Apparition of Pope Benedict to Colombian nun, revealing his real Testament, confirming that he was the last legitimate Pope on earth.

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Apparition of Pope Benedict to Colombian nun, revealing his real Testament, confirming that he was the last legitimate Pope on earth.

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On February 2, 2023, Candlemas, a Spanish-speaking nun from Colombia is said to have had an apparition/vision of Pope Benedict XVI during Mass, and then another vision in the esq is investigating his sources, and will not just bring out something so weighty. It also seems authentic to us. In this testament, he recounts the coup d’état at the Vatican, and reveals what Bergoglio is really like; And what he told him just before his death. Read it, and pray for discernment. St. Paul says that we must discern everything and preserve the good.

Short statement from the German translator:

This was communicated on 2 February 2023 in Colombia to Sister Benedicta of the Holy Cross, a member of the community of the Franciscan Sisters of the Holy Cross, in the form of a diktat during an apparition of Pope Benedict, with the request to make it public, in particular to inform the Curia of the Vatican and the entire College of Cardinals. This is a preliminary, anonymous translation based on the audio text of the aforementioned video from Radio Rosa Mystica, Colombia. The question of authenticity must be answered by everyone who sees this posthumous testament of Pope Benedict XVI, who died in December 2022. It reveals facts that are partly extremely shocking in their demonic malice. But the Testament is also a wonderful testimony of a heroic faith in Jesus Christ, the Only Way, the Only Redeemer, which should encourage us all, according to God’s will, to imitate. The clear reference of Pope Benedict XVI in several sentences to the Mysterium Iniquitatis, the mystery of wickedness, which will now take its course after his death, that of the last pope, as well as the testimony of the sovereign leadership of the Church in this time of trial by Our Lord Jesus Christ, “who has everything under control”, prepare us for the final battle between good and evil, which will end with the triumph of the elect, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

First Vision of Sister Benedicta of Holy Cross, of February 2, 2023, the feast of Candlemas, during Mass:

While the priest praised the gifts of bread and wine, everything was swallowed up before my eyes and what I saw was Pope Benedict XVI. He was dressed in white and gold robes; He praised the offerings and the altar, and then he turned to praise the people. So I could see him clearly; Before that, I only saw his back. He celebrated the Traditional Latin Mass. His robe was brilliant white, and on his chest he wore a pectoral cross with emeralds. On his chasuble were lilies embroidered with silver, and the sacred hearts of Jesus, Mary and Joseph entwined in gold brocade. I was shocked to see Pope Benedict XVI in all his splendor; quite the opposite of how I had seen him before in my dreams. It was then the day of his funeral; he was dressed like a pope, but he did not shine; He was like an ordinary person, scarred by age. But today I saw him differently, I saw him in full splendor, rejuvenated, full of life force. Everything about him shone, as if he was being irradiated with light from the inside. His face matched that of young, yet mature people. He looked very focused. Then I heard Pope Benedict XVI utter the words of the canon in perfect Latin, in the rite of the Traditional Tridentine Mass. The chapel was filled with incense, of exquisite color, with a very fragrant mixture of myrrh. There was a sense of holiness in the air.

I think everyone present had the same perception. There was a holy fear of God. We were all filled with awe. It was very solemn when Pope Benedict XVI lifted the Holy Host that had been transformed into the Body of the Lord. I saw a lot of incense rising to Heaven. On one side of the altar stood an angel. He was royally dressed and powerful, with a golden chalice in his hand. This chalice overflowed with incense and ascended to the throne of God. Still in ecstasy I looked up and there were three golden niches with gems. In the right niche I recognized Saint Augustine of Hippo and in the left Saint Bonaventure, a saint from our Franciscan Order. Both are Teachers of the Church. The niche in the middle was empty, and I saw Pope Benedict XVI floating up to take a seat in that niche. I watched as the angel filled the altar with a large amount of incense, and then I watched him consecrate Pope Benedict XVI and the other saints who were with him. Before each censer the angel bowed.

Then I saw Pope Benedict XVI take off his skullcap and sacrifice himself to God. Then he bent his gaze down to his feet, something like a mirror appearing through which he looked at the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. I saw that he was looking at the whole church and that he covered his face with his hands, just like the two other saints next to him, Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Bonaventure. It was as if they were ashamed to see what was happening in the church. The priest came to me to give me communion. I was still in ecstasy, but I did not see the priest, I saw Benedict XVI. As he approached, I said, “Holy Father” and received communion. Then I fell into a kind of spiritual calm. I kept repeating, “Holy Father, Holy Father.” When I recovered, I had to be helped to my cell, because I felt faint and embarrassed, because there were guests present at the Mass on February 2, 2023, and from what I was told, everyone present was aware of the ecstasy I had. For an ordinary person like me, such supernatural events are beyond our powers. Many have no idea how much one suffers from these supernatural graces.

On the same day, February 2, 2023, at 23:00, Pope Benedict XVI again appeared to Sr. Benedicta.

This time I saw him in my cell, wearing his white papal robe, his beautiful emerald cross on his chest, his fisherman’s ring and his very bright red shoes. He was sitting on a chair that I have next to my bed, but the chair didn’t look real, it was a high chair, upholstered in white, the wood that adorned him was finely carved and golden, very elegant and sober, the whole thing sparkled with a radiant glow. The white was very intense and his skin was rosy. His face was healthy, rested and fresh, with an unwavering calm.

I cried, “Your Holiness, is it you?” I hadn’t fully recovered yet. I heard him pray in Latin in a sonorous voice. It was like a prayer for the Church. His pronunciation was perfect, what a great Latinist! He looked at me, smiled and said, “Laudetur Jesus Christ”. I replied: In saecula saeculorum. He continued:

“Arise, for our Lord wants you to write what was wanted to hide after my death. It’s imperative that you do that, and I have a lot to say.”

His Holiness spoke to me in Latin and I understood him in perfect Spanish. Some time ago another saint spoke to me in French and I understood him in Spanish. How do you do that? I don’t know. All I know is that I understand what they’re telling me. So I sat down with difficulty and took paper and pen to write. Pope Benedict XVI said to me:

“The story is long, and what I am about to tell will cause a hurricane that will shake the Church to its foundations, especially the central government, the Curia of the Vatican. My enemies feel they have won by their successes, but their joy will not last long. They say among themselves: we have finally silenced him. His vote had harmed our interests. What a relief! But they do not take into account the will of God. They don’t expect me to speak, they don’t think about that possibility, they think the dead don’t speak, but they forget that God is righteous and sometimes, as in my case, lets them speak, even though it’s from eternity, and bears witness to the truth that is Christ. I am with God and live forever and ever. Our Lord knows how to write straight on crooked lines, and he has allowed me to reveal myself to different souls after my death, to testify that there is life after death, and that no matter how much they want to silence me, the truth will come to light, albeit post-mortem.

During the funeral mass of my great friend John Paul II, I felt a great stir in my heart. John Paul II had undergone surgery on his neck with the sole purpose of silencing him and thus worsening his health, to prevent him from making decisions that were inconsistent with ecclesiastical Freemasonry that held high positions in the central government, and not as the media of the time claimed.

Pope John Paul II had another government plan in mind, one that did not provide for changes unless they were necessary. He was initially skeptical of an investigation conducted within the Curia of the Vatican, a report that contained very important and compromising information that required immediate changes because it threatened the stability of the Church, information known in detail to his predecessor, Pope John Paul I, who was assassinated not only because he knew this information, but also because he had initiated a purge that involved some changes within the central government and the Vatican Bank, which was reason enough to depose him. Only after the assassination did the great John Paul II change his mind. He shared this information with me and we got to work. At that time I was Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. The damage done was irreparable and it was very complicated to remove many high church hierarchs.

And yes, it is true that some steps had already been taken. Freemasonry, which was predominant in the college of cardinals and in the various dicasteries, had spread its tentacles through alliances not only within the Vatican, but also outside it. We just did what we could and not what we wanted. It is very difficult to work with a hostile government, as I did, and with few allies, against a majority that openly stands up as relativism and modernism, in all its shadows. We soon noticed that there was a climate of open rebellion and disobedience to the Pope, and all this threatened to lead to a great schism within the Church. In the course of my life, and especially during my pontificate, I have experienced terrible and painful moments. Some of them are known only to God. It was never thought that evil could reach the highest levels, and now Satan feels powerful and lord over everything.

I had learned that there is a very dangerous mafia in the Vatican of Masonic cardinals pursuing occult interests. They are traitors to the Church, who occupy very important positions and create allies and then destroy the Church and the Catholic faith from within, cardinals and bishops who do not fear God and without conscience kill souls in cold blood, all out of love of power and money, and move further and further away from the true mission entrusted to us by our Lord Jesus Christ. When I looked at the lifeless body of the great John Paul II, I thought of this. And at that moment, in the depths of my soul, I made the decision to go with emirate and dedicate myself to writing books. I felt that my mission had been accomplished. I had given it my all, and in the best possible way. Moreover, my health was not good. I wanted to continue my contribution to the Church in a calmer and more relaxed position and keep myself in the background. I was convinced that my task was over after the death of the Holy Father. But God’s plans are not our plans, and he had already decided for me. In the conclave, when I realized with horror during the vote that the choice would fall on my poor humanity, I said to God with resignation from the bottom of my heart, “Lord, don’t do this to me!”, a phrase that was then adopted by the media, manipulated by some Masonic cardinals to distort everything and fabricate a destructive and false image of me until my death.

The rumors included that I would tighten the laws of the Church because I was conservative and traditional, and that I would oppose the new modernist air that was emerging at the time, and it was also said that I was a threat to their plans because I opposed relativism. When I was asked whether or not I accepted the will of God, I replied, “Yes, I accept the will of God.” While all the protocols were being processed, I thought to myself that there were people in the group of cardinals who were better qualified than I was, but God in his goodness chose me out of all men, a simple and humble worker in the Lord’s vineyard, a phrase I made public on the day of my election as successor to the apostle Peter. I knew very well what was in store for me, and my enemies had grown stronger and more numerous. I was aware of some of the files that Pope Paul VI had created during his pontificate on the Vatican Curia and which we later studied together with my predecessor John Paul II. My wish was to initiate a thorough cleansing, and I knew that this would not be easy, that there would have to be a total reorganization within the Vatican Curia. I was aware that it would most likely cost me my life, as it had cost my predecessors, but I decided to take the more difficult road, supported by the help of some people of faith.

To this end, I began a much-needed purification within the Legionaries of Christ at the time, forcing their founder, Marcial Maciel, to withdraw from all public office. That alone earned me many enemies, not only within the church but also outside it.

I knew the greatest purge awaited me. I knew the Curia of the Vatican and all the intrigues that were drawn out there. I knew I wasn’t the favorite candidate for Peter’s chair, not because of a lack of quality, but because I wouldn’t help the Masons in their goals. In the meantime, they would prepare the ideal candidate according to their interests, they needed someone to burn while choosing a candidate who was in line with the powers, and that stopgap was me. –

Here Pope Benedict sighed deeply, and his gaze was like an endless sea of peace.

But God, in his infinite mercy toward his Church, was kind enough to delay the great mystery of iniquity a little longer, for He knew that this mystery would be revealed after my death, and that he would act in complete freedom, supported by his most faithful associates. The great destroyer of the Church was already on his feet, his name was already heard in the corridors and in the hidden meetings, but he had to wait until he was well prepared and the right moment came, a moment that God had prolonged in his goodness thanks to the prayers of the saints and the righteous souls in the Mystical Body of the Church, simple, peaceful, silent souls with unshakable faith, able to lay down their lives for Jesus Christ, souls who do not give in to evil and who know where the fault lies. These souls are loved by the Lord and are present in great numbers, they are quietly ordained and form a mighty army that walks at the hand of Mother God.”

Then an angelic smile appeared on Pope Benedict’s face, and he continued:

“That I was an inadequate instrument was not unknown to God, for he gives his strength and strength to bear the cross with love, as he himself has done, and this was a comfort to my soul, which was already beginning to feel the rejection by the majority of the members of the College of Cardinals and the civil authorities, and was aware that the battle had only just begun. My suffering as pope began on the first day of my election. When I stepped on the balcony and saw the roar of a sea of souls, I understood my fate. God had me in his grip. When I was dressed as Peter’s successor, a shiver ran over me. Throughout my body, I felt like a lame lamb being led to the slaughter. Over the course of my life, I have come to realize that the Lord’s ways are not easy and are littered with roses and thistles.

It is dangerous to believe that one can choose any path, that they all lead to the truth. This is a great mistake on the part of the person who is currently “leading” the Church. I’m talking about Francis. He can promote this kind of regime and division within. In a way, this means accepting communion with relativism, an ideology that I have condemned countless times, and with revolutionary ideologies that seek to impose the powers of the world by force. The grave errors propagated by the Church from the desecrated throne of Peter drive souls to suicide. In an act of hellish violence, evil has already been done and cannot be undone, only God can save his Church from falling into the abyss, and I had already seen this clearly during the sessions of the Second Vatican Council. There I had a vision of the future of the errors that had arisen from that moment on, thanks to the misinterpretation of the council and the many purple wolves that had infiltrated, and which had certainly entered through the schism in the Church during the pontificate of John XXIII.

All my life I have fought against relativism, and in many of my writings I have condemned these kinds of revolutionary theories that are against God. It saddened me personally to see how most cardinals, except for a few, adopted this ideology. And that is precisely why they eagerly sought reforms within the Church, reforms that would include my elimination, for I was their greatest obstacle.

I would have felt their boundless hatred of me, and had it not been for the mercy of God, who was always with me, I would certainly have succumbed to these attacks. They had several occasions to kill me, but God preserved me, for my hour had not yet come until the day when I would be eliminated. I knew that with my death the sheep would spread, but I was sure that the Divine Shepherd would gather them in His flock. I was only an instrument in the plan of salvation, nothing more, and soon the great purification would come. It is our Lord Jesus Christ who is truly in charge of His Church. After my death, there was great confusion. Somehow, God allowed the wickedness of the hearts of those who claim to be true disciples of Christ, and who in reality become the Judas of this age, to cause even more confusion and division within the Church.

On my 95th birthday, among many other slander talk, it was said: This is the pope who did not want to be pope, I heard it myself live from some cardinals. I felt tired and exhausted, I was deprived of all enlightenment and comfort. I was on the road to Calvary with our Lord and embraced the cross of the Redeemer. I knew that soon my hour would come, I experienced the prison of loneliness, the fear of not being able to speak openly except through codes and parables.

I experienced the prison of guarding by a prison guard who I knew could not be trusted. I was overwhelmed and without comfort, but I tried to imitate our master as best I could. And I did not refuse the bitter cup that was offered to me, always with the grace of God, with all my trust in Jesus Christ and distrustful of my own strength. I knew that Judas Iscariot was by my side day and night and that he would soon betray me with a treacherous kiss. Yet I did not reject him, for I saw the hand of God in everything, although, like a meek lamb led to the slaughter, I was dumb and did not open my mouth except to bless and forgive.

Judas Iscariot was amazed at Jesus, the divine Master, because he did not live up to his expectations as a political warrior, but was a peace-loving, humble and meek man. Somehow I saw myself as a reflection of this image, I was meek and humble, a man of peace, and this confused many who challenged me. Many put me to the test, but the most disturbing was my jailer, my own secretary.

In the past, I had had the terrible experience of being betrayed by my friends. My jailer pretended to be my friend, pretended to repent, pretended to be by my side, but at the end of my life I was endowed with a keen discernment of spirits and knew that I could not trust him and the people who lived with me day and night. My prison in exile was the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, and there was a special reason for that. God saw to it that I was inside, as his rightful shepherd, and not outside, to support the Church, to pray and live in penance, through a seemingly hidden and silent life, without any comfort except the occasional visits that my jailer allowed because he had to obey his Lord, who saw to it that I was isolated, devoid of communication with the world. But I could never be deprived of communication with God. The more I suffered, the closer I came to the beating of Christ’s heart. My life became a constant prayer of intercession. I discovered the way to be truly free, and that was through prayer. My mind was never trapped as some would have liked. My decaying body was tortured and treated with drugs that threatened rather than improved my health, bringing me closer to eternity bit by bit.

I was aware of everything that was happening around me. God gave me clarity in his goodness, even though I was in such a painful situation. As the rightful representative of Christ, the only Shepherd, I was held captive by my executioners. Those who one day appointed me shepherd of shepherds were the same ones who would crucify me a short time later, just as it had happened to our Lord Jesus on Palm Sunday.

It is precisely in our human limitations and weaknesses that we are called to be conformed to Christ. With every minute that passed, I could clearly read my life in the light of Christ. Step by step I saw the fulfillment of the prophecies, and at the end of my life I saw myself more in heaven than on earth. I fully realized that I could be more useful to the Church if I went to God than if I stayed here in this valley of tears. And this thought alone encouraged me to carry the cross forward out of love for Him who gave himself completely to the cross out of love for me. This is my public confession. I, Benedict XVI, Vicar of Christ, the last and legitimate successor of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord has given the key to the Kingdom of Heaven, have been thrown into prison like Peter. Because I proclaimed the truth, I have become hateful to the powers of the world, who with obvious cruelty have broken my clay body, but have freed my immortal spirit, which now enjoys the blessed sight of God, the reward of those who remain faithful to His Son Jesus Christ, to whom all honor and glory belongs forever.

I would have felt their boundless hatred of me, and had it not been for the mercy of God, who was always with me, I would certainly have succumbed to these attacks. They had several occasions to kill me, but God preserved me, for my hour had not yet come until the day when I would be eliminated. I knew that with my death the sheep would spread, but I was sure that the Divine Shepherd would gather them in His flock. I was only an instrument in the plan of salvation, nothing more, and soon the great purification would come. It is our Lord Jesus Christ who is truly in charge of His Church. After my death, there was great confusion. Somehow, God allowed the wickedness of the hearts of those who claim to be true disciples of Christ, and who in reality become the Judas of this age, to cause even more confusion and division within the Church.

In the past, I had had the terrible experience of being betrayed by my friends. My jailer pretended to be my friend, pretended to repent, pretended to be by my side, but at the end of my life I was endowed with a keen discernment of spirits and knew that I could not trust him and the people who lived with me day and night. My prison in exile was the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, and there was a special reason for that. God saw to it that I was inside, as his rightful shepherd, and not outside, to support the Church, to pray and live in penance, through a seemingly hidden and silent life, without any comfort except the occasional visits that my jailer allowed because he had to obey his Lord, who saw to it that I was isolated, devoid of communication with the world. But I could never be deprived of communication with God. The more I suffered, the closer I came to the beating of Christ’s heart. My life became a constant prayer of intercession. I discovered the way to be truly free, and that was through prayer. My mind was never trapped as some would have liked. My decaying body was tortured and treated with drugs that threatened rather than improved my health, bringing me closer to eternity bit by bit.

With speed and cunning, they staged a coup d’état and convened a conclave to choose my supposed successor, bypassing my authority. In the conclave, there was a majority of Masonic cardinals, a long-organized attempt to undermine the college of cardinals, for which there is irrefutable evidence with extensive information. The infiltration was led by Masonic allies in the United States, and at the behest of that country’s then-president, Barak Obama, pressure was put on the conclave demanding that I be replaced by their candidate because the world’s major elites, and China in particular, demanded it. They had frozen the Vatican bank and even threatened to kill me if I didn’t resign the next morning. It was an untenable situation that floated like a sharp sword in my soul.

It is clear that the media was manipulated by the Vatican to destroy my image and make the world hate me. The country of the United States contributed the most to my coup. Every time I said a word, there was great uproar among the cardinals, especially among the German clergy, who were among the first to raise their hands against me, and then I said to myself: a son who raises his hand against his father and causes a violent schism and encourages other communities to follow his example of stubborn rebellion. This situation reached such an unbearable and discouraging level for me that the Holy Spirit of God inspired me in prayer to decide to continue my Peter ministry in a different way, not so much actively and publicly as contemplative and prayerful. In this way I managed to divert attention from me within the central administration of the Curia of the Vatican, as they demanded of me, and thus avert the greatest schism of all time.

As Supreme Pontifex, I stood alone, without the support of anyone except a few loyal cardinals. Suddenly I was alone with God, and I realized that when human words have no effect, there is only one way out: prayer. And that’s what I did. I immersed myself in prayer, lived in repentance, which was torture for my modernist enemies, the friends of pederasty and all those revolutionary ideologies that go against God’s law and all Christian morality. I, with the help of divine grace, have turned the bitter into the sweet and have taken advantage of the suffering for the good of the whole Church and her Mystical Body entrusted to me. It is precisely in human weakness and limitation that we are called to live in accordance with Christ. They manipulated the course of my life and made me a despicable person to the world, who had to be replaced as soon as possible. They spread the untrue rumor that I had protected pedophile priests, when the reality was very different.

In imitation of Christ, the divine Master, I remained silent and did not open my mouth, I relied on divine intervention, placed myself in the hands of the righteous Judge, and like a meek lamb I was led to the slaughter to shed my blood for the good of the Church. As a true pastor of the Catholic Church, I did not back down, even though I was called a traitor by the manipulated and generously paid information of the various media. My enemies said that the Church would harden with me and that I intended to return to the pre-conciliar era.

I was the most reviled and discredited pope. My name caused gnashing of teeth in the corridors of the Vatican Curia. Among the many slanders that were spread about me was that I was a coward who would get off the cross and flee from the wolves. Everything I said in public or in private was twisted with the sole intention of organizing a coup. Another said: He is the worst pope we have ever had, and so one by one the swords drilled into my heart. Faced with the harsh reality I saw, I went my way, and that way was to follow Christ to Calvary. The disobedience of the college of cardinals reached such a level that I could not possibly rule.

As a shepherd, I was always respectful, cordial, and polite in my dealings with everyone, without exception. In return, I received contempt, slander, and insults. My so-called personal secretary was not my confidant, on the contrary, I knew he could not be trusted. He was my executioner, an open microphone for my enemies. It was Francis who had me locked up in solitary confinement and heavy guard. Apparently, he feared that I would say something that would damage his reputation. He feared that I would reveal the truth and thwart his secret plans to destroy the Catholic Church. I made that clear to Georg (Gänswein) when I told him: It seems that Pope Francis no longer trusts me.

Even the carefully selected and trained nuns who accompanied me could not be trusted. I felt very lonely, I was literally in a prison. More than once I wept before the Blessed Sacrament, looked to Christ and asked for the strength not to give in and for the wisdom to do God’s will in all things.

My secretary Georg saw me do it. It was in the second year of my exile in prison and exactly on my secretary’s birthday when I spoke these words: Georg, today is a special day for you. He said to me, “Thank you, Your Holiness,” and he looked at me with a fixed gaze. I continued: You know that my true program of government was not to do my will, but to listen to the word and will of the Lord, together with the whole Church, and to be led by Him. He replied, “Yes, Holy Father, I know.” “Well, today I want to tell you that it is our Lord Jesus Christ who, in this hour of our history, in this moment of my apparent uselessness, leads the Church and will bring it to a happy end, because He has promised that the powers of hell will not overpower the Church. Do you believe what I’m telling you?” He said, “Yes, Your Holiness,” and there was a great silence around us and we looked at each other. For the first and only time, I saw in his gaze a trace of genuine friendship. At that moment I prayed to the Lord in the depths of my soul for the conversion of Georg and all my enemies, and I said in the depths of my heart, “Lord forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”

I was certainly in Mary’s school of silence, which kept everything in her heart, and among the many things I learned in that painful exile was silence. Silence is not weakness, silence is not fear or cowardice, silence is the wisdom of God, it is prudence. And the truly wise person is the one who knows how and when to shut up, not the one who talks a lot. And there are times when the Holy Spirit prompts to speak or remain silent. The silence of the righteous prompts the righteousness of God to act, for we put ourselves in the… in the hands of God, the righteous judge. When I began my pontificate, I made it clear that I listen to God’s Word with the Church, always do His holy will, am always docile to His Word, always willing to forgive as often as necessary and give a second chance, for it is the souls who must insist on a true shepherd who always avoids judgment not to be judged and who is willing to correct when it does is needed; and while I recognize that one has human weaknesses, and I had them, it is also true that I have never let go of the hand of God, who was always in the boat with me. And although there were many storms, I never distrusted the power of God. Despite my many failures, I always remained faithful to the Lord and repeated in my heart the words of Peter: Lord, You know, You know that I love You.

It was very painful for my broken humanity to discover that they were slowly poisoning me, for I heard my master Georg Gänswein, without them noticing, giving instructions from Francis to the nuns who served me. I heard him say: keep giving him the medicine, do everything so that it seems natural, suspect nothing, do not ask questions, orders from above, do not worry, you will be well rewarded. I pretended not to notice anything, and from that moment on, every food or medicine I was given was torture, I avoided eating it for fear that it might have been poisoned. And this lack of food was even more damaging to my already weak health. I always blessed the drugs because I was sure they replaced them.

My life in prison, which had lasted almost 10 years, was coming to an end. God was in a hurry with me. Even if I had wanted to speak clearly, I could not have done it. They wouldn’t even have believed me. They would have twisted my words, I had no one around me to trust. It was a very stressful situation, so God enlightened me so that I could somehow communicate through codes and parables, through the books, hoping that at least someone would understand the way I spoke.

On the occasion of my 95th birthday, Francis came to visit me, brought a bottle of wine with caramel paste and asked if he could be alone with me. I never thought his cynicism and capacity for evil were so outspoken. Again I saw his hatred of me, of the Church and, above all, of boundless hatred of the Mother of God. I had always considered myself a peaceful and diplomatic person: What could I do? Only suffering in silence, in great solitude, for at the end of my life I found myself in perfect agreement with the suffering Christ who had also been abandoned by all divine help. That was part of my catharsis. I understood. My office as Christ’s vicar required a great purification. Much had been entrusted to me, and soon I would have to answer to God for all my administration. I had to answer, not only for my soul as a baptized Christian, but for the whole church. What a great responsibility, what a heavy cross I had to bear as pope. From that moment on, everything was clear to me, and this realization made me doubly uncomfortable.

Under the seal of confession and in his usual flattering attitude of false brotherhood, Bergoglio, or rather Francis, told me in a mocking tone and in his very cynical and ruthless way that he liked to have the Church in his hands, that he would completely destroy her and bury the Eucharist forever. He said: I will wipe your God off the face of the earth, I have many allies to help me, not only from within but also from without. The Curia kneels at my feet, and the College of Cardinals, they are faithful dogs, as you know. You can’t deny that they are faithful, that they obey, and he smiled mischievously. “I brought them here for you, and in case you don’t know, I’ll confirm it for you. Consider it a favor on my part. I’m not as bad as they say. He smiled again, this time icy.

His gaze frightened me, and having him in front of me was like seeing Satan. He confessed to me that one of his goals was to throw mud at the Mother of God, to eradicate dogma if possible, and to trample on the Eucharist. He told me that he would eradicate the extraordinary rite in one fell swoop, leaving only the current rite with its many prophecies and sacrileges. Eventually, the new rite was worked out by a Freemason who was an expert in liturgy, and he confessed to me that he felt joy when he went to the Tepeyac and insulted the Queen of Heaven face to face. He talked about Mexico. And then he took great pleasure in the pantomime he performed with a supposed devotion of Russia and the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. He said to me, coming even closer and with irony: Do you want to know who I have invoked for the beloved image of Our Lady of Fatima? I replied to him that it was not necessary. He told me he would tell me anyway because he knew it would hurt me: I have called upon the King of Darkness, you understand? I stayed in complete silence, then he said, “Oh grandfather, I admit I had a lot of fun, but it’s time to end the farce. The Catholics are ignorant and mindless, and it is good that they should continue like this, obedient and submissive to everything that is said to them.” And he smiled again.

He confessed to me that it gave him the most satisfaction to see me suffer. He told me that he liked it and that I was his prey, that he had my life in his hands, that he could lock me up for good at any moment, that it wasn’t the first time he did it and that he didn’t mind.

He said: Do you know what euthanasia is? And he smiled, shook his head, and said with a look, “Are you in pain?” I was shocked by everything I heard him say, I could not believe such wickedness, in his heart there was only hatred and from his lips came nothing but horror. Immediately he said to me, Holy Father, do not worry, your suffering will soon be shortened, I promise you, and I looked at him and answered: You fear God not. And he said to me, I know no fear, and he added, What is fear?

I said to myself, He is the destroyer of the Church, and it is clear that he was under the influence of Satan. Then my thoughts flew to Fatima and tears came to my eyes. Iwas sure that my days were numbered and that the curtain of my life would soon fall.

The person responsible for shortening those days was my jailer. My seemingly loyal secretary Gänswein. This task had been entrusted to him, and he had to fulfill it without leaving the slightest suspicion of murder. The day before my death, my secretary received a phone call. It was Francis, and he said this phrase, “It’s time,” and he hung up. I had heard it because he was near me and I thought I was asleep. I did not resist my executioner. I waited patiently for my end. What else could I have said or done since I was completely isolated and guarded 24 hours a day, since they were really in charge within the Vatican and they, who are now in the majority thanks to Francis, manipulated information and published a truth that was modified and generously paid by the Vatican itself.

It is no secret that throughout history, many popes were murdered and poisoned by the same Masonic cardinals who had infiltrated the central government. After they became secretaries of state, many of these murders were dismissed as natural death or heart attack, and to dispel any suspicion, they were canonized. To name just one example: the files of Pope John Paul I and the great John Paul II, on whom they had made several failed assassination attempts, and who was eventually silenced with an unnecessary and conveniently performed laryngectomy. Finally, I am here, and I can assure you that there are many ways to kill.

His gaze was a glimpse into infinity, that of Benedict XVI. I couldn’t believe, sister Benedicta says, what I heard. I felt a great pain in my heart and a great indignation, but there I was, sitting on the edge of the bed, in complete silence, writing as if I were the pope’s secretary and saying to myself: What a horror, my God. What a lowness. Then the Holy Father looked at me and said,

Be strong and keep writing. I still have a lot to say, all of this is already part of the story. Write, daughter.

I said, I listen to you, Holy Father, and he went on:

As Pope, I always wore the white soutane, hoping that the world would realize that I had never resigned and that I was under pressure to act and make decisions for the good of the Church. In the few conversations I could have, I always expressed myself in a veiled way so as not to arouse the suspicion of my enemies who were constantly watching me, and I had to be very careful. My enemies were numerous and had many microphones. Now I enjoy great peace, for God is righteous and He always chooses the right time. These are times when many think they own and know the truth. The truth is only one: Christ, and to Him alone we must always remain faithful, even if it costs us life, as it does with me.

On December 8, 2022, with a gesture of confidence and goodwill, I informed my secretary that I had written several letters and my last encyclical Mary Coredemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate. I said this, strongly encouraged by my predecessor, the great John Paul II, a faithful defender of Mary Coredemptrix at the foot of the Cross. I told my secretary where they were. His surprise was not long in coming. He told me: Letters?!, and at the same time he told me with an obligatory smile that he thanked me for the vote of confidence. I pointed out to him that these letters were confidential and addressed mainly to the central government, the Curia of the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Liturgy, the College of Cardinals, Cardinals Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Raymond Leo Burke, Cardinal Zen, Cardinal Robert Sarah, the

Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X, and St. Peter.

I wrote a letter to priests and seminarians urging them to always strive to be exemplary priests, animated by constant and intense prayer, cultivating chastity and intimacy with Christ, and I emphasized that the priest must be conformed to the heart of Christ and that only in this way can the priesthood be successful and bear apostolic fruit, and advised them never to be seduced by the logic of career and power—words I have often said to priests and seminarians. Finally, I urged them not to make the mistake of taking communion in hand and doing penance according to Our Lady’s request.

I also wrote letters to the Institutes of Consecrated Life, to journalists around the world, and to my good friend, the theologian Giulio Colombi. Finally, I addressed an open letter to the People of God. I urged Georg that these letters be published three days after my death, and he gave me his word.

In my task of imitating Christ, who had with him to the end the treacherous and perfidious Judas Iscariot, an image of the traitors who would be seen in my Church, I also had Georg, to whom I showed sincere affection, trust and patience until the last moment, desiring the well-being of his soul and his conversion, Even though I knew I would soon see him commit the worst betrayal and the greatest murder. Knowing that my secretary would betray me, I wisely decided to give a copy of these letters to my great friend Giulio Colombi on his last visit, which was granted to me by a miracle of God after much supplication by my secretary Gänswein. Discreetly and without arousing suspicion, I quickly explained to Giulio what was going on and asked him to publish these documents after my imminent death and give a copy to each member of the College of Cardinals, so that they in turn could make the right decisions and convene a lawful conclave after my death.

Motivated by this act of trust that I showed my secretary, he secretly and treacherously communicated everything to Francis, the letters and the encyclical, the encyclical Mary Coredemptrix, which I had written and in which I dogmatically proclaimed the co-salvation of the Mother of God. Without him noticing, and thanks to the volume of his phone, I could hear Francis give the order to burn everything, and he added: We must not leave anything that could be compromising, to which he replied: I will, and he hung up. He didn’t know I had heard everything. [However, Giulio Colombí died on January 1, 2023, the day after Benedict’s death, ed.]. Knowing of the betrayal of my secretary Georg Gänswein and as a last chance for him to justify himself before God, I explicitly recommended to him the encyclical I wrote on March 25, 2022. March 2022, in which after three years, day and night, in deep prayer and asking God to enlighten his servant with his Holy Spirit, I solemnly and dogmatically declared the role, knowing the complete and accurate documentation that lies in the archives and accompanies this new Marian dogma, revealed to the Blessed Virgin Mary as the spiritual Mother of all peoples, among her three main aspects as Coredemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate, which enable her to fully exercise her spiritual motherhood, a gift given to her by her Son Jesus Christ on the cross for all mankind of all times.

The encyclical states: “The Blessed Virgin Mary is our Mother in the order of grace, Coredemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate, whose motherhood is universal and has been addressed to all peoples and races since the creation of the world, beginning with the salvation accomplished by her Son Jesus Christ. In the face of the unprecedented crisis of faith, family, society and peace that characterizes the present state of humanity, the intercession of the Mother of God is needed today more urgently than ever.

I am convinced that this papal definition of the spiritual motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary will be an extraordinary remedy for the current global crisis that threatens humanity,” and I signed it: Benedict PP. XVI, Shepherd of Shepherds.

When I finished writing this encyclical, I received a sign from heaven. In my heart, I was sure my career was over. It was the last thing I would do as pope and from that moment on the countdown had begun. I felt at that moment like the Omega who ended a cycle in the Church and began a new and strong faith persecution.

That last morning I couldn’t sleep, I was breathing heavily, my sleepless nights were getting longer and longer. But I was aware that the Lord was in control. My state of mind was not the best, I felt tired and very overwhelmed by everything I knew was going on, with Francis’ confession tormenting me day and night, and that I could not possibly speak given my situation, and especially the seal of confession, which is inviolable. It tormented me to cause an unprecedented scandal. My communication with the world was veiled, it was like a silent scream in my long and painful agony.

Then came the moment when my secretary Gänswein came in in the early morning hours. He thought I was asleep, because I had had several long nights. He was convinced that he had fooled me all those years we had been forced to live together. To his surprise, I was awake. I prayed the rosary to my good and dear Mother, my companion in this exile, Mary the Coredemptrix. What better companion could there be than she who was always faithful to her Son Jesus Christ and who stood at the foot of the cross?

George came up to me and said, “Your Holiness, can’t you sleep? I have to give you this medicine.” I was done, and God let me know it was time to go. Then I stared into his eyes. He looked at me and immediately averted his eyes. His gaze was cold, like that of a corpse.

I took heart and said to him, Georg, have you ever thought of my death? He replied, “No, Your Holiness.” I said: You should do that and examine your conscience often, it is very healthy for the soul, life is very short and one day you will have to answer to God for your life. He said to me, Your Holiness, why these words? In a very low tone and with great difficulty breathing, I answered him: “Gänswein, you have been with me for a long time and you do not know me yet? What you have to do, do it now and without further ado, but remember that one day you have to answer to God, don’t forget that,” and we stared at each other in silence.

Then my secretary was surprised and realized that I had exposed his deception and that it was he who had been deceived. Then he gave me the injection and told me in my ear: “it’s time to end the farce”. I was ready and I prayed, and contrary to his wish, I had peace, that peace that only God can give the soul, and I whispered to him, “I forgive you everything from my heart,” and in my agony, my last words were, “Lord, I love You. You know me and you know I love you,” And I fell asleep like someone falling asleep in his mother’s arms.

Throughout my painful pontificate, that is, during the eight years of active office and the nearly ten years of contemplative office, I was subjected to harsh criticism and humiliation. All my life I was mercilessly subjected to public ridicule, but the most painful humiliation I experienced when I came to Berlin and the German bishops and cardinals refused to welcome me. The other and greatest humiliation I experienced was on the part of my executioners on the day of my funeral. When I accepted the Peter ministry on April 19, 2005, I had that firm certainty that has always accompanied me, the certainty of the Church’s life through the Word of God. At that time, as on other occasions, I spoke out publicly. The words that resounded in my heart were these: “Lord, why do you want this from me and what do you want from me? It is a heavy burden that You have placed on my shoulders, but if You ask me with Your word, I will cast out my nets, trusting that You will guide me in spite of all my weaknesses.”

At the end of my life, I can say that the Lord really guided me, that he was close to me, that I could feel his presence every day, that I had moments of joy and light, but also moments that were not easy. I felt like Peter with the apostles in the boat on the Sea of Galilee. The Lord gave us many days with sun and a light breeze, days when there was plenty of fishing, but there were also times when the water was rough and the wind fickle, as in all the history of the Church, and the Lord seemed to be asleep. But I have always known that the Lord was in that boat, and I have always known that the Church’s boat is not mine, not ours, but His, and the Lord does not sink him, it is He who guides him, certainly also by the people he has chosen because he has so willed it. That was and is a certainty that nothing or no one can cloud, and that is why my heart today is full of gratitude to God, because he has never left the whole Church or me without his comfort, his light and his love.

I have loved each of you, indiscriminately, with that pastoral love that is the heart of every shepherd, especially of the Bishop of Rome, the successor of the Apostle Peter, every day. I have carried each of you in prayer with the heart of a father. I want my greeting and thanksgiving to reach everyone. I want my heart to expand to the whole world. Now, at the end of my career, I can assure you that the Pope is never alone. The Lord has always been with me. He worked with me. He rested with me. He rejoiced with me at the abundant catch. And he wept with me. All this was experienced by my heart during my pontificate, until the last day of my death. My yes was a total surrender to God and to his work of redemption. It was a yes forever in the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I never left the cross, as many have claimed, but remained at the side of the crucified Lord in a new way, firmly with Mary at the foot of my Lord’s cross. Now I want to ask you one last favor.

“I listen, Your Holiness,” Sister Benedicta replied.

I want you to publish this in the media without leaving out a detail, as I have written, because everything is of great importance to the Church. Do not be afraid, I understand that it is a delicate mission that I ask of you. Can I trust you?

And the sister answers him: Your Holiness, of course you can count on me, I will be your secretary, if you will allow me. And he says to her:

Do it and don’t be afraid of the possible retaliation this letter may cause. I want it to reach the Vatican Curia, every member of the College of Cardinals.

“Holy Father, may I ask you a question,” says the sister, and he replies:

“I’m listening.”

“After your death, a spiritual will was published, presumably yours. Is it true that it is yours?” Pope Benedict replied:

As for my Spiritual Testament, I will tell you that it has been published in an incomplete form. Every pope is free to write a spiritual will. I wanted to write it in two parts. I decided to do this because I was in a predicament at the time and especially because there was a risk of schisms within the Church.

The situation was so complicated that I even risked being locked up in a real prison if I didn’t comply with their demands — the pressure was clearly coming from the United States and the Chinese government.

This was the reason I couldn’t write a full will and was thinking about writing it in two parts. I called the part that was published Alpha, while I called the second part of the will Omega. This second part was burned along with the letters and the encyclical I had written. This second part is the part I just dictated to you. That is why this document is very important and it is important that you bring it to light. This task requires your courage.

“I understand, Your Holiness,” said the sister.

As for my secretary [Gänswein], I will tell you that he has again used me to his advantage. I also refer to the book he self-published. Many of his confessions have been conveniently adapted. He’s just trying to entertain without saying what he should say. But that’s irrelevant now. The real testimony, and more than a testimony, is this document that I have just dictated to you and that I leave in writing thanks to you who was the Lord’s secretary and is now mine. Before I conclude, I want to send a message of faith to all religious communities through your community. On this day, I invite you, who participate in the life and mission of the Church in the world, above all to nurture a faith capable of illuminating your vocation, so that your life may be an evangelical sign of contradiction for a world that is increasingly moving away from God and his love. A world that wants to live without God is a world without hope.

Dress, tender children, in Jesus Christ and carry the weapons of light, as the apostle Paul admonishes, and remain awake and watchful. Always remember that the joy of consecrated life necessarily goes hand in hand with participation in the cross of Christ. The same was true of Mary the Coredemptrix. On this Feast of Lightmas, I wish that the Good News in you will be lived, witnessed and proclaimed and that it will shine as the word of truth. You are the lightning rod of the Church and stand firmly at the foot of the cross with Mary, the Mother of God. Tell everyone I’m with God. I go, but I also abide and accompany the Church in her purification as far as Calvary, that she may be adorned with the same glory as the Bridegroom.

Dear friends, God leads his church, he always supports it and especially in difficult times. Never lose that vision of faith that is the only true vision of the way of the Church and the world. May there always be in the heart of each of you the joyful knowledge that the Lord is with us. He will not disappoint us. He is close to us and fills us with his love. I invoke the eternal protection of Mary, the Coredemptrix and the Apostles Peter and Paul for the whole Church, and lovingly grant to all the children of God the Apostolic blessing: Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen.

Your Holiness, says Sister Benedikt, and now your signature. He said:

“Write: ‘Benedict PP. XVI’”

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AMERICA HAS HAD ENOUGH OF THE BLINKING BLINKEN, IT IS TIME FOR HIM TO GO

John Ratcliffe says Blinken Must Resign or Face Impeachment.

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On Sunday, the former Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said that Mike Morell, former acting CIA Director, and fifty former intelligence officers claimed in a letter that Russia was linked to the Biden device knew their statement was false.

Ratcliffe said as for the Secretary of State Antony Blinken; he should resign or be impeached for his role in creating the letter, among other issues.

Morell testified to the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month that Blinken, then a Biden campaign official, was the one who reached out to him and asked him to get his associates in the intelligence community to sign a statement claiming that the emails found on the Biden laptop were Russian disinformation in the weeks before the 2020 election.

Ratcliffe claimed that 14 hours after he made those assertions on national TV, Antony Blinken, Mike Morrell, and the other fifty former intelligence officers who didn’t have access to intelligence had put out this letter. They were fully aware that the letter they would distribute was fraudulent and designed to deceive the American people. And in doing so, to frame a foreign government for an event that did not occur.

Ratcliffe explained that Blinken, as former Deputy Secretary of State, knew of Hunter Biden’s troubles. When he heard the rumors that Hunter Biden was involved in prostitution, drug dealing, gun crimes, and financial wrongdoing, he initially dismissed them as baseless. Thinking the Russian government was the dishonest party in that situation.

Biden’s campaign, Ratcliffe claims, came up with a misleading narrative after realizing how much was at stake. They knew it was untrue, yet they went ahead and did it anyhow, so Ratcliffe declared Antony Blinken should step down.

The fact that Antony Blinken, the current secretary of state, blamed a foreign government for a crime or sins he was committing, in an elaborate fraud, sticks out now when so many influential people were involved in orchestrating the laptop tale.

Ratcliffe chimed in that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a despicable person, and he believes that Putin should be prosecuted for war crimes committed in Ukraine. However, the Russian government is not to blame for any drug, gun, or financial crimes that may have been committed on the Biden family laptop.

He is also worried about Blinken’s interactions with the Russian government since Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons.

Ratcliffe claimed that the Russian government is aware of what has happened. Some current intelligence community members are the same ones who concocted the Russiagate conspiracy theory in 2016 to mislead the American public. They made up this story in 2020 to boost Biden’s popularity and damage Trump’s, and it worked. So, the question becomes, what will happen in 2024? In what way does the Biden administration plan to enforce a false narrative?

Ratcliffe added that China is a contributing factor to this worry.

According to Ratcliffe, the CCP has significantly benefited from the policies of the Biden administration. China wants Biden to return for another term in the White House because he’s been good for Chinese business.

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“A REPUBLIC IF YOU ARE SMART AND BRAVE ENOUGH TO KEEP IT”

 “A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”

Keep It, We Must.

By: Stanley Ralph

April 28, 2023

 Like last time, Trump seems to be on a scorched earth path against all comers.  Since all the candidates are more or less on the same policy path, this opens again a very destructive course.  Attack, attack, attack.  Lose, lose, lose. 

Trump, especially, is attacking the wrong guy.  Biden is the enemy, not DeSantis. 

I tire of Trump, but he is a force of nature like no other.  In battle, if you have an unstoppable force with a bad attitude or a better-than-average force with a more pleasant attitude, you must pick the unstoppable force. 

Trump vs DeSantis is destructive to both. They batter each other, draining money… for what?  A “victor” in the end, having exposed all the bad in both of them.  Who benefits?  The vicious Biden machine. 

Why do this?   Why not bury the hatchet?  They actually complement each other very well.  And look at the two potential First/Second Ladies.  What better pair to bring back the America we love and miss so dearly?  The Constitutional Normalcy, our Republic, recovered from the clutches of Marxism. 

DeSantis has been very careful not to attack Trump.  Imagine a Trump/DeSantis ticket.  Potentially, a 12-16 year run.  DeSantis is the perfect understudy.  If they announced a unity ticket early, everyone else would need to recede.  The debates just tear open wounds.  If Dems won’t debate, then why should R’s?  Trump already hinted at not going. 

Note that Pompeo took a pass.  That is the key move. 

I know, I know.  Trump again?  Sounds exhausting.  But we need more than a wrecking ball now.  We need a political nuclear option to defeat the onset of Marxism. 

Joe Biden, a bumbling and stumbling shell of a politician, who can’t even remember what country he last visited (your beloved Ireland last week, Jack!) is nothing more than a rusting hood ornament on an authoritarian bullet train.  Someone is at the controls, but clearly, it’s not Biden.  Add the growing Biden criminal grifting enterprise, and we just don’t know who is rooting for whom.  Whether Soros or China or both, our country is in grave danger.   

Time to set aside all the happy talk formalities of the Ronna McDaniel RNC fairyland and form up behind our best and brightest warriors, giving them the political weapons they will need to save America.

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IT IS A WONDER THAT ANYONE WILL VOTE AGAIN

 Dominion vs. ‘Russian Collusion’ and ‘Disinformation’

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

April 27, 2023

Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

The network just settled for an astounding $757.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host.

The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were “fixed” and misreported the vote count in some precincts of the 2020 presidential election.

In other words, Dominion walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars on the accusation that some raving guests and a few Fox journalists insinuated, falsely, that the machines had thrown the election to Joe Biden.

Yet no one argues that such post facto accusations influenced the election. The post-election dispute instead was over whether a news organization was responsible for all that its hundreds of guests and hosts say that proved later to be not substantiated, false, or defamatory.

Fox settled with Dominion reportedly to avoid messy revelations of its internal texts and to stop the hemorrhaging of its brand.

But by doing so, the network may have inadvertently set a dubious standard that any speculative opinion, voiced in public media, however nutty and later proven to be inaccurate, will be actionable.

If that is the standard, we are going to see a lot more costly lawsuits.

Compare Dominion’s writ with the twin “Russian collusion” and“Russian disinformation” hoaxes.

Lots of journalists and guests on network news, cable, public broadcasting, and internet news sites ran daily with the utter lie that the concocted Christopher Steele dossier was accurate.

Four years later, they were still claiming that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election only by enlisting the aid of the Russians—as an “asset” and puppet of Vladimir Putin.

All that was demonstrably untrue.

No one on these news shows ever produced any information validating the dossier, much less offered apologies to those whose lives they ruined, as in the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

The steady two-year drumbeat of media and DNC-fabricated untruths neutered the first two years of the Trump Administration.

Robert Mueller’s $40 million, 22-month special counsel “investigation” leaked wild and lurid rumors of Trump indictments to come, and yet ultimately found no proof of collusion.

No matter. The agendas of the Democratic Party’s collaboration with the media were fulfilled. The Trump Administration was wounded, forced on defense to reply to countless new fabrications, and smeared to the point of caricature.

The incumbent president went into the 2020 election crippled by years of media-voiced lies about collusion. Given all that, did these miscreants learn anything the second time around?

No. They redoubled their efforts. This time, the new farce was “Russian disinformation,” even as the playbook of smearing remained the same.

First, once again, the Left enlisted the media. It helped to spread the lie that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was a product of “Russian disinformation” aimed at helping Donald Trump.

Second, once more,  the FBI helped to further what the agency knew was a lie. So the agency either persuaded or paid social media companies in Silicon Valley to suppress news that pointed to an authentic Biden laptop—whose contents revealed embarrassing details about Joe Biden’s (“The Big Guy”) apparent quid pro quo profiteering with foreign nations.

Twitter was hired as a news suppressor. The FBI paid the company $3 million to suss out “disinformation.”

Joe Biden’s campaign operative, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, tapped former interim CIA Director Mike Morell on the eve of the 2020 presidential debate to round up 50 former senior intelligence officials.

The “experts” publicly promulgated the lie that the laptop “bears the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” Then, as planned, Biden in the debate used the experts’ phony consensus—dreamed up by his own campaign team—to play the victim of Trump/Russian disinformation.

He blasted Trump as a demagogue who unfairly had suggested Biden and his family were trading influence for cash.

One conservative poll suggested that the farce influenced enough voters to have changed the election. Again, no one has apologized—not the current secretary of state, not the former interim CIA Director, not the 50 experts who signed the bogus letter.

Massaging a U.S. election by conspiring to concoct a disinformation campaign must be as actionable as Dominion’s postelection claim of $757 million in damages.

Did not Twitter, the FBI, CNN, and MSNBC knowingly try to influence an election by spreading what they must have known was an absurd lie?

Almost no one after the election swallowed the notion that Dominion had rigged its voting machines. But millions before the election may have been swayed by the Biden campaign and the media-generated lie that the authentic Biden laptop was part of a Russian intelligence operation.

And that lie, unlike the Dominion charge of postelection defamation, might have changed history.

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TUCKER CARLSON’S INITIAL STATEMENT FOLLOWING THE CANCELLATION OF HIS PROGRAM ON FOX

Variety

Tucker Carlson Issues Vague Statement in Wake of His Firing by Fox News

14.3k

Zack Sharf

Wed, April 26, 2023 at 7:27 PM CDT·4 min read

Tucker Carlson has issued a statement following his exit from Fox News.

In a video posted to Twitter on Wednesday, Carlson delivered a vague speech in which he spoke about what it’s been like to “step outside the noise” and how “true things prevail.”

More from Variety

“One of the first things you realize when you step outside the noise for a few days is how many genuinely nice people there are in this country,” Carlson started. “Kind and decent people, people who really care about what’s true. And a bunch of hilarious people, also. A lot of those. It’s gotta be the majority of the population, even now. So that’s heartening.”

He continued, “The other thing you notice when you take a little time off is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are. They’re completely irrelevant. They mean nothing. In five years, we won’t even remember that we had them. Trust me, as someone who has participated. And then at the same time, and this is the amazing thing, the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.”

Though he never addressed Fox News directly, Carlson finished his statement by saying that America’s “current orthodoxies won’t last” and there “aren’t many places left” where one can find “Americans saying true things.”

“Both political parties, and their donors, have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state. That’s a depressing realization, but it’s not permanent. Our current orthodoxies won’t last. They’re brain dead. Nobody actually believes them. Hardly anyone’s life is improved by them. This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue. And so it won’t,” Carlson said. “The people in charge know this; that’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive. They’re afraid. They’ve given up persuasion, they’re resorting to force. But it won’t work. When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars, who have been trying to silence them, shrink and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some. And that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon.”

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=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%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1651376097349578753&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com%2Fentertainment%2Ftucker-carlson-issues-vague-statement-002733710.html&sessionId=c11262bd8641bb67afade5653f8581ac70e3e745&siteScreenName=Yahoo&theme=light&widgetsVersion=aaf4084522e3a%3A1674595607486&width=550px

Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023

Fox announced Carlson’s exit in an April 24 statement that read: “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.” A spokeswoman for Fox News declined to elaborate.

Carlson’s flagship Fox News series “Tucker Carlson Tonight” started airing in November 2016 and eventually made Carlson the network’s most-watched primetime host. The final episode of the show aired April 21, 2023. The host joined Fox News in 2009 as a political analyst after working at CNN in the early aughts and hosting the MSNBC series “Tucker” from 2005 to 2008.

Carlson’s abrupt exit from Fox News was announced just days after corporate parent Fox Corp. agreed to pay $787.5 million in a settlement to Dominion Voting Systems after being accused of defaming the ballot-technology company by passing along specious conspiracy theories about its role in the 2020 presidential election. Carlson was expected to have to testify in the matter and the goings-on at his show were expected to be analyzed in a separate suit Fox is navigating involving Abby Grossberg, a former producer.

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ARCHBISHOP PAGLIA AND CHURCH MILITANT “DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH”

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The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks: Three Questions on the Church Militant/Paglia commitment to Magisterial Teaching on the Sanctity of Life

The lady doth protest too much, methinks” is a line from the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. It is spoken by Queen Gertrude in response to the insincere overacting of a character in the play within a play created by Prince Hamlet to prove his uncle’s guilt in the murder of his father, the King of Denmark.

The phrase is used in everyday speech to indicate doubt of someone’s sincerity, especially regarding the truth of a strong denial. A common misquotation places methinks first, as in “methinks the lady doth protest too much” -Wikipedia[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much,_methinks#:~:text=%22The%20lady%20doth%20protest%20too,father%2C%20the%20King%20of%20Denmark.]

Three questions for Church Militant:  1) if PAL’s and Archbishop Paglia’s commitment to Magisterial teaching on the sanctity of life is so total and unqualified in the first place, why the need to issue a forceful clarification?

And secondly, how is Archbishop Paglia’s insistence that such teaching be conditioned by the demands of living in a pluralistic society consistent with such a clarification at all?

Is it “misleading” for people to question where Paglia is coming from, or misleading for Church Militant to assert that he is coming from a perspective of Catholic orthodoxy?

Methinks they all protest too much.

Note: This post was written by a Catholic Monitor reader.

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

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

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

Francis Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

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

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

Election Notes: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Devil’s Playground: By all accounts, the movie, NEFARIOUS, depicts the most realistic description in popular culture of how the devil actually operates since William Peter Blatty’s, “The Exorcist.”

charliej373Apr 25By Charlie Johnston I have not yet seen the movie, “Nefarious,” but I intend to as soon as I finally get settled at home. Our own Sheryl Collmer, managing editor of the CORAC Newsletter, wrote a marvelous review of it for Crisis Magazine. By all accounts, the movie depicts the most realistic description in popular culture of how the devil actually operates since William Peter Blatty’s, “The Exorcist.” As Collmer notes in  her review:“The young psychiatrist is played by Jordan Belfi, of Entourage and Grey’s Anatomy. His is a brilliant portrayal of breakdown, his glib unbelief shattering one splinter at a time under the sly onslaught of the demon.  The movie had tones of The Screwtape Letters (without the whimsy) as it drew the curtain back from the strategies and objectives of the dark angels. He tells us exactly how the demons win their game, and thus it becomes a warning for the audience. Like Screwtape, Nefarious plays the long game, waiting patiently as his subjects make tiny decisions wrong and, unexaminedly, go on to make bigger wrong decisions until the sins are so disastrous that the soul despairs and then belongs wholly to the demons.”Popular depictions of the satan range from treating him as non-existent, an amorphous malevolence, to a misunderstood, but charming and well-meaning misfit. Some treat him as a particularly brassy mob boss or a snarling, sneering supervillain right out of a Marvel comic book. The reality is that he is smarter, more subtle, more charming, more vicious and deadly than you or me. He has and will get no kingdom other than what he can cobble together in this world while it endures, by luring gullible fools who think themselves great demon-slayers or great allies to the fallen angel. When time ends, he will be as isolated in hell as all of its other occupants. His great, malicious obsession is the destruction of mankind – each and every one of us. He delights in making us ugly before the Lord. He would prefer to destroy people of faith, but is perfectly content to crush and mutilate those foolish enough to think themselves his allies. He uses our weaknesses against us. If you have grandiose delusions of what a great warrior you are, he delights in cowering before you to augment your pride – at least for a time. If you think he is an equal and opposite to Christ, he will delight in giving you a scream show to exploit your lack of trust in God. He does whatever is most expedient in drawing your attention away from Christ, for as soon as you turn loose of God, you are easy prey for him. His sole weakness, in human terms, is that he is so obsessively malevolent towards humans that he will exchange the pleasure of short-term torment of men for long-term loss. I don’t like to talk of him because I don’t like to think of him, but I shudder when I see people eagerly going to their doom because of some romanticized view of the satan, either as demon-slayers or allies, largely propped up by popular depictions. If you knew a hundredth of what he is capable of or his true nature, you would find the courage to flee from him rather than vainly engaging with him. Oh, and if you are one of those atheists who think you are brilliant and don’t believe in such nonsense, you are among the easiest prey of all. Rarely will he manifest to such. Why should he? They are easily influenced anyway and do his work more willingly while it is unknowingly. I am glad of this movie because I am glad any time a popular depiction gives a sliver of a glimpse of the truth about him. I thank God for the courage of actual exorcist Priests who, knowing the satan’s true nature, serve God as instruments to battle him anyway on behalf of the poor, suffering faithful. They do not come out of such battles unscarred: some are completely destroyed if they are beguiled into turning loose from Christ. As for those who eagerly seek to engage with the satan, they are as pitiable as the silly girls who lusted after Ted Bundy, seduced by his charm, thinking they could heal him without understanding his savage, remorseless nature. *********For the last month I have had the weirdest sense that the electric car market is going to collapse suddenly, unexpectedly and catastrophically. It has nothing to do with any conscious, rational analysis. Yes, they are actually coal or natural gas powered; they require rare earth minerals mined through child slave labor; and they add pressure on an already over-taxed power grid. They are less efficient and adaptable than traditional fossil fuel powered cars. I have tried to zero in on why this sense is so powerful in me. I think it comes down to the reality that God is not mocked. In working to draw us back to Him, a powerful tool in God’s arsenal is to reveal to us how empty and vacuous our certainties and experts are. He is our ONLY source of security and He is progressively revealing the hollow core of our preening experts. If you own stock in any electric car companies, my gut says you should diversify soon. Or not. The world economic system is on its last legs anyway. *********I pulled up a post from the old Next Right Step site that seemed appropriate to today’s discussion. Titled, “I Killed Christ – And so did You,” it was originally published on Oct. 16, 2016:I confess to Almighty God,And to you, my brothers and sisters,That I have greatly sinned,In my thoughts and in my words,In what I have done,And in what I have failed to do…(Public Penitential Act)I am often publicly impatient with Catholics who promote the idea that angels will lead all the faithful to refuges, safe havens to weather the full fury of the Storm. While that may be figuratively true, it is not literally true. It is just a Catholic version of the Protestant doctrine of the Rapture that has sprung up over the last 200 years. (The idea of Rapture was first proposed by John Darby of the Brethren Movement in 1830). Both ideas posit that God is going to mystically take the good folks to a place of complete safety while all the rest on earth suffer through a terrible chastisement. Everybody who posits such things assumes that they are included in the cohort of good little boys and girls who are going to be taken to safety – and sometimes are at pains to hide an unseemly glee at the idea of all the rest of those poor slobs out there getting smacked down.I am also unsettled when people speak of being part of “The Remnant,” once again all the good little boys and girls who have kept faith – and again with the unwarranted triumphal assumption that the speaker IS part of that anointed tribe, not like those dirty, unwashed heathens who so abound out there.This troubles me for two major reasons. First, many otherwise decent people are liable to go into despair that they are not among the chosen when no angel comes to lead them to safety or that they are left behind with the rest of us when the final crash comes. Second, few who hold to such things are likely to consider that they have misread God’s call to action in troubled times for a promise of immunity – when it does not happen as they expect. We are each called to be refuge to our neighbors and to leave the old worldliness behind, so that we can act as God’s hands and feet during crisis.Second, it presumes some facts that are very much not in evidence to quietly support a smug complacency. We are taught, Magisterially, that we cannot know with certainty that we are in a state of grace. How then can we be so certain that we are the elect, the remnant? Is it just because we have not violated the laws? If so, we are unprofitable servants, indeed. As Christians, we are called to go forth, not just to sit tight. I doubt that many people here have actively participated in the ongoing assault on faith and culture that is rapidly reaching its climax. But as the Penitential Act I quoted above so pointedly says, we are not just responsible for sin in what we have done, but in what we have failed to do. Could we really have reached this pass had there not been a massive failure in what we, as Christians, are called to?A few examples of what we have failed to do…Several decades ago, a black mayor of a majority black city in my area had a breakfast meeting with me. To my astonishment, he told me he was considering switching to the Republican Party. I told him we would be glad to have him – except that he would never get elected in his city again – so what had brought this on? He told me he was sick of Democrats treating him and his city as if they were all thugs and bums. He said the only legislation they would help with is things decriminalizing drugs, easing off on the punishment of crime, and expanding welfare: that that was all they thought “black legislation” consisted of. He added that when he wanted something to help the law-abiding majority in his town to strengthen their families, to help them with work or with real infrastructure improvements, he always had to go to the Republicans anyway. We talked for a while. He was deeply offended – and more than a bit bitter at the casual unconscious slur he consistently got from Democratic legislators. I told him we would continue to be his allies, but he and I both knew if he made the switch it would end his career. I suggested he stay where he was, we would continue to lead on the serious legislation his city needed – and ask that if we had a close one where he could quietly help, he do so. That worked for us all. But I never forgot that conversation – and I never forgot the vehemence with which he spat the line, “We are not all thugs and bums and I am sick of the Democrats treating us as if we are.”The anti-God progressive left has succeeded where the Ku Klux Klan failed. It has atomized the black family, particularly in inner cities. In many of our cities there are hellholes of dysfunction and despair – and almost every city where this exists, the government has been led by anti-God progressives for at least two generations. While the dysfunction plays out on largely racial lines in America, that is not the root cause. In England, you have the same type of hellholes, mainly populated with impoverished whites. The result is the same. When you treat people like helpless animals, completely dependent on your largesse, many start to behave in animalistic faction. Both our government – and too many elements in our Churches – treat the poor with paternalistic disdain and preening self-regard. It is a form of animal husbandry, not brotherhood. The anti-God progressives have created a permanently dependent underclass in order to harvest their votes and use them as enforcers in mob actions to enhance the power of the progressives. This is racist to its core. The Black Lives Matter movement has led to increasing murder rates – and most of the newly murdered are black, killed by other blacks. Most of the businesses and homes destroyed in rioting are owned by blacks. So why does the progressive left not care about that? For the same reason they don’t care about the huge rate of black-on-black crime: because it is just black folks being killed and does not advance the narrative they prefer to seize more power. It is hideously racist. Yet we Christians and conservatives are busy defending ourselves against the charge of racism from the most successfully racist enterprise in American history: the progressive left – instead of holding them to account for their bigotry.So where were we when the progressives were making pockets of inner cities into hellholes? Most of us considered it not our affair. The progressives, in true Animal Farmfashion, replaced the old white exploiters with new, black exploiters. Then they screamed, “Racist,” if anyone seriously tried to stop exploitation. What did most of us do? Figured it was none of our business and retreated to the safety of ignoring it rather than submit ourselves to the calumny and vitriol we would be hit with if we tried to defend our brothers. Where were we when the progressives made many city school districts into support systems for progressive activists, students be damned? Just in the last week, the NAACP, which once advocated for black people, issued a call for restricting Charter Schools, which have been one of the few ways out of the ghetto for many minorities. In Chicago, the City averted a teachers strike by cutting back on Charter Schools. Both hideously racist propositions, designed to enhance the stranglehold of progressive activists at the expense of children’s needs and best interests. We sat by and let neighborhoods and schools be destroyed in the name of empowering progressive activists – and did it so people wouldn’t talk ugly about us. And we think we are the faithful remnant? We are moral cowards and sinners, glad to opine against the dead carcass of institutional racism that largely expired by the 80’s, but unwilling to challenge the new, more virulent racism visited by the progressive left.Let’s go back to first things. Man is made in God’s own image – all of us. As such, we hold a share in His divine dignity. If this is true (and the Bible says it is) we participate in a subordinate way in His fundamental nature. His fundamental nature is, through the procession of love between the Three Person of the Trinity, to create. He is the Creator. And since we are made in His image, we share most fully in His dignity when we love and act as subordinate creators. But that is what modern “philanthropists” will not hear of. They reserve to themselves the dignity of dispensing largesse and acting as creators, treating those they “help” as children of lesser gods, who must never be given the dignity or joy of creating anything by the work of their own hands. Though it plays out on largely racial lines because of the ghettoes of despair we allowed to be created, it is the classic master-subject relationship that has always been at the heart of tyrannical aspirations.I love St. John Paul’s frequent discussion of the concept of solidarity. It is the foundation of my belief in the concept of the Family of God. We are not to treat each other as greater and lesser, but as fellow workers in the Lord’s vineyard, as brothers and sisters. We are not called to simply dispense largesse to the poor and congratulate ourselves on our nobility. We are to accompany our brothers so that all may find the joy and dignity of acting as creators. We are not merely called to be philanthropists, but to help all to become philanthropists. What kind of brother would you be if you let your brother’s neighborhood be destroyed by dysfunction without fighting for him? What kind of brother would you be if you allowed activists to take over your family’s schools for their benefit instead of the children’s? Yet that is what we have done. We deride affirmative action – and usually rightly so – but what did we do to see that our brothers were not robbed of their right to an education? Not robbed of their right to real opportunity based on building their character through family and faith? We did not want any trouble. Now we have reaped a bitter harvest because of what we failed to do. And we dare to think God should take us to a place of safety while everyone else gets it? We should be crying mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa instead of patting ourselves on the back for our fidelity.Then there is the matter of abortion. Over 60 million killed in America since 1973. Thanks be to God, many have worked to stop it – and people of several faiths have come to respect each other’s faith for their mutual efforts. But we have certainly been ineffective against this ongoing holocaust. Thankfully, many clerics have found a newfound boldness in speaking and acting out against the Culture of Death St. John Paul spoke of. But how many times, particularly in the 70’s and 80’s, but even today, have you heard clerics say that poverty or unemployment is equally as bad as abortion? None of those clerics have solved poverty or unemployment with their pious pronouncements – and have often enabled those who made it worse – but they have given effective cover to the aggressors in this Culture of Death. And because of their assistance, we are now dealing with active euthanasia and the destruction of the health care system. How often have we, Catholics and Evangelicals, justified our vote for someone who was fundamentally an aggressor in the Culture of Death on the basis that some ancillary issue was equally important?When I was a teenager, there was an old man, Mr. Valentin, who lived in a house in back of us. He was a wonderful old man, full of lively stories and always with some cookies or cake to offer. I liked to visit with him. He was a German expatriate who had come to America after the war. Once we were talking about the war and what it was like to live in Germany then. He said, in passing, that he did not agree with how Hitler treated the Jews, but that he had been very good for the German economy – and that he thought Hitler was largely given a bad rap. I was stunned and horrified. I was polite, but I never visited him again, though I was pleasant when I saw him in passing. It has always been a part of my pondering how otherwise decent people can tolerate great evil when it is the norm in their cultural milieu. It troubles me a lot that, since then, I have seen us become a nation full of Mr. Valentins.Then there are the Churches. I hate the sterile, bloodless bureaucratic model that our whole culture has adopted in just about everything. I particularly loathe it in our Churches. Once, in private conversation with a Bishop, he surprised me when he mournfully said that when a Priest dies, he is quickly forgotten. I asked why he thought that. He said they have no families – and a Priest’s  flock just moves on to the next to fill their needs. It struck a deep chord in me.I met a former Anglican Priest in Billings, Montana. A common theme I have is how poorly we treat Priests, and how terribly isolating it must be for them. We treat Priests like any other service person, consulting them when a problem arises, lining up to receive the Sacraments from them, but almost never acknowledging their humanity or treating them with the easy affection we would a friend or family member. This Priest has five children at home – and agreed it was a terrible problem. He said his family regularly has picnics and family events to which he invites Priests in the area, so they can participate in an active family life, to share in affection and joy as well as benediction – and it helps a lot.We should always treat our Priests and Pastors with the respect due to them as spiritual fathers. But we should also treat them with the affection and intimacy we would a beloved Uncle. Yet most of us treat them like an appliance repairman: fix my problem and move on. And we think we are the faithful remnant?Yet many Priests and Pastors have bought into the bureaucratic model, as well. Too often they see parishioners as cogs in the Sacramental assembly line. I see Dioceses where they talk of being open to life, but the tuition for a high school student at a Catholic School is $12,000. How is a normal family that is open to life supposed to cope with that? Are our deeds matching our words? When they don’t, our actions give the lie to our pious words.We are called to be the Family of God. We have failed miserably. We are not the faithful remnant. If God was going to take the good little boys and girls to safety during this Storm, I don’t know anyone who would qualify. Oh, I don’t mix with many people who have actively assaulted our culture…but I don’t know many who have effectively defended it or acted as if they really mean to treat all their brothers and sisters as the Family of God.The good news is that, while there is no blameless faithful remnant, God is giving us the chance to audition for the role in this Storm. You be the refuge. You do it by being a participant in the Rescue that has already begun, unseen by the world. You do it by recognizing all the things you have failed to do – then set your jaw like flint and resolve to acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to those around you. There will be no passive spectators taken to safety because of how good they have been, only active participants who choose to become a place of safety to all they encounter.If you do this, if you acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to those around you, you will become a participant in the Rescue and truly earn a place among the faithful remnant. If we all do this, the Son of Man will find faith on earth when He comes again. But we should be thankful it is not now, for the best of us are not nearly as good as we think we are.Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

The Devil’s Playground

charliej373Apr 25By Charlie JohnstonI have not yet seen the movie, “Nefarious,” but I intend to as soon as I finally get settled at home. Our own Sheryl Collmer, managing editor of the CORAC Newsletter, wrote a marvelous review of it for Crisis Magazine. By all accounts, the movie depicts the most realistic description in popular culture of how the devil actually operates since William Peter Blatty’s, “The Exorcist.” As Collmer notes in  her review:“The young psychiatrist is played by Jordan Belfi, of Entourage and Grey’s Anatomy. His is a brilliant portrayal of breakdown, his glib unbelief shattering one splinter at a time under the sly onslaught of the demon.  The movie had tones of The Screwtape Letters (without the whimsy) as it drew the curtain back from the strategies and objectives of the dark angels. He tells us exactly how the demons win their game, and thus it becomes a warning for the audience. Like Screwtape, Nefarious plays the long game, waiting patiently as his subjects make tiny decisions wrong and, unexaminedly, go on to make bigger wrong decisions until the sins are so disastrous that the soul despairs and then belongs wholly to the demons.”Popular depictions of the satan range from treating him as non-existent, an amorphous malevolence, to a misunderstood, but charming and well-meaning misfit. Some treat him as a particularly brassy mob boss or a snarling, sneering supervillain right out of a Marvel comic book. The reality is that he is smarter, more subtle, more charming, more vicious and deadly than you or me. He has and will get no kingdom other than what he can cobble together in this world while it endures, by luring gullible fools who think themselves great demon-slayers or great allies to the fallen angel. When time ends, he will be as isolated in hell as all of its other occupants. His great, malicious obsession is the destruction of mankind – each and every one of us. He delights in making us ugly before the Lord. He would prefer to destroy people of faith, but is perfectly content to crush and mutilate those foolish enough to think themselves his allies. He uses our weaknesses against us. If you have grandiose delusions of what a great warrior you are, he delights in cowering before you to augment your pride – at least for a time. If you think he is an equal and opposite to Christ, he will delight in giving you a scream show to exploit your lack of trust in God. He does whatever is most expedient in drawing your attention away from Christ, for as soon as you turn loose of God, you are easy prey for him. His sole weakness, in human terms, is that he is so obsessively malevolent towards humans that he will exchange the pleasure of short-term torment of men for long-term loss. I don’t like to talk of him because I don’t like to think of him, but I shudder when I see people eagerly going to their doom because of some romanticized view of the satan, either as demon-slayers or allies, largely propped up by popular depictions. If you knew a hundredth of what he is capable of or his true nature, you would find the courage to flee from him rather than vainly engaging with him. Oh, and if you are one of those atheists who think you are brilliant and don’t believe in such nonsense, you are among the easiest prey of all. Rarely will he manifest to such. Why should he? They are easily influenced anyway and do his work more willingly while it is unknowingly. I am glad of this movie because I am glad any time a popular depiction gives a sliver of a glimpse of the truth about him. I thank God for the courage of actual exorcist Priests who, knowing the satan’s true nature, serve God as instruments to battle him anyway on behalf of the poor, suffering faithful. They do not come out of such battles unscarred: some are completely destroyed if they are beguiled into turning loose from Christ. As for those who eagerly seek to engage with the satan, they are as pitiable as the silly girls who lusted after Ted Bundy, seduced by his charm, thinking they could heal him without understanding his savage, remorseless nature. *********For the last month I have had the weirdest sense that the electric car market is going to collapse suddenly, unexpectedly and catastrophically. It has nothing to do with any conscious, rational analysis. Yes, they are actually coal or natural gas powered; they require rare earth minerals mined through child slave labor; and they add pressure on an already over-taxed power grid. They are less efficient and adaptable than traditional fossil fuel powered cars. I have tried to zero in on why this sense is so powerful in me. I think it comes down to the reality that God is not mocked. In working to draw us back to Him, a powerful tool in God’s arsenal is to reveal to us how empty and vacuous our certainties and experts are. He is our ONLY source of security and He is progressively revealing the hollow core of our preening experts. If you own stock in any electric car companies, my gut says you should diversify soon. Or not. The world economic system is on its last legs anyway. *********I pulled up a post from the old Next Right Step site that seemed appropriate to today’s discussion. Titled, “I Killed Christ – And so did You,” it was originally published on Oct. 16, 2016:I confess to Almighty God,And to you, my brothers and sisters,That I have greatly sinned,In my thoughts and in my words,In what I have done,And in what I have failed to do…(Public Penitential Act)I am often publicly impatient with Catholics who promote the idea that angels will lead all the faithful to refuges, safe havens to weather the full fury of the Storm. While that may be figuratively true, it is not literally true. It is just a Catholic version of the Protestant doctrine of the Rapture that has sprung up over the last 200 years. (The idea of Rapture was first proposed by John Darby of the Brethren Movement in 1830). Both ideas posit that God is going to mystically take the good folks to a place of complete safety while all the rest on earth suffer through a terrible chastisement. Everybody who posits such things assumes that they are included in the cohort of good little boys and girls who are going to be taken to safety – and sometimes are at pains to hide an unseemly glee at the idea of all the rest of those poor slobs out there getting smacked down.I am also unsettled when people speak of being part of “The Remnant,” once again all the good little boys and girls who have kept faith – and again with the unwarranted triumphal assumption that the speaker IS part of that anointed tribe, not like those dirty, unwashed heathens who so abound out there.This troubles me for two major reasons. First, many otherwise decent people are liable to go into despair that they are not among the chosen when no angel comes to lead them to safety or that they are left behind with the rest of us when the final crash comes. Second, few who hold to such things are likely to consider that they have misread God’s call to action in troubled times for a promise of immunity – when it does not happen as they expect. We are each called to be refuge to our neighbors and to leave the old worldliness behind, so that we can act as God’s hands and feet during crisis.Second, it presumes some facts that are very much not in evidence to quietly support a smug complacency. We are taught, Magisterially, that we cannot know with certainty that we are in a state of grace. How then can we be so certain that we are the elect, the remnant? Is it just because we have not violated the laws? If so, we are unprofitable servants, indeed. As Christians, we are called to go forth, not just to sit tight. I doubt that many people here have actively participated in the ongoing assault on faith and culture that is rapidly reaching its climax. But as the Penitential Act I quoted above so pointedly says, we are not just responsible for sin in what we have done, but in what we have failed to do. Could we really have reached this pass had there not been a massive failure in what we, as Christians, are called to?A few examples of what we have failed to do…Several decades ago, a black mayor of a majority black city in my area had a breakfast meeting with me. To my astonishment, he told me he was considering switching to the Republican Party. I told him we would be glad to have him – except that he would never get elected in his city again – so what had brought this on? He told me he was sick of Democrats treating him and his city as if they were all thugs and bums. He said the only legislation they would help with is things decriminalizing drugs, easing off on the punishment of crime, and expanding welfare: that that was all they thought “black legislation” consisted of. He added that when he wanted something to help the law-abiding majority in his town to strengthen their families, to help them with work or with real infrastructure improvements, he always had to go to the Republicans anyway. We talked for a while. He was deeply offended – and more than a bit bitter at the casual unconscious slur he consistently got from Democratic legislators. I told him we would continue to be his allies, but he and I both knew if he made the switch it would end his career. I suggested he stay where he was, we would continue to lead on the serious legislation his city needed – and ask that if we had a close one where he could quietly help, he do so. That worked for us all. But I never forgot that conversation – and I never forgot the vehemence with which he spat the line, “We are not all thugs and bums and I am sick of the Democrats treating us as if we are.”The anti-God progressive left has succeeded where the Ku Klux Klan failed. It has atomized the black family, particularly in inner cities. In many of our cities there are hellholes of dysfunction and despair – and almost every city where this exists, the government has been led by anti-God progressives for at least two generations. While the dysfunction plays out on largely racial lines in America, that is not the root cause. In England, you have the same type of hellholes, mainly populated with impoverished whites. The result is the same. When you treat people like helpless animals, completely dependent on your largesse, many start to behave in animalistic faction. Both our government – and too many elements in our Churches – treat the poor with paternalistic disdain and preening self-regard. It is a form of animal husbandry, not brotherhood. The anti-God progressives have created a permanently dependent underclass in order to harvest their votes and use them as enforcers in mob actions to enhance the power of the progressives. This is racist to its core. The Black Lives Matter movement has led to increasing murder rates – and most of the newly murdered are black, killed by other blacks. Most of the businesses and homes destroyed in rioting are owned by blacks. So why does the progressive left not care about that? For the same reason they don’t care about the huge rate of black-on-black crime: because it is just black folks being killed and does not advance the narrative they prefer to seize more power. It is hideously racist. Yet we Christians and conservatives are busy defending ourselves against the charge of racism from the most successfully racist enterprise in American history: the progressive left – instead of holding them to account for their bigotry.So where were we when the progressives were making pockets of inner cities into hellholes? Most of us considered it not our affair. The progressives, in true Animal Farmfashion, replaced the old white exploiters with new, black exploiters. Then they screamed, “Racist,” if anyone seriously tried to stop exploitation. What did most of us do? Figured it was none of our business and retreated to the safety of ignoring it rather than submit ourselves to the calumny and vitriol we would be hit with if we tried to defend our brothers. Where were we when the progressives made many city school districts into support systems for progressive activists, students be damned? Just in the last week, the NAACP, which once advocated for black people, issued a call for restricting Charter Schools, which have been one of the few ways out of the ghetto for many minorities. In Chicago, the City averted a teachers strike by cutting back on Charter Schools. Both hideously racist propositions, designed to enhance the stranglehold of progressive activists at the expense of children’s needs and best interests. We sat by and let neighborhoods and schools be destroyed in the name of empowering progressive activists – and did it so people wouldn’t talk ugly about us. And we think we are the faithful remnant? We are moral cowards and sinners, glad to opine against the dead carcass of institutional racism that largely expired by the 80’s, but unwilling to challenge the new, more virulent racism visited by the progressive left.Let’s go back to first things. Man is made in God’s own image – all of us. As such, we hold a share in His divine dignity. If this is true (and the Bible says it is) we participate in a subordinate way in His fundamental nature. His fundamental nature is, through the procession of love between the Three Person of the Trinity, to create. He is the Creator. And since we are made in His image, we share most fully in His dignity when we love and act as subordinate creators. But that is what modern “philanthropists” will not hear of. They reserve to themselves the dignity of dispensing largesse and acting as creators, treating those they “help” as children of lesser gods, who must never be given the dignity or joy of creating anything by the work of their own hands. Though it plays out on largely racial lines because of the ghettoes of despair we allowed to be created, it is the classic master-subject relationship that has always been at the heart of tyrannical aspirations.I love St. John Paul’s frequent discussion of the concept of solidarity. It is the foundation of my belief in the concept of the Family of God. We are not to treat each other as greater and lesser, but as fellow workers in the Lord’s vineyard, as brothers and sisters. We are not called to simply dispense largesse to the poor and congratulate ourselves on our nobility. We are to accompany our brothers so that all may find the joy and dignity of acting as creators. We are not merely called to be philanthropists, but to help all to become philanthropists. What kind of brother would you be if you let your brother’s neighborhood be destroyed by dysfunction without fighting for him? What kind of brother would you be if you allowed activists to take over your family’s schools for their benefit instead of the children’s? Yet that is what we have done. We deride affirmative action – and usually rightly so – but what did we do to see that our brothers were not robbed of their right to an education? Not robbed of their right to real opportunity based on building their character through family and faith? We did not want any trouble. Now we have reaped a bitter harvest because of what we failed to do. And we dare to think God should take us to a place of safety while everyone else gets it? We should be crying mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa instead of patting ourselves on the back for our fidelity.Then there is the matter of abortion. Over 60 million killed in America since 1973. Thanks be to God, many have worked to stop it – and people of several faiths have come to respect each other’s faith for their mutual efforts. But we have certainly been ineffective against this ongoing holocaust. Thankfully, many clerics have found a newfound boldness in speaking and acting out against the Culture of Death St. John Paul spoke of. But how many times, particularly in the 70’s and 80’s, but even today, have you heard clerics say that poverty or unemployment is equally as bad as abortion? None of those clerics have solved poverty or unemployment with their pious pronouncements – and have often enabled those who made it worse – but they have given effective cover to the aggressors in this Culture of Death. And because of their assistance, we are now dealing with active euthanasia and the destruction of the health care system. How often have we, Catholics and Evangelicals, justified our vote for someone who was fundamentally an aggressor in the Culture of Death on the basis that some ancillary issue was equally important?When I was a teenager, there was an old man, Mr. Valentin, who lived in a house in back of us. He was a wonderful old man, full of lively stories and always with some cookies or cake to offer. I liked to visit with him. He was a German expatriate who had come to America after the war. Once we were talking about the war and what it was like to live in Germany then. He said, in passing, that he did not agree with how Hitler treated the Jews, but that he had been very good for the German economy – and that he thought Hitler was largely given a bad rap. I was stunned and horrified. I was polite, but I never visited him again, though I was pleasant when I saw him in passing. It has always been a part of my pondering how otherwise decent people can tolerate great evil when it is the norm in their cultural milieu. It troubles me a lot that, since then, I have seen us become a nation full of Mr. Valentins.Then there are the Churches. I hate the sterile, bloodless bureaucratic model that our whole culture has adopted in just about everything. I particularly loathe it in our Churches. Once, in private conversation with a Bishop, he surprised me when he mournfully said that when a Priest dies, he is quickly forgotten. I asked why he thought that. He said they have no families – and a Priest’s  flock just moves on to the next to fill their needs. It struck a deep chord in me.I met a former Anglican Priest in Billings, Montana. A common theme I have is how poorly we treat Priests, and how terribly isolating it must be for them. We treat Priests like any other service person, consulting them when a problem arises, lining up to receive the Sacraments from them, but almost never acknowledging their humanity or treating them with the easy affection we would a friend or family member. This Priest has five children at home – and agreed it was a terrible problem. He said his family regularly has picnics and family events to which he invites Priests in the area, so they can participate in an active family life, to share in affection and joy as well as benediction – and it helps a lot.We should always treat our Priests and Pastors with the respect due to them as spiritual fathers. But we should also treat them with the affection and intimacy we would a beloved Uncle. Yet most of us treat them like an appliance repairman: fix my problem and move on. And we think we are the faithful remnant?Yet many Priests and Pastors have bought into the bureaucratic model, as well. Too often they see parishioners as cogs in the Sacramental assembly line. I see Dioceses where they talk of being open to life, but the tuition for a high school student at a Catholic School is $12,000. How is a normal family that is open to life supposed to cope with that? Are our deeds matching our words? When they don’t, our actions give the lie to our pious words.We are called to be the Family of God. We have failed miserably. We are not the faithful remnant. If God was going to take the good little boys and girls to safety during this Storm, I don’t know anyone who would qualify. Oh, I don’t mix with many people who have actively assaulted our culture…but I don’t know many who have effectively defended it or acted as if they really mean to treat all their brothers and sisters as the Family of God.The good news is that, while there is no blameless faithful remnant, God is giving us the chance to audition for the role in this Storm. You be the refuge. You do it by being a participant in the Rescue that has already begun, unseen by the world. You do it by recognizing all the things you have failed to do – then set your jaw like flint and resolve to acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to those around you. There will be no passive spectators taken to safety because of how good they have been, only active participants who choose to become a place of safety to all they encounter.If you do this, if you acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to those around you, you will become a participant in the Rescue and truly earn a place among the faithful remnant. If we all do this, the Son of Man will find faith on earth when He comes again. But we should be thankful it is not now, for the best of us are not nearly as good as we think we are.Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Devil’s Playground: By all accounts, the movie, NEFARIOUS, depicts the most realistic description in popular culture of how the devil actually operates since William Peter Blatty’s, “The Exorcist.”

JOHN SENIOR WAS MY KIND OF MAN! AS A PRE-TEENAGER HE TOOK HIS PIGGY BANK, RAN AWAY FROM HOME ON LONG ISLAND, BOUGHT A BUS TICKET TO NORTH DAKOTA AND JOINED SIGNED ON AT A NORTH DAKOTA RANCH AS A RANCH HAND BECAUSE HE WANTED TO A COWBOY

John Senior: Prophet of Tradition and Realism

 Julian Kwasniewksi April 25, 2023 0 Comments

Once I had embarked safe and sound on the ship of the Church, I was dismayed to see it headed straight towards the shipwreck that I had just escaped. A worldly Church and a world without the Church on the edge of the abyss.

Thus wrote the author and philosopher John Senior shortly before his death in 1999. Although his work continues to inspire small pockets of Catholics today, Senior is a prophetic figure who deserves to be far more widely known, both for his philosophy of liberal education and for his principled traditionalism.

Early Life

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Born in Connecticut in 1923, John Senior grew up in a cultured and multi-talented East-coast family, but with little organized religion. He was deeply interested in literature, poetry, and music but was not an overly bookish boy—he loved swimming, bicycling, and anything related to cowboys. During the depression of the 1930s, the Senior family fell on hard times; the financial strain, as well as dismay at seeing the encroaching urbanization of Long Island (where his family was living at the time) inspired thirteen-year-old John Senior to run away from home and head west, in search of his beloved cowboys. Boarding a Greyhound bus, John’s money took him as far as the Dakotas, where he found manual work with a Norwegian immigrant named Tinzer. Tinzer eventually informed John’s parents of his whereabouts, but the upshot of the escapade was that the Seniors consented to John’s “going west” every summer thereafter to work. Senior eventually did find work with real cowboys, which included everything from drinking coffee round the campfire to going on multi-week cattle drives.

Academically, Senior was successful in high school. World War II interrupted his college education, but following honorable discharge from the military (he was never deployed), Senior enrolled at Columbia University, where he would eventually earn his doctorate. He focused on literature and philosophy, and came under the influential mentorship of the great liberal arts promoter Mark Van Doren, who also profoundly affected the course of Thomas Merton’s intellectual life. In 1945, Senior married Priscilla Woods, whom he had met during his first years of college before joining the army. Their union would be blessed with three children.

From Positivism to Common Sense

In an interview published in the French newspaper La Nef towards the close of his life—“The Final Interview”, as it is titled in The Remnants, a posthumously published collection of Senior’s writings—Senior succinctly explained many of the key elements in his life and thought. He described his intellectual journey as one from “Positivism and Agnosticism” to the Catholic Church. Dabbling in Eastern philosophy, Marx, and Freud, Senior’s encounter with such thinkers as Plato and Thomas Aquinas convinced him of the existence of truth and common sense, and confronted him with traditional Western Christianity. This would eventually lead him and his wife, along with their children, into the Church in 1960.

The whole complexus of Western religion, culture, and thought with which his study of Christianity brought him into contact had a profound influence on his pedagogical goals as a professor at the English department of Cornell University, which he joined in 1955. “As a young professor and convert in the 1950s, I realized that the scholastic philosophical system, so effective in refuting the rational skepticism of my generation, had had no impact on students whose minds were disconnected from tangible and emotional realities.” At Cornell, Senior found himself “in one of the top ten American universities, led by an intellectual elite that had been perverted by Existentialism and Phenomenology.” Thus Senior took up a position at the University of Kansas, “fleeing,” as he put it, “to the American West, where people’s minds were not as corrupted.” There, with two colleagues, Dennis Quinn and Frank Nellick, he founded the innovatively traditional program which has since become inseparably linked to Senior’s name: the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP).

Humanities and Christian Culture

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Seeing that modern students were out of touch with reality due to the technological and philosophically nonsensical age in which they lived, Senior tried to teach the “perennial philosophy” of the fact that “reality is real” by indirect means—“forcing myself to rectify our student’s imaginations by teaching the poetry of Homer and Virgil, Saint Augustine’s Confessions,” and other great works of the Western tradition. He believed that materialism along with subjectivism had divorced modern man so far from the reality of creation that the arguments of thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas were initially ineffective in communicating truth since they were based on a completely different conception of reality and truth. The only way to make such authors accessible was to reconnect men with reality through experiential or “poetic” knowledge rather than purely intellectual knowledge. Texts like Homer’s Iliad or Shakespeare’s dramas, which were not so much discursive and logical as poetic and emotive, along with activities like dancing, classical and folk music, star-gazing, and calligraphy had the potential to refresh and reform the students’ imaginations by putting them in touch with the real. Consequently, Senior and his colleagues Quinn and Nellick incorporated such “poetic” activities as part of their humanities program. This fundamental and important concept of “the real” was central to Senior’s low-tech educational method.

Senior developed and expounded this diagnostic of modern “anti-realism” along with a presentation of the remedies found in traditional humanities in two famous books, The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture. “There is something destructive—destructive of the human itself—in cutting us off from the earth from whence we came and the stars, the angels, and God himself to whom we go,” Senior wrote in The Restoration. In the attempt to help students regain touch with the really real, Senior found that the experience of wonder was fundamental. For Senior, the mind had to be born in wonder if it was to be brought to wisdom, and this was only possible through experiencing God’s creation “raw.”

Poor little rich suburban children who have all these delights [of modern conveniences], and living in constant fluorescent glare, have never seen the stars, which St Thomas, following Aristotle and all the ancients, says are the first begetters of that primary experience of reality formulated as the first of all principles in metaphysics: that something is.

Senior saw the pre-Socratic Heraclitus as the fore-father of the fundamental “modernist” error: that since everything is in flux “there is no such thing as river, no such thing as a thing” (from “The Last Epistle,” in The Remnants collection.)

“Not only did IHP boys get their hair cut [this was the 70s after all] and girls start wearing skirts, but the students were also turning to Christ,” Fr. Bethel writes in his excellent biography John Senior and the Restoration of Realism. The success of Senior’s educational model was quickly verified by numerous converts to Catholicism among his students, even though he did not actively proselytize. This, and along with it the fact that his students started becoming proponents of objective truth, brought the ire of the University of Kansas down upon the IHP. The University squashed the program in the mid-seventies. Senior continued teaching his humanities courses until he retired from KU in 1984.

His Spirituality

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Senior had a great love of the Benedictine monastic tradition: a number of his students in the IHP later entered monasteries. The IHP students used to visit Fontgombault Abbey in France, for example, in order to enter into the round of chanted prayer, the axis around which Europe had turned for so many centuries. “Everything that I have learned in literature and philosophy can be summed up by ora et labora. Reading the Rule during a retreat in a Benedictine house (before the Council and its disasters) was a decisive element in my conversion,” Senior wrote. Some of his students had a fundamental role in the foundation of Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma: the current superior of that monastery, Abbot Anderson, was a student of Senior’s, as was Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, and Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City.

The Vatican II Controversy

Senior was keenly aware of the crisis in the Church following Vatican II and was highly critical of the direction the Church had taken in its “updating.” A lover of the Church’s literary and artistic traditions as well as of her rigorous theology and intellectual tradition, the widespread apostasy from beauty and truth in the post-conciliar Church grieved Senior deeply. Given his path to the Faith and his intellectual assessment of modernity, it is therefore unsurprising that he was a staunch supporter of the traditional Latin Mass and found refuge with the Society of St. Pius X for many years. He is buried in St Mary’s, Kansas.

The status of the SSPX, especially after the episcopal consecrations in 1988, weighed on Senior heavily. His view of their position changed over the years, gradually becoming more favorable towards them. His essay “The Glass Confessional” in The Remnants is a poignant exposé of the soul-searching he undertook in trying to follow the path that seemed most faithful and obedient.

Speaking in his “Final Interview” of the liturgical crisis of the Church, and the motu proprio Ecclesia Dei of John Paul II in particular, Senior stated in piercing and profound words that there is no “new Mass,” only “a multitude of deviations” from the Mass:

It is true that in a pragmatic and imperfect world, we must be aware that we can still remain devoted to prayer—the only thing necessary (unum necessarium)—of which the primary act is the Mass. The negative aspect of Ecclesia Dei is that it insinuates that permission is needed to exercise a right. What is called the “Tridentine Mass” is simply what Christ instituted on the Cross. One cannot “prefer” the old Mass to the new one, because there is no “new” Mass, but a multitude of deviations, some of which border on blasphemy.

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In the intuition that there is no need for permission to “exercise a right” to pray the Mass of the Ages, we hear an early echo of arguments in defense of the Latin Mass that would later find a more theologically complete articulation on the lips of Joseph Ratzinger and would return again in a worldwide chorus upon the release of the motu proprioTraditionis Custodes in 2021.

Senior seems to combine a unique blend of pessimism and hope, especially in regard to the Church. In the “Final Interview,” he told La Nef: “The crisis is over; we have lost. This is no longer just a prediction, it is a simple observation: Rome has been desecrated. We are in the age of darkness. Triumphalist reactions are in vain.” But Senior did not despair: “The fear of the Lord is not despair,” he continued. “Quite the contrary. Insofar as it is in the first degree of humility [in the Rule of Saint Benedict], it is also our second reason to hope… after Our Lady, Mother of Good Hope.” In one sense, this dark outlook has been somewhat disproved by the exponential development of the traditionalist movement in the years after Senior’s death. At the same time, the current pontificate and its renewed clampdown has more than confirmed it.

Although I have only been able to briefly touch on Senior’s insights in this article, his thought deserves consideration by all serious Catholics, especially as his predictions and insights prove to be ever more true and urgent as the world and the Church continue to suffer from the cancer of modernism. In the coming months I will be drawing on Senior and his followers to investigate various subjects in greater detail. As a prophet both of Tradition and realism, Senior, in his own way, ought to have a place alongside the first generation of traditionalist heroes such as Malachi Martin, Michael Davies, and Fr. Bryan Houghton.

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Julian Kwasniewksi
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on JOHN SENIOR WAS MY KIND OF MAN! AS A PRE-TEENAGER HE TOOK HIS PIGGY BANK, RAN AWAY FROM HOME ON LONG ISLAND, BOUGHT A BUS TICKET TO NORTH DAKOTA AND JOINED SIGNED ON AT A NORTH DAKOTA RANCH AS A RANCH HAND BECAUSE HE WANTED TO A COWBOY

Political candidates who supposedly support my beliefs, spare me the “gimme, gimme, gimme” pleas for more money. I don’t have enough to give to you and if the present government continues, what I do have will be made into digital “dollars” that can be taken from me when I refuse to obey.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. . .

By: Valerie Protopapas

April 20, 2023

(Emphasis added)

I have been a supporter of Donald J. Trump since he intruded so happily upon the Republican political scene in 2015 to the dismay of the masses of big government, war-loving neocons. I voted for him in the Republican primary in New York and the election of 2016. However, I went to bed that night with the dire belief that on the morrow I would have perhaps the most wicked woman since Queen Jezebel as the next “president” of what was left of my country after eight years under communist change agent Barak Obama and his “trans” wife, Michael . . . ah, Michelle. Parenthetically, I think I was giving Queen Jezebel a bad deal in the comparison! But never mind, my frame of mind was so bad that I never turned on anything the next morning and thus only learned of Trump’s victory when speaking on the telephone to a friend. (I hadn’t asked about the matter, but he let it slip in his momentary delirium!) I think it was the happiest I had been in several years!

Of course, the rest is history as the old saying goes. But, sadly, the Trump “presidency” despite any number of excellent moves was a nightmare of ongoing Deep State attacks that simply got worse and worse (and worse) until the rigged election of 2020 at which time the enemies of America and Americans were able to deprive him of a richly deserved (and actually consummated!) victory. Now, through those four trying years, Trump had to continue to campaign because the rest of Washington (I hate to use that great and good man’s name in reference to the slime that exists in the District of Columbia!) continued to act as if another vote would be taken at any time that would put one of their own into the Oval Office! And, of course, under the circumstances, Mr. Trump was forever asking for donations to continue a fight that should have ended on the night of November 2nd, 2016! 

But Donald Trump is/was not the only politician seeking “donations.” Virtually every candidate on both sides continued to request, plead and demand that individual Americans fill their campaign coffers! And, of course, it only got worse after the high rollers used their billions to overcome the will of the people in 2020 and onward! I did not receive any requests for donations from the left, of course, but I got plenty from the right and not only from Mr. Trump whose needs now addressed not political campaigns but virtual survival! Meanwhile, as noted, billions were pouring into every leftist campaign for every candidate and/or agenda going – and God knows, there were more than enough of those! But as I continued to be dunned for money from candidates on “my side,”as it were, I couldn’t help but notice that the arguments presented to me as a means of persuading me to part with my very limited sustenance were, frankly, ridiculous given the present situation. I was constantly assured that the “conservative” candidate’s opposition had tons of money and therefore, if my candidate’s campaign did not match that largesse, well, victory just could not be won! And this is where I found myself wondering greatly about the intelligence of, if not the candidate him or herself, then at least those in charge of the campaign!

To begin with, despite every effort of the Deep State to hide its criminal behavior – and thus the criminal behavior of those candidates supporting it – few indeed are the intelligent American voters unaware of what was going on. Now, what that means is that any candidate on my side should have been voted for by each and every voter on that side. It wouldn’t matter if billionaire George Soros was funding the “other guy,” our folks should vote for our candidate no matter how much money he had in his campaign coffers! Gone were the days when either candidate could be made to appear honest and willing to do the work of the People! Lines had been drawn in blood and fire! Those lines made it quite clear that the candidate on this side believed and would do this, while the candidate on the other side would do very much the opposite. In other words, folks, there was no longer any middle ground in which a candidate on either side could be acceptable to both sides. I had voted for Democrats when I was younger coming from a lower middle-class working population in the Borough of Queens, New York City. We were Democrats. Republicans were seen as being for the “rich folks.” But, as I grew older, I found that things had changed and by this time, I could see that what used to be the Democrat Party is now “Communism light” if it even is “light!”Neither am I alone in coming to this conclusion! So, in fact, the usual campaign gambits – speeches, bumper stickers, advertising, etc. – should no longer have any influence in any election at least among reasonably intelligent people! I am quite assured that if Democrats running in their blue cities spent not one dime on their campaigns they would be elected overwhelmingly and those who voted against them would not have required the candidate that they did choose to spend a dime on their campaign to woo their votes. All that was needed was to let the voters know that they opposed Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Bernie Sanders et al. and the vote was cast.

The idea that money spent on a campaign makes a difference at this point in our nation’s history is worse than stupid! It is wicked! Good people should vote for good people whether or not they have the best bumper stickers and lawn decorations! God knows that evil people will vote for their candidate no matter what their “campaign” consists of. We have got to stop going forward as if nothing has changed when it is absolutely obvious that little or none of our present government is honest and worthy! The best our side’s voters can hope is that those running as supposed supporters of our beliefs are actually supporting those beliefs and that they are not change agents who will double-time it over to the Deep State when they have won their seats, something that too many Republicans have done far too often for far too long! 

So, political candidates who supposedly support my beliefs, spare me the “gimme, gimme, gimme” pleas for more money. I don’t have enough to give to you and if the present government continues, what I do have will be made into digital “dollars” that can be taken from me when I refuse to obey. Those who will support your agenda in hopes that you are honest will support you if you don’t have a “pot nor the window to throw it out of” in your campaign! We cannot make up for the billions given to the other side by the Soroses, the Gates, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. Even if we gave you our every penny, it would gain you nothing. The only thing that we can – and will – give to you is our support at the polls but even that may be useless if nothing is done to save our electoral process. You will benefit far more from our prayers than from our financial pittances. 

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IF STANFORD, HARVARD, AND OTHER LAW SCHOOLS ARE EXAMPLES OF OUR FUTURE SYSTEM OF LAW, THE FUTURE LOOKS BLEAK

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on IF STANFORD, HARVARD, AND OTHER LAW SCHOOLS ARE EXAMPLES OF OUR FUTURE SYSTEM OF LAW, THE FUTURE LOOKS BLEAK