“Congratulate me, all ye that love the Lord, because when I was a little one I pleased the Most High.” Such is the invitation thou addressest to us, O Mary, in the Office chanted in thy honor; and on what feast couldst thou do so more appropriately?
When, even more little in thy humility than by thy tender age, thou didst mount, in thy sweet purity, the steps of the temple, all heaven must have owned that it was henceforth just for the Most High to take his delight in our earth. Having hitherto lived in retirement with thy blessed parents, this was thy first public act; it showed thee for a moment to the eyes of men, only to withdraw thee immediately into deeper obscurity. But, as thou wast officially offered and presented to the Lord, he himself doubtless surrounded by the princes of his court, presented thee not less solemnly to those noble spirits as their Queen. In the fullness of the new light that then burst upon them, they understood at once thy incomparable greatness, the majesty of the temple where Jehovah was receiving an homage superior to that of their nine choirs, and the august prerogative of the Old Testament to have thee for its daughter, and to perfect, by its teachings and guidance during those twelve years, the formation of the Mother of God.
Holy Church, however, declares that we can imitate thee, (Ambrose, de Virginibus, 2) O Mary, in this mystery of thy Presentation, as in all others. Deign to bless especially those privileged souls who, by the grace of their vocation, are even here below dwellers in the house of the Lord: may they be like that fruitful olive enriched by the Holy Spirit, to which St. John Damascene compares thee. (Damascene. de Fide oxthodoxa, 4) But is not every Christian, by reason of his Baptism, an indweller and a member of the Church, God’s true sanctuary, prefigured by that of Moriah? May we, through thy intercession, follow thee so closely in thy Presentation, even here in the land of shadows, that we may deserve to be presented after thee to the Most High in the temple of his glory.
In light of world events, and in light of the fact that there are two bishops out there wearing white, pre- and post- Labor Day for that matter, I repost the words of Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia in the part of the Third Secret that has been released so far:
“J.M.J.
The third part of the secret revealed at the Cova da Iria-Fatima, on 13 July 1917.
I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’. And we saw in an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it’ a Bishop dressed in White ‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father’. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
I always think of November as the start of a new year. Strange, right? I guess the reason for that feeling is that the first Sunday of Advent usually occurs in November. The total-Church remembrance of every single soul in the Church Triumphant and Suffering, as well as mentally consolidating the “holidays” as a totality, only add to the feeling.
I won’t insult you with the notion I have all- new thoughts about the beginning of the next, new, old, same, portentous year. But I wanted to collect some observations from this part of the world that come to mind just now. So in no particular order, here they are:
1. This (s)election is the last clear chance for what remains of the American republic. I don’t mean by that that I am ignorant of the fact that the elections are corrupt, and that they have been largely totally corrupt for AT LEAST the last 60 years. If you think they aren’t, wake up a bit and listen to Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, Murder Most Foul, on a continuous loop for 24 hours straight. What I mean is that until the Trump victory where, whatever you think of his complicity or independence, something CLEARLY did not go to plan for the satanist cabal that runs the world, there was an effort to keep the appearance of choice, normalcy, and legitimacy in the election game. It was getting pretty old anyway, but hey, remember voting for Tsar Nicholas II (the execrable John McCain, h/t to John Zmirak)? Or frontier Hindu Mitt Romney? Please. But something in the Trump election put a spanner in the works. It might be worth a year in Purgatory to have seen chief witch and suicide-machine Hillary so disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong. There absolutely will be massive election fraud next week. Massive. My observation that this is the last clear chance for what remains of the republic centers around this: are the powers that be going to go with the strategy of the illusion of choice and legitimacy, or, having never before been so close to total power, with a cowed, deathvaxxed, effeminate and obedient populace, will they simply not give a final damn about whether you know that they know that you know that they know they are lying to you and just grab total power for the foreseeable future. Until Our Lady acts or Our Lord comes again.
Which will it be? Unless they let the Republicans take back both Houses with clear majorities, then folks, we really are near the end of the thing. The country, that is. And it is a truism that every day brings us one day closer to the end of everything.
2. When will anyone do something about Bergoglio? There are still several good Bishops left. Some good Cardinals. How can anyone with a functioning brain + Catholic sensibility NOT see that this guy is an antipope and a destroyer. I sometimes wonder whether anyone would act even if Bergoglio live-streamed a gay blessing on two people in the very act of sodomy. Hello? Synod on synodality? Really? They’re just laughing at you. I shudder to think what is said at the sodomite frivolities held on Vatican grounds about our total lack of response to the (attempted— I know the Church will last until the end) destruction of the visible Church.
And, with respect for what they have protected from the wreckers for so many years, I do not exclude the SSPX from this lament. They are not in schism, true. They also have an irregular canonical status. There is a much greater latitude for them to act, even viewing things from a temporal perspective. Is the Francismercy they’ve gotten so great that they cannot say the way things are?
The emperor has no clothes! Cardinals, bishops, priests… do something! Our Lord is daily mocked and insulted!
3. It is so important to do everything possible to stay in or get in the state of grace. End of the world? Possibly. Fatima cataclysm? Likely. You could also die today from any number of causes. We are on the edge of societal collapse and Divine chastisement. It pays to take care of one’s soul.
4. Finally, in light of the above, pray fervently for the dead, the holy souls in Purgatory. This November, you might want very much their intercession for you in a time of judgement that may come very soon indeed.
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!
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!
As usual, I’m a bit late, but today’s saint, St. Hyacinth, has prompted me to write about the Enemy’s latest attack on the Holy Rosary.
The execrable publication The Atlantic published an absolutely sacrilegious screed against the Rosary. Frank Walker at Canon 212 first tipped me off to it by linking to a great piece at the One Mad Mom blog. My first thought was that the devil sure does hate the Rosary. The truth will out; the Truth is victorious over the Father of Lies. By this early salvo (not the first, of course) in the globalist freemasonic final push to antichrist, the enemy is compelled to tell us a very important truth: the Rosary is a weapon indeed. It is our weapon to defeat him. He doesn’t want us to use it. As Our Lady herself told us through her many apparitions, the Rosary is a most powerful weapon in the fight against satan and our protection against the loss of our own salvation. Can it be more obvious why satan hates the Rosary than to consider these words of Our Lady to Sr. Agnes at Akita?:
As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by My Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and priests.
Mary earned and earns God’s favor through her many virtues, but perhaps most of all by her perfect humility. She is the great enemy of satan, who is destroyed through pride. We must pray the Rosary every day.
But, but… Why? Why this means? I don’t “get” anything out of it. It’s dry. I get more out of this or that devotion. Well, how about this? SHE wants it. HER SON wants it. How about we imitate her humility and in gratitude for this clear sign of our salvation, pray the prayer of the Rosary? Every day, as she asked. This powerful prayer (without prejudice to God’s omnipotence) is a sign of election. How many saints have told us so?
The interplay between the need to pray, particularly the Rosary, for our salvation and predestination is a mystery about which Mundabor wrote a thought-provoking post recently. I highly recommend it.
All this leads to our saint of the day, St. Hyacinth. The title of this post are the words she said to this great Dominican saint when the Mongols attacked Kiev. Consider this:
Saint Hyacinth is known to have performed numerous miracles. The one miracle that has been most associated with him was the result of the Tartars siege of the city of Kiev. Hyacinth gained a child-like and tender devotion to the Mother of God from Saint Dominic. To her he attributed his success, and to her aid he looked for his salvation. When Hyacinth was at Kiev, the fierce Tartars sacked the town. Hyacinth was celebrating the Mass and did not know of the onslaught and danger until the Mass ended. Without waiting to unvest, he took the ciborium in his hands and was fleeing the church. It is recorded that as he passed by an statue of Mary he heard a voice say, “Hyacinth, my son, why dost thou leave me behind? Take me with thee and leave me not to mine enemies.” Although the statue was made of heavy alabaster, Hyacinth took it in his arms and carried it away along with the ciborium with the Holy Eucharist. It is for this miraculous moment that Saint Hyacinth is most often depicted. The story continues that Hyacinth and the community that accompanied him came to the river Dnieper. There he urged them to follow him across the river. He led the way, and they all walked dry shod across the waters of the deep river, which then protected them from the fury of the Tartars. Polish historians are in agreement on this marvelous fact, although some of the writers confuse it with a similar crossing of the Vistula which happened earlier. A circumstance, which is recorded in connection with this miracle, renders it all the more remarkable. It is said that the footprints of the saint remained on the water, even after he had crossed the river; and that, when the stream was calm, they could be seen for centuries afterwards.
St. Hyacinth, member of the order of St. Dominic, to whom she gave the Rosary, a Saint invoked in hopeless cases, gives us the advice he himself heard in similarly dangerous times. He urges us to hear the words of Our Lady: “My son, why dost thou leave me behind? Take me with thee and leave me not to mine enemies.”
My own road to the particular judgement fills me with dread, but almost certainly not enough dread. I came late to doing anything to try to pray the Rosary daily. I say it poorly, and I am so easily distracted. But Mary has taken pity on me and patiently cares for me, protects me, and hits me over the head as often as I need it, without tiring. I know for a fact that if it were not for her I would have no chance to make it to Heaven. And yet, here she is, inviting, imploring me to continue to pray the Rosary every day. To go back to confession. To assist at Mass and receive the Sacraments while we have them. Because in the end, the only arms which will remain for us are the Rosary and the sign left by her Son.
High caliber intellects whose work I respect are among those who dismiss the thesis that Benedict XVI remains the pope. Perhaps there is something I haven’t accounted for, but to date I haven’t found any adequate rebuttal to the specific claim that Benedict XVI did not fulfill what is required by canon law for a valid renunciation of the Papal office.
There has also arisen a rift of sorts among those who are rightly convinced Bergoglio is an anti-pope. In one camp are those who feel that Benedict XVI made a “substantial error” in his Declaratio, because he aimed to retain a portion of the Papacy yet also incorporate a successor pope to take over the practical, day to day administrative and governing functions of the universal Church.
In other words, he mistakenly thought he could bifurcate or otherwise expand the Papacy – transform it from a Divinely instituted charge given individually to St. Peter and all his individual successors to a similarly authoritative but more collegial unifying entity.
The relevant canon for this view is 188, which reads:
A resignation made out of grave fear that is inflicted unjustly or out of malice, substantial error, or simony is invalid by the law itself.
Whether or not Benedict XVI audaciously intended to introduce an unprecedented and inadmissible wrinkle into the nature of the Papacy, it may also be said that the failure to heed the distinction between resigning the office itself and ministries or activities emanating from said office constitutes an invalidating substantial error.
In another camp are those who contend that Benedict XVI did not erroneously attempt to pluralize the papacy, but rather that he specifically and intentionally did not renounce the munus because he intended to remain Pope. So why such a tack?
He did this because he felt he could no longer properly function as Pope on account of pervasive opposition from within the Church itself. He was essentially impeded from governing in accordance with his charge in the manner he saw fit. (Canon 412 delineates the criteria of an impeded See).
By stepping aside the way he did, he judged his unworthy, subversive adversaries would likely jump at the chance to seize power; their nefarious ways would eventually be exposed, thereby hastening a much-needed purification of the Church.
Talk about intrigue! I can appreciate how anyone considering this possibility for the first time might be incredulous. But this is not a movie or a novel; if only the widespread, hostile infiltration of the Church – the rot even at its highest levels – were fictional.
One shudders to ponder the depravity stacked against Benedict XVI, who explicitly mentioned his “fear of the wolves” upon first assuming the Papacy. So his maneuver may have been a purposeful act of inspiration born out of desperation.
Both of the above interpretations, sincerely held by their proponents, are products of intensive investigation; both are reasonable suppositions, plausible enough at least at first hearing that they cannot simply be dismissed.
In one sense, both explanations cannot be right because they offer conflicting analyses of Benedict XVI’s motivation for doing what he did – a highly important question that awaits an answer in due time. And yet both are correct in what matters most: whatever his motivation or intention, Benedict XVI did not renounce the Papacy in accordance with Canon Law, and therefore Bergoglio is an anti-Pope and everything he has done carries no weight whatsoever because he has never held the Papal munus.
The implications are massive going forward – and not just for Catholics. If the situation is not rectified, the next conclave (regardless of who dies first) would be invalidly constituted, so we’d have another anti-Pope, succeeded by yet additional anti-Popes – who, like Bergoglio, would not likely supply much forceful, indispensable moral and spiritual resistance to the various inhumane agendas menacing our horizon.
Though initially a bit reluctant to look into this matter, I found myself at peace with my conclusion. Sure, it is a distressing, grave situation. But it also provided an interpretive key to so many other things unfolding all around us – primarily the lockdowns. The unprecedented closure of churches. The “Pope” canceled Easter! A pope never does that.
Your lightning lighted the world; the earth quivered and trembled. – Introit, Feast of the Transfiguration
“The only way out of this is for someone in authority, which we all know at this point means Cardinal Burke – let’s stop pretending there is anyone else with the authority of the illegally deposed Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura (aka Chief Justice of the Vatican Supreme Court) – to end this Antipapacy and BREAK THE CYCLE outside of supernatural intervention.” HERE
Cardinal Burke, you were born for this, for this you came into the world. God works through men, and men are called to do God’s work. God desiring to carry out His Divine Will through men of His choosing is the very fabric of the bible, further testified through the lives of the saints. Your Eminence, this is your time, your time to be transformed into a saint, perhaps even a Doctor of the Church. It’s been nine years; you know full well there is no way Bergoglio is pope, and you know that antipopes need to be deposed in real time, by real men and women who know the truth and have the conviction to get it done. Bergoglio is openly worshipping demons, for all the world to see, and he installed a demon at St. Peter’s. What exactly is it going to take? You need not even start with any sort of declaration of moral certainty, you just need to set things in motion. Try this: “Significant irregularities have been discovered concerning the purported February 2013 resignation of Pope Benedict XVI which need to be investigated.” Trust me, legions of canonists, Latinists, theologians, and historians are waiting for this signal, and will pounce like a tiger when given the chance.
Readership, you need to get in on this. I am asking everyone to please pray one extra Rosary for Cardinal Burke, today or tomorrow, and make it the Sorrowful Mysteries, with a concentration on the fruit of the third mystery:
Saint Louis Catholic 