$10 Gasoline and the Holy Mass

Let’s do a thought experiment–totally hypothetical, of course. It could never happen. But let’s have some fun with it anyway:

Let’s say a relatively small group of people who hate God and who have lots of money and influence took over the policy direction of major national governments, or at least wielded incredible influence in them. Let’s also suppose this group assumed control of transnational quasi-governments and regional quasi-governments. No, I know, crazy. But let’s continue.

Let’s say they hated God a whole lot, and didn’t like people who loved Him. Let’s say these viewse were considered odious by normal people, so their ability to control things didn’t come about right away, it had to be stealthily and patiently done. Let’s suppose they placed their trusted people, via money, influence, blackmail and power, into all sorts of places over a long period of time. Their people were slowly, but steadily and increasingly, placed into local governments, universities, large corporations. Let’s say further that the biggest obstacles to their agenda are/were, in order: the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church; sovereign nation-states, principally a non-communist United States and a non-communist Russia; and a market economy where free people made free decisions with their own physical currency based on their own efforts and God-given talents.

Let’s go really crazy and suppose that over a loooooong time, like 60, 70, or 100 years, they succeeded in finally infiltrating and controlling all of these institutions, including the earthly administration even of the Holy Church–even to the point of being on the cusp of ending dissent through constant surveillance and their control of digital currency.

Would that kind of power make possible the weaponization of a manipulated version of the common cold? No, crazy! People wouldn’t stand for it! What if they said people couldn’t worship God in churches, including the true worship of God at Holy Mass, because of a manipulated version of the common cold? No way! The pope and bishops would tell them to stick it. Priests would refuse en masse to go along. And even if they were to go along, the people would revolt. Right? And in the temporal world, suppose they told people if they could or couldn’t work, or could or couldn’t leave their homes, and that they had to wear muzzles, and further that they must inject their bodies with unknown biological stews that reprogram their DNA and further were made by the diabolical artifice of killing babies. No one would stand for any of this! Stop putting us on!

Okay, I know. But work with me here. It’s just a thought experiment.

Assume all of the above did work, and easily so. Would toying with and controlling 99% of the world population be enough for these people? Surely they’d stop then, yes?

Well let’s assume the crazy possibility that this immense power grab didn’t satisfy them– instead, it encouraged them.

So, let’s further assume that to increase human misery to the maximum extent possible and to encourage the despair that leads to the worship of their master, the true worship of God must be stopped. The Mass must cease, people must hate each other and rat out any people who put God before their lies Right?

But wait– in my hypothetical, they already have functional control of the Church, and their people will cancel Masses whenever requested, right? Yes, but not ALL Masses. All must stop. God must not be worshiped. So what is left, and what can be done?

Let’s assume that the remaining worshipers of God are reduced to a very small group of people, worldwide, and that they attend relatively few Churches. By relatively few, I mean almost enough– almost– to be able to shut them all down through control, surveillance and treachery. But not quite yet. In addition to continuing the measures above, what to do?

If the common cold can be manipulated into being believed to be worse than bubonic plague, then people must also believe that the earth is angry with them because of the changeableness of the weather! Stop– they wouldn’t fall for such nonsense, I know, but let’s pretend they do. Let’s say they give it a really scary name and tell people they must sacrifice their happiness, freedom, rights and their duty to God to stop this scarily-named thing. Like they did with the common cold, they declare it an emergency, a crisis? So their pawns in the institutions reject cheap and plentiful energy and replace it with substandard and expensive energy? Let’s say that the energy that runs automobiles must be shipped from places far away from where these God-worshipers live– even though they possess it in abundance in their own countries. Instead, it comes from far away, in places consistently destabilized economically and politically by this diabolical group. Yes, yes, crazy, why would people stand for it?

Then assume that a cargo ship “accidentally” “gets stuck” in the Suez canal. That plentiful energy would likely now become waaaay more expensive to get to people whose economies have been decimated for a year and whose very jobs may be gone due to a girlish panic over a seasonal cold. Lots of these God-worshipers might be destitute, or saved from destitution only by dependence on a government controlled by those who hate God and want His worship ended.

Hey Catholics with your favorite, safe-haven, non-sacrilegious Mass centers? How close do you live to them? Are you ready to drive an hour to Mass on $10/gallon gas? And for those who will, by the grace of God, the numbers will be smaller, both in places and people. They will be even more easily susceptible to the next, bigger lie and by ever more efficient surveillance and treachery. In a period of time, sooner or later, the Masses go. Priests get arrested. Faithful get arrested– all of these for endangering public health, encouraging political and religious extremism, and for encouraging activities that will destroy the planet. In our hypothetical, this ginned-up fear of the weather to make travel prohibitively expensive is merely step 29 of 33 on the way to the total cessation of the Holy Sacrifice. In our hypothetical, it comes at breakneckincreasing speed with nothing to stop it. And it sure seems in our hypothetical that steps 11-28 have come in the last year alone, yes? So what happens next?

Nah, forget it. None of this could happen.

But if it did, I would hypothetically say that our only weapons would be the Holy Rosary and the Sign left by Mary’s Son. I would pray to Our Lady to aid us. I would pray for Hope, real Hope, because, you see, the victory is not hypothetical.

Dignare me, laudare te, Virgo sacrata. Da mihi virtutem contra hostes tuos.

Perfect Charity

Fear is not in charity: but perfect charity casteth out fear, because fear hath pain. And he that feareth, is not perfected in charity. 1 St. John 4:18

You Would Think, but This Was Written before the Current Administration in Rome

We think that a pint of wine a day is sufficient for any one.

—Rule of Saint Benedict

Feast of St. Benedict

Though for most, falling as it does on Passion Sunday, the feast of the father of Western monasticism is an uncelebrated memorial, for the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest it is celebrated on March 22 as a first class feast.

Three years ago, my wife and I were privileged to celebrate our patronal feast at the Institute’s motherhouse and seminary in Gricigliano, Italy.

Thankful for that and for all other graces granted by Our loving Father, I wish all of you, particularly those members of the Institute who read this, a blessed Feast day tomorrow.

St. Benedict of Nursia, pray for us!

Barbarism

Incisive and timely. Everything you need to know in fifty seconds.

The Suppression of Private Masses in St. Peter’s Basilica is Unlawful

One would assume Bergoglio ordered it. Wait, that might be redundant. But, of course, like everything that communists and other modernists do, the act is cloaked in a mist of plausible deniability, to provide cover should anyone push back. The letter was not signed by Bergoglio, but consists of an unsigned directive from the Office of the Vatican Secretary of State. Not even signed by him, though it is reasonable to wonder what liturgical authority he has over the celebration of Masses in St. Peter’s Basilica. My working theory is that he has as much as I do. The question no one will answer is whether he has as much as the current occupant of the Casa Santa Marta, and whether his power is universal and immediate, or whether he, too, has the same authority as I do. But I digress. In Rome, in Washington, in Brussels, in Beijing– power is the rule of the day.

Fr. Hunwicke posted on this shocking turn of events. Well, perhaps it is shocking only for those five Catholics left in the world who are still Catholic and don’t know that the Church lives under active tyranny. No private Masses, only “concelebrations”.

I recall one of my favorite early memories after my “tradversion”. Perhaps “reversion to the Faith” may be a better way to say it. At my local Church, a conference of clergy was taking place that week. As I entered the Church for morning Mass, I saw a glorious sight. At several of our side altars, of which thank God we have many, priests were offering their private Masses. There they were, offering up that one and eternal Sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins, pleading the Blood of Christ, appeasing the Father. I could easily understand the multitude of angels and saints gathered in that space. It made me weep with joy. Such a miracle, taking place right before my eyes. Not only could I see the multiplicity of each Mass in space, but the mind could see by easy extrapolation the Mass through the ages, all the way to Calvary.

It was a breakthrough moment; the ancient Mass is not designed to emphasize the didactic perhaps, but it teaches by its very existence. That moment was more didactic that a year’s worth of sermons on the timelessness and universality of the Mass. A lifetime of catechism in that little weekday Mass setting.

So, of course, Bergoglio must suppress it.

Fr. quotes an Anglican scholar, and even he knows the truth about the timelessness and corporate nature of the many– yet just one– Sacrifice(s) of the Mass taking place all over the world. But for how much longer?:

[If] you want to make ‘anybody understand wherein the corporateness of the mass really consists’ the best thing you can do is to take him into a church with lots of simultaneous private masses going on, and tell him that “the different priests saying their different masses at their different altars are doing not different things but the same thing, that they are all taking part in the one eternal Liturgy whose celebrant is Christ and that their priesthood is only a participation in his … the multiplication of masses emphasises the real unity of the mass and the true nature of the Church’s corporate character as nothing else can … what makes the mass one and corporate is not the fact that a lot of people are together at the same service, but the fact that it is the act of Christ in his body (corpus) the Church … ‘Look at those men at their various altars all around the church, each of them apparently muttering away on his own and having nothing to do with the others. In fact, they are all of them doing the same thing – the same essentially, the same numerically – not just a lot of different things of the same kind, but the very same identical thing; each of them is taking his part as a priest in the one redemptive act which Christ, who died for our sins and rose again for our justification, perpetuates in the Church which is his Body through the sacrament of his body and blood’.

Tres Años

Para abrazos

el apóstol

Three Years Ago

Ferrol, Spain, on the North Atlantic Coast— the beginning of the Camino Inglés

Today, three years ago, I started my only Camino de Santiago to date, in an all too brief period on the way to visit our son in Venice. I pray to get back, but am sanguine as to the possibilities. Even that one Camino Ingles changed my life forever. To join an 800+ year company of peregrinos is something that makes a difference in a fundamental way. There isn’t a day that goes by without my reflecting on being a pilgrim and this current state of pilgrimage-wherever I happen to be.

To anyone reading this, I cannot urge you strongly enough to make pilgrimage. Buen Camino!

“Why are parents desperate to return their precious offspring to the degenerate hands of the public-school system?”

Leaving aside catechetical and liturgical considerations, the degradation of what passes as our system of education is the next biggest reason for the wholesale rejection of Western Civilization. The political response to the coronavirus “pandemic” has proven that this educational system is so death-producing that it must be completely abandoned and replaced.

The current reputed pandemic and the political response thereto highlights that the real damage to children’s academic progress and social formation from “distance learning” is actually less danaging than handing children back over to the brood of vipers who seek to destroy them in the name of education.

Like the proverbial tiger-by-the-tail, the schools can’t be trusted as they are and cannot easily be reformed. The political apparatchiks in charge reject the very civilization that gave them their power. They seek power only, and our children are merely means to an end.

This article from The American Thinker asks the obvious question quoted in the title to this post. Worth a read— one must see the depth of the problem before solutions can be found.

Ask yourself why even the most tyrannical of politicians who love to scare everyone into slavery are willing to encourage, allow, or at least consider reopening public schools. Is it because getting children back to school gets them out of the home and prevents the dangerous possibility that parents’ values will take precedence over theirs? That people might begin to actually think for themselves?

And yet it must be pointed out that the criticisms of public education apply almost equally to what is called Catholic education.

Homeschooling works best to inculcate parents’ values. But the commitment and skill-set needed aren’t universally possessed. This is why schools began in the first place. Those parents who delegate their responsibility to educate their children must take steps to ensure that the education they’ve contracted for is sound. The Church that founded a system to help parents do this must also take seriously her duty as mater et magistra.

Until Catholics and the Church hierarchy realize that Catholic cult and culture are the necessary underpinnings of real academic and social formation, the system is dead. And yet the hierarchy refuses to ensure the Catholicity of Catholic schools. And the faithful refuse to demand and reinforce the Catholicity of Catholic schools. Hence, in the post-“pandemic” environment, the Catholic system of education, which ought to lead the way in vivifying civilization, instead clings to its secular counterpart as it destroys all.

Face it: Homeschooling is currently the best way to limit the damage of modern maleducation. But a vibrant Catholic school system is the only way to restore real civilization. It has to start now. What we have now is neither Catholic, nor an education. It is a system of slaves, producing slaves for perpetual slavery.