A blessed New Year 2016 of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to you!

This is a revised reflection for today's feast and Holy Day Obligation, the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is also the First Friday of the month of January, the month of Holy Name of Jesus.

As a good deal of transcription is necessary to complete for the next article, which will be about the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus that is celebrated on Sunday, January 3, 2016, I must beg your patience. It is just taking me longer to complete the articles, and overnight postings such as the one four days ago are something that cannot be done on a regular basis any longer. Thank you for your understanding.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

The production of articles has slowed. I regret that this is the case. However, I am doing what I can as time and strength permit.

This new article, which includes information that will be familiar to longtime readers that will help newer readers to this site, amplifies the fact that everything that a true and legitimate Successor causes to be published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis is binding on Catholics.

Ah, as the Catholic Church cannot be the source of any kind of error, ambiguity or heresy, the fact that heretical propositions have been published by the conciliar “popes” is proof that they belong to a false religion and do not hold exercise any kind of legitimate magisterial authority. (Links are provided to two important posts at Novus Ordo Watch Wire that document this fact beyond any doubt.)

Additionally, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s recent blasphemy against Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph is discussed near the end of this rather long commentary.

I will return to the subject of the Midget Naturalists and their circus in my next commentary. There is not much “new” to be said that I have not written over a thousand times before on this site. However, I will make every effort to provide an analysis worthy of your time.

A dyslexic error, writing the year 1957 instead of 1958 for the beginning of the current line of antipopes, has been corrected after a reader kindly brought this to my attention. Some of the text had to be rewritten after it went "poof," and it was approaching three o'clock in the morning when the error occurred. I am sorry.

A continued blessed Christmas to you all!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

There was a time when there were real, honest-to-goodness Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury. Let's see here, that would be from the time of Saint Augustine of Canterbury in 597 A.D. to the time of Reginald Cardinal Pole in 1558, a period of nearly a millennium. The fortieth legitimate Archbishop of Canterbury is the saint whose feast we celebrate today, Saint Thomas a Becket, who was indeed a martyr for the Church's liberties.

Saint Thomas a Becket asserted the rights of Christ the King as the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisting that clerics accused of civil crimes be tried in ecclesiastical, not civil, courts. This led him to clash with his onetime friend, King Henry II of the House of Plantagenet. Prefiguring another English king named Henry (this one, number The Eighth, from the House of Tudor), Henry II could not abide his former friend's resistance to his, Henry's attempt to assert royal power over the Church, leading him to uttering the words that would inspire three of his barons to murder the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket, on this date in 1170, eight hundred thirty-nine years ago now. The latter Henry, the one called "The Eighth," had Saint Thomas a Becket's relics destroyed as his martyrdom was a reminder to one and all that the Church has Divine Rights superior to those of the civil state.

King Henry II had to do public penance for uttering the words that resulted in the martyrdom of Saint Thomas a Becket. His son, King John I, having been slow to learn the lessons of his public penance, was forced by his barons and noblemen in the year 1215 to sign the Magna Carta to guarantee the rights of the Church under civil law in England. This was a victory for the liberties of the Catholic Church that had been won by the blood of this great champion of the Social Reign of Christ the King, Saint Thomas a Becket, whose intercession we seek this day and every day for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King in all nations, including the United States of America.

Indeed, the situation we face in the United States of America today is the direct result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry. Nations founded in the belief that men can pursue the common temporal good without subordinating themselves to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explications who believe that they can be "good" and "virtuous" on their own powers without belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace--are bound to degenerate over the course of time. Statism is the only end result of the process of decay that must occur when nations reject the simple truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. And it is the statists of the present moment, starting with Barack Hussein Obama, who sacrifice the legitimate national sovereignty and national security of their own nations in order to demonstrate their "solidarity" with "bettering" the world on a "global" basis.

A continued blessed Christmas and a blessed Feast of Saint Thomas a Becket to you all!

(Yes, the next original article continues to be written. It's late enough as it is on the morning of December 29, 2015. This revised reflection will have to do for the time being. There is a brief preface to this revised article that asks for prayers for Aden Hailu, the twenty-year old college student whose very life is being threatened by the medical industry's sham "brain death" money-making scheme, and for those, such as Dr. Paul Byrne, who are seeking to save her life from state-sponsored vivisection. Aden's case is to be heard in court again today in Nevada at 10:00 a.m., Pacific Standard Time. Please join us in praying that Aden's life with be spared. Thank you.)

Today, the Fourth Day within the Octave of Christmas, is the Feast the Holy Innocents, the children who were put to death at the orders of the jealous titular King of Judea who had been installed by the Roman occupiers to pacify resistance to their unjust occupation of the Holy Land. King Herod the Great, whose sons Herod and Philip were no less corrupt and violent than he was, wanted to kill the Baby King Whom he thought to be a threat to his own political suzerainty, such as it was as a puppet ruler under the Roman occupiers. It meant nothing to him to wipe out so many innocent children in his quest to kill the Baby King, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who was born in Bethlehem to save, his, Herod the Great's, own immortal soul by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

There have been imitators of Herod the Great throughout history who have sought to put to death the followers of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in an insane effort to wipe the Faith off of the face of this earth. The names of these imitators are legion. Their likes are to be found in our own midst today as politicians of both major organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America, the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, believe that a just social order can be established and maintained while innocent preborn human beings are slaughtered under cover of law and while the Sovereignty of Christ the King is denied in favor of the sovereignty of men and their false, naturalistic, semi-Pelagian and anti-Incarnational ideas.

That having been noted, however, it is important to point out that the Holy Innocents are honored as saints because they died in the place of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as a political potentate drunk with his own self-importance sought to kill the Newborn Baby King with a furious rage. The slaughter of the innocent preborn today, as horrible as it is and as deserving of our attention especially by means of praying Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary and by means of sidewalk counseling, is different in that the children being killed today are not being targeted specifically in the place of Our Lord.

Unlike the speculative conclusions offered by the "International Theological Commission" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism in 2007, the Catholic Church has never held out "hope" that the souls of unbaptized infants go to Heaven, which is why the crime of the killing of the preborn is so monstrous as it kills the souls of those involved in the execution and denies the slaughtered babies the glory of the Beatific Vision. The Holy Innocents are saints because they were targeted quite specifically because of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and thus shed their blood on His account.

We need to invoke the intercession of the Holy Innocents today and every day to stop the shedding of the blood of the innocent under cover of law, praying to them especially that Catholics blinded by the allure of various naturalistic "strategies" to end the social evils of the day will be reminded of this truth stated by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must reign as King of men and nations, my friends. Accept no naturalistic substitutes from the "Herods" of this world and their enablers in the counterfeit church of conciliarism who reject the Social Reign of the Newborn King, Our Divine Redeemer Whom Herod the Great sought to kill.

Saint John the Evangelist, a son of Zebedee, was the youngest of the twelve Apostles. He was a virgin, a man who offered to His Divine Master, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, pure love in a heart that was not sullied by the world, the flesh and the devil. This youngest Apostle with the purest heart was permitted to lean on Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's chest, wherein beat His Most Sacred Heart, at the Last Supper. And it was this purity of heart possessed by Saint John the Evangelist that led him to be present at the foot of the Holy Cross and to be given the singular privilege by Our Divine Redeemer of caring for His own Most Blessed Mother until the time of her death and bodily Assumption into Heaven.

Despite what the now retired Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI contended blasphemously in his Jesus of Nazareth book concerning the "disputed" nature of the human authorship of the Fourth Gospel, Saint John the Evangelist is indeed the human author of the Fourth Gospel and of his epistles and the Book of the Apocalypse. Saint John is the Evangelist of the Incarnation of the Word whose Gospel provides us with Scriptural proofs for the doctrine of the Eucharist and for the Sacrament of Penance. And the Charity preached by Saint John the Evangelist was no exercise in empty sentimentality. For it was Saint John himself who wrote:

" Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God. And every one that loveth him who begot, loveth him also who is born of him. In this we know that we love the children of God: when we love God, and keep his commandments. For this is the charity of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not heavy. " (1 John 5: 1-3.)

This reflection has been revised and expanded in several places.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us to remain faithful to the Catholic Faith.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

The shadow of the Holy Cross hung over the cave in Bethlehem even as the shepherds who had been called by angels from the nearby fields adored the Infant King alongside the Mother of God and her Most Chaste Spouse, Saint Joseph. Holy Mother Church directs our attention to this fact today as we focus on the truth that the Birth of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in Bethlehem on Christmas Day was to make possible our own spiritual rebirth in the Baptismal font and our birth unto eternal life at the moment of our deaths if we persist to the very end in states of Sanctifying Grace. The path to our salvation runs directly through the Holy Cross and it requires us to be willing to sacrifice riches and honors and pleasures and human respect and even our very lives to bear witness to Christ the King a He has revealed Himself to men exclusively through the Catholic Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.

Saint Stephen the Protomartyr was willing to lay down his life as he preached the Gospel of the Divine Redeemer in an attempt to convert the Jews who were listening to him and engaging him in disputation. He exhibited the Virtue of Fortitude as he proclaimed the Gospel in the midst of insults an threats. And Saint Stephen the Protomartyr exhibited the Virtue of Charity as he prayed for his executioners, one of whom was the fire-breathing anti-Catholic zealot named Saul of Tarsus. Saint Stephen's prayers at the time of his martyrdom and from eternity thereafter won the conversion of Saul, who became the Apostle to the Gentiles, Saint Paul the Apostle.

Saint Stephen wanted to effect the conversion of his executioners. He did not seek to reaffirm them in their act of murder or to reaffirm them in the practice of Judaism. Saint Stephen did not dismiss or denigrate the gravity of their crimes. He simply did not hold those crimes against his persecutors as he prayed for their conversion.

We must pray always for those who hate us, for those who calumniate us, for those who have done us some injury in the past, for those who have rejected us for one reason or another. Praying for and forgiving those from whom we are estranged is not an option for a Catholic. It is an obligation of the interior life imposed directly by the God-Man Himself in the Sermon on the Mount. If He forgives us so readily in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, why are we so slow to forgive others who owe us but an infinitesimally small portion of what we owe Him for our own forgiven sins? As the late Father John Hardon, S.J., noted in a conference in Sterling Heights, Michigan, at which I gave two presentations, "God permits us to sin so that we can forgive each other. Let me repeat myself here: God permit us to sin so that we can forgive each other." A sinner who is contrite and thankful to God never withholds forgiveness from his fellow sinner. Saint Stephen teaches us that lesson today. Are we going to learn it once and for all?

A continued merry and most blessed Christmas to you all.

The conception and birth of a child changes the life of his parents forever. The death of a husband or a wife ends the sacramental bond of Holy Matrimony. Neither the death of a parent or his child ends the bonds between them that were forged at the moment of the child's conception. A parent has the solemn obligation to help his child get home to Heaven from the first moment he is aware of the child's existence in his mother's womb.

A very late overnight hour has been kept as this article simply was not going to be published if matters were not stretched a little bit. My apologies for the long delay.

The Articles page will be updated later today, the Vigil of Christmas, and links to several articles of interest will be provided at the same time.

A revised reflection, “Make Haste, the Lord is Nigh,” can be found by scrolling directly below.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is nigh today. He comes to us in Midnight in piercing cold in Bethlehem.

Have we prepared to "make haste," that is, to flee from the world and its false attractions and promises and "saviours" to welcome Him in our hearts and souls by means of Holy Communion?

Have we asked His Most Blessed Mother, Who brought Him forth miraculously in the cave when there was no room for Him in the inn, to help us to make room for Him in the "inns" of our hearts and souls.

Have we asked the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful, Good Saint Joseph, to protect and to guide us as we seek out His Divine foster-Son as He is born for us on Altars of Sacrifice in the Catholic catacombs?

Are we prepared to make this day, Christmas Eve, the Vigil of Christmas, one final day of penance as we abstain from the eating of meat and as we have but one full meal?

Are we prepared to celebrate this Christmas with joy and with thanksgiving as the Word Who was made Flesh in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost beckons us to adore Him in His Real Presence day in and day out?

Make haste, the Lord is nigh.

Midnight is coming.

Are we ready?

Make haste.

Prepare well.

Our Saviour is to be born for us!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.