Today is the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle. Saint Thomas did not believe that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had risen from the dead on Easter Sunday. Our Lord told the doubting Apostle to press his finger into His nail marks and to press his hand into His wounded side. Saint Thomas believed. Along with the other Apostles, including the one who replaced Judas Iscariot, Saint Matthias, Saint Thomas became a bold proclaimer of the Catholic Faith, going to India, where he sacrificed his life for the Holy Faith. Saint Thomas the Apostle touched the flesh of the Risen Saviour with his own hands. He then went on to touch the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of that same Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ with his own priestly hands as he uttered the words at Holy Mass that made the Messias incarnate under the appearances of bread and wine. The very words Saint Thomas uttered after he had touched Our Lord on Low Sunday, Dominus meus et Deus meus, are what we pray every time a true priest utters these words at Holy Mass: "Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum." As we prepare the celebration of Christmas Day four days from now, we should ask Saint Thomas to help us reverence Our Lord in His Real Presence with greater fervor as we grow stronger in the Faith with every passing day, consecrated as we are to Our Lord through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. 

A follow up to Monday's commentary about "Father" Frank Pavone will be published within fifteen minutes of this posting,

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Thomas the Apostle, pray for us.

The blaspheming Argentine Grinch has struck again.

This commentary is about the "excommunication" of "Father" Frank Pavone.

A follow-up commentary will be posted by Wednesday, December 21, 2022, the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle and the Commemoration of the Fourth Sunday of Advent. A few links have been added to the body of this commentary since its original posting. 

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

The saint whose feast we celebrate today, Saint Lucy, resisted all efforts made by the civil authorities to induce her to worship the idols when a suitor, who was angered by her rejection of him after she had given away her riches to the poor, betrayed her as Christian to the pagan officials of the Roman Empire in Syracuse, Sicily, at the beginning of the Fourth Century A.D., in the year 304 A.D.

Saint Lucy could have saved her life if only she worshiped the idols. Unlike the conciliar "pontiffs," men who have esteemed the symbols of various and sundry false religions, with their own consecrated hands, Saint Lucy refused to do so and was immovable when taken to a house of sin. She refused even to look upon the vice that was before her.

May this immovable foe of religious liberty help us to see more clearly with the eyes of our immortal souls that the Catholic Church cannot be in the least responsible for the abominations and blasphemies and sacrileges and defections from the Faith perpetrated by the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

May Saint Lucy, a model of purity and gentleness and grace and courage, help us to see so clearly that we flee to the catacombs where the Faith is protected without any concessions to conciliarism.

A blessed Feast of Saint Lucy to all who are named after this great witness to the Faith, especially my dear wife, who took Saint Lucy as her patron at Baptism, and our dear daughter, Lucy Mary Therese Norma, who has, of course, a special devotion to the virgin and martyr from Syracuse, Sicily.

I ask your prayers also for the repose of the soul of the late Father Salvatore V. Franco, who died on this day twenty years ago now. Father Franco, who suffered from serious heart problems but died of a form of leukemia that he only found out he had weeks before he died, was good enough to offer us refuge in his kitchen in Westbury, Long Island, New York, in April of 2002 until November of 2002 as he offered the Immemorial Mass of Tradition for us each weekday.

Although I had long before abandoned the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination on Sundays as I moved in "indult" circles, we made the decision to abandon all putative "offerings" of this abominable travesty during the week when Father Franco took ill and before he died. Father Franco, who was ordained as a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn in June of 1953, had a heart attack in 1963 at the age of thirty-seven, an act of God's Divine Mercy that kept him from being immersed in parish life as the conciliar revolution proceeded apace. Father Franco kept active, however, offering Mass and helping souls. We will be forever grateful to him for providing us with the refuge that he did in the months after Lucy's birth. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen. We still miss you, Father Salvatore V. Franco!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Lucy, pray for us.

The conciliar revolutionaries have isssued a "preparatory document" prior to the sixteenth meeting of their false religious sect's geneal synod, which is all about the work of the destruction of whatever remains of the sensus Catholicus within their ranks.

This relatively brief commentary discusses the conciliar desire to listen to "the people" rather than to obey God.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

A fuller description of today’s feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is found in the introduction to “We Must Be Made as Simple and Trusting” below. A Spanish language translation of this commentary that was prepared by Mr. Juan Carlos Areneta seven years ago can be read at: Las Américas Pertenecen a Nuestra Señora.

Finally, please pray for my younger brother (and only sibling), who turns sixty-nine years of age today. Our late mother died on March 18, 1982, and our father died on September 5 1992. The years have certainly passed quickly.

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is not on the universal calendar of the Catholic Church nor is it a mandated feast in the United States of America except in the Archdioceses of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe as well as in the Dioceses of Monterery, Fresno, Tuscson, and El Paso. We can nevertheless celebrate it with joy on this Advent ferial day upon which a votive or requiem Mass can be offered. 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

[N.B. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is not on the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. According to the General Roman Calendar of 1954, this feast is particular to the Archdioceses of San Francisco and Los Angeles and to the Dioceses of Monterey, Fresno, El Paso, San Diego, and Tuscon. This having been noted, however, today is an Advent ferial day upon which a votive or requiem Mass may be offered. Thus, this Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe should celebrated as widely as possible.

Our Blessed Mother gave us two great miracles on this day four hundred ninety-one years ago this very day.

Acceding to the demand of Apostolic Administrator [later Archbishop] Fray Juan de Zumarraga, O.F.M., the Mother of God saw to it that Castilian roses grew atop Tepeyac Hill so that her little "Juanito," Juan Diego, a fifty-five year-old widower to whom she had first appeared on December 9, 1531, could provide proof that it was she who had made the request of Fray de Zumarraga to build a shrine in her honor on the hill where she appeared. 

The administrator's guards, who had treated Juan Diego with such cruelty and even racism, spied those roses and tried to grab them out of Juan's tilma as he waited to see Fray de Zumarraga. The roses, quite miraculously, disappeared every time the guards sought to snatch them away from Juan Diego. Those Castilian roses were presented by Juan Diego to Fray Juan de Zumarraga, who knelt before the Indian convert to the Faith as he gazed upon the miraculous image that Juanito did not know was there: the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who was clearly expecting the Baby Jesus. 

Remember, this was Advent in the year 1531, just forty-nine years after Christopher Columbus first set foot on the Island of San Salvador to implant the Cross of the Divine Redeemer in this hemisphere for the first time since Saint Brendan the Navigator had done so in the First Millennium.

Our Lady's miraculous image showing her expecting the Baby Jesus is quite symbolic of the expectant desire she had then—and has now—for the conversion of the peoples of the Americas to the true Faith, that each person and each nation be born anew as they submit themselves to Christ the King through His Catholic Church. Over nine million indigenous people converted to the true Faith within a short time following her apparition to Juan Diego on this day four hundred ninety years ago, almost person for person the number of people lost to the Faith as a result of the Protestant Revolt in Europe. It was almost as though God was saying to those who left, “Fine. I will have My Mother get new souls to populate Holy Mother Church and hence Heaven itself.”

The Americas were indeed converted to Catholicism, which is why the devil had to attack the Faith in Latin America with such ferocity by means of the Masonic revolutionaries who were supported in both philosophical and monetary terms by the lodges in the nascent Untied States of America. Great crimes were committed against Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother as a result. These crimes continue to this day, which is, of course, one of the reasons that Saint Michael the Archangel appeared with Our Lady as she spoke to Juan Diego. Our Lady has crushed the head of the serpent with her heel and Saint Michael the Archangel is our helper to crush him in our own lives and in the Americas where he reigns, albeit temporarily, in civil government and in popular culture.

May we rely upon the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Empress and Patroness of the Americas, to help us to be courageous enough to plant seeds for the conversion of the Americas, including the United States of America, to the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by the Catholic Church.

Perhaps an extra Rosary today on this glorious feast day will help us to be more faithful and more courageous in our promotion of the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. 

Finally, today is my only brother's (and my own sibling's) sixty-ninth birthday. Please pray for him today. Thank you.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Viva La Virgen de Guadalupe!

A blessed Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe to you all.

This commentary's title is self-explanatory about its content, which seeks, as always, to go to root causes rather than dwell inordinately on the dog and pony shows of the moment.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Pope Saint Melchiades, pray for us.

I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION." Those words, uttered by the Mother of God herself to Saint Bernadette Soubirous in the Grotto of Massabielle near Lourdes, France, on March 25, 1858, was a Heavenly ratification of the solemn, infallible proclamation of the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1854, in the Bull Ineffabilis Deus.

"I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION."

Our Lady was conceived in the womb of her holy mother, Good Saint Anne, without any stain of Original or Actual Sin in anticipation of the merits that would be won by her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on the wood of the Holy Cross. She, the Singular Vessel of Devotion, had the perfect integrity of Adam and Eve before their Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden.

It is important, therefore, to get the doctrine of Original Sin right in order to understand the great miracle worked by God in the soul of the fairest flower of our race, Our Lady, from the very first moment of her Immaculate Conception. To get anything about the doctrine of Original Sin wrong leads to the efforts on the part of Modernists to deconstruct the doctrinal definitions of Original Sin and of the Immaculate Conception.

Alas, the Catholic Church, our Holy Mother on earth, our Mater and Magister, is as spotless as the Immaculate Blessed Virgin Mary. Holy Mother Church does not deconstruct infallible dogmatic definitions. Holy Mother Church cannot do so, which is why we need to pray to Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces and our Immaculate Queen, to help us to make no concessions to the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has promulgated an abominable "liturgy" and whose officials feel feel to "reinterpret" dogmatic truths according to Modernist propositions that have been condemned by the authority of our spotless Mother on earth, Holy Mother Church.

Mindful of the effects of our own sins on our immortal souls and of our need to make reparation for them to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, may we make the Secret prayer for today's Holy Mass our own:

"Receive the saving Victim we offer to Thee, O Lord, on the solemn feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary: and grant that, as we confess that by Thy prevenient grace she was kept free from every stain of sin; so, by her intercession, we may be delivered from all our offenses. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God."

A number of prayers from The Raccolta in honor of Our Lady's Immacualte Conception can be found in Appendix A. Appendix B contains material on the Immacualte Conception as found in The New English Edition of The Mystical City of God.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

A blessed Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary to you all!

(An original commentary will be appear on Friday, December 9, 2022, or Saturday December 10, 2022.) 

An original article, Sin: More Deadly Than the Coronavirus, part nineteen, was published yesterday, Monday, December 5, 2022, the Feast of Saint Sabbas, and I hope to another new article by the end of the week.

For today, however, I offer the readers of this site a brief and revised reflection on two saints who opposed heresy, Saint Nicholas of Myra and Saint Ambrose of Milan. 

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Nicholas of Myra, pray for us.

Saint Ambrose of Milan, pray for us.

Herewith, patient, long-suffering readers, is part nineteen of "Sin: More Deadly than the Coronavirus."

This commentary details at length the causal link between the "vaccines" to prevent or mitigate the effects of a man-made virus that poses no mortal threat to anyone, especially not children, without preexisitng co-morbidities if treated properly with early intervention protocols developed by front-line physicians and the pletheora of sudden deaths. Incidents of myocarditis and other heart problems have skyrocketed with the launch of the mass vaccination campaign two years ago and sadly, so many people do not understand that it is the government, Big Pharma, and Big Tech that are disseminating genuine misinformation for profit and power, not those who oppose this diabolical agenda to subject us all to "cures" that are designed to eliminate those messy, "polluting" creatures called human beings, each of whom is made in the very image of likeness of the Most Holy Trinity.

Lots of information in this one, folks. I hope that you will give it a read sometime soon.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Peter Chrysologus, pray for  us.

Saint Barbara, pray for us.

Saint Sabbas, pray for us.