I believe that Russia will be the scourge of us, and then, after its conversion, will be the tool used by Our Lady to save us from the reign of evil under which we now suffer.
Read in full the speech Mary Ann posted over at Les Femmes the Truth blog. Read it with an eye to Fatima. Read it in light of the vision which the Third Secret, still unreleased, explains. Read it in light of the Bishop in White whom the children took to be the pope, and in light of the Holy Father walking through the half-ruined city of Rome on the way to his execution.
Pray that the Holy Father will at long last consecrate Russia to Mary’s Immaculate Heart as she requested.
Please, Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us and deliver us!
[57] And it came to pass, as they walked in the way, that a certain man said to him: I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. [58] Jesus said to him: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. [59] But he said to another: Follow me. And he said: Lord, suffer me first to go, and to bury my father. [60] And Jesus said to him: Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou, and preach the kingdom of God.
[61] And another said: I will follow thee, Lord; but let me first take my leave of them that are at my house. [62] Jesus said to him: No man putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.
Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, one of my favorite Marian Feasts. In Spain, Our Lady is referred to as “Virgen de la Merced” (Virgin of Mercy), or simply as “La Merced” (the Mercy, or, Mercy). She is venerated under this title in Spain and the Spanish-speaking countries of the New World.
Under this title she is Patroness of the Mercedarian order. This order, begun in Barcelona by St. Peter Nolasco in 1218, was founded with an eye towards mercy– real mercy– to the poor Christians captived by the Mohammedans. The full title of the order in English is the “Royal and Military Order of Our Lady of Mercy of the Redemption of the Captives”. Hence the traditional title of today’s feast, Our Lady of Ransom. They established a church that was later designated a papal basilica in Barcelona, Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes (You’ve no doubt seen the Mary’s Fiat memes. Think about Our Lady’s much nicer car when you’re touring around in a Mercedes). There is a good page on the history of the order here.
Perhaps nowhere has she been venerated more than in Barcelona. “La Merced” in the local language is rendered “La Mercè”. She is Patroness of the city, and each year, on her feast day of September 24, the city holds a magnificent festival to celebrate. They celebrate as only Spaniards do, with intensity, passion and exuberance. There is a festival with its timeless traditions and fireworks. Lots of fireworks. The image at the top of this post is the city’s yearly poster for the event from 1957. Note the obvious image of Our Lord and Lady, the cross, the Sagrada Familia in the background, and the Spanish flags. Say what you will about El Caudillo, but the country was Catholic. Here is another poster from that era:
When my family first visited Barcelona in 1998, this fiesta (about which we knew nothing and thus for which were totally unprepared) was a revelation. It was so lively, and combined Catholic Marian veneration with city patriotism. On my old, obliterated blogger site, I posted some photos, but here are some of the more interesting customs, such as castellers:
Back in 1998, it was still an obviously Catholic country with Catholic sensibility. Of course as we all know, the rot was well on its way to destroying everything, but when we went out in the evenings, churches were open, with people going to confession and sizeable congregations praying the Rosary together. Church bells rang throughout the day. You could go to one of many stores that sold religious articles (and nationalist memorabilia if you were so inclined). It just felt Catholic, in Madrid most of all, but everywhere you went.
By 2002 when we returned, that feeling was palpably passing away. It wasn’t like you couldn’t walk into a Church, but the sizeable congregations weren’t there and the religious goods stores we remembered were closed. It didn’t feel anti-Catholic, but rather that it just didn’t matter in day-to-day life. Admittedly, these memories are not the basis for a logical argument, they are just what two tourists remember.
And as of our last trip to Barcelona in 2014, considering the political situation there, the place didn’t feel Spanish (even allowing for the regional Catalonian version thereof), let alone Catholic. There was some barely measurable menace or hostility in the air, which at the time I chalked up to the independence-from-Spain push, but now I recognize as the miasma of this current, demonic, anti-God hellscape in which we find ourselves. It is easier to recognize from our spot in the U.S., because of the lag time, growing ever shorter, between the European rush to suicide and our unthinking amble off that particular cliff.
Our last experience of Spain, on the Camino de Santiago in 2018, confirmed the analysis for us. Even while walking through some of the most still-religious parts of Spain–on THE CAMINO for crying out loud, an overtly religious activity– the historical Camino Churches were all LOCKED, unless Mass happened to be going on at the time. All of them were, until we reached the Cathedral itself. I keep wanting to write a post entitled, “The Camino of the Closed Doors”. Nearly five years later, I suppose I never will.
So, you may wonder, how did we get from then to now? How did it collapse so spectacularly in one generation? Actually, by now we know the answer all too well. The Mass was attacked, and the Church lost her most beautiful expression and her most powerful guardian. A certain council brought forth the regime of error and the era of libertines. But to give you sort of visual travelogue of the demise of the West, let’s look at some posters. Recall the two beautiful, and beautifully faith-filled posters for La Merced, above.
Now let’s go forward some years. First, from 1992, the year of the Olympics in Barcelona, popularly thought of as Barcelona’s “coming of age” as a city in the modern world:
Pretty decent, as a poster, though secular. Fireworks. Columbus, not yet cancelled. Palm trees. The Spanish “Merced” now becomes the Catalan “Mercè”. Now on to the poster for 1998, the year I first visited the city:
Weak sauce, that. And barely had we cleared the area, than in 1999 this abomination was chosen:
Wow, there was zero warning of the Mohammedan re-invasion of Europe, was there? Prominent Arabic-style lettering and the crescent moon. I see churches but no crosses. Those are offensive, you know. Could it get worse? Oh, you know it can. Here is 2018, the year of our Camino:
Not only disregarding of the faith, but hostile to it. Lots of rainbow. Lots of girl power. Is there a straight man depicted in it? Seemingly no. Let’s keep going, to 2020:
Nothing says, “Come on out and celebrate!” like a dystopian poster of diabolically-masked girl (?) contemplating a cricket. Am I right? It is as though she’s thinking, “If I take off this mask I’m just going to have to eat this bug.” This poster is the perfect chronicle of the death of both cult and culture. And this isn’t the end. I’ll give you one more, the poster from this year. I think it perfectly portrays the ersatz globo-farcical anti-culture our betters have planned for us:
This, to me, is perfect for where we are now. Total communism. The name of the event is barely noticeable. It is not at all beautiful. The women with their ambiguously-sexed child are creepy as hell. There is a glimpse of the modern finish to La Sagrada Familia, but in the bottom left– is that a guard tower in our prison camp? And best of all, the laughable virtue signaling for sexual perversion and the glorious Ukrainian cause in the bottom right. Just what is this fiesta about?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is where we are. The great thing about traveling is that since you don’t live in the places where you travel, you get snapshots of change that help avoid incremental creep. I submit to you that these posters and our anecdotal travel experiences verify what we know from our faith and our intellects– that we as the civilization following Christendom have lost our way, and nearly completely.
Today we are as much captives as our poor ancestors were in Spain at the founding of the Mercedarian order. More so, because they were physically captived but they knew their faith was true. How many of us today believe in the Catholic Faith? How many of us are left to call upon La Virgen de la Merced? She is our Lady of Ransom, and we NEED RANSOMING.
She can ransom us. She will do it, if we heed her call to penance and the Rosary. She promised it. Today, on this beautiful feast of hers, beg her again and again– Our Lady of Mercy, ransom us from the slavery of sin and the reign of antichrist! She said it before: only she can save us. Lady of Mercy, save us!
My thanks to Frank Walker for highlighting this article from Dr. Naomi Wolf, who has been doing yeoman’s work to expose the death cult these days. Here is an excerpt:
The Pfizer documents reveal monstrous damage to menstruation, harm to the testes and epididymis, harms to the penis, horrible harm to the ova and ovaries, mechanisms for compromising the placenta, contamination of amniotic fluid, and damage to newborns. They reveal that four women’s breast milk turned blue-green. They reveal injuries to at least one newborn that extend to death (or murder) from ingesting tainted breast milk. They reveal horrific levels of miscarriages. They reveal that Pfizer defined “exposure” to the vaccine as including sexual intercourse, especially at conception. They reveal a weird focus on mammalian sexual and reproductive issues.
Soon humanity will realize that the worst thing ever to happen to it, has taken place.
Soon humanity will realize that the miscarriages and the drops in birth rate worldwide documented by Igor Chudov; the drop in life expectancy; the neonatal deaths; the ruination of eggs and ovaries; were done to them with knowledge aforethought, and that, in many cases relating to fertility, the means for healing the bodies of women is not clear.
The novel Children of Men, by P.D. James, seems prescient. If you haven’t read it, you should. The movie based on this novel is to be ignored. As we lose population, tyranny will advance with greater rapidity.
The oily, smarmy technospeak of the Cupich’s spokesman in responding to press inquiries about his crushing of the Mass and the ICRSP in Chicago is infuriating to read. Here is an excerpt from the story at the Chicago Sun-Times:
____________
[A representative of the Shrine restoration effort] said the ban came from the archdiocese under a directive issued early this year to bring parishes and shrines in line with a papal decree aimed at limiting Mass being celebrated in Latin. Christ the King Church only celebrates Mass in Latin.
But a representative of the archdiocese disputed Blackman, saying the decision to stop the Masses was made by the church.
“They chose to discontinue the Masses and sent the archdiocese a letter [on July 31] stating that they would stop offering Mass and other sacraments at the Shrine,” said Susan Thomas, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese. “They were not denied. We did not ban them. They chose to discontinue altogether.”
“The Shrine had the option to continue Latin Mass under the guidelines and decided not to,” Thomas added. “It is a false statement that we have a citywide Latin Mass ban. That’s simply untrue. Latin Mass is offered in the archdiocese.”
_______________
To draw an analogy, if Cardinal Cupich and his spokesman had been government officials they would have denied causing the deaths of people they forced to take the gene serum by responding, “That is a false statement. They voluntarily chose to get the vaccine. They simply could’ve allowed us to take away their jobs and their children and their ability to travel and their ability to buy food or go anywhere or have a life or go to church and worship or any of the other things to make human life worthwhile. There are many people in our diocese who did not actually die.”
The devil is very pleased with those advancing his agenda in Chicago.
At that time, Jesus said to His disciples: Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. By their fruits you will know them. Do men gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore, by their fruits you will know them. Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father in heaven shall enter the kingdom of heaven.
Secret
O God, You Who have given us in one perfect sacrifice the fulfillment of the various sacrifices made under the Old Law, accept these sacrificial gifts offered You by Your devoted servants, and make them holy as You did the gifts of Abel, so that what each one of us has offered in praise of Your majesty may profit for the salvation of all.
Through Jesus Christ, thy Son our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end.
I cannot resist quoting Bob Dylan. The title above is from his anthemic song about the salvific action of Christ, Pay in Blood. Listen to it now. I’ll wait.
But this post, while reminding me of the above line, isn’t about Bob at all. It’s about “This is how.” It’s about the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest (ICRSS). I’ll explain.
In a post over at Gloria TV about the satanic attacks of the Archbishop of Chicago against one of the finest Catholic priestly societies in the Church today, a post that relates how the ICRSS did not sign a letter that contains falsehoods and would neuter the entire Institute, not to mention would abandon the timeless Mass for the mess of pottage that is the n.o., one comment caught my eye:
“This is a big test for ICKSP. I’m curious to see how they will handle this.”
Well, This Is How. They didn’t sign the letter.
They now have incurred the petty wrath of a mid-manger servant of a truly satanic agenda. The “test” isn’t “how will the Institute get back at the Cardinal?” No. The test is “will the Institute betray its charism and abandon the timeless Mass?” And they have not.
The very interesting question of what happens next is not the same as how will the Institute handle the test. To date, they have passed it. They signed no letter of betrayal. They didn’t abandon Our Lord.
Whatever prudential decisions they make to care for the many souls attached to them may or may not be what internet Catholics, desperate for any check on the agenda of evil, would like to see in the heat of the moment. Count me among these people much of the time.
But.
That isn’t the test. The test is whether the ICRSS will remain true to Christ, His Mass, and their own charism.
So far so good.
They do not seek confrontation, but it is clear that there are lines that will not be crossed. They are doing well in a tough spot, and have an worldwide flock to consider. They deserve our prayers and support.
I have seen nothing yet to shake my confidence in them. Veritatem facientes in caritate.
We are back in the ghetto of post-1969 suppression of our rights as Catholics. Read Quo Primum. Rest assured you have a right to the traditional Mass. The Real Mass. And then pray, resist, be at peace, ask Our Lady to act. Ask Our Lord to let her heart triumph, and that the true pope will be known, recognized, and reign gloriously.
The servants of satan in the hierarchy will fall. Rest assured. No matter what persecution comes, stay on the side of Christ and His Holy Mother.
The execrable move of the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago to “shut down” (in the words of Fr. Z) the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest in that Archdiocese merits a vigorous response. I know what I would do. What the Institute will do I can only guess.
Pray for its Superiors and the faithful that Cupich wants to spiritually slaughter. Petty, vindictive move by a petty, vindictive hireling of the worst order.
But Tim, isn’t the Institute a Society of Apostolic Right? Doesn’t its charter allow exclusive recourse to the timeless Mass? How can Cupich do this? Doesn’t the Pope have to approve it? Well, certainly the Pope has to approve it (either legally or politically— Cupich is nothing if not mad for power over others).
Will anyone, ANYONE, do something about the question of our time? Just WHO is the pope? Because I doubt Pope Benedict is behind this.
I have no vote on the Institute response—so far, they have held the line, and deserve credit for it.
But for what it’s worth, I would carry on as usual regardless of this lawless act. Publish Mass times for August and thumb in the eye.
Over at TakiMag, a provocative and often witty site of social commentary, the “Z Man” (who would ever give themselves a third-person nickname? That’s weird.) has an excellent piece on why Conservative Inc. must learn the lesson that the “who” who decides is more important than the “process” by which things are decided. Read the whole article, but here are some highlights:
Right there is one of those mileposts that reveal just how much America has changed in the past fifty years. Abortion used to be an issue fought between white lesbians and Christian mothers. The former argued that abortion was a feminist sacrament that magically made women on par with men. The latter argued that it was just another step in stripping women of the natural respect they command in a just society. […]
Interestingly, the other side of the issue has been subdued in response to what is their one and only victory in the culture war. Many of the people who made social conservatism a force on the right have been dead for a generation. Others simply got tired of waiting and moved on to other issues. Fifty years is a long time to wait for the conservative movement to deliver on a promise.
Conservative Inc. is also struggling with this one. Their whole model is based on losing gracefully, so they are unprepared for an actual victory. Crisis counselors have been called to American Enterprise and Heritage to help the staff cope with something they were told could never happen. For professional conservatives, Dobbs is like seeing Big Foot riding a unicorn. They are questioning their sanity.
What makes this even more difficult for Conservative Inc. is the fact that Dobbs was made possible by their archnemesis, Donald Trump. In his debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump made clear that abortion would be a litmus test issue for him when it came time to select judges for the court. His matter-of-fact explanation for how he would roll back Roe was mocked at the time, but it turned out to be correct. […]
Although they probably do not see it, the Dobbs decision cuts the legs out from under the New Right just as it does Conservative Inc. Both sides of this debate claim that how things are done is what matters. In reality, it is who, not how. Who decides is what matters in the law and in social policy. If a society has the right people in charge, people with a natural attachment to society, they will make decisions in the public interest.
This is why the most unhinged opposition to Trump came from the neocons. They have always been the brains of Conservative Inc., and they correctly saw what the Trump phenomenon represented to them. Trump was not running to promote a process but on the promise that he and he alone could make the required changes. His campaign was an explicit appeal to the who rather than the how.
In the end, Dobbs will not change much about abortion in America. The states will arrive at policies that match their inclinations. In other words, the issue will quickly fold into the normal process of government. That was always the right answer, but the people promoting abortion opposed this because it made it impossible for them to impose their morality on the rest of society. Again, who versus how.
Saint Louis Catholic 