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The Sammons/Francis Creed & possibly Kwasniewski Creed because “it’s so Dangerous to think there might be an Antipope” or that Francis is a Heretic

December 01, 2022

thecatholicfamilynextdoor says:

July 15, 2022 at 8:36 am

Jorge Bergoglio’s apostasy was external and made public and notorious, when as a cardinal, he stated in his book, On Heaven and Earth, in regards to same-sex sexual relationships, and thus same-sex sexual acts, prior to his election as pope, on page 117, denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque)and demonstrating that he does not hold, keep, or teach The Catholic Faith, and he continues to act accordingly:

“If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage, there could be children affected. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help shape their identity.”- Jorge Bergoglio, denying The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and the fact that God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), Is The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, while denying sin done in private is sin. To deny The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, is to deny The Divinity Of The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, And Holy Ghost, which is Apostasy.

From The Catechism Of The Catholic Church:

II. THE DEFINITION OF SIN

“1849 Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been defined as “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.”121

1850 Sin is an offense against God: “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in your sight.”122 Sin sets itself against God’s love for us and turns our hearts away from it. Like the first sin, it is disobedience, a revolt against God through the will to become “like gods,”123 knowing and determining good and evil. Sin is thus “love of oneself even to contempt of God.”124 In this proud self- exaltation, sin is diametrically opposed to the obedience of Jesus, which achieves our salvation.125

1851 It is precisely in the Passion, when the mercy of Christ is about to vanquish it, that sin most clearly manifests its violence and its many forms: unbelief, murderous hatred, shunning and mockery by the leaders and the people, Pilate’s cowardice and the cruelty of the soldiers, Judas’ betrayal – so bitter to Jesus, Peter’s denial and the disciples’ flight. However, at the very hour of darkness, the hour of the prince of this world,126 the sacrifice of Christ secretly becomes the source from which the forgiveness of our sins will pour forth inexhaustibly.”

It is a sin to accomodate an occasion of sin, and thus cooperate with evils.”

Thank you for your courageous witness to The Catholic Faith, outside of which, there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), For “It Is Through Christ, With Christ, And In Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost” (Filioque), that Holy Mother Church exists.

Pray that Pope Benedict XVI will be moved to a safe location so that he, and all those Bishops in union with him, can do The Consecration Of Russia to Our Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Heart, exactly as Our Blessed Mother requested, visibly separating the counterfeit church from The One Body Of Christ, United Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque). [https://abyssum.org/2022/07/13/one-does-not-get-anymore-retired-than-being-excommunicated/]

I’m very glad Eric Sammons wrote this article. There is so much hyperventilation about what it means to “be in communion” with the pope. I think Sammons makes a good case that the meaning of it is fairly minimal. I think the benefit of Sammons’ approach (and, after all, it is only a short article) is that he accepts a certain messiness in the situation. – Dr. Peter Kwasniewski [https://akacatholic.com/happily-not-in-communion-with-francis/%5D

The following is from a Catholic Monitor reader commenting on an Eric Sammons post:

The Spiritual Dangers of Sedevacantism

Those who deny that Francis is pope diametrically oppose the fundamentals of Catholicism and thus are on a spiritually dangerous path.

• Eric Sammons

The Spiritual Dangers of Sedevacantism – Crisis Magazine…

… blab blab blab… it’s so dangerous to think there might be an antipope.

They aren’t even trying to make sense.

Mr. Sammons read and, please, give serious arguments against Bishop Rene Gracida’s Open Letter to the Cardinals analyzing and quoting Pope John Paul II’s Universi Dominici Gregis calling for an investigation into the Francis conclave.

Please read and give serious arguments against Latin langauge expert Br. Bugnolo’s in-depth thesis “Munus and Ministerium: A Textual Study of their Usage in the Code of Canon Law of 1983” using exhaustive quotations from canon law showing why canon law explicitly states that ministerium and munus cannot be synonyms that mean the exact same thing or nearly the same thing.

Mr. Sammons are you too lazy to seriously debate? 

Moreover, Archbishop Jan Lenga rejected “being de facto suspended by Wioclawek  Bishop Wieslaw Meeting, Poland.”
(Glovia.tv, “Archbishop Lenga will not Respect Sanctions,”  February 25, 2020)

There are reports that Texas Bishop Rene Gracida supports Archbishop Lenga.

Is Archbishop Lenga in schism as some are stating for claiming Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation was invalid thus Francis is an antipope?

It must be remembered in history that St. Bernard of Clairvaux claimed the supposed pope in Rome was an antipope as Lenga is doing and was declared correct by an imperfect council which he headed.

Was St. Bernard in schism?

The Arian heretics were saying the same thing about St. Athanasius. That he was in schism.

The saint was resisting the Arian heretic bishops even apparently outside the valid pope’s approval.

It appears that Archbishop Lenga may force the cardinals and bishops to do an investigation and call an imperfect council into the validity of the Francis’s papacy because a bishop cannot suspend a bishop, but only by a valid pope. 

But Lenga states Benedict is still pope because of a invalid resignation and therefore Francis isn’t pope according to the archbishop.

Cardinal John Henry Newman it appears showed that a validly appointed bishop can’t suspend another validly appointed bishop.

Newman said Athanasius ordained priests against the authority of the Arian heretical bishops who were validly appointed bishops.

In fact, scholar Joseph Bingham on page 98 in “The Antiquities of the Christian Church” said:

“Athanasius… made no scruples to ordain… [Bishop] Euesebius of Samosata… ordained bishops also in Syria and Cilicia.”

Moreover, Newman in his “The Development of Christian Doctrine” denied that Bishop Athanasius’s “interference” in the dioceses of the heretical Arian bishops was schism:

“If interference is a sin, division which is the cause of it is a greater; but where division is a duty, there can be no sin interference.”
(Gutenberg.org, “An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” Sixth Edition)

Was Doctor of the Church St. Athanasius a schismatic?

Moreover, serious scholars are claiming Francis is a material heretic. The 19 Scholar’s Open Letter say that Francis is a material heretic which also brings into play the Bellarmine and Francis de Sales option of declaring an explicit heretical pope self-deposed.

However, the Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales option might not be available to him because of his creed:

The Sammons/Francis Creed

“I believe in Francis and that it is infallible dogma that he is pope no matter what evidence shows that he violated the Pope John Paul II constitution that governed the validity or invalidity of the 2013 conclave. He suffered under Bishop Rene Gracida who classified the evidence that the constitution was violated and called the cardinals to investigate. He descended into the Vatican gay lobby. He ascended to the papal throne where he sits surrounded by the gay lobby cardinals from where he shall judge the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Ten Commandments and all the infallible Catholic teachings.”

“I believe in Amoris Laetitia, the Communion of adulterers, Francis’s representation of globalist teachings which embodies the Soros gospel of unlimited mass immigration, climate change, an one-world government and the goddess Mother Earth everlasting.”

I wrote this ecumenical creed in honor of Sammons with the hope that it will help all the Francis traditionalists and the Francis liberals to unite in their common communion with Francis.

After all, isn’t it true that the leftist Mark Shea Catholics have joined hands with their Francis traditionalist brothers in using the Steve Skojec and Sammons talking points of “schismatic” and “sedevacantist” against all Catholics who present evidence that the 2013 conclave Pope John Paul constitution was violated including Bishop Gracida and even Cardinal Raymond Burke for daring to imply that the Francis conclave could be invalid and that Francis’s Communion for adulterers could be heretical.

While it is well know that Dr. Peter Kwasniewski , Sammons and all the Francis traditionalists feel uncomfortable with the Soros gospel part of the Francis creed, they must endure this temporary discomfort.

They must remember that they do agree with the Francis liberals in the part of the creed that says it is a infallible dogma that Francis is a valid pope no matter what the evidence shows and moreover they must stay in communion with him even when by his “authentic Magisterium” authority he teaches Communion for adulterers without committing obstinate heresy.

They must never forget that they are in union with the Francis liberals in believing that he cannot be corrected nor can he as Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales proclaimed be “deprived… of his Apostlic See” for being “explicitly a heretic”:

“The Pope… when he is explicitly a heretic… the Church must either deprive him or as some say declare him deprived of his Apostlic See.”

(The Catholic Controversy by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)Pray an Our Father now in reparation for the sins of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.

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

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

Francis Notes:

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

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”

(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”

[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

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

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

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

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

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

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

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

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

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

Election Notes: 

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

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

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

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:

http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

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

http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 

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

Pray an Our Father now for America.

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

A Sign of HopeA Redux Brimming with Insight and WisdomBeckitaDec 1With all that’s been on Charlie’s plate in the last, nearly three, weeks, and with the continuing weightiness of what is happening around us – including the intensity many are experiencing with personal trials – it’s a good moment to revisit a piece filled with counsel which calls us to introspection and self-examination as we consider our relationship with God, particularly in the areas of expectations, obedience, prophetic discernment and interpretation, taking responsibility in exerting the awe-inspiring and precious gift of free will, abandonment to Divine Providence with complete reliance on Abba and unshakeable trust in Him and His Ways. What I perceive in this piece is an invitation to live the paradox that John the Baptist presented in the Scriptures: “He must increase; I must decrease.” (John 3:30) We’re being called, via Charlie’s contemporary words and examples, to reject the temptations (some obvious, others more stealthily presented) to exalt ourselves above God and, instead, choose to be humble, for it is a mighty and essential way to reach the union with Him that our hearts desire and for which His Heart yearns beyond our own. In such an intimate union, we truly can rest in Him… not just physically rest, although that’s good, but to rest in Him in the totality of who we are with all of our emotions, thinking, and deeds. From this spiritual mindset, we become heartened, refreshed and focused on acknowledging God, ready to take all the next right steps that find us joyfully doing the little we can wherever we may be. (Beckita)Drill Deep to Find What Trust Really MeansBy Charlie JohnstonI am going to cover some important ground today. It is not new ground, but it is downright flinty in how hard it is. People are not usually ready for such until they have had some serious setbacks and reversals – and found things are not quite as they have confidently believed. I expect some blowback, but many of you are ready for this next level of wisdom. I know because I have been inundated of late with people seeking serious personal counsel – counsel because their most pious of expectations have been confounded.Most genuinely pious people who say they trust God really think they do, but they do not. They think they have divined His will perfectly – and trust implicitly what are merely the interpretations they have made. Or they think that, like Jiminy Cricket, God has given them perfect knowledge down to the finest detail of what His plan for them is. Or that if you devote yourself to Him, He will never allow anything seriously temporally bad to beset you. Trusting God is knowing that you do not know the details and that you will regularly find yourself at the bank of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army in hot pursuit – and that God will open up a way or He won’t.Though I make NO new prophecies here, I am going to share with you a few of the hard-won lessons from what I believe to be a lifetime worth of training.First, interpretation is incredibly hard…and often it pleases heavenly beings to let you meander on in your misunderstanding in order that the lesson is remembered more deeply AND to cement in your mind that you will never contain the mind of God. It is like believing you can contain the ocean in a drinking glass. I said once that I was promised that I would live for several years beyond the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart – and so I was. But stupidly, even after many decades of training, I somehow forgot that if we follow God, we are eternal from the moment we are conceived. I understand better now that, so long as I cling to Him, so long as I am more useful here, He will keep me here, no matter how things seem in any given moment. If I am more useful to those here from the next world, He will take me. Either way, I will live. If He decides to give me some bonus years here after the Triumph, that will be nice, but is entirely His call. I wasn’t promised that I would live here, only that I would live. He told me true and I imposed my own gloss over it.If you think your discernment is so perfect you cannot be fooled by the devil, he has already fooled you. Many of the greatest of saints have confessed to having been deceived by the devil for a time. If you think you are superior to all these saints in your immediate discernment, your vanity already marks you as a (hopefully) unwitting tool of the devil.God insists on each of us exercising our free will and taking responsibility for it at every moment. If you are dubious about a potential course of action, it may be God warning you against it – or it may be the devil trying to prevent you from doing something especially fruitful. In the end, you must decide and take responsibility for the decision with humility before God. That means that you can NEVER be sure the course you choose is right, but you can ALWAYS be sure that so long as you call sincerely on the name of the Lord, He will look with favor on your efforts and steer you safely to His path, drawing graces even from your errors. Make a decision and live with it. Change it only if you genuinely see it to be errant, never because it gets you blowback from the world, including your friends.Never justify your actions by saying, “the Lord told me to…” This rule applies whether your actions turn out good or bad. This is something that has been hammered into me from the earliest days of my understanding. You may think, as I once did, that you are stealing honor from God for the good things that come from you. Wrong. ALL good things come from God – as even beginners in the faith should know. When someone is constantly claiming that God told them to do such and such, they are rarely honoring God. Rather, they are trying to claim unwarranted authority for their own preferences. When someone disagrees with them, they are intimating that that person is actually disagreeing with God. Always seek counsel – from God and from good men – and always take responsibility for your actions and your words. If it flourishes, thanks be to God. If not, try again…but without having blamed God for your own misunderstandings or errors.For at least seven years I was told things which, when they came, would match up precisely with what I was told, but in ways I had not expected at all. My interpretation was wrong every single time for at least seven years. I cried a lot of tears of frustration. My angel finally explained that I was NOT told anything so I would know the mind of God, but so that when certain temporal events happened I would look deeper to see the spiritual reality behind them. They were a form of road signs. Each of us are God’s servants if we choose. None of us are God’s mini-me’s. Take responsibility for everything you do and don’t blame any of it on God. If you think you can surely discern even the seemingly most simple straightforward directions from the Most High, you have deceived yourself. Frankly, I am most suspicious of those things that are seemingly the most straightforward. And frankly, my angel sometimes proves my fidelity by my determination that I cannot understand with certainty even the simplest of commands – but simply make a decision and offer it to God, taking full responsibility for it, trusting that He will amend my errors so long as I hold fast to Him.When I was publicly speaking prophetically, I avoided speaking about what people should do other than cling closely to God. Rather, I spoke of what was coming. Even then, when I dug too far into details rather than sticking with the big picture, I made two big blunders. These days a lot of people tell me that I was right in a meta-sense. It does not matter. I erred badly in my interpretation. When I was adamant about noting the error, some thought it was humility. I suppose it was, but it was simply obeying the lifelong command to take full responsibility for what you say and do. Yeah, you can be combative (as all know I can be), but if you persist in trying to make error into not error, you may be serving someone, but it is not the Lord. My understanding of my work from the earliest days was that I was called to help give people heart to get through what would be the greatest crisis yet in the history of the world; a crisis that would feel, in many ways, like the end but most emphatically was NOT the end. It was instead to be God’s renewal of the faith and the face of the world. If you only knew how many times I have misunderstood the details in the six decades since I had the first nascent understanding of what this all means! God lets you make your mistakes in hopes that you will persist despite your frailty and will become less stupid over time.Contrary to popular belief, God does not play Jiminy Cricket and tell you in precise detail what to do (at least in my case). He gives you a broad picture, even if often detailed. Then you must do your research to determine if this is possible or reasonably plausible, then you must choose how best you can address it. Every step involves free will and discernment – all of which YOU must take responsibility for. This helps weed out demonic-inspired stuff – because you have to do your extensive homework – and prevents you from blaming God if you err. Yet it imposes a heavy discipline. Once you engage, you cannot know with certainty that you have got it right BUT you are not allowed not to act.I was not directed to speak publicly about the Storm. I chose to do so as the best means I could think of to inoculate people. It was never about telling you about the coming Storm. That was coming whether I spoke or not. My thinking was that it did not matter that much whether people knew in advance: they would have to adapt to it with or without anything I said. So why did I speak? Very simply, I knew that by telling you this most improbable event which unfolded largely in the manner I said, it would give credibility to what I would later say: that this is NOT the end. And that would come at a time when people desperately needed to hear it credibly. But it wasn’t even that simple. Once I decided on that plan if things continued to play out (I came to this decision in 1993), my angel told me I would make at least one serious mistake he would not correct once I began speaking publicly – and that it would serve God’s purpose. I did NOT like that, but I was NOT allowed to not speak once I started. I tried to come up with a different plan, but the plan had to work as well to ultimately reassure people – not just to make it more comfortable for me. But this was the best way. I pray that my errors and the way I carried on after stepping back for a time will help others to do the same after they find that things they have been certain of turn out errant. Today, I am profoundly thankful for the training I so often chafed under. Already I see people grasping at straws trying to maintain their balance and make sense of a world gone stark raving mad. Some try to grab hold of an imagined rigorous traditionalism and hold to it scrupulously. When they scream that every Pope since Pius X is a fraud what they are really doing is whistling frantically past the graveyard. Others grasp at any prophetic word they can find, including a host of those that are contradictory. Many, shaken at having what they thought were pious plans overturned, are fearful that God has abandoned them. Others (oddly the genuinely more theologically inclined) posit vast centuries of massive conspiracy theories. All of it is an effort to maintain some semblance of control in a disintegrating world. Now is when God is teaching you that the only answer is real trust. You are not in control. You never were. You never will be. And you will never know God’s mind on this side of the veil. Quit flailing about wildly and surrender to God. Trust Him.I was still in my 20’s when I was told that the time would come when I would not be able to see more than a single step ahead of me – and sometimes not that much – and that it was then that I would have to learn what trust really is. Trust is to surrender to God…to just take that next step in front of you (and yes, that event was the genesis of my philosophy of the next right step) as best you can see it while trusting that God will guide each of your steps as they happen and correct them when, in your humanity, you misstep. That is where we are.When someone tells me that God told them exactly what to do – or to inform me of what exactly I must do, I know they think this gives their command added authority. Actually, it immediately erodes their credibility in my eyes. God HAS given me guidance through others at times to see if I am paying attention, but it always comes cloaked in humility rather than hubris. Take responsibility for what you say and do, whether you believe it comes from God or not. A woman told me recently that she realized I was someone to take very seriously a few years ago when I told her to take what I say with a grain of salt because I never know with certainty – but work hard to give my very best counsel. She said she has since applied it to everyone and it has been a powerful tool for discernment. You don’t know the mind of God. Take responsibility for what you say and do and pray that He will continue to direct your steps.When someone tells me they always know whether something comes from God or not I dismiss them as a dolt who would dismiss the words of the Apostle Paul, so immature in their faith that they think a little knowledge is the sum total of it all, or so vain that they think they have captured the mind of God. Stop it and truly work out your salvation in fear and trembling – knowing how easily you are deceived and how you must cling to Christ at every moment to avoid deception and recover from the deception that you will inevitably fall into, nonetheless. When you think like this, you do not trust God; you trust Him to execute what you have interpreted as being His plan in precise detail – which is to say, you trust yourself. Walk humbly with God without ceasing to speak boldly of Him.For those who seek and confidently interpret coming signs and wonders, you should remember that they are almost always so subtle that all but a literal handful miss them altogether. As a species we are ever playful pups eagerly looking for the next fireworks show. Sometimes God does give us the fireworks show, as with the sun dancing at Fatima or the parting of the Red Sea, but most of the time He does not. The star of Bethlehem was not a particularly bright star; it did not dominate the sky. In fact, it was so subtle that only a couple of wise guys from the east understood it for what it was. I fully believe in both the Illumination of Conscience and the Warning. I frankly hope they both play out as the great majority think they will – in a big blaze of glory that no one could possibly misunderstand except through determined, willful, and malicious ignorance. If it happened that way, it would make what I have always perceived to be my job (to give people heart to endure the Storm) a LOT easier. But I know God rarely works that way. As everything is imploding right now, could that not satisfy the requirements for the illumination of conscience? When absurdities are taught as truth you must believe, the reality is that everyone knows. What everyone must choose is whether they are going to live by what they know to be lies or to stand, however forlornly, for what is true, honest, just, pure, lovely and of good report. Once again, free will is insisted upon by God. Everyone knows and everyone must choose. I know, I know, all the people who have not had to undergo the instruction of almost a decade of getting their interpretations wrong every time will tell me in great detail why their interpretation is the only possible right one. It’s why so many advocates of Garabandal insisted that the blind Joey Lomangino would live to see the miracle from this side of the veil – until he actually died. That did not faze me in the least. In fact, what they were told was almost a tautology: that Joey would see on the day of the miracle. This obviously did not mean he would not die before the miracle, only that he would see when it came…which could have very well meant he would already have passed on to the next world where all infirmities are healed. But enthusiasts insisted that he would be alive here. In thinking they had perfect interpretation, they dealt themselves and Garabandal an unnecessary blow. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity under the sun.Some get so excited about having a mystical experience, thinking it makes them special, that they seek out mystical experiences and think it gives them leave to direct everyone. Don’t you know that the devil can create mystical experiences – and if that is what you desire he is glad to oblige you? If you have had some initial mystical experiences, you have graduated first grade. You do not show authority by telling others what they should do. You look ridiculous and you are in danger of being given to the devil for some serious sifting.Others think that dutiful obedience to God and piety will exempt them from any serious temporal evil. Seriously?! Have you ever even read the Bible? God’s servants are rarely notable for their prosperity; they are notable for their fortitude and patient endurance under severe trials – and occasional martyrdom. I have known some who, when they have suffered some great setback, think God has failed them. What a poverty to call such thin gruel, “faith”!I have been indulgent over the years when people boast of their preparations because I am not the sort who would snatch a teddy bear from a frightened child. Many people think “prophecy” is God giving them inside information so they can then kick Him to the curb and rely on their own plan. It is good to make prudent preparations, particularly with an eye to helping others, so long as you don’t rely on them. As it is written, God often intends that one man sows while another reaps. If you can make preparation and not lose your peace if all is taken from you in a blow, you are on the right track. But if your hope is in the stores you have laid up, your hope will be in vain, because it is in your cleverness rather than in God. Learn, with St. Paul, to be content in whatever state you find yourself, trusting that God has His reasons (Philippians 4:11); to have as if having not and to have not as if having. This is trust that does not depend on God executing your plan.Right now, people inside and outside the Church are busily arguing that Christ is here and Christ is there – through rigid adherence to a supposed golden age of tradition that actually had its own severe challenges; through an unceasing multitude of prophetic words; and through novel and ersatz interpretations of salvation history. It all amounts to the same thing: do what I say and all will be well. Poppycock! When God is so insistent on free will that He will not interfere with it, why would you think He would want you to abrogate your free will to a mere earthly guru? Some will say, well, isn’t that what you do, Charlie? No. I give counsel – and my counsel consists of telling you that Christ is close TO YOU, right at hand and ready to help you if you ask Him. Added to that, I offer some counsel on how to listen effectively to Him and discern for yourself His call in your life.Do not misunderstand obedience. Jesus set up a hierarchy and gave them authority on earth. Understand that in God’s economy, obedience does not signify what it does in man’s understanding. With man, obedience is a sort of submission of the lesser to the greater. With God, obedience to the legitimate authority He has ordained is a means of opening up channels of grace. This is why, when Jesus went up with His earthly parents after the temple, Scriptures record that He was obedient to them. Not that He pretended obedience, but that He WAS obedient. And He grew in goodness and grace. Some think I am obedient to my Bishop because I have the good fortune to have one over me who is solidly orthodox. But if I were in a Diocese with the most heterodox Bishop, I would be obedient to his authentic authority. Of course, a Bishop’s authority is not plenary: it is limited to faith and morals and cannot be obviously contradictory of Scripture or the Magisterium. The disposition necessary to weather all this is abandonment to God. Understand that if you follow Him you ARE immortal, but He is the casting director. If he has use for you here, here you will remain. When He has better use for you in the next world, there you will go. Do your daily work with confidence that whatever happens to you, He either intends it for you or allows it for your good. Do not ask, “Why me, Lord.” when trials come; rather ask, “What do you intend for me in this, Lord?” Good times and bad times are variations on the same thing. It is like the weather: whether it is sunny and mild or storming ferociously, you are still responsible for your journey. Walk on in confident hope that you will see the Lord in the land of the living. The Lord will perfect your faith through your fortitude in season and out of season.Do not assume you know His mind. Whatever your plans, He probably has something else in mind. This is why the only preparation I make is to carry a backpack and hiking boots with me wherever I go. It is also why I relentlessly keep doing what I am doing for as long as I can. I do not know when – or even if – all will collapse or where I will be when it comes. But I trust that, wherever I am and whatever I am doing, God will open up a new way forward for me in His service when it pleases Him. Until then, I will wait upon the Lord knowing that if I am of good courage, He will strengthen my heart. That is enough.Remember who our God is. He is Jesus who, when His followers gave him a little fish and a few crusts of bread, fed a multitude. We will never be able to feed a multitude – and Jesus does not expect us to. But He DOES expect us to give Him the little fish or crust of bread we can come up with – and then the multitude will be fed. Do the little you can right in front of you. Do not be distracted by the winds and waves. Do not let the satan deceive you that you are master of the wind and waves. Trust God in complete abandonment.In the end, the only thing that will sustain a noble purpose through all the seeming trials and triumphs of your life is love – love for God actively expressed in love for your fellows along your way. What is needful is what I have told you from the start: Acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to those around you. Contemplate that deeply and you will be on the threshold of wisdom that will carry you through the Storm.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.Find me on Gab at Charliej373 or at the CORAC group.

Was Trump Our Captain Queeg?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

November 28, 2022

The Left, the Never-Trump Right, and many independents are tiring of Donald Trump’s recitations of prior, however justified, grievances at the hands of the media, the Democratic Party, the administrative state, and hard-core Left.

The conventional wisdom runs that Trump’s whines and victimization recitations reveal deep paranoias, and increasingly to an obsessive degree. We are told that his near neurotic obsessions with the unfairness of his critics are alienating the independent voter, who finds Trump’s strolls down 2020-21 memory lane the same-old, same-old ad nauseam.

True, Trump’s occasional recklessness contributed to many of his misadventures. At least at some point, friendly critics suggest, he might have realized that his nationalist/populist agenda, his orphaned outsider status, his lack of prior political experience, and his estrangement from the Republican political hierarchy, bipartisan Washington, D.C. media and government fixtures gave him no margin of error – despite what prior presidents and our current commander-in-chief have been accorded.

The haters would have hated Trump regardless. But his tweets and ad hominem retorts served to disguise their peremptory venom while instead highlighting his own retaliatory crudity.

“Fact-checkers” doted on every Trump statement, nitpicking them to find some exaggeration or untruth. Fine. But then these same hypercritics simply went comatose during the Biden Administration, with little care that Biden spins fantasies daily, from a son lost in the Iraq War to insulting claims that he passed his student loan amnesty in Congress by a close vote, and on and on. With Trump, voters got real achievement with coarseness, with Biden utter failure with near senility.

The media lied about supposed felonious behavior of the two Trump sons during the Russian collusion mania. The same reporters snoozed when Hunter Biden all but served up a guilty writ of felonious behavior on his laptop. Yet Hunter and the Biden accomplices were given de facto exemption by the Department of Justice and “50 former intelligence officials” who were willing to lie about the laptop’s authenticity rather than risk the chance of seeing Trump reelected.

What, then, are we to make of Trump’s endless tales of maltreatment? Is he a genuine victim or a “victimized” near-neurotic, or neither, or both? The question again is apart from what he accomplished and what now is in Trump’s self-interest. Clearly, it would be more advantageous for him to move on, speak of his plans for a second term, contrast his past record with the Biden catastrophe, and refer to balloting only in terms of reform to increase greater scrutiny and audit—but not replay the injustices done to him in 2020.

Target Trump

Yet the truth is that Trump was a victim, no matter how much or how tiresome it is that he recites the endless script of injustices. And his victimizers have far more to answer for than their victimized target.

The record is clear: no president in U.S. history has ever been impeached twice. None has ever been impeached and then tried as a private citizen out of office.

Remember, in both rush-to-judgment politicized efforts, there was no special counsel’s report and no lengthy cross-examination of witnesses. The first impeachment writ was based on a clumsy phone call in which Trump suspended aid to an often compromised Ukrainian government until it investigated the Biden family’s corruption and collusion with members of the Kyiv apparat and state-related corporations.

Trump did not cancel the approved aid in quid pro quo fashion, but eventually greenlighted a package that included offensive weapons, ironically vetoed by the prior Biden Administration.

His allegations of Biden family illegality were not just part of partisan pressure, but prescient given what we know of the Biden family syndicate from Hunter’s former associates and his self-incriminating laptop.

Trump’s Justice Department certainly did not go after candidate Joe Biden, much less raid his home, or otherwise harass a potential rival to his reelection. By such impeachment standards, Joe Biden would be in the danger zone by railing at American ally Saudi Arabia, and radically altering long-standing U.S. foreign policy, because he was angry the kingdom would not flood the world with cheap oil before the midterm election. Ditto his pre-midterm selfish efforts to beg enemies like Venezuela and Iran to help assuage his unpopular and self-created energy crisis.

Trump was certainly reckless in cheering on volatile demonstrations on January 6, 2021. But he did not plan or condone the violence. The act of unarmed but often violent buffoons trashing the Capitol building was sordid, but they were clowns, not insurrectionists. There has been so much misinformation and disinformation about that riot that we will have to await a disinterested investigation. In the meantime, recall that Officer Brian Sicknick did not die at the hands of violent protestors as is still alleged by Joe Biden and many members of the media.

The name and identity of the officer who shot and killed an unarmed Ashli Babbitt were suppressed for months. Reporters and leakers alike attest that numerous FBI informants were ubiquitous among the protestors. And the January 6 committee deliberately banned questions about lax security. Ditto communications between Capitol security and Nancy Pelosi’s office.

In any case, the day’s violence did not compare with the still uninvestigated 120 days of largely non-stop looting, arson, assault, and death, all orchestrated by BLM and Antifa that were often contextualized and excused by Democratic mayors, governors, and congressional officials. And there were plenty of iconic targets such as the torching of a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and an historic church across from the White House.

Storming the Capitol is a mortal sin, but so is attempting to rush the White House grounds to injure a president and his family. That failed leftwing mob effort was cheered on by the New York Times, with its snarky headline “Trump Shrinks Back.”

For 22 months the media cheered on leaks from Robert Mueller’s special counsel dream team. House Intelligence prevaricator, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) habitually offered outright lies concerning the culpability of the president, without a single retraction or apology when they were exposed as utterly untrue.

Collusion was better defined as either the Obama-Clinton disastrous reset policy that appeased a thuggish Putin, or Hillary Clinton’s efforts to destroy the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency with the false charge of Putin partnership.

No one in retrospect can seriously argue that Trump colluded with the Russian government to corrupt an election. In fact, the truth was far worse than that false allegation. His projectionist accuser Clinton most certainly did collude through Christopher Steele’s use of Russians or Russian-based sources that fed him a litany of lies he then turned around and built upon with his concoctions. In a just world, Clinton would be indicted for hiring foreign nationals to work for her campaign, by using stealth DNC funds to hire opposition contractors to frame the innocent, and for lying about her own role in forging such a conspiracy.

In this entire sordid process, the obsessed FBI disgraced itself through doctoring writs, losing subpoenaed records, and leaking to a toady press. Its dream team included the amorous members Peter Strzok and Lisa Page who were either fired or resigned from the team in disgrace. Mueller himself proved either noncompos mentis or untruthful in his final testimony before Congress. His lieutenant Andrew Weissmann confirmed right-wing allegations that he was a rank partisan out to get Trump.

No Speaker of the House has ever torn up a president’s State-of-the-Union Address on national television as did Nancy Pelosi in an act of historical disgrace. CNN ruined its reputation and was rendered inert by its fixations with Trump that were nightly manifested through exaggeration, hearsay, smears, rumors, and lies.

Do we remember not just “Anonymous,” but the deification of this unnamed and self-described member of the “resistance” who bragged on the pages of the New York Times that he was deliberately trying to undermine the Trump Administration’s duties to execute the laws? He was hardly a “senior official” as reported, but one Miles Taylor, a minor bit player at the Department of Homeland Security, who after his media role as a useful pawn, faded back into deserved obscurity.

Before Trump took office, there was an organized effort to destroy his designated administration, by calls for his impending impeachment in Congress, by an influential essay calling for a possible military coup to remove him from office, by FBI efforts to ambush his national security advisor designate, and by the continuance of campaign lies of Russian collusion.

Before he even had established a record to oppose, leftist iconic denialists like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Jimmy Carter had pronounced the elected president illegitimate.

A Confederacy of Connivers

We forget that far before 2020, the original election deniers were led by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic hierarchy. The former urged Joe Biden never to concede in 2022 should he lose the popular vote. Leftist journalists have outlined how the voting process was warped by changing voting laws, vast infusions of dark money to absorb state responsibilities in key precincts, and modulating the street protests of Antifa and BLM to wax or wane depending on Joe Biden’s electoral fortunes.

Major U.S. institutions were corrupted by their obsessive loathing. James Comey and Andrew McCabe, FBI directors, disgraced themselves by either lying under oath or feigning amnesia. Their bookends, Robert Mueller and Christopher Wray reminded the nation that Comey and McCabe were emblematic of deeper FBI pathologies. Retired four-star military officers systematically violated codes of military conduct by comparing their commander-in-chief to Nazis and fascists.

Trump’s lieutenants such as Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General Bill Barr, or former National Security Advisor John Bolton, along with a host of others have sometimes leveled legitimate worries and grievances about Donald Trump. Some rightly point out that his personal excesses often weakened implementation of and support for his otherwise cogent and necessary policies.

But sometimes lost in their frequent book tours and media appearances is that Trump not only had a singular record of accomplishments, but that he brought them either out of retirement or career stagnation and gave them opportunities that ultimately explain their current ubiquitous profiles.

That fact does not mean their criticisms, warnings, and worries are necessarily inaccurate or even should be ignored. But their current prominence does demand some perspective. A president of supposedly such dubious character nevertheless resurrected former officials like themselves to re-enter government service at the highest levels and achieve successful records working with Trump, when it was most likely that their trajectories were over, and they would not or could not serve under subsequent Republican presidents.

The point is not that Trump was not a wounded fawn, obsessed with his hurt and wallowing in his victimization. But he was also a genuine victim of a despicable effort of permanent government officials, the media, and the Left to destroy a presidency before it had even begun. Again, much of Trump’s crudity was retaliatory rather than preemptory.

Trump’s political future now hinges on his ability to forget all that, to move ahead, to unite his party, to win back independents, to get out the vote, and to advance a concrete agenda for America. But if he often cannot do that, it may well be because he is understandably all too human.

Trump Was What?

All sorts of fictional characters come to mind in understanding the enigma of Donald Trump, from Rodney Dangerfield’s role as the boisterous, uncouth but talented and underappreciated Al Czervik in “Caddyshack” or the archetypical ostracized Western gunslinger whose one-dimensional methods eventually alienate the vulnerable homesteader community that called upon and benefited from his unorthodoxy. I’ve noted in the past that Trump is a combination of John Ford’s tragic hero and a stubborn, flawed, but unyielding and competent character on the Sophoclean stage.

Yet perhaps another referent is found in Herman Wouk’s 1951 prize-winning novel The Caine Mutiny (far more complex than even its superb film treatment). The book charts the wartime neurotic, flawed career of an old Navy captain (with less talent than, and without the record of achievement, of Trump) serving mostly in the backwaters of World War II. The martinet Captain Queeg’s self-assured subordinate officers focus solely on his character shortcomings and insecurities, rather than either ignoring them or helping him address them for the good of the ship and crew—if for no other reason than to unite to defeat the enemy.

Instead, the Never-Queegers grow consumed by their hatred of the erratic Queeg. And they finally succeed in extremis in relieving the paranoid and often lapsing Queeg—but at what cost and for what in exchange?

Wouk offers the dilemma of whether the blemished Queeg, who once dutifully served in the underfunded and forgotten peacetime Navy when most others would not, might not have been so phobic had his officers only navigated Queeg’s shortcomings, rather than been consumed by them.

Later in court, the conspirators find ostensible justification, as their astute lawyer Barney Greenwald (played brilliantly in the film version by José Ferrer) mercilessly dissects Queeg’s neuroses to the point that the shattered captain implodes on the stand into catatonia.

Queeg ends up as a disgraced captain as the mutineers go free. Case closed?

Not quite. Wouk offers the warning that such self-righteous denigrators may be the true nihilists. In their clubby, black-and-white fixations on their commander’s obvious frailties, they miss the totality of a man and the importance of seeking to aid their captain rather than destroy him in a time of war.

As the novel closes, the promoted and chief Never-Queeger proves no better in battle and on rough seas, but perhaps even worse. And in a final twist, while Queeg’s career is destroyed, he is eventually exonerated by the Navy. Most of the mutineers fare badly in their circular firing squad. Wouk reminds us that for all their self-righteous rhetoric about patriotism, legality, and duty, they nevertheless did a great disservice to themselves—and to their country.

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Federal Court Blocks Joe Biden’s Mandate Trying to Force Christian Doctors to Do Abortions

National  |  Steven Ertelt  |   Nov 30, 2022   |   10:01AM   |  Washington, DC

A federal appeals court has blocked Joe Biden’s controversial mandate attempting to force Christian doctors to kill babies in abortions.

Christian medical leaders raised the alarm about a new pro-abortion mandate from the Biden administration that could shut down Christian health care throughout the U.S. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials planned to revoke a Trump administration rule that protected pro-life medical workers from being forced to kill unborn babies in elective abortions.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed suit presenting Christian doctors challenging two Biden administration mandates. They say the mandate forces religious nonprofit and for-profit employers to pay for and perform surgeries, procedures, counseling, and treatments that seek to alter one’s biological sex and to do abortions — actions that violate their religious beliefs.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Biden abortion mandate on August 26, ruling that religious doctors could not be required to perform procedures like abortion that violate their beliefs.

The Biden administration had until November 25th to appeal the ruling and failed to do so — meaning the mandate is now blocked by the appellate court.

The Christian Medical & Dental Associations told LifeNews that the end of the Biden mandate is a major victory for pro-life physicians to protect the religious beliefs of healthcare professionals from being forced to perform gender-transition procedures or abortions against their conscience and best medical judgment.

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“This key legal battle is a hard-fought victory that impacts and protects the rights of healthcare professionals across this country,” said CMDA CEO Mike Chupp, MD, FACS.

“CMDA’s national polling proves that healthcare professionals of faith are committed to caring for all patients with dignity and respect,” said CMDA Senior Vice President of Bioethics and Public Policy Jeffrey Barrows, DO, MA (Ethics), who is an OBGYN.

“No one should be forced to violate their conscience or sincere religious beliefs,” said Dr. Barrows. “Most importantly, each patient we treat is better off when healthcare professionals who are motivated by their convictions are free to provide quality care without being forced to check those convictions at the door.”

ADF Legal Counsel Jacob Reed said “All employers, including those in the Christian Employers Alliance, have the constitutional right to conduct their business in a manner consistent with their deeply held religious beliefs.”

“The employers we represent believe that God purposefully created humans as either male or female, and so it would violate their religious beliefs to pay for or perform life-altering medical procedures or surgeries that seek to change one’s biological sex. We urge the court to immediately halt enforcement of these unlawful mandates that disrespect people of faith,” he added.

The lawsuit explains that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is misinterpreting and improperly enforcing discrimination based on sex in Title VII to force religious employers to pay for and provide health insurance coverage for such surgeries and procedures. Additionally, the lawsuit challenges the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ reinterpretation of “sex” in federal law to include gender identity, thereby forcing religious healthcare providers to physically perform or facilitate surgeries and procedures that conflict with their deeply held beliefs.

The HHS mandate also compels religious healthcare providers to speak positively about these procedures even if they disagree with them and prohibits them from sharing their medical opinions or objections. Neither the EEOC nor HHS provide religious exemptions to these mandates. If CEA members fail to comply with these mandates, they face loss of federal funds, the prospect of expensive and burdensome litigation, and in some cases fines, criminal penalties, and attorneys’ fees and costs.

Responding to the news, pro-life leaders criticized the Biden administration for wanting to force hardworking Americans to choose between exercising their beliefs and being able to feed their families.

“Doctors, nurses, and other medical providers should enjoy this same constitutional protection, free to live and work in a manner consistent with their faith,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Matt Bowman said in a statement. “Yet the Biden administration’s proposed rule would abandon health care professionals to being forced to perform medical procedures that directly violate their religious beliefs or risk losing their jobs.”

Abortion advocates loved the Biden mandate.

Jacqueline Ayers, the senior vice president of policy, organizing and campaigns for Planned Parenthood, told Politico that they are excited about the new Biden administration rule. Twisting the issue, she slammed conscience protections as “discriminatory.”

“As state politicians continue to strip people of their sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms, it’s imperative that the Biden-Harris administration revoke this discriminatory policy and help ensure people can access the health care and information they need when they need it,” Ayers said. “We look forward to seeing the details of the new rule and are excited about this step forward.”

Forcing doctors and nurses to abort unborn babies or lose their jobs is the real discrimination, and pro-life advocates are urging the president to withdraw his plan.

“This is an illegal and gross overreach of executive power, and we urge the administration to withdraw this harmful proposal immediately,” Bowman said.

Pro-life leaders feared Biden would work to dismantle religious freedom for pro-life medical workers after his administration dropped a lawsuit last year defending a pro-life nurse who allegedly was forced into aborting an unborn baby. The Vermont nurse said she was tricked into helping with an elective abortion even though the doctors knew her objections; she said they told her she would be helping with a miscarriage.

FTX Kept Your Crypto 

in a Crypt Not a Vault

The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is a tale 

of the way we live now — tweeting, not reading.

By: Niall Ferguson

November 20, 2022

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) doesn’t read books. As he explained in a profile on Sequoia Capital’s website (which will be an assigned text in journalism courses for the rest of time), “I would never read a book.” “I’m very skeptical of books,” he said. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”

This error is not irremediable, because Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, is likely soon to have a lot of time for reading.  

I, by contrast, as the author of many books, am very skeptical of Sam Bankman-Fried. As I noted on May 1: “There is a great deal of loose talk among the crypto bros.”

How about this from Sam Bankman-Fried, … who was asked to explain the practice of yield-farming on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. Yield farming, to put it simply, is borrowing someone else’s crypto tokens in exchange for your own “governance tokens,” and then exchanging the borrowed tokens for higher-yielding DeFi (decentralized finance) instruments.

Bankman-Fried’s explanation:

Like this is a valuable box as demonstrated by all the money that people have apparently decided should be in the box. And who are we to say that they’re wrong about that? … And so then, you know, [the governance] token price goes way up. And now it’s a $130 million market cap token because of, you know, the bullishness of people’s usage of the box. And now all of a sudden, of course, the smart money [goes and pours] another $300 million in the box and … it goes to infinity. And then everyone makes money.

My comment was: “Never mind the Wild West; this is the Wacko West.”

At a conference I attended in late September, Bankman-Fried was one of the speakers in a session devoted to cryptocurrency. I take notes on such occasions. My first observation was that he had “a constant jiggling knee issue, also an f-word issue.” The moderator asked him politely what the point was of cryptocurrency. He replied, unhelpfully: “The industry needs to get its sh** together.” Asked when the “crypto winter” would end, he retorted: “Who the f*** knows?” Among his other responses were that he didn’t “want scams on the exchange” and that a lack of regulatory clarity was “more than half” of the problem.

At the time of the conference, “SBF” was said to be worth a bazillion dollars (I forget the exact figure that was being bandied about). This has gone to “zero dollars and a likely jail term” very rapidly indeed.

The essentials are that as of Nov. 10, FTX had an $8 billion gap between its liquid assets and its liabilities. For a time, it was believed to have been hacked for as much as $477 million. In fact, these remaining assets were transferred to a wallet belonging to the Securities Commission of The Bahamas, where FTX was based.

Crypto traders such as Genesis and Galois Capital have disclosed hundreds of millions of dollars in funds trapped on FTX. They have plenty of company. In short, a lot of people who entrusted their money to SBF are never going to see it again. Maybe they thought their crypto was in a vault. Their crypto is in a crypt.

So, what’s the right analogy? I’ve heard a few this past week: Crypto’s Lehman moment. Crypto’s Long-Term Capital Management moment. Nope. The Federal Reserve intervened in 1998 and 2008 to prevent those collapses from becoming financial crises; the Treasury had to help out in the case of Lehman Bros. Some things really are “too big to fail.” That’s not happening here because neither FTX nor even crypto is all that big.

A better analogy might be the dot-com bust of 1999-2000. But there wasn’t all that much fraud in Web 2.0’s mass-extinction event. More accurate might be crypto’s Enron moment: a bubble plus fraud.

In truth, however, these modern analogies fail to do justice to Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall. To understand what just happened, you need to go back a century and a half, to Anthony Trollope’s coruscating The Way We Live Now(1875). Inspired partly by the 1866 collapse of Overend, Gurney and Co., the novel describes the ascent and descent of Auguste Melmotte, whom Victorian society hails as a financial genius not because he is one, but because he offers the elite the prospect of easy money.

Today, the easy money seems most likely to come from the internet, if we can only “monetize” it. In the 19th century, the easy money came from another kind of network: railroads. Melmotte floats a company on the stock exchange: the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway Board, which is supposed to construct a new railway line from Salt Lake City in Utah to Veracruz in Mexico. The railroad is fictitious, but the promised future profits are large enough to attract Lady Matilda Carbury and her bounder son, Sir Felix. Hand in glove with Melmotte is the wonderfully named American tycoon Hamilton K. Fisker.

Melmotte rises to the pinnacle of London society, buys a country estate, and becomes a member of Parliament. Of course, the whole thing is a massive scam, which becomes clear when Melmotte forges documents to find the cash for the country estate. Everything comes crashing down. Disgraced, Melmotte commits suicide.

The Lady Carburys of today include Orlando Bloom, Tom Brady, Bill Clinton, Katy Perry, and all the other celebrities who recently flew to FTX’s Bahamas base; the Miami Heat basketball team, to whom SBF paid $135 million to rename their arena; not forgetting the comedian Larry David, who appeared in a Superbowl commercial for FTX.

But it wasn’t just the celebs. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and the Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek were among the respectable entities that invested with FTX.

Sequoia, one of the biggest names in venture capital, appears to have been completely taken in. In the 19th century, it was very common for journalists to promote stocks. Let’s revisit that Sequoia profile. SBF, we read, had a “vision about the future of money itself” and might “very well end up creating the dominant all-in-one financial super-app of the future.”

Bankman-Fried was superhuman. He could score 10 out of 10 in a meeting with top venture investors while simultaneously playing the video game League of Legends. He was “as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today” — but (unlike, say, Harvard’s Greg Mankiw) SBF could teach macro “while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl.” The man was “obviously a genius.” He was “a future trillionaire.”

How to make sense of Bankman-Fried’s spectacular fall from future trillionaire to nothing-there? The New York Times offered some touching insights. Yes, SBF had lost “most of his fortune” but he was “surprisingly calm,” sleeping reasonably well, still playing Storybook Brawl during interviews. Had FTX improperly used billions of dollars of customer funds to prop up his hedge fund Alameda Research? He could “offer only limited details.” He just wished he had “bitten off a lot less.”

Still not sure what really happened? Let’s try SBF’s social media. “I f***ed up, and should have done better,” he tweeted on Nov. 10. But relax. “THIS IS ALL ABOUT FTX INTERNATIONAL, THE NON-US EXCHANGE. FTX US USERS ARE FINE!” (Cut away to dog-in-burning-house meme.)

He continued: “FTX International currently has a total market value of assets/collateral higher than client deposits (moves with prices!). But that’s different from liquidity for delivery.” SBF was shocked, shocked to learn that some FTX users were using margin credit to speculate in crypto tokens and that a run on his exchange was possible. “Because, of course, when it rains, it pours.” No kidding!

Last Tuesday, he offered more illumination. “As of post-11/7 … a) Alameda had more assets than liabilities M2M [marked to market] (but not liquid!) b) Alameda had margin position on FTX Intl.” The Wall Street Journaltranslation: “Behind the scenes, FTX was using billions of dollars of customer money to fund risky trades by Alameda Research.”

FTX was also spending actual dollars in the manner usually associated with drunken sailors: $1.1 billion on acquisitions from October 2021 through March 2022, plus $153 million on sales and marketing, and $122 million committed on real estate.

We financial historians have seen this movie before — many times. To encourage SBF to try reading books when he has some more time on his hands, here’s what I wrote on the subject in my 2008 book The Ascent of Money:

In the four hundred years since shares were first bought and sold, there has been a succession of financial bubbles. Time and again, share prices have soared to unsustainable heights only to crash downwards again. Time and again, this process has been accompanied by skullduggery, as unscrupulous insiders have sought to profit at the expense of naive neophytes. So familiar is this pattern that it is possible to distill it into five stages:

1.     Displacement: Some change in economic circumstances creates new and profitable opportunities for certain companies. 

2.   Euphoria or overtrading: A feedback process sets in whereby rising expected profits lead to rapid growth in share prices. 

3.   Mania or bubble: The prospect of easy capital gains attracts first-time investors and swindlers eager to mulct them of their money. 

4.   Distress: The insiders discern that expected profits cannot possibly justify the now exorbitant price of the shares and begin to take profits by selling.

5.    Revulsion or discredit: As share prices fall, the outsiders all stampede for the exits, causing the bubble to burst altogether

The rise and fall of SBF is in many ways a classic case. As my advisory firm, Greenmantle, explained to its clients back in January, Bitcoin — the original cryptocurrency, which was supposedly inflation-proof — was nevertheless bound to decline in price this year. “The main reason,” we wrote, “is that major central banks … are preparing to tighten monetary policy … Since the onset of the pandemic, monetary and fiscal stimulus has been a substantial source of price support for Bitcoin. But this is coming to an end.”

Wrongly, it seems, we saw “below $30,000” as the likely year-end price and gave only a 10% chance Bitcoin would fall below $15,000-$20,000, in the mistaken belief that its widespread adoption as an “option on digital gold” would create a higher floor than its previous crashes. On Friday, it traded at roughly $16,500.

It turned out that the adoption trend had stalled and the effect of rising rates on leveraged players was more important. Among the reckless deals Alameda did this year was a $500 million loan agreement with failed crypto lender Voyager Digital, which filed for bankruptcy protection soon afterward because of its exposure to Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a hedge fund whose investing strategy was going “levered long” on crypto. 3AC’s thesis had been that the world was in a crypto “supercycle” in which token prices would only go up.

However, 3AC was one of the biggest losers from the implosion of the Terra stablecoin and its sister token Luna, losing between $200 million and $500 million in a matter of days. This triggered a credit squeeze across the industry and, as prices plunged and interest rates rose, 3AC faced margin calls it couldn’t meet. Counterparties to 3AC took a hit; Blockchain.com lost $270 million in loans to 3AC. There was a chain reaction that led from 3AC to Voyager to Alameda to FTX.

There is nothing in this story that would surprise the ghost of John Law, the Scottish financier who blew up the Mississippi Bubble in early 18th-century France. Bubbles are nearly always inflated with cheap credit. When monetary conditions tighten, the most leveraged players go down first, but the result is a cascade of illiquidity, which then turns into insolvency as asset prices plunge.

Another classic feature of the FTX story is the role of shady political influence. Just as Law ingratiated himself with the Duke of Orleans, the regent during the minority of Louis XV, so financial fraudsters through the ages have relied on friends in high places to protect them from legal or regulatory scrutiny.

Take Enron, the energy trading company that filed for bankruptcy in December 2001. Ken Lay, its chief executive, could not have inflated his castle in the air without Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s monetary policy “put,” but Enron also bought itself protection with roughly $6 million of political donations, a third of which went to Republicans. In addition, the company sought to buy itself popularity by paying the Houston Astros to rename their ballpark Enron Field.

Sound familiar? In 2020, Bankman-Fried gave the Joe Biden campaign at least $10 million. In the 2022 midterm election cycle, he was the second-largest funder of Democrats, after George Soros, giving $39.8 million in federal contributions. The majority of those donations, about $27 million, went to the Protect Our Future PAC, which supported candidates who prioritized pandemic prevention.

Not all bubble-blowers present themselves as philosopher kings. Law did; Lay not so much. As the son of two law school professors, SBF was exceptionally well prepared for self-aggrandizement. The Sequoia profile is full of gems:

Q: You just happen to be alive in the most important time in the history of the future race. The existential point! Really?

SBF: It certainly would not be one’s prior — at least, not naively. But if you want to really needle on that, there are some anthropic considerations by which that might not be as crazy as it sounds.

When a young man sets out to make billions of dollars very quickly, there is a common suspicion that he is actuated by greed. By raising him as a doctrinaire utilitarian, professors Bankman and Fried provided their son with the perfect alibi: He was making the money purely to engage in “effective altruism,” the get-rich-quick version of utilitarianism. Because you can only do the greatest good for the greatest number if you first make the greatest amount of money.

Effective altruism also seems to have led SBF and his sometime girlfriend, Caroline Ellison — the chief executive of Alameda — to rationalize the crazy risk-taking they engaged in as investors. In an interview with my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen, Bankman-Fried came close to agreeing that it would be worth repeatedly playing a game in which there was a 51% chance you could “double the Earth out somewhere else” but a 49% chance of the Earth disappearing.

This was music to the ears of the Democratic donor class. A young man willing to take huge risk to make billions — to give it all away to solve all the world’s problems — and get Democratic candidates elected in tight congressional races. Will you take a meeting with such a prodigy? Of course, you will. If he is lucky, he’ll be the world’s first trillionaire! Never mind about the fact that there’s a 90% chance he blows up.

Three questions remain to be answered, each of which distinguishes the case of FTX from other bubbles in history. First, what the heck were the regulators thinking? We read in the Financial Times last week that “The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating FTX over its crypto lending activities and management of customer funds.”Wait, the SEC investigates Bankman-Fried only now? As opposed to months ago?

Second, what is the future of crypto exchanges? At one level, SBF’s downfall was the result of a turf war between FTX and the bigger exchange Binance, founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ. At one time an investor in FTX, CZ still owned a large amount of FTT, the FTX token. In a Nov. 2 article, the crypto news site CoinDesk revealed the huge amount of generously priced FTT on Alameda’s balance sheet. Four days later CZ announced on Twitter that he was selling roughly $530 million of FTT for “risk management” reasons.

This was not his only motive. “We won’t pretend to make love after divorce,” he wrote. “We won’t support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs.”This was the declaration of war that sparked the nosedive in the FTT price and the run on FTX.

“A competitor is trying to go after us with false rumors,”Bankman-Fried tweeted on Nov. 7. “FTX is fine. Assets are fine.” (Again, dog-in-burning-house meme.) For a brief moment, Zhao seemed willing to buy his ailing competitor. But then he sent a Signal message to SBF and his team. “Sam, I’m sorry,” he wrote, “but we won’t be able to continue this deal. Way too many issues. CZ.” Bankman-Fried told his team that Binance “probably … never really planned to go through with the deal.”

Any student of 19^th-century financial history will recognize the dynamic. It was how the joint-stock banks and railroads fought their wars for market dominance. However, in the case of crypto, there is a puzzle. Why do these exchanges even exist? The original theory of the case, dating back to the original white paper on Bitcoin by its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was that cryptocurrency would permit peer-to-peer payments without the need for third-party intermediation. All transactions would be logged, unalterable, on the blockchain.

Purist proponents of decentralized finance, such as my Hoover Institution colleague Manny Rincon-Cruz, have long argued that the exchanges are an aberration — an unwelcome intrusion into the world of DeFi from the world of TradFi (traditional finance). Sure, exchanges offered convenience, especially to speculative day traders looking for quick returns. But they also offered opacity. To an effective altruist looking to make billions in a hurry, transparency was an obstacle, which explains why SBF lobbied to “kill DeFi”through the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act of 2022.

I was never a user of FTX, preferring a more reputable US-based exchange for my experimental forays into Cryptoland. However, as soon as the crypto bubble began to deflate — the proverbial canary in the coal mine was the collapse of Terra’s $15 billion UST stablecoin — I withdrew the lot and stored it on a Ledger hardware wallet. Those who continued to trust FTX have learned the hard way the truth of the early crypto maxim “not your keys, not your coins.”

Having spent some anxious hours refreshing my memory about Ledger, Uniswap, and MetaMask, I would say that DeFi is currently about as user-friendly as personal computer software in the pre-Windows era. So long as that remains true, crypto exchanges will have a role. It’s possible that, as happened with Web 2.0, a single exchange will become the dominant player, centralizing what was supposed to be a decentralized network, just as Amazon centralized e-commerce, Google centralized search, Facebook centralized social networking, and Twitter centralized outrage. But I guess that the attempt to rename crypto Web 3.0 was based on a flawed analogy. The stakes are just too high when financial services — as opposed to personal data — are being traded online.

Finally, if exchanges are not necessarily the future, what will remain of cryptocurrency? To those, like my friend Nouriel Roubini, who have long predicted the collapse of the “sh**coins,” 2022 has been a good year. Readers of his new book, Megathreats, will relish his demolition of crypto as a giant Ponzi scheme dreamt up by “scammers and carnival-barkers” to fleece naïve retail investors suffering from internet-induced FOMO. A great many crypto coins and tokens will indeed go to zero — indeed, many already have. Yet I am still not convinced that the experiment with blockchain-based finance will end up being a total failure.

If Roubini had been around in the 1720s, he likely would have said the last rites for stocks with equal fervor. But the bursting of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles did not mark the end of equity financing and stock trading, any more than the many financial waves of panic of the 19th century marked the end of joint-stock banking.

On the contrary, both stock markets and banks went on to play a crucial role in financing the later phases of the Industrial Revolution. As Antonio Garcia Martinez put it, “Innovation starts in mad genius and grift and bubbles and ends in establishment institutions. … Every Web titan you see about you — Square, Stripe, Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber — all launched or massively scaled after another such … panic. … And then what followed was the biggest tech boom of a generation.”

Will the current crypto winter be succeeded by a DeFi boom? Or will it be like the weather in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia: always winter, never Christmas? Financial history is on Martinez’s side more than Roubini’s.

And that’s another reason why Sam Bankman-Fried should read books. I suggest starting with The Ascent of Money.

A judge ordered Jen Psaki to spill the beans on this Biden regime censorship scheme

Jen Psaki apparently thought that as one of the newest members of the establishment elite she now plays by different rules than everyone else.

But she got hit with a rude awakening.

And now a judge has ordered Jen Psaki to spill the beans on this Biden regime censorship scheme.

https://decide.dev/lad/15117603156727654?pubid=ld-5386-1795&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fpatriotpolitical.com&rid=&width=696&utm_source=patpolnl&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_medium=email

Psaki bombed

Back in May, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit against the Biden regime for colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions.

The lawsuit accused President Joe Biden, and agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of colluding with or coercing the companies to “suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content” on their platforms with “dis-information,” “mis-information” and “mal-information” labels, according to The Daily Caller.

As part of the legal process, the Attorneys General requested to depose many prominent Biden regime officials, including former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Dr. Anthony Fauci, amongst others.

But unsurprisingly, the Biden regime officials put up a fight, leading a judge to order on October 21, that all of the individuals named in the suit must cooperate with deposition requests.

Psaki, though, thought she could simply claim she’s too busy with her part-time MSNBC gig to answer the critical questions on the minds of tens of millions of Americans under oath.

That is, until a federal court handed down an order, once again ruling that Psaki must comply with the disposition for the lawsuit.

“Psaki filed a motion last week in a bid to avoid complying with the subpoena requiring her to testify, but Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District Court of Louisiana decided Monday to reject the motion and Psaki’s alternative request to stay her deposition,” The Daily Caller reported.

Dose of reality

According to the memorandum released by the court with its ruling, Psaki and the other Biden regime officials were attempting to make an “end run” around its previous October 21 ruling by trying to get it reversed.

Furthermore, the court also stated that Psaki’s reasons for having to prepare and give deposition were not “undue burdens,” and she would not suffer irreparable harm, that justified exempting her from giving a deposition.

“The public interest lies in determining whether First Amendment free speech rights have been suppressed,” Judge Terry Doughty stated.

As The Daily Caller pointed out, the Attorneys General had argued that Psaki made statements as Press Secretary that “(1) attested to her personal knowledge of the participation of high- level White House officials in pressuring social-media platforms, and (2) reinforced the public threats of adverse legal consequences to social-media platforms if they do not increase censorship of views disfavored by federal officials.”

Needless to say, any time a member of the establishment elite is forced to play by the same rules as everyone else, it’s a major win.

But the fact that this win also includes recorded depositions of Biden regime officials like Jen Psaki and Anthony Fauci answering the questions the corporate-controlled media refuses to, is just an added bonus.

Patriot Political will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story. 

Roma Locuta Est

What does Cardinal Becciu know about Francis?

Steven O’ReillyNov 28November 27, 2022 (Steven O’Reilly) – In this article Roma Locuta Est revisits some of the oddities and incongruities surrounding the case of Cardinal Becciu. Readers may recall that Cardinal Becciu is on trial before a Vatican tribunal with regard to accusations against him and others involving financial corruption, including “fraud and money laundering” (see here).This past week there was a startling revelation that Cardinal Becciu had taped a phone conversation between himself and Pope Francis in July of 2021. In that call, Becciu asked Pope Francis to confirm he had approved a ransom payment to a group of terrorists in order to free a nun back in 2017.  Per the reporting in article on Union of Catholic Asia News:”Did you or not give me the authorisation to start the operations to free the nun?” Becciu asks in the call, according to the transcript published by Italian media.”Did you or not give me the authorisation to start the operations to free the nun?” Becciu asks in the call, according to the transcript published by Italian media.”For the ransom we had fixed 500,000, we said no more because it seemed immoral to give more money… that would go into the pockets of the terrorists… I think I had informed you about all this… do you remember?”According to the transcript, the pope said he “vaguely” remembered but asked Becciu to put his request in writing.The call was recorded in Becciu’s apartment by one of his relatives, on a speakerphone, the court heard.The nun, who had been taken hostage in 2017 by al-Qaeda-linked jihadists, was freed in Mali in October 2021.(Source: Cardinal on trial secretly taped call with Pope Francis)That any Cardinal would surreptitiously record a discussion with a pope is outrageous. It is odd that the prosecution even introduced the tape as evidence, as the transcript arguably helps Becciu’s case, in as much as it seems to suggest Francis may have approved of one of the expenditures apparently at issue in the case.Certainly, the prosecution would not have played the tape if it were thought the conversation might damage Pope Francis in any way. This conversation was recorded by Becciu in 2021, a year after he had already been disciplined by Francis, but before his trial began. While the conversation does seem to hurt either Francis or Becciu, it does not appear to exculpate Becciu either.In light of some of the oddities and incongruities surrounding the relationship between Pope Francis and Cardinal Becciu; the question that comes to our minds at Roma Locuta Est is, if Becciu is the sort of man who would secretly tape a Roman Pontiff for his own interest, has he done any thing similar before?So, what let us examine some of the oddities and incongruities as we see them.Francis disciplines BecciuWhile the Cardinal’s guilt or innocence has yet to be adjudicated with regard to the London real estate deal, it was only when the controversy surround it became public and only after international authorities began to act upon it that Pope Francis moved to punish Becciu (see here, here, and here). Only then did Francis remove Becciu from any office he held in the Church, as well as taking away most if not all the benefits, privileges and duties of being a Cardinal – essentially leaving Becciu a Cardinal in name only. Thus, the appearance at least is that the hand of Francis was forced by others. Regardless, given that the above punishment inflicted by Francis upon Becciu occurred before the start of the trial, it seems obvious that at least Pope Francis was convinced, rightly or wrongly, of Becciu’s guilt in 2020.Yet, according to Forbes, five years before this disciplinary action — i.e., circa 2016 — Francis had been previously given a dossier accusing Becciu of financial corruption, involving “incontrovertible” proof of wrongdoing (see Catholic World Report, Pope Francis and the Cardinal Becciu affair). However, Forbes’ source said Francis “closed the file; that was the end of it.”If the above is indeed the case, why did Pope Francis allow Becciu to remain in office another four years into 2020?  Furthermore, why did Francis not remove Becciu from the Cardinalate altogether in 2020, instead of allowing him to retain his title, even in name only?As odd as all that is, there is something even more bizarre. Recall, by 2021, Francis had been both aware of the accusations against Becciu involving the London real estate deal for about a year, and of the 2016 dossier with “incontrovertible” evidence regarding other potential corruption accusations against Becciu, as reported by Forbes.  Yet, even having (1) disciplined Becciu for his alleged part in the London deal, (2) and having knowledge of other “incontrovertible proofs” from the 2016 dossier, and (3) with the impending trial date approaching; Francis met privately with Becciu at the latter’s apartment, on Holy Thursday of all evenings! (see Catholic News Agency: Report: Pope Francis celebrates Holy Thursday Mass with Cardinal Becciu).Now, why would a Pope, on Holy Thursday of all days be meeting in the private apartment of an essentially ‘indicted’ man, a former member of the Curia who he had disciplined upon the assumption of his guilt? Weren’t there more official “pope” things Francis could attend to on Holy Thursday?  Very odd. What happened on that night in Becciu’s private apartment? Did they discuss the case?  Did they discuss what Becciu might conceivably say or not say publicly or at trial about Francis?  Certainly, the “optics” of having such a meeting were not good.Francis dangles restoration before Becciu…why?However, the Pope’s incongruous behavior toward Cardinal Becciu does not end there.  Readers may recall the news in August 2022 when it appeared that Pope Francis was in some sense, seemed to be rehabilitating Cardinal Becciu (see our article recounting the event, The Rehabilitation of Cardinal Becciu: what’s up with that?). For example, at the time, according to Crux, Cardinal Becciu told a group in August 2022 before an approaching consistory that: “On Saturday, the pope phoned me to tell me that I will be reinstated in my cardinal duties and to ask me to participate in a meeting with all the cardinals that will be held in the coming days in Rome” (See Crux, Cardinal at center of Vatican trial claims he has been ‘reinstated’ by Pope).In the same Crux article, Cardinal Becciu’s lawyer confirmed the invitation noting also that attendance at consistories is a prerogative of a cardinal, and that Francis had “frozen” these prerogatives with regard to Cardinal Becciu back in September of 2020. Yet, even so, Becciu was “summoned” to the consistory.  According to a separate Crux article (emphasis added):“Speaking on background, a Vatican source has said Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu’s apparent invitation to participate in a high-profile meeting of cardinals next week represents a personal gesture on the part of Pope Francis, but that it does not necessarily mean Becciu’s rights as a cardinal, stripped by the pope two years ago, are being restored.”(Source:  Crux, Invite for accused cardinal doesn’t necessarily imply rehabilitation, Vatican source says)The Vatican statement that this “does not necessarily mean” Becciu’s rights are being restored is effectively meaningless because this line can as easily be interpreted to allow that his rights might be restored! This news in August certainly had the appearance of a pardon being dangled before Becciu, and even of a back and forth negotiation being conducted in the public between the two parties. Allow him some taste of his former privileges; of what he might earn back? But based on what expectations?  Is this where Becciu’s recording, or recordings(?) of Francis enters the discussion?Does Becciu hold other tapes? Other evidence that is potentially damaging to Pope Francis?Did Francis know in August 2022 that Becciu had recorded their July 2021 call on the ransoming of the nun? Surely, Francis would have been informed at some earlier date that the prosecutors were in possession of such a tape. However, that in itself would not provide an adequate explanation as to why Francis seemed to tease the possibility of a full restoration of Cardinal Becciu back in August. After all, while the recording we know of so far does not convict Becciu, it does not exculpate him.Still, this back and forth between Becciu and Francis, i.e., the Holy Thursday meeting, the teasing of a restoration, has the appearance of a negotiation playing out in public before our eyes. So, if the recording that has thus far been revealed is not damaging to Francis, are there possibly other recordings, or is there other information in Becciu’s possession which would explain the Pope’s strange behavior in the Becciu case?Imagine if an American president met privately with a prominent, criminally indicted, former member of his Administration.  Then, imagine further, if this president were to publicly dangle the official’s reinstatement to office before criminal proceedings began, this would certainly give — at least — the appearance of collusion or obstruction of justice.  Then, imagine, shortly thereafter, the criminally indicted official is found out to have a recording of at least one of his discussions with the president.Under such a scenario, what would average citizens think?  What inferences might they reasonably draw?  Perhaps that the President was dangling a pardon to entice the ‘indicted’ official not to release any other recording or information damaging to the President and his presidency?  Certainly, such a theory has explanatory power.I am not saying there is something Becciu knows about Francis that is damaging, only that the patterns of actions and inaction in this relationship certainly give rise to a reasonable suspicion there is much more going on here below the surface than meets the eye. In particular, Francis appears to tease Becciu’s restoration to the Cardinalate before the outcome of a trial without any apparent factual basis, and then we find out Becciu has taped at least one conversation with the Pope! Hmmm.  Is that not strange? Is in unreasonable for the outside observer to consider the inference Becciu might know something, perhaps something damaging to Francis and or his papacy, that Francis does not want to become public knowledge?   Is it reasonable to wonder whether this explains the seeming dangling of a full restoration to the cardinalate before Becciu?However, if such a hypothesis is to be entertained, it may be necessary to go back further in time to find a complete theory. That is, in addition to the more recent incongruities, we need a sufficient explanation for older ones, such as why Francis did not act upon the reported dossier on Becciu in 2016, which supposedly contained “incontrovertible” evidence against Becciu. If there was such a dossier, why did Francis not act against Becciu at that time?  Did Francis have fears even earlier in his pontificate that Becciu might possess damaging information against Francis and his papacy — information which prevented Francis from taking action against him at that time?Cardinal Bergoglio’s Financial TransactionsWhile more investigation and inquiry is required here, there is evidence that money flowed from Argentina to the Vatican, and under questionable circumstances.Henry Sire, in his book The Dictator Pope, writes (emphasis added):“As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio was ex officio chancellor of the Pontifical  Catholic University of Argentina, which had a rich endowment of $200 million. For no clear reason, a large part of this money was transferred to the Vatican Bank. The transaction recalls a scandal years previously when Bergoglio had been auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires and the archdiocese repudiated a debt of ten million dollars, on the grounds that the check issued by the archiepiscopal Curia had not been correctly signed. Austen Ivereigh gives a whitewashing account of this incident, presenting Bergoglio as the reformer who cleaned up the mess, but the truth is that, as Cardinal Quarracino’s right-hand man at the time, he must have had inside knowledge of how the check was issued, and the facts were never satisfactorily explained.”(Source: Henry Sire, The Dictator Pope, p. 41)Henry Sire went on to discuss the transfer of the University of Argentina funds in greater detail in an article appearing on the OnePeterFive website.  Mr. Sire, writes (emphasis added):Between 2005 and 2011, some 40 million dollars were transferred from the Catholic University of Argentina to the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (the Vatican Bank), in a transaction that was supposed to be a deposit but which the IOR has hitherto treated as a donation. (Just this year, the reports are that this misappropriation has begun to be remedied, but only partially.) Pablo Garrido was responsible for this transfer, against the protests of members of the university who pointed out that the university, as an educational foundation, could not make a donation to a foreign bank. Together with the case of the Sociedad Militar Seguro de Vida, this is one of the obscure financial episodes in Archbishop Bergoglio’s administration that deserve to be studied in depth by a qualified researcher.(Source:  Henry Sire, Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires: Some More Unanswered Questions, OnePeterFive, September 11, 2018)As Mr. Sire’s research suggests, the transfer of $40 million dollars of funds to IOR (the Vatican bank) and which was converted from a deposit to a donation is quite strange. The suggestion by Mr. Sire seems to be that the funds were used to gain influence for Bergoglio in Rome [NB: Roma Locuta Est had discussed this issue in its articles on the Vatileaks scandal, and the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI (see here and here)]. While not suggesting a connection to the transaction, the dates of the transfer begin at a time (2005) when Cardinal Sodano was still Secretary of State (NB: Sodano supported Bergoglio in the 2013 conclave), and end when Archbishop Becciu, now embroiled in a Vatican trial involving allegations of financial corruption, was Substitute for General Affairs at the Vatican beginning in 2011 (NB: The office of Substitute is third highest ranking post in the Holy See). It would be interesting to inquire of Cardinal Becciu if he has any knowledge of these transfers and the use to which they were put.Final Thoughts  As noted throughout this article, the actions of Pope Francis toward Cardinal Becciu seem odd and incongruous when one considers what has been alleged against Becciu going back to 2016. With regard to the more recent allegations of which Becciu is accused; whatever their ultimate merit and the findings of the Tribunal, Francis certainly appears to have accepted there were sufficient grounds to strip Becciu of his curial offices and the benefits attached to him being a Cardinal.Yet, even having done this — though his hand seemingly was forced by public revelations; curiously, Francis met privately in Becciu’s apartment on Holy Thursday of 2021 before the start of the trial, and then teased the possibility of Becciu’s full restoration as a Cardinal before a consistory in August 2022 while the trial was still in process.Why didn’t Francis take action against Becciu in 2016 on the basis of supposedly “incontrovertible” proof? Why did Francis discipline Becciu before the trial?  Why did Francis tease the possibility of restoring Becciu before the trial’s completion?  We know Becciu surreptitiously recorded Francis on at least one occasion. Is Becciu in possession of other recordings of conversations with Francis, or of other types of evidence?  Is Francis worried Becciu might reveal something damaging to his papacy, and if so, what?Becciu served in the Vatican going back to the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI.  He appears to have been close to Cardinal Sodano (who consecrated him a bishop) who in turn seemed to be something of an enemy of Pope Benedict XVI, and Cardinal Bertone (see here and here). There are various tantalizing avenues to explore, some of which are considered in The Conclave Chronicles.I suspect we may see more oddities and incongruities emerge in the back and forth between Francis and Becciu before all is said and done in this matter.Steven O’Reilly is a graduate of the University of Dallas and the Georgia Institute of Technology. A former intelligence officer, he and his wife, Margaret, live near Atlanta. He has written apologetic articles, and is author of Book I of the Pia Fidelis trilogy, The Two Kingdoms; and of Valid? The Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. (Follow on twitter at @fidelispia for updates). He asks for your prayers for his intentions.  He can be contacted at StevenOReilly@AOL.com  or StevenOReilly@ProtonMail.com (or follow on Twitter: @S_OReilly_USA or on GETTR, TruthSocial, or Gab: @StevenOReilly).

To the German Bishops: No, the Church Will Not Change

What is keeping the German bishops from leaving the Church? The Church, after all, will never change on the “pelvic issues” they care most about.

• Regis Martin

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest. Samuel Johnson

I have sometimes puzzled over that sentence—so portentously pronounced by perhaps the most earnest Englishman I can think of—and have asked myself why anyone would advise another to wait so long before becoming earnest. Shouldn’t we always be in earnest? Also, isn’t it a bit odd that if Dr. Johnson had taken his own advice, he’d never have lived long enough to observe it? He pegged out, as they say, at age 75, missing the mark by two years. 

As for myself, I won’t be 77 for at least another year. Does that mean I am free to remain unserious until then? If so, I shall be in very good company, not a few bishops under seventy-seven having already cornered that particular market for some time now. Bishop Georg Bätzing, for instance, current Chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, is only sixty-one, and what a strikingly unserious specimen he seems to be. Indeed, judging from remarks he recently made while in Rome with sixty or so fellow prelates for a chat with the pope, one might almost think the poor fellow had no faith at all.   

“It hits me personally very hard,” he admitted the other day, surveying the growing exodus among Catholics in Germany, “that so many people are leaving the Church. In doing so,” he continues, “they are casting a vote and showing me that they no longer agree with the way the Church presents herself. The reasons are certainly varied and, for the most part, justified (italics added). Nevertheless,” he concludes, “there are reasons to stay.” 

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Really? Why should anyone stay having just been assured by Bishop Bätzing of all the reasons for leaving? And, come to think of it, how exactly should the Church present herself if, by her failing thus far to do so, one is entirely justified in leaving her? Obliged to do so, in fact, if Bishop Bätzing is to be believed. People have no alternative but to leave, he is saying, given her continued recalcitrance on so many fronts. His Excellency has certainly not been at all shy in telling us this.  

On all the hot button issues, from sex outside marriage, to the ordination of women, to blessing same-sex marriages, to extending Eucharistic privileges to non-Catholic Christians, he is square in the camp of the dissenters. On the matter of women priests especially, he has been most vociferous in his criticism of Rome’s continuing refusal to ordain them: “Popes have tried to say the question of women priests is closed, but the fact is that the question exists. Many young women say, ‘a church that refuses all of this cannot be my church in the long run.’” And, putting himself into this little drama, he would himself leave the Church if he “got the impression that nothing would ever change.”  On all the hot button issues, from sex outside marriage, to the ordination of women, to blessing same-sex marriages, to extending Eucharistic privileges to non-Catholic Christians, Bishop Bätzing is square in the camp of the dissenters.Tweet This

What’s keeping him, I wonder? Because the Church, which he and his allies are so eager to change, is simply not going to change. She will never change. And where does one get the idea of “my church,” as if one somehow owned the institution of which one had agreed to become a member? One would think even German bishops would know that it is not my Church, or their Church, but Christ’s Church. And have they already forgotten that the last time changes of the sort welcomed by people of their persuasion took place, it was called Lutheranism? Is that what they want? Then maybe they should just say so and get on with it.  

I am reminded of a telling comment once made by Karl Rahner about his erstwhile colleague and friend Hans Küng, whose flirtations with heterodoxy pretty much left him bereft in the end. Fr. Rahner stated that he could so much more easily read and understand Küng as a Protestant. It was only when he sought to present himself as a Catholic, you see, that his writings became unintelligible. Could it be that the Bätzing crowd are only coherent to the extent you view them as non-Catholics—straightforward secularists, in fact—effectively disconnected from the Church whose teachings they no longer share?  

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Why won’t someone tell them this? Like the pope, for example. It’s his job, after all, to tell us all about the Church, beginning with, one would think, the truth that Jesus Himself fashioned her to be the extension of Himself and His work in the world. And that whoever hears her, hears Him, and the one who sent Him. Why is that so complicated? Philip, one of His followers, certainly didn’t think so when, putting the question to Jesus about when they might all see the Father, Jesus in effect tells him, “Look, Philip, old boy, the Father and I are one. When you see Me, you see Him.” In other words, if Christ instituted the Church to prolong His saving presence in the world, does it not follow that in seeing and hearing her, one necessarily sees and hears Christ? 

So, why do they refuse to listen to her voice? Are their own voices so compelling that the rest of us are expected to listen, heeding advice which overturns two-thousand years of Catholic Christianity? Are the witness of countless saints and scholars, popes and martyrs, to count for nothing? The authority, no less, of Christ Himself, who made provision for none of the changes being proposed today? 

Alas, they know nothing of the Church at all, her mystery eludes them entirely. They really are unserious people. Not even a line from Henri de Lubac will move them. But I shall quote him anyway because he gets the juices flowing for those of us who not only love the Church but feel the need, especially now, to defend her.   

“The richness of the thing is unique,” he tells us in a particularly beautiful and luminous passage from The Splendor of the Church, his masterpiece, which was first published back in 1953 but has since gone through multiple editions. He continues:  

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nothing comparable has ever been thought up by men, let alone realized…. And this richness is marvelously multiform. If we wanted to explore every aspect of it there would be no end to the business. But let us look for a moment at the whole great panorama of the twenty centuries. It begins in the wounded side of Christ on Calvary, goes through the “tempering” of the Pentecostal fire and comes onward like a burning flood to pass through each of us in turn, so that fresh living water springs up in us and new flames are lit. By virtue of the divine power received from her Founder, the Church is an institution which endures; but even more than an institution, she is a life that is passed on. She sets the seal of unity on all the children of whom she gathers together.  

She will certainly survive the insanity now engulfing her. And so, too, her members, however beleaguered. 

[Photo: Bishop Georg Bätzing (credit: Tobias Steiger)]

• Regis MartinRegis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Martin is the author of a number of books, including Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God(2012) and The Beggar’s Banquet (Emmaus Road). His most recent book, published by Scepter, is called Looking for Lazarus: A Preview of the Resurrection. 

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The Conservative Heresy

‘Religious right’ is an oxymoron.

MICHAEL WARREN DAVISNOV 25

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Just a few years before his death, the great Roger Scruton gave a fascinating interview that (I think) gets to the heart of the whole conservative project.  Sir Roger says that,

In the world in which we are now, where it’s so difficult to find a transcendental source for moral values—given the skepticism about religion and so on—we have to look for other sources.  And it’s been very much part of the consciousness of Western civilization since the Enlightenment that there are other sources.  One must open one’s eyes to nature and to the human world.

That, I think, is the essence of Anglo-American conservatism.  It’s an attempt to defend “traditional values” without relying on traditional metaphysical systems. And, of course, those values are predominantly Christian.  There are pagan and Jewish elements, but these are filtered through Christianity.  So, conservatism is really an attempt to defend Christian values without relying on Christian metaphysics. 

And it doesn’t work. Conservatism doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for two reasons.

First of all, you can’t make Christians without the Church (i.e., the Body of Christ).  That’s like trying to grow apples without an apple tree.  You can try, of course.  But the result—this new, hydroponic strain of “cultural Christians”—leaves a whole lot to be desired.  They’re sour and mealy and lack essential nutrients.

Secondly, you end up sidelining thinkers, activists, and voters who are too “Jesusy”. 

Scruton put it very well.  Conservatism isn’t just about defending traditional values. It’s about (A) defending traditional values given (B) the difficulty of finding transcendental sources for values and (C) a prevailing intellectual culture of religious skepticism.

From the conservative’s perspective, (B) and (C) actually make the Church a liability in the pursuit of (A).  You can’t have a rational discussion about the virtue of pietas or the nature of commonwealth when the vicar keeps butting in about his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  It’s unseemly.

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There’s a third, even more vital reason why conservatism failed: because religious conclusions can’t be defended from secular premises.  If one agrees to argue only from Enlightenment sources (nature, reason, etc.), Christian values are indefensible.

No Christian—Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox—should be surprised by that statement.  This is what the Church has always taught, and what the faithful have always believed.  While God reveals Himself through natural law, He reveals a great deal more through divine revelation.  Christianity doesn’t make sense without both reason and supernatural faith. 

The trouble is that conservatives reject supernatural faith as a first principle.  They may argue for an “enduring moral order”, as Russell Kirk did.  But they’re not usually talking about the grace and truth of Jesus Christ (John 1:17).  By and large, they mean something more like “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” to use Thomas Jefferson’s phrase.

And the reason we need revelation as well as natural law is because nature, like Man, is fallen.  Every sin that human beings commit has some mirror in the animal kingdom.  Many animals copulate with members of their own sex, or kill their own young, etc.  That’s why these evils were common even among highly civilized pagans like the Greeks and Romans. 

Don’t get me wrong.  There are plenty of good arguments against all these vices from natural law.  The trouble is that, without divine revelation, those arguments don’t “take.”  You need both faith and reason.  We have neither.

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It’s true that conservatism, as a habit of resisting change, has proved useful to Christians.  For instance, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke makes a passionate case for the Church of England:

The consecration of the state, by a state religious establishment, is necessary also to operate with an wholesome awe upon free citizens; because, in order to secure their freedom, they must enjoy some determinate portion of power.  To them therefore a religion connected with the state, and with their duty towards it, becomes even more necessary than in such societies, where the people by the terms of their subjection are confined to private sentiments, and the management of their own family concerns.  All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society.

That’s a beautiful line, and true. Yet Burke’s case for the Church of England has nothing to do with Anglicanism.  It has nothing to do with Christianity, for that matter.  And if the C. of E. lost its ability to exercise that “wholesome awe” upon the English people, it would no longer serve any purpose at all—at least, not in Burke’s view.

Of course, that’s exactly what has happened.  The idea that anyone might be awed by the C. of E. today—wholesomely or otherwise—is laughable.  

In the twenty-first century, our case for the Church should be the same as it was in the first: it is the Body of Christ, without which there is no salvation. Instead, Burke’s argument for the Church in 1790 becomes an argument against the Church in 2022.

Speaking of Scruton, he offers a new defense the C. of E. in his 2013 book Our Church.  Sir Roger argues that religion is necessary because “religious beliefs shape the allegiance and coherence of a community”:

Religious experience is a specific way of encountering and solving the problem of membership, and one that engages another and deeper aspect of the human psyche, which is the recognition of the sacred and the associated fear of profanation.

He goes on:

Religion expresses a profound and species-wide longing for purity, a longing to be “cleansed” of the many and minute transgressions that are the price we pay for consciousness.  This idea—conveyed to Jews, Christians, and Muslims by the story of the Fall—is not an arbitrary addition to the store of religious dogma.  It is the heart of religion in all its forms and an inescapable part of the human condition.

And because the C. of E. is England’s “national church” (Scruton argues), it is the most suitable nexus for these cleansing rituals.

Well, all right. But net notice that Scruton’s argument is just a softer, more modest version of Burke’s.  It still has nothing to do with Anglicanism, or Christianity, or even God. 

Carl Jung said that Christians didn’t need therapists because we have pastors. Sir Roger seems to say that atheists don’t need pastors because they have therapists. What is church to Scruton except a big group therapy session? He doesn’t say.

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These are extremally English examples, but American conservatives have the same exact problem.  They praise churches for passing on good values, strengthening communities, providing for the needy, etc. And that praise is well deserved! But these conservatives are still justifying the Church by its social utility. That doesn’t work in the long run, for three reasons.

First of all, Christianity isn’t supposed to be socially useful. Time and again, Jesus warns His followers that they will be persecuted by lawful authorities (Mt 5:10-12), that His teachings will cause social unrest (Mt 10:34-36), and that families will turn against one another for His sake (Mt 10:21). 

Secondly, very few people will perform religious rituals unless they believe in the efficacy of those rituals. “Social utility” is not enough. Hardly anyone goes to confession with a Catholic priest just because he want to get something off his chest. That happens in the movies, but not in real life. (In real life, most Catholics don’t even go to confession with a Catholic priest.) 

Thirdly, and most importantly, conservatives are training folks to think in terms that are antithetical to Christianity.

Our Faith is not remotely concerned about helping us to flourish in this world. On the contrary. If you take Jesus at His word, the ordinary Christian’s life is pretty grim. We accept suffering in this life, though, in exchange for the pearl of great price: an eternity spent in blissful contemplation of the Blessed Trinity.

That is what Christianity is. That is the Church’s self-identity. It gets souls to Heaven. Any good it does in this world—and it does a great deal of good!—is incidental. To focus on that worldly good, as conservatives do, is to implicitly reinforce secularism’s imperative (to help men to flourish in this life) and reject Christianity’s (to help men flourish in the next).

C. S. Lewis was right. While the Christian life ends in unspeakable comfort, it begins with dismay. So, the man who comes to the Church seeking only to flourish in this life will realize the Church doesn’t share his priorities. 

Two paths then open up to him. Either he can walk the hard road of the Saints, or he can look for a quick jolly at the sleezy bar down the road. But he can’t hang around just for the stained glass, or the old-timey hymns, or even the “traditional values.” Someday, he’ll get restless. He’ll move on. Whether he takes the high road or the low road… well, that’s up to him.

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Anyway. Strictly speaking, “religious right” is an oxymoron.  “Christian conservative” is a contradiction in terms, because conservatives actively discourage ordinary folks from prioritizing supernatural faith and the afterlife. 

Whether or not they mean to is irrelevant. The point is, they do. They train Christians to think in “this-worldly” terms, the way irreligious folks do. Little wonder if those Christians come to think irreligious thoughts.

To be clear, I know that Christians will find ourselves “on the Right” far more often than we do “on the Left.” I’m not trying to make Christianity out to be a kind of smug centrism. We’ll leave that to the Solidarity Party. 

My point is that notions like Left vs. Right and liberal vs. conservative shouldn’t color our judgment one way or the other. That’s City-of-Man talk. We belong to another country.

This is why conservatism has failed, and continues to fail, and will go on failing. Conservatives think that life better in and around the Christian Church. And they’re right! What they can’t seem to grasp is that it’s only by losing our lives—for Christ’s sake—that we find them. 

Here, too, Lewis put it best: “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

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“Yesterday I received the following email from a fellow Bureau [FBI] retiree… ‘I believe that the Republican/GOP establishment has decided on DeSantis as a means of protecting the elite in DC'”

November 24, 2022

Former FBI agent Mark Mauck recieved an email that “expressed views regarding the Bureau [that] are fairly typical for something like a majority of retired agents—nostalgia for what the Bureau once was, or seemed to be, and fear for the future”:

Mark:

     First, thank you for your ongoing insightful commentary.  Your thoughts have significant value and I appreciate your careful analysis.  

     Second, as I mentioned when I first emailed you, the Bureau continues to descend into greater depths of politicization.  I was talking with several other retired agents I worked with and the first question that comes up is whether the Bureau can recover from all of this?  What is more telling is the second or follow on question, which is should the Bureau recover?  I think the answer to the first question would necessitate an immediate and complete overhaul and essentially the dismissal of everyone above the GS14 level, with significant oversight including real, honest to God prosecutions and jail time where former agents actually turn big rocks into little rocks.  This of course says nothing about the remainder of the intelligence community.  I am not sure it can be accomplished.  I am still undecided about the answer to the second question.  That said, I believe that all of the other Republican “also rans” such as DeSantis are woefully unprepared to attack this problem.  I don’t think they have a clue to the depths of corruption that they face, nor do they fully comprehend that this is a struggle for the very nature of our Republic. I believe that the Republican/GOP establishment has decided on DeSantis as a means of protecting the elite in DC.

     Third, as I previously mentioned, I volunteer in local conservative politics in [Red State].  I can tell you that from my neck of the woods, there is a civil war going on in the GOP and it will likely manifest itself in the Trump nomination process.  The folks who are conservative who have faithfully voted R because they have been cajoled by the Republican elite, are pretty much fed up with the GOP both at the national level and state level.  I suspect that this will manifest itself in large numbers of traditional Republican voters not voting in 2024 if Trump isn’t on the ticket and either the destruction of the GOP as we know (See Senator Josh Hawley’s comments about the death of the old GOP) and rebirth of a new party out of the ashes of the old.  If the GOP elite are successful at remaining in control of the party, you will see a significant defection among the grassroots faithful.  Folks are actively questioning just exactly what the GOP does for them in various issues [at the state level] and they are finding that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

     Thanks for your attention to all of this.  I wish you and your family a fabulous Thanksgiving.  I am now going back to prepping our meal for tomorrow.  Take care,

                    [Signed] [https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=473679&post_id=86597996&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email]

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

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

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

Francis Notes:

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

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”

(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”

[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

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

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

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

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

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

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

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

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

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

Election Notes: 

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

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

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

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:

http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

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

http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 

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

Pray an Our Father now for America.

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