not to obey or ignore the Catholic Church law.

Last year, Fr. Robert Morey denied Holy Communion to the “gravely sinful” Biden following a “2004 decree signed jointly by the bishops of Atlanta, Charleston, and Charlotte”:

“In denying Biden communion, [Fr.] Morey was following a diocesan policy set forth in a 2004 decreesigned jointly by the bishops of Atlanta, Charleston, and Charlotte. The decree states that supporting pro-abortion legislation is ‘gravely sinful’ and that public figures who do so must be denied communion until they repent.”
[https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/10/31/cardinal-dolan-on-biden-communion-denial-i-wouldnt-do-it/]

Might the “gravely sinful” Biden be a predator like his protector McCarrick?

Gateway Pundit presents evidence that Biden could be a “groping” predator:

“In 2017, the Gateway Pundit exclusively reported that a Secret Service agent was suspended for a week in 2009 for shoving then-Vice President Joe Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him.”

“Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the agent asserted that,  “we had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.” The annual party was for agents and Navy personnel who were tasked with protecting the Biden family.”

“The Secret Service has now inadvertently confirmed our report to Judicial Watch, who has filed a lawsuit after the Secret Service failed to respond to a July 14, 2020 administrative appeal challenging its claim that all files related to the 2009 altercation, “ha[d] been destroyed,” due to “retention standards.” [https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/secret-service-inadvertently-confirms-gateway-pundit-story-biden-sexually-assaulting-agents-girlfriend/]

Finally, might Biden be a liar like McCarrick? 

The evidence is overwhelming that Biden’s political career is packed with lies:

– User Clip: Joe Biden Lies About His College & High School Record | C-SPAN.org [https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4821169/user-clip-joe-biden-lies-college-high-school-record#]

– That Time Joe Biden Lied About His Academic Credentials – Mother Jones [https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/that-time-joe-biden-lied-about-his-academic-credentials/]

– 2 truths and 31 lies Joe Biden has told about his work in the Civil Rights Movement – Shaun King’s Newsletter [https://shaunking.substack.com/p/2-truths-and-31-lies-joe-biden-has]

–  Biden Claimed He Was In Top Half Of Law Class [https://apnews.com/cd977f7ff301993f7976974ba07c5495]

– Joe Biden’s 1988 presidential run doomed by plagiarism scandal – Business Insider [https://www.businessinsider.com/plagiarism-scandal-joe-biden-first-presidential-run-1988-2019-3]– Why Biden’s plagiarims shouldn’t be forgotten. [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/08/why-biden-s-plagiarims-shouldn-t-be-forgotten.htm

 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. 

Ordo Dei

A site about matters of the Catholic Church, history, philosophy, and literature

The Concept and Reality of “Nation-Building” — a Critique

hicksonfamilyDemocracy, Iraq, Military History and Strategy, Nation-Building, Uncategorized, War September 3, 2021 16 Minutes

Dr. Robert Hickson

5 April 2004

The Concept and Reality of „Nation-Building”: A Moral and Strategic Critique of a Recent Long-Range Study

A Note from the Author on 3 September, 2021: This essay was first written in Switzerland seventeen years ago. The author was then asked by several Europeans to write a commentary on this RAND study on Nation-Building in light of the earlier history of Umerziehung (Re-Education). The study variously attempts to endorse a two-fold “core doctrine” concerning both “a Global War on Terrorism” and also “Nation-Building.” With the publication of this essay now seventeen years, the author hopes to help enlighten, in a larger strategic context, the intended principles and the actual fruits of the U.S. historic presence in both Afghanistan and in Iraq, starting in October of 2001 and March of 2003, respectively. 

***

America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (2003) is the title of a 240-page strategic and historical study released in July 2003 by the RAND Corporation, an influential national-security Institute which originally did special research for the U.S. Air Force.¹

An implicit premise of the RAND study – but a dangerously unexamined premise – is that the U.S. Military’s still strongly resisted, but newly proposed, “core mission” of foreign (and often – Muslim) “nation-building” can and must and should be conducted simultaneously with their already declared and very dissipating “Global War on Terrorism” (or the “GWOT,” as it is sometimes affectionately known). RAND’s strategic study, however, explicitly supports this new “core mission” of concurrent “nation-building,” even though “the GWOT” itself is already so increasingly ambiguous and elusive in definition, as well as centrifugally dispersing and over-extending in operation of the American military resources. Therefore, any such protracted and concurrent combination of two new “core missions” for the U.S. Military – “the GWOT” and foreign “Nation-Building” – will certainly produce and perilously constitute a self-inflicted and “self-sabotaging binary weapon.”

That is to say, if such a concurrent combination of exhausting military (and quasi-imperial) “core missions” were ever essentially and protractedly implemented as a U.S. policy and new grand-strategy, it would be a very self-destructive, self-defeating act – a sort of strategy and ideology of national suicide (in the words of the great James Burnham). The U.S. Military itself – as the armed and just defender of the U.S. Constitution (but not of the de-constructed – or “living” – Constitution) against all enemies foreign and domestic – would become thereby, in virtue of its dissipating dispersion, even more de-constructed and demoralized and exhausted than it now is. Were that to occur, one wonders whether the U.S. Military could then even be an effective proxy for Israel, despite that long-standing, manifest priority, or effectively compulsory requirement, as it would seem.

Under such cumulative conditions of dispersion and “overreach” and exhaustion, could the U.S. Military – or would the U.S. Military – then any longer even partially (let alone adequately) defend the State and far-sighted Grand-Strategy of Israel? And has that unconditional support for Israel not also effectively become a “core mission” of the U.S. Military? However, the RAND study omits any discussion of these momentous matters, let alone their longer-range implications for war and peace and the enrootedness of ordered life.

According to this 240-page Rand analysis, which is, I regret to say, a very presumptuous (and often superficial) study, the current “U.S.-led stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq” is, indeed, “after all, the sixth major nation-building enterprise the United States has mounted in 12 years, and the fifth such in a Muslim nation” (p. 220 – my emphasis added). (The other four Muslim nations alluded to are: Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan; Haiti is the one non-Muslim country which was made especially subject to U.S. “nation-building” over these twelve years.)

In Iraq, however, says the self-vaunting study, the U.S. now “embarks on its most ambitious program of nation-building since 1945” (p. 219), when an arguably pre-Imperial United States purportedly conducted “nation-building” in Germany and in Japan. And, indeed, both of those instances of “nation-building” were clearly, in the view of the RAND Corporation, “successful.” It should be noted, however, that the RAND Corporation’s only criterion of “success” in “nation-building” was Germany and Japan’s attainment of “democratization” and of a “vibrant economy.” (Does this not reveal a profound understanding of the formation and nature of a long-standing cultural nation?!)

However, the RAND Corporation now has certain grave concerns about the current U.S. vulnerability and unpreparedness for such a new and admittedly “ambitious program of nation-building” almost sixty years later, in Iraq, a predominantly Muslim society:

Over the past decade, the United States has made major investments in the combat efficiency of its forces. The return [sic] on investment has been evident in the dramatic improvement in warfighting demonstrated from Desert Storm [1991] to the Kosovo air campaign [1999] to Operation Iraqi Freedom [sic – March-April 2003]. [But,] there has been no comparable increase in the capacity of the U.S. armed forces or of U.S. civilian agencies to conduct postcombat stabilization and reconstruction operations (p. 220 – my emphasis added).

Furthermore, the RAND study also addresses the matter of the willingness of the U.S. Armed Forces to conduct “nation-building,” not only the matter of their capacity (or their capability) to do it:

“Nation-building” has been a controversial mission over the past decade, and the intensity of this debate has undoubtedly inhibited the investments that would be needed to do these tasks better. Institutional resistance in the departments of State and Defense, neither of which regard nation-building among their core missions, has also been an obstacle (p. 221 – my emphasis added).

It is worthwhile to consider these above words very closely. The language is characteristic of their entire study, and their style also reveals their mentality, which is so often asphyxiatingly superficial, equivocally vague, and altogether frigid and presumptuous. (I do not exaggerate.)

The above critique of the resistance to nation-building, and the implicit grand-strategic recommendations by the RAND Corporation itself, are especially significant; not only because they are to be found on the last page of their study’s main text, but also because their concluding analysis is itself so unspecific and ambiguous – so bereft of clarity and of substance.

For example, the RAND study only mentions the “intensity,” but no substance, of the purported interior “debate” (i.e., either within both the U.S. Defense and State Departments, or disputatiously between them? – it is not clear!) concerning the putative “mission” of “nation-building.” And RAND does not even say wherefrom this purported nation-building “mission” comes, nor on what grounds, nor by what authority! (This is really a trustworthy, professional analytical study, isn’t it?!)

And what about the deeper substance of this purported debate, which is much more important than its ostensible “intensity”? What about the essential content of this policy and strategic debate? And who, specifically, are the key proponents and antagonists in this debate? The reader will search in vain, however, for RAND’s presentation of any such substantive evidence or argumentation.

lt is also significant, I think, that the RAND study does not even mention the key arguments for “nation-building” or the key arguments against such a protracted and deeply consequential, arguably neo-imperial, mission. Such omissions of important and indispensable substance are altogether unprofessional and deplorable – as well as sophistical. For, like the ancient Greek Sophists, the RAND authors “make the worse seem better and the better seem worse.” (It is clear, however, that the RAND Nomenclatura tendentiously favors an expanded neo-imperial (or neo-colonial) mission of U.S.-led “nation-building.”

Nevertheless, the RAND study does not even give a “working-definition” of “nation-building,” much less an adequate and properly strict definition of nation-building, although that concept is the key-concept of their entire study. Nor do they give any reasonable critique of “nation-building,” as such. No deep and searching objections are ever presented, much less refuted. They do not even suggest that nation-building could be, at least, a potentially utopian (and self-sabotaging) “operation,” or even an intrinsically unfulfillable “project” full of hubris. Thus, their study is, once again, evasive as well as superficial and vague. It is also embarrassingly chimerical and arrogantly wrong!

Furthermore, why should “nation-building” ever constitute a “core mission” for any military institution, for any deeper military culture in the world, let alone for the U.S. Military, which is already centrifugally over-extended, linguistically unprepared, culturally and religiously under-educated, and exhausted by the tempo of its multifarious “global” operations – such as their “Global War on Terrorism” (“the GWOT”)?! Even “the GWOT” is making war against a method of warfare, and not against a clearly specific enemy, nor a consistent “image of the enemy (a Feindbild)”! (Will anyone ever defeat “psychological warfare,” for example, as a method of warfare – or “terrorism,” either?)

And why does the RAND Corporation so disapprovingly call the U.S. Military’s firm “resistance” to “nation-building” (as a “core mission”) an “obstacle”? – an obstacle to what? Is this rational and moral military resistance to an „utopian deformation” an obstacle to the U.S. Military’s further de-construction as a military force? Or, is it, rather, an obstacle to the U.S. Military’s further transformation into an imperial police force? – or to a neo-colonial “gendarmerie” and “constabulary”?

In its important “Executive Summary,” the RAND study says the following (and without, it would appear, any intentional sarcasm or irony!):

The current [G. W. Bush] administration’s efforts to reverse the trend [in America] toward ever larger and more ambitious U.S.-led nation-building operations have proven short-lived, however. (p. xv – my emphasis added).

Indeed, in seeming contrast to President Clinton, “President Bush,” according to RAND, “adopted a more modest set of objectives when faced with a comparable challenge in Afghanistan [as in Kosovo?]” (p. xv – my emphasis added). However, the RAND study never tells us what, specifically, this “more modest” set of objectives was! (Name 5!). Once again, no specificity!

But now, their study continues:

In Iraq, the United States has taken on a task with a scope comparable to the transformational attempts [from what, to what?] still under way in Bosnia and Kosovo and [on] a scale comparable only to the earlier U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan. Nation-building, it appears, is the inescapable responsibility of the world’s only superpower (p. xv – my emphasis added). [N.B. Some might even consider these words to be somewhat presumptuous, not to say malodorously self-vaunting!]

Moreover, the first paragraph of their Executive Summary will further focus – and perhaps even provoke – the attentive mind of the reader: 

The goal of the work documented here was to analyze and extract the best-practices in nation-building from the post-World War II experiences of the United States. To do this, we examined U.S. and international [?] military, political and economic activities in postconflict situations [sic] since World War II, identified the key determinants of the success of these operations in terms of democratization and the creation of vibrant economies, and drew implications for future U.S. nation-building operations (p. xiii – my emphasis added).

And, it is clear that Iraq is the strategic focus. In fact, after the preceeding Chapter 9 on “Lessons Learned” from history, the study’s concluding chapter (Chapter 10 – pp. 167-222) is a lengthy and very sobering consideration of Iraq itself and its vulnerable geography, and the barriers to any U.S. mission of “nation-building” there. Nevertheless, the study’s consideration of the deeper religious factors is very poor, indeed, and even dangerously shallow.²

The Executive Summary itself later concludes with a slightly more unambiguous set of statements and an often-repeated emphasis, except, perhaps, for their “softening” last sentence, which is itself all too characteristically vague and equivocal as well as evasive and so timorously optimistic:

The current administration [of President G. W. Bush], despite a strong disinclination [even by the strategically influential “Neo-Conservatives”?] to engage U.S. armed forces in such activities [i.e., “nation-building”] has launched two major nation-building enterprises within 18 months [both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, as part of its “Global War an Terrorism”]. lt now seems clear that nation-building is the inescapable responsibility of the world’s only superpower [and its “Messianic Democracy”]. Once that recognition [of the U.S.’s “superpower-responsibility”] is more widely accepted [but, by whom, specifically?], there is much the United States can do to better prepare itself to lead such missions [i.e., the new multi-national “nation-building” missions!] (p. xxix – my emphasis added).

All things considered, the RAND’s Study strongly implies that the current, internal U.S. military resistance to the “mission of nation-building” constitutes an “obstacle to success” – like the purported success that the U.S. Military had with their nation-building in Germany and Japan after the military defeat and “unconditional surrender” of the “Axis-Powers” in 1945³. Once again, it should be emphatically noted, RAND’s only measure of “success” was the degree to which Germany and Japan underwent “democratization” and attained to a “vibrant economy”!

However, did the United States really build the German nation? Did the United States really build the Japanese nation? Are such deeply formed cultural nations of long history ever to be “built” by “outsiders”? Can a slowly growing, well-rooted and fruitful nation ever be “engineered,” even by “insiders”? lt would seem not!

And, with reference to Iraq, what, indeed, is the substance of the historic culture of this purported “Iraqi nation,” which is now also to be reformed? Was there ever such a thing as “the Iraqi nation,” and is it in any way comparable to the coherent (and unified) German or Japanese cultural nations? What cultural substance is the United States now to draw upon, so as to conduct (or inflict) its new “nation-building operations” there? What is the nature of the evidence for an historic Iraqi nation (as was the case in Germany and Japan)? What are we really talking about? “Democratization” and “vibrant economy,” once again? Is that it?

And how many years would it take for the U.S. to build even a slightly deeper “democratic (non-autocratic) political culture” in Iraq? And, what, in truth, are the real linguistic capacities and working skills of the current (or future) resident American “reformers” and “nation-builders”? What are the facts, not only about the language problem, for example, but also about the deeper issues of mutually alien and incommensurate religious cultures?

For, it is true, that both the Arabic Shi’ite and the Arabic Sunni religious cultures of Iraq are not so easily compatible with increasingly secularized (and formless) U.S. religious traditions, nor even with each other! Nor are they made easily compatible even with Iraq’s significant Kurdish, Turkoman and Assyrian religious and cultural traditions! Nor with the Christian minority of the Oriental Chaldean Rite. Therefore, this question of the interaction of religious cultures, not to mention the “re-building” of often incommensurate (or immiscible) religious cultures, will be an especially challenging factor for the U.S. “occupational” and “democratizing” forces. The combination is likely to be a “time bomb” – especially if the U.S. will regard Iraq, effectively, as a “Satrapy.”

And, in this context, let us return once again to the concept and reality of “nation-building.” What, after all, is this process or this thing called “nation-building”? A nation is not an artifact nor a product to be engineered. Nor does a nation have a “modular” structure capable of being “changed” and “re-arranged” in various artificial “permutations.”

What does it really mean to “build” a nation, or even to “re-construct” and “reform” a militarily defeated nation? From the evidence of history, a cultural nation grows slowly over time in and through its deeply shared experiences and vivid, living memories, even (and sometimes especially) memories of intimately shared sorrow, and of tragic, but heroic military defeats. Remember the Serbian military defeat against the Turks in the 14^th century (on the current territory of Kosovo) and its unifying effects still today upon the broken Serbian people. Remember the Hungarian military defeat at Mohacs in 1526, an heroic and turning-point battle near the Danube River, against the advancing Ottoman Turks, whose own very costly “Pyrrhic victory” there caused them to withdraw from their more ambitious plans of domination for almost 150 years thereafter.

More generally, how does any foreign culture – especially an increasingly intrusive and very secularized culture like the USA – “build a nation” during its own military occupation of a religiously Muslim society? After an openly pre-emptive, supposedly “preventive,” “war of aggression” (against current and long-traditional International Law, as well), can any foreign “interventionist” armed forces really build a nation, even if they were both linguistically competent and culturally sensitive, as well as religiously respectful? In any case, what should be our realistic expectations about the United States, i.e., our realistic expectations of how the impatient and largely technocratic Americans are likely to try “to build a nation,” even if they were to be very generous and sincerely acting “according to their own lights” and best wisdom for the common good of Iraq? For, it is important to remember that the United States of 2004 is not at all the United States of 1945. The U.S. is now, moreover, also “culturally Balkanized” and even “religiously Lebanonized.” And, morally (ethically), even under the so-called “neo-conservative” Bush Administration, the United States itself is still “Clinton’s America,” as well as a “proxy force” for the intelligently advancing grand-strategy of Israel.

Those who would want to know much more about the deeper nature and meaning of this thing called “Clinton’s America” should read Joe Sobran’s eloquent and discerning book, entitled HUSTLER, on “the Clinton Legacy.” For, it is this very “legacy,” at least in part, which the U.S. is now presuming to inflict upon other countries, often under the deceptive guise of progressive “globalism” or of “economies (and finance) without borders.” And, this includes the whole ideology of unrooted and restless neo-Liberal (and neo-Mandevillean) Capitalism (along with its oligarchical “chaos managers”).

In the longer light of history, how might (or how would) the Ancient Greeks have thought about this whole matter of “nation-building”? For example, after their unexpected victory over the arrogant Persian Empire (c. 490 B.C.) – after Marathon and Salamis – to what extent might the Athenian Democracy have then considered as a wise strategic policy their subsequent “nation-building” of the defeated Persians? Would the “vibrant” Athenian Democracy have believed that their own aggressive energy and love of freedom could have sufficiently (or at all) transformed the autocratic political culture of Persia? It would seem not. The “temptations of Empire” would come a little later, nonetheless, especially for the Athenians.

For, the Ancient Greeks, learning from their own grave mistakes, have also taught us so much about true tragedy and about “the tragic view of life,” to include the Athenian tragedy which resulted from their hubris in the Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 B.C.), as was so memorably depicted by Thucydides. (Perhaps, the greatest tragedy occurs – as in Sophocles’ Antigone – when a lesser good tramples out a greater good without ever knowing it, until it is too late !)

Even after the Greeks’ earlier exultant victory against the Persians, almost sixty years before their own tragic Peloponnesian War began, would the high leadership of the surprised and very vigorous Athenian victors have even dared to presume to re-build or transform the defeated Persian Empire? Or, would they have wisely and immediately considered this to be an act of self-destructive, overweening pride? lt is likely that they would not have been even so blind and foolish as to consider the theoretical possibility! In all likelihood, they would have practically considered such a policy or such a strategy to be an act of folly (ATË, in Greek – i.e., “blinding self-infatuation”) – or, an act of blinding self-aggrandizement (PLËONEXIA, in Greek) and a presumptuous “overreaching” (HUBRIS, in Greek).

Yet, it may have been possible, once again, that the restless Athenians would also have (even back in 490 B.C.) tragically succumbed to the seductive temptation to overreach themselves, as the conspicuously more arrogant Athenians later did in their “Sicilian Expedition” during the Peloponnesian War; especially after they had so unjustly, so cynically and self-blindingly destroyed the weak and vulnerable Melians on their little Island of Melos off the coast of Sparta; and even after General Nicias himself had later honorably and wisely tried to warn the Athenians against their over-extended and likely self-sabotaging military expedition!

What lessons might the United States learn from this Greek experience, an experience which was not at all considered by the RAND study as part of their “lessons to be learned from history”? In view of this illuminating and admonitory history from the Ancient World, where is the open and honest public debate in the United States now about America’s own potentially tragic “Sicilian Expedition” to Iraq? Or, where is the public debate about the wisdom and the justice of America’s protracted presence there amidst the Muslim society of Iraq, much less the “transformational efforts” at “nation-building”? The neo-Trotskyites and the Socialist International, as well as the “Muslim International,” among others, might be very pleased, however, – and even the Zionists! – with America’s centrifugal and presumptuous and self-sabotaging over-extension in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as its infatuated and concurrent “nation-building projects” in Afghanistan and in Iraq (as well as in the Balkans). But just-minded and far-sighted and well-rooted Americans should not! Nor should they be in complicity with any grand-strategy designed to fragment and de-stabilize the Middle East, and certainly not as a “useful idiot” or “proxy” for the Israelis and their long-range objectives as an historical cultural nation. Moreover, the moral resistance to such destructive and self-destructive conduct (and policy and strategy) should intelligently and courageously grow.

To what extent does the United States have even one general like the deeply wise (but tragically rejected) General Nicias – or a far-sighted admiral (and strategos) like Admiral Thucydides – who also, like them, may have to suffer much for speaking the truth, but who is humble enough to learn from his own (not only from his country’s) mistakes?

May they have the courage and the fuller virtue to come forth, to bear full witness to the truth – to speak out and to act and to help make a „course-correction”, also for the common good – and in the spirit of high chivalry. For, it is true, that a grand-strategic „course-correction” is needed by the United States – and leaders of virtue are needed, too, for the greater common good, and to resist the growing injustice and suffering! (The true spirit of chivalry always taught that “the more defenseless someone is, the more that one calls out for our defense”!) Hubris is always a form of blindness and self-destructivness. Pride (superbia, orgueil, Hochmut) is not a spiritual strength, but a weakness. And a “provocative weakness”! It is certainly provocative to others. Caveat Imperator.

— FINIS —

© 2004/2021 Robert Hickson

1 The early intellectual leadership of the RAND Corporation is still influential in U.S. “Neo-Conservative” circles. For example, Albert Wohlstetter and his friend, Andrew Marshall (the long-serving and founding head of the Pentagon’s “Office of Net Assessment” – a very influential “in-house Think Tank” of the Department of Defense) have been, like Professor Leo Strauss himself, deeply formative mentors – and strategic collaborators – of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, among others.

2However, the study is especially aware of the contrary national interests of the bordering countries of Iraq, to include the NATO member of Turkey, as well as the more expectedly resistant countries of Iran and Syria, all of whom could provide a serious impediment to any U.S. success in the context of Iraq’s multi-cultural and religious conflicts, and other strategic vulnerabilities.

3A second essay could be usefully written on the RAND Corporation’s two superficial „case studies” of the U.S. operations of “nation-building” in Germany and Japan after World War II – both of which RAND considers to be an impressive success. RAND’s measures (or “criteria and standards”) of the reality and essence of an historic cultural nation are, indeed, very insulting and very embarrassing, I think. “Democratizations” and “vibrant economies” just won’t do! Furthermore, all those who know the deeper history of the Occupation and “Re-Education” (UMERZIEHUNG) of Germany and Japan – and especially its distorting long-range effects on the “guilty” German nation and its youth – will be justly indignant and impatient with Rand’s perfunctory and smugly condescending treatment of this earlier “success” in “nation-building”!

 

Joe Biden Launches Campaign to Make Sure Texas Babies Will be Killed in Abortions

National  |  Steven Ertelt  |   Sep 2, 2021   |   12:21PM   |  Washington, DC

In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to not block a Texas law banning abortions, Joe Biden has launched a full federal government campaign to ensure that unborn babies in Texas will be killed in abortions.

As LifeNews.com reported, pro-lifers won another victory for life when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against a request from pro-abortion groups to temporarily block enforcement of the pro-life law, meaning it will stay in effect for the time being.

Biden condemned the pro-life law on Wednesday with his own statement celebrating abortions. Today, Biden called the Supreme Court decision an “unprecedented assault” on abortion.

“By allowing a law to go into effect that empowers private citizens in Texas to sue health care providers, family members supporting a woman exercising her right to choose after six weeks, or even a friend who drives her to a hospital or clinic, it unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts,” Biden said in a statement.

“For the majority to do this without a hearing, without the benefit of an opinion from a court below, and without due consideration of the issues, insults the rule of law and the rights of all Americans to seek redress from our courts,” Biden added. “Rather than use its supreme authority to ensure justice could be fairly sought, the highest Court of our land will allow millions of women in Texas in need of critical reproductive care to suffer while courts sift through procedural complexities.”

But the more worrisome portion of Biden’s comments is his pledge to mount a full federal government campaign to make sure babies are aborted.

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Biden said he was asking his Gender Policy Council and White House Counsel to “launch a whole-of-government effort to respond to this decision, looking specifically to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice to see what steps the Federal Government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions as protected by Roe, and what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”

The Texas law could save as many as 150 babies a day from abortion but if Biden issues a unilateral order to try to facilitate abortions elsewhere, that number could be adversely impacted. And it could have  the tax dollars of pro-life Americans at work shuttling abortion customers to abortion centers in other states — seemingly in violation of the Hyde Amendment.

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that Joe Biden wants Congress to pass a law making abortions legal up to birth.

In their ruling late Wednesday, the Supreme Court said the pro-abortion groups did not provide sufficient reasons to justify blocking the law.

“The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue,” the majority wrote. “But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden. … In light of such issues, we cannot say the applicants have met their burden to prevail in an injunction or stay application.”

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett made up the majority in the decision. The justices who dissented were Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Kagan, Breyer and Sotomayor also wrote separate dissents slamming the court for allowing Texas to restrict abortions.

Kelsey Hazzard, a lawyer and leader with Secular Pro-Life, said the justices did not rule on the constitutionality of the law. They basically said “it’s too early for the Supreme Court to get involved” and the lower courts should handle it first, she explained.

The heartbeat law has the potential to save tens of thousands of babies’ lives every year, including 100 every day. Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in May, it prohibits abortions once an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable, typically about six weeks of pregnancy. Exceptions are allowed if the mother’s life is at risk. Unique from other heartbeat laws, the Texas legislation includes a private enforcement mechanism that allows people to file lawsuits against abortionists who violate the law.

Texas Right to Life expressed hope that its life-saving legislation will spread to other states and save babies from abortion all across the country.

“Texas Right to Life celebrates this phenomenal victory for tens of thousands of preborn children who will be spared the evil of abortion,” the organization said in a statement. “We are optimistic that the Texas Heartbeat Act will continue to survive ongoing and future legal attacks against this historic policy.”

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear another major abortion case out of Mississippi in October, bringing even more hope that the justices will allow states to protect unborn babies from abortion again.

Planned Parenthood has already stopped killing babies at its abortion centers while one abortion business killed as many babies as possible before the pro-life law went into effect.

Other pro-life leaders also celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday, while urging people to support mothers and babies in need across Texas.

“We are celebrating this decision for what it is, baby steps in the right direction toward the obvious conclusion that Roe is fatally flawed and must go,” said Students for Life of America/Students for Life Action President Kristan Hawkins. “Students for Life of America was founded as a Post-Roe organization, working for the day after Roe with help and support for mothers and their children, born and pre-born. We are now one day closer to that reality.”

Pro-life advocates are reaching out to pregnant women across Texas with compassion and understanding, offering resources and emotional support to help them and their babies. Earlier this year, state lawmakers also increased support for pregnant and parenting mothers and babies, ensuring that they have resources to choose life for their babies.

Texas Right to Life encouraged women seeking pregnancy help to visit its website for a list of resources. Find it here.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, Whole Woman’s Health and other abortion groups are suing to block the law. Their case now returns to the lower courts.

Whether the Texas law will remain in effect or ultimately be upheld as constitutional in court remains uncertain, but pro-life leaders are hopeful now that the Supreme Court has a conservative majority.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court took away the states’ ability to protect unborn babies from abortion under Roe v. Wade, and instead forced states to legalize abortion on demand. Roe made the United States one of only seven countries in the world that allows elective abortions after 20 weeks. The court is scheduled to hear a Mississippi case in the fall that challenges this precedent.

Polls show Americans support heartbeat laws. An April poll by the University of Texas-Austin found that 49 percent of Texans support making abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, while 41 percent oppose it. In 2019, a national Hill-HarrisX survey also found that 55 percent of voters said they do not think laws banning abortions after six weeks – when an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable – are too restrictive.