Apostasy Continues to Have Consequences

The conciliar revolution against Catholic Faith, Worship, and Morals that began with the “election” of Angelo “Cardinal” Roncalli as the first in the current line of antipopes on October 28, 1958, the Feasts of Saints Simon and Jude, and continues to this day with Jorge Mario Bergoglio has devastated the vineyard of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

A recent article on this site, No Certitude, No Reverence, No People, discussed the decline of self-identifying Catholics here in the United States of America. Although the conciliar revolution has been the key factor in this decline, it would intellectually shallow to contend that there were not other factors that led up the lion’s share of American Catholics giving their ready acceptance of conciliarism’s “relaxation” of penances (no Ember Days, only two days of obligatory fast and abstinence per year—Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) and “renewed” liturgy with its mania for vocal participation from the pews and the invasion of laity into the sanctuary, which itself disappeared in many churches in conciliar captivity in favor of the egalitarian spirit of the times.

One of those factors, at least here in the United States of America, was the fact that Catholics in the decades before the “Second” Vatican Council,” had become so Americanized that, despite their faithful attendance at Holy Mass and their devotion to weekly Confession and to Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary, that they had become culturally indistinguishable from their Protestant and Jewish countrymen. This is a point that William Thomas Walsh made in Characters of the Inquisition:

Here on the last edge and in the twilight of the world, the stage is set for the reenactment of an ancient tragedy – or can it this time be a comedy? Here are all the actors who have appeared over and over again in that tragedy in Europe. Here we have most of the Freemasons of the world, the Jews, most of the gold and its masters; Parthians and Medes and Elamites – men gathered together from all nations under the sun, speaking one language, leading a common life; and among them heirs of all the isms and heresies that the Catholic Church has denounced throughout the centuries, and some millions of good bewildered folk who have ceased to believe much in anything, and do not know what they believe, or whether anything be worth believing; and, scattered among these millions with their roots in such movements of the past, some twenty-five millions of Catholics.

Now, either the Catholic body will come into sharp conflict with those about them, or they will not.

If they do not, it will be the first time in history that the Mystical Body of Christ (and American Catholics, like all others, are “cells” of that Body) has not aroused violent and unreasoning antagonism. This has been so uniformly a characteristic of the life of Christ and the life of the Catholic Church, that when persons calling themselves Christian or Catholic do not meet with oppositions, and strong opposition, one may well begin to wonder whether they are profoundly Christian and truly Catholic. Perhaps then it is a reflection upon us American Catholics that we have inspired so little antagonism (comparatively) thus far. Perhaps we have not been telling our neighbors the truth, the strong truth, the hard saying they will not like: that the real test of our republican experiment here must ultimately be whether it accepts or opposes the Church of Christ; that it must become either a Catholic state, or a slave state.

A great many Catholics, influenced by the Protestant or Liberal environments in which they have lived, have sincerely and deliberately set out to propagate Christianity in such ways as to never arouse antagonism. They have compromised with Socialism, they have compromised with the economic theory of history, they have emphasized the importance of various material elements. It is a sad evidence of the lack of unity into which we have been betrayed when a Catholic Justice of the Supreme Court [Frank Murphy] can publicly proclaim that “Democracy” is more important than religion; when a Catholic priest, who has taught for some years at the Catholic University at Washington and has filled our country with his disciples, openly goes to address a Jewish Masonic lodge (though Catholics are still forbidden by Canon 2335 to cooperate with or condone Masonry in any way)—and this, according to the press, not to remind his hearers of their true home in the Church Catholic, but to confirm them in their sense of injured innocence; or when a Catholic journalist burns a little incense on the altar of the economic theory of history, or a Catholic college professor condones usury, or defends the Communist cause in Spain.

Now all these gentlemen, these liberal broad-minded Catholics, many of whom are teaching the next generation of American Catholics no doubt think that they are doing a service to God in smoothing out our differences with others, and neglecting to utter the challenge which Christianity has uttered everywhere else in the world, until the opposed gnashed its teeth, and took up stones to cast. Perhaps they hope in this way to avert persecution, and gradually to bring about the conversion of the country they love to the true Faith. I do not impugn their motives or their sincerity; indeed, they are often animated by a great, if misguided charity. But if the history of Christianity teaches anything, it fairly cries out from the stones of desecrated and stolen churches that if they have their way, they will do just the opposite to what they intend, and even worse. They will lead us, if we are foolish enough, to follow them, to that abyss over which English Catholics fell, one by one and family by family, in the Sixteenth Century. The English Catholics, a huge majority, were kept comparatively silent and inactive in the face of an intolerable but gradual oppression by a small rich crafty minority, in the hope that if they ever compromised on this point and that point, they would ultimately prevail, since they were more numerous, and had truth on their side. The result was the almost complete extinction of Catholicism in England for centuries—perhaps forever. (William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940 pp. 281-294.)

That last paragraph summarized the theme that I have tried to hammer home in hundreds upon hundreds of lengthy commentaries on this site—and in countless hours of lectures around the country and online. William Thomas Walsh’s prophetic vision of what would happen to Catholicism in the United States of America has been accomplished by conciliar revolutionaries, many of whose American predecessors before the “Second” Vatican Council sought to pave the way for the triumph of Americanist “ideals.”

A recent Pew Research Study, released on February 26, 2025, Wednesday in Quinquagesima Week and, in some places, the Feast of Saint Margaret of Cortona, indicated that large numbers of Catholics in the United States of America accept such perversities as “same-sex marriage” and “transgenderism” as well being in favor of surgical baby-killing. Although I, for one, having some familiarity with the methodology of polling from a graduate course I took at the then named State University of New York in Albany in the Spring of 1974 and from my own campaigns for public office and active participation as an authorized volunteer surrogate speaker for Partrick Joseph Buchanan’s presidential campaign from December 8, 1995, to March 26, 1996, do have some reservations about the Pew Research Study’s method of collecting the sample from which its conclusion were reached, it is nevertheless fair to say that the findings are believable if one considers how many self-identifying Catholics continue to vote for pro-abortion and pro-perversity statists while patronizing every vile Hollywood production that glorifies aberrance, blasphemes Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother, and mocks Holy Mother Church with a satanic regularity.

Here are the major findings from that Pew Religious Landscape Studies within the United States of America:

Acceptance of homosexuality

In all three Religious Landscape Studies, large majorities of religiously unaffiliated Americans have said homosexuality should be accepted by society. Most Jews and Buddhists also have consistently expressed this view, as have seven-in-ten or more Hindus in both 2014 and in the new survey.

A smaller majority of Christians say homosexuality should be accepted by society. Most Catholics, mainline Protestants and members of historically Black Protestant churches say homosexuality should be accepted, while most evangelical Protestants say homosexuality should be discouraged by society. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (widely known as Mormons) are divided on this question.

Still, Christians overall are more accepting of homosexuality today than they were when the first RLS was conducted in 2007. Some Christian groups exhibited increased acceptance between 2007 and 2014 and then a leveling off, while others continued to exhibit increased acceptance between the 2014 survey and the new study.

Same-sex marriage

Since the last RLS, nearly every Christian group large enough to be analyzed has become more likely to favor allowing same-sex couples to marry legally. None of the U.S. religious groups analyzed here have shown a decline in support for same-sex marriage.

For example, 70% of Catholics favor same-sex marriage in the new survey, up from 57% in 2014. And 56% of adults in the historically Black Protestant tradition now favor it, up from 40% in 2014.

At the same time, the survey shows that most evangelical Protestants (62%) continue to oppose same-sex marriage, as do 56% of Latter-day Saints.

Acceptance of transgender people

Religiously unaffiliated Americans are a lot more likely than those who identify with a religion to say that increased acceptance of people who are transgender is a “change for the better” (58% vs. 32%).

Majorities of Hindus (67%) and Jews (59%) in the U.S. also see transgender acceptance as a change for the better.

Taking the other position, 47% of U.S. Christians and 48% of Muslims say that increasing acceptance of transgender people is a “change for the worse.” Among Christians, this includes:

64% of evangelical Protestants
55% of Latter-day Saints
50% of Orthodox Christians

Catholics, mainline Protestants and members of historically Black Protestant churches are more divided on this question. For example, 39% of mainline Protestants say greater social acceptance of people who are transgender is a change for the better, while 37% say it is a change for the worse.

Abortion’s legality

In the new survey, roughly two-thirds of Latter-day Saints (69%) and evangelical Protestants (65%) say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. Majorities in most other groups, by contrast, say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. As found at: Religion & views on LGBTQ issues, abortion in the US | Pew Research Center.)

The chart below tells the sad story:

Yes, apostasy continues to have consequences.

Once again, although there are many factors that have caused this, I contend that the most important factors causing Catholics to adopt the false spirit of the world are (1) conciliarism’s “open window” to the world; and (2) the refusal of all but handful of conciliar “bishops” to preach against contraception or to work against legislation permitting it; (3) the conciliar authorization of and adoption of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to Holy Purity; (4) the equating of the direct, intentional taking of innocent life in the world to the death penalty, climate change, and matters so-called “economic justice”; (5) the rapid, ceaseless nature of liturgical changes that led many poorly formed Catholics to conclude that Catholic moral teaching can change with the “time” just as the Novus Ordo liturgy continues to do; (6) the loss of any sense of the horror of Mortal Sin and, worse yet in the case of so many Catholics today, a total ignorance about sin in general and Mortal Sin in particular; (7) almost no preaching about Hell from the lecterns of Catholic churches held in conciliar captivity; (8) a loss of any sense of duty on the part of parents to encourage their children to pursue sanctity, avoid the near occasions of sin, and then to shun them as a last resort after all efforts at persuasion and exhortation have failed if they decide to live in sin without any desire to reform their lives; (9) parental encouragement of immodesty according to the ever-changing standards of a “culture” whose “fashions” are based gross indecency; (10) a refusal on the part of parents to shield their children from the evil influences of television, so-called “music,” motion pictures, obscenity, scurrility, and pornography; and (12) Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s de facto endorsement of sodomy, “transgenderism,” and contraception in the belief that “below the belt” issues do not matter to God in a time of “mercy” that demands “accompaniment” and an insistence on an “impossible ideal.”

Most of these factors are self-evident and need no further elaboration except to note that Bergoglio’s “Who am I to judge?” rhetorical question on July 29, 2013, during an in-flight interview during his trip back to Rome from Rio di Janeiro, Brazil, Amoris Laetitia, March 19, 2016, and Fiducia Supplicans, December 21, 2023, have basically given carte blanche to hardened sinners to persist in their lives of perdition, noting as well that the Argentine Apostate’s open embrace of pro-abortion politicians, “scientists,” researchers and even at least one abortionist herself, Emma Bonino, has reaffirmed many Catholics in their tragically mistaken belief that killing an innocent child is “no big deal.”

The one factor, though, that I believe that is most responsible for any kind, no less widespread, acceptance of grave moral evils, is contraception and the refusal of confessors of souls to take remonstrate with those who even have a qualm of conscience to mention it in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance the concomitant refusal of the American bishops, true and false, to preach against it by teaching that the prevention of children is a denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and that is practice leads to the spread of other sins against Holy Purity that even The Washington Post, editorialized about on March 22, 1931:

The Federal Council of Churches in America some time ago appointed a committee on "marriage and the home," which has now submitted a report favoring a "careful and restrained" use of contraceptive devices to regulate the size of families. The committee seems to have a serious struggle with itself in adhering to Christian doctrine while at the same time indulging in amateurish excursions in the field of economics, legislation, medicine, and sociology. The resulting report is a mixture of religious obscurantism and modernistic materialism which departs from the ancient standards of religion and yet fails to blaze a path toward something better.

The mischief that would result from an an attempt to place the stamp of church approval upon any scheme for "regulating the size of families" is evidently quite beyond the comprehension of this pseudo-scientific committee. It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would lead to the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous. If the churches are to become organizations for political and 'scientific' propaganda they should be honest and reject the Bible, scoff at Christ as an obsolete and unscientific teacher, and strike out boldly as champions of politics and science as substitutes for the old-time religion. ("Forgetting Religion," Editorial, The Washington Post, March 22, 1931.)

Catholics do not live in a vacuum. They have been subjected to one assault after another against their sensus Catholicus ever since the dawn of the Protestant Revolution, perhaps never more so than in the past century by the rapid advancements in the means of modern mass communications. It was to blunt the advance of propaganda in favor of the "small family" and thus the inversion of the ends of marriage that Pope Pius XI issued Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, to reaffirm the Catholic Church's prohibition against any direct interference in the conception of a child and to remind everyone in the world that the primary end of marriage remained what it will be until the end of time: the propagation and education of children:

7. Since, however, We have spoken fully elsewhere on the Christian education of youth,[18] let Us sum it all up by quoting once more the words of St. Augustine: "As regards the offspring it is provided that they should be begotten lovingly and educated religiously,"[19] -- and this is also expressed succinctly in the Code of Canon Law -- "The primary end of marriage is the procreation and the education of children."[20] (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

Pope Pius XI gave a specific warning to priests about their duties as confessors when married persons confessed using some kind of contraceptive:

Indeed, Pope Pius XI explained that confessors had to go to great lengths to counsel penitents not to surrender themselves to the propaganda in favor of contraception and the contraceptive mentality to which they were being exposed on an almost constant basis:

54. But no reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.

55. Small wonder, therefore, if Holy Writ bears witness that the Divine Majesty regards with greatest detestation this horrible crime and at times has punished it with death. As St. Augustine notes, "Intercourse even with one's legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Juda, did this and the Lord killed him for it."

56. Since, therefore, openly departing from the uninterrupted Christian tradition some recently have judged it possible solemnly to declare another doctrine regarding this question, the Catholic Church, to whom God has entrusted the defense of the integrity and purity of morals, standing erect in the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her, in order that she may preserve the chastity of the nuptial union from being defiled by this foul stain, raises her voice in token of her divine ambassadorship and through Our mouth proclaims anew: any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.

57. We admonish, therefore, priests who hear confessions and others who have the care of souls, in virtue of Our supreme authority and in Our solicitude for the salvation of souls, not to allow the faithful entrusted to them to err regarding this most grave law of God; much more, that they keep themselves immune from such false opinions, in no way conniving in them. If any confessor or pastor of souls, which may God forbid, lead the faithful entrusted to him into these errors or should at least confirm them by approval or by guilty silence, let him be mindful of the fact that he must render a strict account to God, the Supreme Judge, for the betrayal of his sacred trust, and let him take to himself the words of Christ: "They are blind and leaders of the blind: and if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

Would anyone want to argue that the propaganda in favor of some type of "family planning" has abated in the past eighty-one years? Of course not. We know that even young traditionally-minded Catholics are influenced by this propaganda, believing that it is "impossible" for them to have a large family, sometimes counseled to believe that they should be "informed" about the natural means by which they could avoid conceiving a child so that they do not have a temptation to use artificial contraception.

Despite Pope Pius XI’s warnings in Casti Connubii, there were more than a handful of bishops at the “Second” Vatican Council who were in favor of family “limitation,” which prompted the following intervention by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, who was the Pro-Secretary of the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII from January 12, 1953, to the time of His Holiness's death on October 9, 1958, continuing as the Secretary of the Holy Office, whose name was changed to the "Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" in 1966, under Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII and Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI until January 6, 1968, noted in the following remarks at the "Second" Vatican Council:

"I am not pleased with the statement in the text that married couples may determine the number of children they are to have. Never has this been heard of in the Church. My father was a laborer, and the fear of having many children never entered my parents' minds, because they trusted in Providence. [I am amazed] that yesterday in the Council it should have been said that there was doubt whether a correct stand had been taken hitherto on the principles governing marriage. Does this not mean that the inerrancy of the Church will be called into question? Or was not the Holy Spirit with His Church in past centuries to illuminate minds on this point of doctrine?" (As found in Peter W. Miller, Substituting the Exception for the Rule; The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, by Father Ralph Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber, Tan Books and Publishers, 1967, is cited as the source of this quotation.)

However, there was an atmosphere favorable to the mentality of birth control in many Catholic circles in the materialistic 1950s that were not such a "golden age" of Catholicism as they are made out to be by so many traditional Catholics today. It was thus the goal of some of the older ethicists and moral theologians to provide Catholic married couples with an "out," if you will, to avoid the evil of contraception by natural means with expansive interpretations of the conditions outlined in the Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, something that stands Pope Pius XII's 1951 caveat against the indiscriminate use of the rhythm method on its head.

A strict adherence to the mind of Pope Pius XII as expressed in his October 29, 1951, Address to Midwives on the Nature of their Profession would have not seen it as advisable to provide every engaged couple with an instruction manual, such as that published under the auspices of the American bishops, replete with ways for them to avoid the primary end of marriage without a truly exceptional case. Many lax consciences were formed as a result of such manuals. There was no mandate from our last true Holy Father to do so. That the American bishops authorized such an approach is yet another reminder that the "Second" Vatican Council and its aftermath did not such "occur" on the spur of the moment.

Please, do not say that this writer is inventing a "straw man." The desire on the part of at least a handful of these ethicists and moralists, some of whom were teaching in Catholic universities and colleges and at Catholic medical colleges, to find some "moral means" to limit the size of families is why there was such interest in the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family and Births that had been established by Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII shortly before his death on June 3, 1963, and reestablished by Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI following his "election" on June 21, 1963.

Let's face facts: the opposition to Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI's reiteration of the Catholic teaching on birth control in Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968) did not come out of thin air. The contraceptive mentality had been, pun intended, alive and well in Catholic intellectual circles some decades before, dating back to the Anglican sect's famous "Resolution Fifteen" issued, as noted earlier, by the Lambeth Conference of 1930.

Fostering The Contraceptive Mentality

Humanae Vitae is not, however, an orthodox statement of the Catholic Faith. It is, much like everything else in the false "pontificate" of Paul VI (referred to by former friend of longstanding in the conciliar structures as "Paul the Sick"--great phrase, Father, one of many of yours), a revolutionary document that inverted the ends proper to marriage as the phenomenology of philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and the theology of Father Herbert Doms were used to assert that the "unitive" end of marriage was primary.

Humanae Vitae was also a revolutionary document in that it continued Paul VI's acceptance of a nonexistent "population crisis" as the foundation for expanding the conditions to use "natural" methods to avoid conceiving children. The hideous false "pontiff," who appointed and promoted all manner of lavender types as "bishops" throughout the conciliar structures, wrote the following in Populorum Progressio, March 26, 1967, that laid the groundwork for the further inversion of the ends of marriage to be found in Humanae Vitae by means of an more expansive view of the reasons that married couples could avoid children than provided in Pope Pius XII's Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession in that wonderful year of 1951:

37. There is no denying that the accelerated rate of population growth brings many added difficulties to the problems of development where the size of the population grows more rapidly than the quantity of available resources to such a degree that things seem to have reached an impasse. In such circumstances people are inclined to apply drastic remedies to reduce the birth rate.

There is no doubt that public authorities can intervene in this matter, within the bounds of their competence. They can instruct citizens on this subject and adopt appropriate measures, so long as these are in conformity with the dictates of the moral law and the rightful freedom of married couples is preserved completely intact. When the inalienable right of marriage and of procreation is taken away, so is human dignity.

Finally, it is for parents to take a thorough look at the matter and decide upon the number of their children. This is an obligation they take upon themselves, before their children already born, and before the community to which they belong—following the dictates of their own consciences informed by God's law authentically interpreted, and bolstered by their trust in Him. (39)(Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio MariaMontini/Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, March 26, 1967.)

Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio MariaMontini/Paul VI was a Marxist sympathizer, if not a Marxist himself. Indeed, Father Michael Roach, who taught Church History at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, said in a class lecture in the Fall of 1981 that he had been with the then rector of the seminary, Monsignor Harry Flynn, who would later denounce Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., as an "anti-Semite" (see Disconnects), in his capacity as the conciliar "archbishop" of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the time of the death of Montini/Paul VI on August 6, 1978. According to Father Roach, the then Monsignor Flynn, a priest of the Diocese of Albany, New York, said, "Ah, yes, Paul VI. A marvelous man. A Marxist, but a marvelous man nonetheless."

The point is this: Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio MariaMontini/Paul VI, who betrayed the identity of Catholic priests behind the Iron Curtain when serving the the Vatican's Secretariat of State under Pope Pius XII, accepted the Malthusian myth of "overpopulation" and "depleted resources" to assert that it is parents who decide how many children they are to welcome into the world. Wrong. God decides this, not parents. God can see to it that children are conceived despite the more careful "precautions" taken against their conception, something that is as true of the use of what is called today "natural family planning" as it is of artificial contraception. God decides this matter. No one else. God is alone the Sovereign over the sanctity and the fecundity of marriage. No one else.

As noted at the beginning of this essay, Pope Pius XI, writing in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, stated this quite explicitly:

10. Now when We come to explain, Venerable Brethren, what are the blessings that God has attached to true matrimony, and how great they are, there occur to Us the words of that illustrious Doctor of the Church whom We commemorated recently in Our Encyclical Ad salutem on the occasion of the fifteenth centenary of his death:[9] "These," says St. Augustine, "are all the blessings of matrimony on account of which matrimony itself is a blessing; offspring, conjugal faith and the sacrament."[10] And how under these three heads is contained a splendid summary of the whole doctrine of Christian marriage, the holy Doctor himself expressly declares when he said: "By conjugal faith it is provided that there should be no carnal intercourse outside the marriage bond with another man or woman; with regard to offspring, that children should be begotten of love, tenderly cared for and educated in a religious atmosphere; finally, in its sacramental aspect that the marriage bond should not be broken and that a husband or wife, if separated, should not be joined to another even for the sake of offspring. This we regard as the law of marriage by which the fruitfulness of nature is adorned and the evil of incontinence is restrained."[11]

11. Thus amongst the blessings of marriage, the child holds the first place. And indeed the Creator of the human race Himself, Who in His goodness wishes to use men as His helpers in the propagation of life, taught this when, instituting marriage in Paradise, He said to our first parents, and through them to all future spouses: "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth."[12] As St. Augustine admirably deduces from the words of the holy Apostle Saint Paul to Timothy[13] when he says: "The Apostle himself is therefore a witness that marriage is for the sake of generation: 'I wish,' he says, 'young girls to marry.' And, as if someone said to him, 'Why?,' he immediately adds: 'To bear children, to be mothers of families'."[14]

12. How great a boon of God this is, and how great a blessing of matrimony is clear from a consideration of man's dignity and of his sublime end. For man surpasses all other visible creatures by the superiority of his rational nature alone. Besides, God wishes men to be born not only that they should live and fill the earth, but much more that they may be worshippers of God, that they may know Him and love Him and finally enjoy Him for ever in heaven; and this end, since man is raised by God in a marvelous way to the supernatural order, surpasses all that eye hath seen, and ear heard, and all that hath entered into the heart of man.[15] From which it is easily seen how great a gift of divine goodness and how remarkable a fruit of marriage are children born by the omnipotent power of God through the cooperation of those bound in wedlock.

13. But Christian parents must also understand that they are destined not only to propagate and preserve the human race on earth, indeed not only to educate any kind of worshippers of the true God, but children who are to become members of the Church of Christ, to raise up fellow-citizens of the Saints, and members of God's household,[16] that the worshippers of God and Our Savior may daily increase.

14. For although Christian spouses even if sanctified themselves cannot transmit sanctification to their progeny, nay, although the very natural process of generating life has become the way of death by which original sin is passed on to posterity, nevertheless, they share to some extent in the blessings of that primeval marriage of Paradise, since it is theirs to offer their offspring to the Church in order that by this most fruitful Mother of the children of God they may be regenerated through the laver of Baptism unto supernatural justice and finally be made living members of Christ, partakers of immortal life, and heirs of that eternal glory to which we all aspire from our inmost heart.

15. If a true Christian mother weigh well these things, she will indeed understand with a sense of deep consolation that of her the words of Our Savior were spoken: "A woman . . . when she hath brought forth the child remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world";[17] and proving herself superior to all the pains and cares and solicitudes of her maternal office with a more just and holy joy than that of the Roman matron, the mother of the Gracchi, she will rejoice in the Lord crowned as it were with the glory of her offspring. Both husband and wife, however, receiving these children with joy and gratitude from the hand of God, will regard them as a talent committed to their charge by God, not only to be employed for their own advantage or for that of an earthly commonwealth, but to be restored to God with interest on the day of reckoning. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii ,December 31, 1930.)

God decides how many or how few children a Catholic married couple will have. No one else. Men may try to the thwart the natural end of marriage. They may be able to be "successful," as they count "success," perhaps even more often than not. No human means of deliberately frustrating the natural end of marriage is infallible, and no carefully planned use of the gift proper to the married state in those times during a month when a woman is more apt it to be infertile than others will avoid the conception of a new child in all instances. God is the Sovereign of the fecundity of marriage.

As a Modernist and a socialist who was, as noted earlier, at the very least sympathetic to Marxism, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, however, thought and spoke in naturalistic terms that were tinged with vestigial after-effects of the Holy Faith. He accepted the myths of "progress" and "world peace" represented by the United Masonic Nations Organization, about which Pope Pius XII, although at first supportive of the organization, began to sour in the 1950s, and accepted the myths of "overpopulation." It was for this reason that he continued the work of the aforementioned "Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family and Births so that its members could study the biological operation of the "birth control pill" to determine if it could be used morally to prevent the conception of children, especially in areas of endemic poverty,. A member of that commission, Archbishop Albino Luciani of Venice, Italy, the future "John Paul I," is said to have voted to endorse "the pill," which, apart from the denying the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage, is a chemical abortifacient, because of his concerns for "the poor."

Montini/Paul VI was open to "the pill" to deal with the nonexistent problem of overpopulation. Unable to endorse its use, though, he used Humanae Vitae to expand the conditions outlined by Pope Pius XII in his Allocution to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession in 1951 to invert the ends of marriage, an inversion that would be institutionalized later by the "personalist phenomenologist" named Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and the hideously disgusting "theology of the body" that he explicated over the course of years in his "general audience" talks in the early-1980s (talks he was giving at the time he was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca on Wednesday, May 13, 1981, by the way), thus paving the way for the propagation and acceptance of the cottage industry that became known as "natural family planning" as the expected norm for married couples, who must be "educated" in matters that violate modesty of speech and detract from the sanctity of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony:

Montini/Paul VI prefaced Humanae Vitae's expanded conditions for the use of a woman's infertile periods as the basis of avoiding the conception of children upon with yet another reference to the myth of overpopulation:

1. The most serious duty of transmitting human life, for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.

At all times the fulfillment of this duty has posed grave problems to the conscience of married persons, but, with the recent evolution of society, changes have taken place that give rise to new questions which the Church could not ignore, having to do with a matter which so closely touches upon the life and happiness of men.

2. The changes which have taken place are in fact noteworthy and of varied kinds. In the first place, there is the rapid demographic development. Fear is shown by many that world population is growing more rapidly than the available resources, with growing distress to many families and developing countries, so that the temptation for authorities to counter this danger with radical measures is great. Moreover, working and lodging conditions, as well as increased exigencies both in the economic field and in that of education, often make the proper education of a larger number of children difficult today. A change is also seen both in the manner of considering the person of woman and her place in society, and in the value to be attributed to conjugal love in marriage, and also in the appreciation to be made of the meaning of conjugal acts in relation to that love.

Finally and above all, man has made stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature, such that he tends to extend this domination to his own total being: to the body, to psychical life, to social life and even to the laws which regulate the transmission of life.

3. This new state of things gives rise to new questions. Granted the conditions of life today, and granted the meaning which conjugal relations have with respect to the harmony between husband and wife and to their mutual fidelity, would not a revision of the ethical norms, in force up to now, seem to be advisable, especially when it is considered that they cannot be observed without sacrifices, sometimes heroic sacrifices?

And again: by extending to this field the application of the so-called "principle of totality," could it not be admitted that the intention of a less abundant but more rationalized fecundity might transform a materially sterilizing intervention into a licit and wise control of birth? Could it not be admitted, that is, that the finality of procreation pertains to the ensemble of conjugal life, rather than to its single acts? It is also asked whether, in view of the increased sense of responsibility of modern man, the moment has not come for him to entrust to his reason and his will, rather than to the biological rhythms of his organism, the task of regulating birth.

4. Such questions required from the teaching authority of the Church a new and deeper reflection upon the principles of the moral teaching on marriage: a teaching founded on the natural law, illuminated and enriched by divine revelation. (Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968.)

It is upon these false premises that the hideous friend of the lavender collective, of which he may very well have been a charter member, handed so many Catholic couples over to the devil so that they could immersed in considerations of physicality that have never had any place in Catholic teaching. Although Montini/Paul VI re-stated the immutable teaching of the Church concerning the begetting of children, this was part of the "bait and switch" game as he used his own text to place what he called the "unitive" end before that of procreation:

And finally this love is fecund for it is not exhausted by the communion between husband and wife, but is destined to continue, raising up new lives. "Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the begetting and educating of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute very substantially to the welfare of their parents."⁸

10. Hence conjugal love requires in husband and wife an awareness of their mission of "responsible parenthood," which today is rightly much insisted upon, and which also must be exactly understood. Consequently it is to be considered under different aspects which are legitimate and connected with one another.

In relation to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means the knowledge and respect of their functions; human intellect discovers in the power of giving life biological laws which are part of the human person.

In relation to the tendencies of instinct or passion, responsible parenthood means that necessary dominion which reason and will must exercise over them.

In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.

Responsible parenthood also and above all implies a more profound relationship to the objective moral order established by God, of which a right conscience is the faithful interpreter. The responsible exercise of parenthood implies, therefore, that husband and wife recognize fully their own duties towards God, towards themselves, towards the family and towards society, in a correct hierarchy of values.

In the task of transmitting life, therefore, they are not free to proceed completely at will, as if they could determine in a wholly autonomous way the honest path to follow; but they must conform their activity to the creative intention of God, expressed in the very nature of marriage and of its acts, and manifested by the constant teaching of the Church.

11. These acts, by which husband and wife are united in chaste intimacy, and by means of which human life is transmitted, are, as the Council recalled, "noble and worthy,"and they do not cease to be lawful if, for causes independent of the will of husband and wife, they are foreseen to be infecund, since they always remain ordained towards expressing and consolidating their union. In fact, as experience bears witness, not every conjugal act is followed by a new life. God has wisely disposed natural laws and rhythms of fecundity which, of themselves, cause a separation in the succession of births. Nonetheless the Church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by their constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life.

12. That teaching, often set forth by the magisterium, is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, capacitates them for the generation of new lives, according to laws inscribed in the very being of man and of woman. By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination towards man's most high calling to parenthood. We believe that the men of our day are particularly capable of seeing the deeply reasonable and human character of this fundamental principle. (Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968.)

Who had been calling for "responsible parenthood" for five decades prior to her death on September 6, 1966? The nymphomaniac, racist and eugenicist named Margaret Sanger, the founder of the Birth Control League that became known as Planned Parenthood, that's who. Her followers continue to champion this shopworn slogan that found its way into the text of an alleged "papal" encyclical letter. Montini/Paul VI's acceptance of "responsible parenthood" slogan of Margaret Sanger and her diabolical minions, coupled with the inversion of the ends of marriage propagated by Dietrich von Hildebrand, constitutes a revolution against the ends of marriage that have "baptized," if you will, a supposedly "natural" form of contraception that is to be used as a matter of routine, not in truly extraordinary cases, where is it only lawful, that is, permissible, and never mandated.

The inclusion of "psychological" reasons to abstain from the conception of children by the use of "knowing" the physicality of a woman's body has been interpreted rather broadly, shall we say. In plain English: the use of "psychological" reasons to abstain from the conception of children has been used to reaffirm the "consciences" of those who are "not ready" for children. This is no different whatsoever than those who have chosen the use of artificial means to prevent the conception of children because they are "not ready" to have them. They have careers. They have poor finances. They have elderly parents for whom to care. They have "plans." They have to get through school. And on and on on. Everybody's got a "serious reason." These are nothing other than excuses and rationalizations that consider marriage in purely naturalistic and materialistic, if not utilitarian, terms without any true love of God and thus of trust that He will send married couples all of the supernatural and temporal helps that they need to provide for the children that God sees fit to send them.

The "teaching" that led to what is called today as "natural family planning" is not to be found in Pope Pius XII's October 29, 1951, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession. It is to be found in Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, devoted to the "responsible parenthood" slogan of Planned Parenthood and the United Nations and environmental groups.

Truly responsible Catholic parenthood is founded in a love for God's Holy Will and by training however many or few children in the truths of the Catholic Faith, which require parents to eschew worldliness and to arm them with the supernatural and natural means to live in a "popular culture" devoted to the glorification of the very thing that caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and that caused those Seven Swords of Sorrow to be pierced through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, that is, sin. That's truly responsible Catholic parenthood. Not that which is represented by "Paul the Sick" and Humanae Vitae.

How the Adversary Used Humanae Vitae to Further Advance Contraception With the Help of Believing Catholics

As has happened in the realm of civil politics, the devil used "false opposites" to divide and conquer believing Catholics as a result of the issuance of Humanae Vitae nearly forty-three years ago now in several ways. Permit me a brief word of explanation.

There were a number of ultra-progressive revolutionaries who were poised to oppose Humanae Vitae even before its release on July 25, 1968. Led by Father Charles Curran, a priest of the Diocese of Rochester, New York, who was then under the authority of his diocesan bishop, a man named Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and was teaching at The Catholic University of America in Washington, District of Columbia, a number of Catholic "dissenters," funded by Planned Parenthood and related organizations, were able to take a major advertisement in The New York Times to express their "loyal opposition" to Humanae Vitae's reaffirmation on the proscribed nature of artificial methods of contraception. Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle, the Archbishop of Washington, sought to fire Curran. He was overruled by the other cardinals who constituted the governing board of The Catholic University of America. Montini/Paul VI did not discipline Curran. Neither did Bishop Sheen, who could have called Curran home to Rochester right then and there.

The rise of the "loyal opposition" posed by Father Charles Curran and his fellow "dissenting" signatories made acceptance of Humanae Vitae a touchstone of what was considered to be Catholic "orthodoxy" in "conservative" Catholic circles These "conservative" Catholics "rallied around the 'pope,'" embracing Humanae Vitae without once considering it to be a truly revolutionary document that helped to launch and institutionalize a "natural" form of contraception that has become the expected norm in conciliar circles (and even in some sedevacantist venues). The "poor, suffering 'pope'" syndrome that afflicted "conservative" and traditionally-minded Catholics in the conciliar structures until Bergoglio’s election on March 13, 2013, began with the issuance of Humanae Vitae and the opposition it engendered from the "ultra-progressives."

It was to protect the "poor, suffering 'pope'" that many "conservative" Catholics, although uneasy with the when it was promulgated on April 3, 1969, and implemented on Sunday, November 30, 1969, accepted the "liturgical reform" and became strong defenders of it as to otherwise would be to place themselves in the same camp as the "ultra-progressives." This was a point that had been made to me first by the conciliar presbyter who had referred to Montini rather consistently as "Paul the Sick." It was a good point, a correct one as he was ahead of me on the harm of the Novus Ordo by about ten years.

Some have even speculated that Montini/Paul VI wanted to use the opposition to Humanae Vitae to "rally the troops" around the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical travesty a year later, much in the same way that the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI used the opposition of many of his ultra-progressive conciliar "bishops" to Summorum Pontificum, issued on July 7, 2007, to evoke "sympathy" for him as sought to further institutionalize the blasphemies, sacrileges and apostasies of conciliarism. Regardless as to whether Montini/Paul VI had this in mind when issuing Humanae Vitae, he, a master exploiter who engaged in massive bouts of self-pity, used opposition to Humanae Vitae as a means to engender support for the rest of his conciliar agenda although he could have put a stop to the "opposition" by having "taken of business" with Curran, which he refused to do.

Having thus become a touchstone of "doctrinal orthodoxy" and of "loyalty to the 'pope,'" Humanae Vitae launched the cottage industry of "natural family planning" (there is something called the "Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction" in Omaha, Nebraska) that was defended by such believing Catholics as Father Paul Marx, O.S.B, who had debunked the myth of overpopulation and who was hated by his Benedictine superiors for his criticism of the conciliar "bishops'" refusal to oppose "artificial" contraception, and Father John A. Hardon, S.J., who was equally hated by his own superiors in the Society of Jesus for his defense of the Faith as best as he was able to do in difficult circumstances. (I would not be surprised if Monsignor George Kelly also became an enthusiast of "natural family planning" out of loyalty to "the pope.") And then there was the syncretist Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who helped to champion the "pope's" cause in this regard. Unfortunately, the cause was that of a false "pope," a true revolutionary who went beyond anything ever intended by Pope Pius XI's Casti Connubii and Pope Pius XII's Allocution to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession.

Montini/Paul VI helped to pave the way as a perverse "John the Baptist" for the endless "personalist" tripe of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II that made discussion of matters that would never pass from the lips of Catholics in any age prior to this a very casual part of the related cottage industry called "the theology of the body." This cottage industry has enriched the likes of Christopher West and others who are obsessed with physicality and thus immodesty and indecency of speech as that which is opposed to Catholic teaching is presented as actually being part of the Sacred Deposit of the Faith in "loyalty" "Blessed" John Paul II. (For a thumbnail sketch of the road from Dietrich von Hildebrand, who was, ironically, opposed to the Novus Ordoservice and told Paul VI so to his face, to Christopher West, see Mrs. Randy Engel's The Phenomenology of Dietrich von Hildebrand and His Novel Teaching on Marriage.)

Pope Pius XII Condemned the Personalist View of Marriage That Gave Rise to Humanae Vitae and Natural Family Planning

Pope Pius XII's Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, which is being treated by some in sedevacantist circles as a positive mandate to teach and practice "natural family planning," contained a complete rejection of the "personalist" view of marriage championed by Dietrich von Hildebrand, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, Albino Luciani/John Paul I, Karol Joszef Wojtyla/John Paul II and Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, to say nothing of the “everything goes” subjectivism of Jorge Mario Bergoglio:

"Personal values" and the need to respect such are a theme which, over the last twenty years or so, has been considered more and more by writers. In many of their works, even the specifically sexual act has its place assigned, that of serving the "person" of the married couple. The proper and most profound sense of the exercise of conjugal rights would consist in this, that the union of bodies is the expression and the realization of personal and affective union.

Articles, chapters, entire books, conferences, especially dealing with the "technique" of love, are composed to spread these ideas, to illustrate them with advice to the newly married as a guide in matrimony, in order that they may not neglect, through stupidity or a false sense of shame or unfounded scruples, that which God, Who also created natural inclinations, offers them. If from their complete reciprocal gift of husband and wife there results a new life, it is a result which remains outside, or, at the most, on the border of "personal values"; a result which is not denied, but neither is it desired as the center of marital relations.

According to these theories, your dedication for the welfare of the still hidden life in the womb of the mother, and your assisting its happy birth, would only have but a minor and secondary importance.

Now, if this relative evaluation were merely to place the emphasis on the personal values of husband and wife rather than on that of the offspring, it would be possible, strictly speaking, to put such a problem aside. But, however, it is a matter of a grave inversion of the order of values and of the ends imposed by the Creator Himself. We find Ourselves faced with the propagation of a number of ideas and sentiments directly opposed to the clarity, profundity, and seriousness of Christian thought. Here, once again, the need for your apostolate. It may happen that you receive the confidences of the mother and wife and are questioned on the more secret desires and intimacies of married life. How, then, will you be able, aware of your mission, to give weight to truth and right order in the appreciation and action of the married couple, if you yourselves are not furnished with the strength of character needed to uphold what you know to be true and just?

The primary end of marriage

Now, the truth is that matrimony, as an institution of nature, in virtue of the Creator's will, has not as a primary and intimate end the personal perfection of the married couple but the procreation and upbringing of a new life. The other ends, inasmuch as they are intended by nature, are not equally primary, much less superior to the primary end, but are essentially subordinated to it. This is true of every marriage, even if no offspring result, just as of every eye it can be said that it is destined and formed to see, even if, in abnormal cases arising from special internal or external conditions, it will never be possible to achieve visual perception.

It was precisely to end the uncertainties and deviations which threatened to diffuse errors regarding the scale of values of the purposes of matrimony and of their reciprocal relations, that a few years ago (March 10, 1944), We Ourselves drew up a declaration on the order of those ends, pointing out what the very internal structure of the natural disposition reveals. We showed what has been handed down by Christian tradition, what the Supreme Pontiffs have repeatedly taught, and what was then in due measure promulgated by the Code of Canon Law. Not long afterwards, to correct opposing opinions, the Holy See, by a public decree, proclaimed that it could not admit the opinion of some recent authors who denied that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of the offspring, or teach that the secondary ends are not essentially subordinated to the primary end, but are on an equal footing and independent of it.

Would this lead, perhaps, to Our denying or diminishing what is good and just in personal values resulting from matrimony and its realization? Certainly not, because the Creator has designed that for the procreation of a new life human beings made of flesh and blood, gifted with soul and heart, shall be called upon as men and not as animals deprived of reason to be the authors of their posterity. It is for this end that the Lord desires the union of husband and wife. Indeed, the Holy Scripture says of God that He created man to His image and He created him male and female, and willed—as is repeatedly affirmed in Holy Writ—that "a man shall leave mother and father, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh".

All this is therefore true and desired by God. But, on the other hand, it must not be divorced completely from the primary function of matrimony—the procreation of offspring. Not only the common work of external life, but even all personal enrichment—spiritual and intellectual—all that in married love as such is most spiritual and profound, has been placed by the will of the Creator and of nature at the service of posterity. The perfect married life, of its very nature, also signifies the total devotion of parents to the well-being of their children, and married love in its power and tenderness is itself a condition of the sincerest care of the offspring and the guarantee of its realization.

To reduce the common life of husband and wife and the conjugal act to a mere organic function for the transmission of seed would be but to convert the domestic hearth, the family sanctuary, into a biological laboratory. Therefore, in Our allocution of September 29, 1949, to the International Congress of Catholic Doctors, We expressly excluded artificial insemination in marriage. The conjugal act, in its natural structure, is a personal action, a simultaneous and immediate cooperation of husband and wife, which by the very nature of the agents and the propriety of the act, is the expression of the reciprocal gift, which, according to Holy Writ, effects the union "in one flesh".

That is much more than the union of two genes, which can be effected even by artificial means, that is, without the natural action of husband and wife. The conjugal act, ordained and desired by nature, is a personal cooperation, to which husband and wife, when contracting marriage, exchange the right.

Therefore, when this act in its natural form is from the beginning perpetually impossible, the object of the matrimonial contract is essentially vitiated. This is what we said on that occasion: "Let it not be forgotten: only the procreation of a new life according to the will and the design of the Creator carries with it in a stupendous degree of perfection the intended ends. It is at the same time in conformity with the spiritual and bodily nature and the dignity of the married couple, in conformity with the happy and normal development of the child".

Advise the fiancée or the young married woman who comes to seek your advice about the values of matrimonial life that these personal values, both in the sphere of the body and the senses and in the sphere of the spirit, are truly genuine, but that the Creator has placed them not in the first, but in the second degree of the scale of values. (Pope Pius XII, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951.)

This is a ringing condemnation of the very philosophical and theological foundations of the indiscriminate, institutionalized teaching and practice of "natural family planning" in the lives of Catholic married couples. It is also yet another papal condemnation of conciliarism's view of marriage.

One cannot overemphasize the importance of Pope Pius XII's condemnation of the very personalist ideology that is at the root of what is called today "natural family planning" as it just a little over seven years and one-half years after the Holy Office's condemnation of the work, which was identical to that of Dietrich von Hildebrand's, of Father Herbert Doms, who had inverted the end of marriage. The condemnation of Father Doms' work was alluded to in a passage from the October 29, 1951, address just cited above. Here it is once again for the sake of emphasis:

Catholics who seek to comment on the foundation of the ideology of "natural family planning" must understand the connection between the work of the likes of Dietrich von Hildebrand and Father Hebert Doms and others that served as the revolutionary basis for Humanae Vitae and thus of "natural family planning" and the "theology of the body." It is also very important for one to familiarize himself with and become conversant in Pope Pius XII's condemnation of these false presuppositions that are the very heart of "NFP" as it is taught and practiced on an institutionalized basis, especially at the likes of the "Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction."

The Foundation of True Married Love: Love of God Above All Else

Higher than any human love is the love that each of is us to have for the God Who created us, the God Who redeemed us, the God Who sanctifies us. Love of God and of His Holy Faith comes before the love that offer to any mere creatures, including our spouses and our children. A husband and a wife's love for each other is inauthentic and thus actually damaging to their eternal salvation if either loves the spouse--or, worse yet, himself or herself and his or her own disordered desire to be the center of the other's universe--more than the true God of Divine Revelation as He has revealed to us exclusively to His true Church. No spouse can be said to be a good husband or a good wife who complains that the one to whom he is wedded in Christ the King loves God more than himself or herself. Such is narcissism. It is egotism. We are called to love to God above all creatures and thus to love all creatures for love of Him, meaning that we will their good, the ultimate expression of which is the salvation of their immortal souls as members of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

The counterfeit church of conciliarism has inverted the ends proper to the Sacrament of Matrimony and endorsed what is, in essence, a Catholic form of “natural” contraception, and enshrined this inversion in their corrupted 1983 Code of Canon Law. This inversion is clear, and it is absolutely undeniable:

856. The primary object of marriage is the procreation and education of offspring; the secondary purpose is mutual assistance and the remedy of concupiscence. (This can be found on page 205 of the following link, which is the 1917 Code of Canon Law in English: 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law.)

Can. 1055 §1. The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring, has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptized. (Canon 1055.1 1983 Conciliar Code of Canon Law. Not even a true pope can change something that exists in the very nature of things.)

There is a straight line from contraception to abortion to sodomy and all of its seemingly never-ending permutations.

Lax moral teaching reaffirms deviant cultural practices, and the result is the further destabilization of the family, the loss of souls, and the rise and then institutionalization of deviancy as the norm, a deviancy, I should add, that many young Catholics learned to accept when they were indoctrinated in such by the conciliar adoption of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to Holy Purity that has evolved into a brainwashing program to condition young Catholics to be “nonjudgmental,” at the least, if not entirely enthusiastic about the acceptance of moral evils to the point of dedicating their lives to their pursuit.

All this has been done in a categorical rejection of Pope Pius XI’s absolute prohibition against classroom instructions in matters pertaining to Holy Purity found in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929, that was reiterated by the Holy Office in 1931:

65. Another very grave danger is that naturalism which nowadays invades the field of education in that most delicate matter of purity of morals. Far too common is the error of those who with dangerous assurance and under an ugly term propagate a so-called sex-education, falsely imagining they can forearm youths against the dangers of sensuality by means purely natural, such as a foolhardy initiation and precautionary instruction for all indiscriminately, even in public; and, worse still, by exposing them at an early age to the occasions, in order to accustom them, so it is argued, and as it were to harden them against such dangers.

66. Such persons grievously err in refusing to recognize the inborn weakness of human nature, and the law of which the Apostle speaks, fighting against the law of the mind; and also in ignoring the experience of facts, from which it is clear that, particularly in young people, evil practices are the effect not so much of ignorance of intellect as of weakness of a will exposed to dangerous occasions, and unsupported by the means of grace.

67. In this extremely delicate matter, if, all things considered, some private instruction is found necessary and opportune, from those who hold from God the commission to teach and who have the grace of state, every precaution must be taken. Such precautions are well known in traditional Christian education, and are adequately described by Antoniano cited above, when he says:

Such is our misery and inclination to sin, that often in the very things considered to be remedies against sin, we find occasions for and inducements to sin itself. Hence it is of the highest importance that a good father, while discussing with his son a matter so delicate, should be well on his guard and not descend to details, nor refer to the various ways in which this infernal hydra destroys with its poison so large a portion of the world; otherwise it may happen that instead of extinguishing this fire, he unwittingly stirs or kindles it in the simple and tender heart of the child. Speaking generally, during the period of childhood it suffices to employ those remedies which produce the double effect of opening the door to the virtue of purity and closing the door upon vice. (Passage and double-indented quotation as found in Pope Pius XI's Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

I) Can the method be approved, which is called "sexual education," or even "sexual initiation?"

Response: In the negative, and that the method must be persevere entirely as set forth up to the present entirely as set forth up to the present by the Church and saintly men, and recommended by the Most Holy Father in the Encyclical Letter, "On the Christian Education of Youth," given on the 31st day of December, 1929. Naturally, care must especially be taken that a full and solid religious instruction be given to the youth of both sexes without interruption; in this instruction there must be aroused a regard, desire, and love for the angelic virtue; and especially must it be inculcated upon them to insist on prayer, to be constant in the sacraments of penance and the Most Holy Eucharist, to be devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mother of holy purity, with filial devotion and to commit themselves wholly to her protection; to avoid carefully dangerous reading, obscene plays, associated with the wicked, and all occasions of sin.

By no means, then, can we approve what has been written and published in defense of the new method especially in these recent times, even on the part of some Catholic authors. (Henry Denzinger, Enchirdion Symbolorum, thirteenth edition, translated into English by Roy Deferrari and published in 1955 as The Sources of Catholic Dogma--referred to as "Denziger," by B. Herder Book Company of St. Louis, Missouri, and London, England, Nos. 2183-2185, pp. 597-598.)

It does not get any plainer than that.

Yet it is that the conciliar revolutionaries have miseducated several generations of young Catholics to place themselves openly in occasions of sin. This is a denial of the efficacy of the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into human hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

How do children learn to grow in purity?

By being taught to love God with their whole hearts, minds, bodies, souls, and strength.

By eliminating, as far as is humanly possible, the incentives to sin as found in popular culture (eliminating the television as a starting point, of course), refusing to expose children to the near occasions of sin represented by immodestly dressed relatives or friends, refusing to permit them to associate with playmates whose innocence and purity have been undermined by the culture and by "education" programs that serve in public schools to be instruments of promoting sin and that serve in conciliar schools as the means of justifying it. By keeping our children close to the Sacraments, which means, of course, getting them out of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, and making sure that the family Rosary is prayed every day with fervor and devotion.

Too Catholic?

Too unrealistic?

Just take a look at the statement issued by the Holy Office on March 21, 1931.

Do we need "theft instruction" in order to keep our children from stealing?

Do children, who are naturally curious, have to learn about the various forms of thievery available to them in order to know that it is wrong to violate the Seventh Commandment? Might such "theft instruction" actually serve as an incentive to the mischievous to steal?

The fact that the conciliar authorities in the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River have seen fit to defy the prohibitions against explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments because they are penultimate naturalists. That these hideous revolutionaries have had to ask the questions that they did is the direct result of their own defiance of Catholic teaching. This is not surprising as they are living and breathing apostates whose almost every word and action is in defiance of the Sacred Deposit of Faith.

While human beings will always fall into various sins of impurity, the fact that there has been an explosion of natural and unnatural sins against the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments has to with the fact that most men, including most Catholics, are influenced by the prevailing rot of a pluralistic culture wherein one of the easiest ways to make a quick profit is to appeal to man’s basest instincts.

For instance, it has been not only recently, for instance, that the motion picture industry, which has been controlled by secular Jews from its very beginning, was committed to the exploitation of man’s lower appetites and passions, and the only reason that Hollywood had to watch itself between 1934 and the 1950s was because of the Hays Code, which was honored more in the breach than in actual point of fact, came into existence because of the unrelenting efforts of Catholic bishops, priests, and laymen, especially Archbishop Joseph McNicholas of Cincinnati, Ohio, Father Daniel Lord, S.J., and laymen Joseph Breen and Martin Quigley. What resulted was termed by a Jewish commentator was a world where Jewish producers sold Catholic theology to Protestant America.

Even during the era of the Hays Code, various producers, most notably Otto Preminger, a Jew who hated efforts on the part of Catholics to convert his father, Markus Preminger, and Alfred Hitchcock, who was a Catholic, found ways to flaunt the code, and the successor of their efforts and others commercially led to the erosion and the elimination of the code by 1968, by which time the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s “opening to the world” had commenced, resulting in an relaxation of vigilance by ordinary Catholics, who were already succumbing to the temptations not to maintain custody of their eyes and ears.

Motion picture producers were not alone in their efforts to make profits from impurity. The fashion industry, working frequently hand-in-hand with Hollywood and the advertisers of Madison Avenue began to produce and market “gradual” changes in feminine attire to reveal rather than to conceal.

Father Martin Stepanich, O.F.M., Cap., S.T.D., explained how changes in women’s fashions were introduced after World War I that had caught of and been condemned by Pope Benedict XV in 1921:

The avowed enemies of God are rejoicing--temporarily--at having brought about an almost total collapse of the virtue of modesty among once virtuous Christian womanhood, while those commissioned by God to teach and uphold this angelic virtue insist on cowardly silence and indifference about it and on gutless permissiveness in manner of dress everywhere.

Meanwhile, vast numbers of supposedly "good" people remain as if without a conscience, being morally blind and insensitive as to what has really happened to a God-given virtue that was once a distinctive trademark of theirs. This type of blindness seems to go hand in hand with a brazen contempt and a sassy resentfulness towards any attempt to revive and restore the missing sense of modesty.

The fact stands out clearly that the immodest fashions of this unchaste generation still offend Our Lord "very much," as Our Lady foretold it through the angelic little Jacinta.

Anyone who still cares about God's virtue of modesty, which He has made shine with such heavenly beauty in the Immaculate Virgin Mary, cannot forget how Our Lord suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane when He foresaw so many sinners, including the immodest and the impure, remaining unrepentant. And the sight of so many immodest creatures displaying crude flesh, like animals, brings vividly before our mind's eye the frightful vision of Our Divine Savior being mercilessly scourged at the pillar. We need not strain ourselves in trying to picture this scene, for we can plainly see the immodest, with their unchaste displays of flesh and figure, continually scourging Our Lord. And we can see them crowning Him with thorns and nailing Him to the Cross all over again.

And look what sorrow the immodest and the impure are causing their Sorrowful and Immaculate Mother, whom God has presented to them as the Perfect Model of Modesty and Purity!

But it has not all happened by accident. Satan planned it this way. As he has done with such evil movements as Communism and Socialism and Freemasonry, so also has he planned out a program of gradual, not sudden, destruction of the sense of modesty and purity. A mere look at the past 50 years or more shows us very plainly how gradually it was all done, first by apparently innocent abbreviations of garments and by slight revelations of bare flesh and by subtle little displays of the figure, and then, as protests died down, by more and more abbreviations and displays--until the crude immodesty of our day became a shocking reality.

Many living today have seen it all happen before their very eyes. They have lived through it and, if they have managed to retain their God-given moral sense, they find the barbarian immodesty of the this day intolerable and they look upon it as a sin crying to Heaven for the vengeance that must inevitably come if sinners continue to refuse to amend their ways.

Perhaps some 50 years ago or more, a publication known as The Frenchwoman presented the following satanic program for the destruction of the virtue of modesty: "Our children must realize the ideal of nakedness... Thus, the mentality of the child is rapidly transformed. To escape opposition, progress must be methodically graduated: first, feet and legs naked, then upturned sleeves; afterwards, the upper part of the chest; then, the back... n summer, they will go around almost naked."

Even if such a daring statement of the powers of darkness had never come to light--though "enlightened" liberals have tried to keep it in the dark--we would still know that it had to be planned that way and could not have happened by accident. And we would also know that such a program for immodesty could not have originated anywhere but in the dungeons of hell and in the mind of Satan.

The program of gradualism intended to lead eventually to the crude immodesty that we know so painfully well today was evidently drawn up, or at least made known, some time during the Fatima years, possibly a little before or after the 1917 Apparitions of Our Lady. (Maybe some well-informed person can provide a precise date.) Bearing this in mind, we can easily conclude that it was no accident that Our Lady insisted so strongly on modesty in her Fatima Message. She knew well of the evil program that would endanger so many immortal souls, and she came to Fatima to warn souls and to save them from the evil awaiting them.

As Sister Lucy has said, one of the things that Our Lady especially asked for was modesty in dress. And still better known, though disregarded, is Jacinta's prophecy: "Certain fashions will be introduced that will offend Our Lord very much"--that little liked prophecy that leaves immodestly dressed "pious" women and girls callous and insensitive and cold.

Just as Our Lady was commissioned by God to oppose the rise of Russian Communism and all the other evils named in the Fatima Message, with God's own program of sanctification and salvation, so was part of her mission to warn souls of the dangers of immodesty and impurity that were to increase the unbelievable proportions in the years to come, and to turn them to modesty and purity and amendment of life.

In connection with the timeliness of Our Lady's message of modesty in 1917, just when Satan's program of gradual nakedness was being put into effect, we must also mention the timeliness of the message of modesty of Pope Benedict XV (1914-1922). It is fairly well known how dynamic were his two successors, Popes Pius XI and Pius XII, in promoting modesty of dress, but it is not as well known that Pope Benedict XV was before them a strenuous defender and promoter of modesty at a time when we might imagine it was not so much of a problem.

We cannot believe that the statements of Our Lady of Fatima and those of Pope Benedict XV on modesty were disconnected or were merely a matter of coincidence. We can only believe that both Our Lady of Fatima and the Holy Father of that time were inspired and guided by God Himself to speak out on modesty in dress, so as to counteract the wicked program of gradual nudism that was being inspired and guided by hell's father of iniquity.

Let us quote an important statement of Pope Benedict XV--by no means his only one--so that we may see how immodesty in dress had already begun to cause moral ruin among women and girls of his day. In an Encyclical Letter (Sacra Propediem, 1921) commemorating the 7th centenary of the founding of the Franciscan Third Order, Pope Benedict wrote as follows:

"From this point of view one cannot sufficiently deplore the blindness of so many women of every age and condition; made foolish by desire to please, they do not see to what a degree the in decency of their clothing shocks every honest man, and offends God. Most of them would formerly have blushed for those toilettes as for a grave fault against Christian modesty; now it does not suffice for them to exhibit them on the public thoroughfares; they do not fear to cross the threshold of the churches, to assist at the Holy sacrifice of the Mass, and even to bear the seducing food of shameful passions to the Eucharistic Table where one receives the heavenly Author of purity. And We speak not of those exotic and barbarous dances recently imported into fashionable circles, one more shocking than the other; one cannot imagine anything more suitable for banishing all the remains of modesty."

If we did not know that a Pope wrote this in 1921, we would surely think it was written, or should have been written by someone, in 1972!

After thus deploring the immodesty of his day, the Holy Father exhorted women with these words:

"In what concerns specially the Tertiary Sisters, We ask of them by their dress and manner of wearing it, to be models of holy modesty for other ladies and young girls; that they be thoroughly convinced that the best way for them to be of use to the Church and to Society is to labor for the improvement of morals."

Whose message, do you suppose, have women and girls accepted: the message of modesty of Our Lady of Fatima and of the Holy Father or, the message of immodesty of Lucifer?

Who has recommended to them short skirts, sleeveless dresses, pants, shorts, and clownish pants suits, and so on?

Not only did women and girls buy and buy and buy the clothing that through the years became gradually shorter and skimpier and tighter and ever more unladylike, thus making the whole program of gradual nakedness a huge success, but something else happened at the same time; the sense of modesty and propriety, which God has instilled into their souls, became gradually more blurred and dim and fuzzy, until in so many it became totally blacked out and dead. They did not, and do not, know what happened to them. By blindly and stupidly following the satanic program of gradual abbreviation of attire, they destroyed in themselves a precious God-given gift--the sense of modesty--so that they have now made themselves incapable of distinguishing between modesty and immodesty, nor do so many of them care to know.

And not only have women destroyed in themselves God's gift of modesty, but they have destroyed it in their children from their earliest years, so that a whole generation has been brought up without any real understanding of modesty without any desire to possess its beauty.

And, mind you, these have been "good" and "pious" women who have done this to their children! They have been the "Lord, Lord" type who have duly said their prayers, which all are obliged to do, but who have not done "the Will of My Father Who is in Heaven" (Mt. 7. 21) by obeying His law of modesty. (Emphases added.) (Father Martin Stepanich, O.F.M., S.T.D., The Remnant, 1972.)

Powerful words, although each of us knows fellow Catholics who scoff at them as being too “severe” or “old-fashioned. Truth never has an expiration date, and that is something that Pope Pius XII himself noted in 1957:

This second virtue, modesty - the very word “modesty” comes from modus, a measure or limit - probably better expresses the function of governing and dominating the passions, especially sensual passions. It is the natural bulwark of chastity. It is its effective rampart, because it moderates acts closely connected with the very object of chastity [...] Yet no matter how broad and changeable the relative morals of styles may be, there is always an absolute norm to be kept after having heard the admonition of conscience warning against approaching danger: style must never be a proximate occasion of sin. [...] An excess of immodesty in fashion involves, in practice, the cut of the garment. The garment must not be evaluated according to the estimation of a decadent or already corrupt society, but according to the aspirations of a society which prizes the dignity and seriousness of its public attire. [...] It is often said almost with passive resignation that fashions reflect the customs of a people. But it would be more exact and much more useful to say that they express the decision and moral direction that a nation intends to take: either to be shipwrecked in licentiousness or maintain itself at the level to which it has been raised by religion and civilization. (Pope Pius XII, Address to the Congress of the Latin Union of High Fashion, November 8, 1957; as found in Norms for Modesty, which is on the website of the National Coalition for Clergy and the Laity, which also includes links to Rome's Decrees on Modesty in Dress and Cardinal Siri’s Notification Concerning Men's Dress Worn by Women. Pope Pius XII's entire address may be purchased for fifty cents at MIQ Center Catholic Books: Papal Decrees, Encyclicals.)

One of the worst aspects of the false religion of conciliarism is how the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical has resulted in the gradual acceptance of gross indecency of dress as thoroughly acceptable in the context of putative offerings of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Some of the attire that is worn—or not worn, as the case might be in many instances—in the Novus Ordo world make some of the pagans of yore blush with shame. Offense is given to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in churches where He was once housed sacramentally and scandal is given to the little ones whose purity and innocence is so precious to Him. This Novus Ordo spirit has infected many Catholics, perhaps even some of your own family members or friends, who are immersed in the make-believe world wrought by Summorum Pontificum.

The false spirit of conciliarism is such that the compromises that are necessary to accept having "the Mass" offered in "communion with the 'pope'" lead to compromises in the lives of many of the Catholics who go to Motu Masses (or simulations of the Mass in those instances where presbyters are the officiants). "Relax." "Don't be too strict." "Just go along with the times." "Things change, you know." Really?

Try telling that to Saint John Mary Vianney, the Cure of Ars, or to Padre Pio or to Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who had to stare down gun-toting Nicaraguans who were upset with her insistence upon exacting standards of Modesty in the tropical climate of that Central American nation. The compromises necessary to "have Mass" to please the local non-bishop in accordance with Summorum Pontificum have seen not a few priests and presbyters in the indult/Motu world called on the carpet for attempting to insist on Modesty in their chapels.

Contraception, immodesty, suggestiveness and outright lasciviousness in motion pictures, art, music, magazines, books, and advertising each have contribute to the rise of the abuse of that which God has given to men to continue the species, and it would be irresponsible to take cognizance of the fact that the conciliar authorities have systematically sought to recruit homosexuals and effeminate men into the clergy who were “malleable” enough to evangelize on behalf of a new religion, a new liturgy, and a new morality that has reached such a nadir that, as will be noted in the next and final part of this series, a supposed prefect of the conciliar curia can suggest that the Catholic Church’s condemnation of homosexual acts as being intrinsically disordered has to be changed.

Catholic young people within the conciliar structures have not been taught to refrain from the rot of a modern “culture” that is steeped in the glorification and celebration of impurity, indecency, immodesty, unnatural vice, rebelliousness, anarchy, and nihilism, and this is mostly, although not entirely, the result of conciliarism’s “official reconciliation” with the “principles of the new era inaugurated in 1789,” to paraphrase what then Joseph “Cardinal” Ratzinger wrote in his very misnamed Principles of Catholic Theology.

Yes, apostasy continues to have consequences.

As is ever the case, we must stay close to the Mother of God as we offer unto her Divine Son all of the sufferings of the present moment through her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, invoking also the selfless, chaste and just head of the Holy Family, Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful. Ever Rosary that a married couple says before they are blessed with children and that they pray after their conceptions and births unites them more closely to each of the three members of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. And it is by possessing and demonstrating the same simplicity of each member of the Holy Family that individual members of families can save their souls and remain as simple as were the great saints who conformed their lives at all times and in all things to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer He has discharged it exclusively in His Holy Catholic Church.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Matthew the Apostle, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Appendix

On the Third Sunday of Lent

Today, Sunday, March 23, 2025, is the Third Sunday of Lent.

Dom Prosper Gueranger’s reflection on the Third Sunday of Lent reminds us of the necessity of making a good, integral confession of our sins to a true priest lest seven devils more powerful and menacing inhabit our souls if we conceal any sins in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance or avoid going to Confession altogether because of human pride:

The holy Church gave us, as the subject of our meditation for the First Sunday of Lent, the Temptation which our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to suffer in the Desert. Her object was to enlighten us how to conquer them. Today, she wishes to complete her instruction on the power and stratagems of our invisible enemies; and for this, she reads to us a passage from the Gospel of St. Luke. During Lent, the Christian ought to repair the past, and provide for the future; but he can neither understand how it was he fell, nor defend himself against a relapse, unless he have correct ideas as to the nature of the dangers which have hitherto proved fatal, and are again threatening him. Hence, the ancient Liturgists would have us consider it as a proof of the maternal watchfulness of the Church that she should have again proposed such a subject to us. As we shall find, it is the basis of all today’s instructions.

Assuredly, we should be the blindest and most unhappy of men if—surrounded as we are by enemies who unceasingly seek to destroy us, and are so superior to us both in power and knowledge—we were seldom or never to think of the existence of these wicked spirits. And yet, such is really the case with innumerable Christians nowadays; for truths are diminished from among the children of men. So common, indeed, is this heedlessness and forgetfulness of a truth which the Holy Scriptures put before us in almost every page, that it is no rare thing to meet with persons who ridicule the idea of Devils being permitted to be on this earth of ours! They call it a prejudice, a popular superstition, of the Middle Ages! Of course they deny that it is a dogma of Faith. When they read the History of the Church or the Lives of the Saints, they have their own way of explaining whatever is there related on this subject. To hear them talk, one would suppose that they look on Satan as a mere abstract idea, to be taken as the personification of evil.

When they would account for the origin of their own or others’ sins, they explain all by the evil inclination of man’s heart, and by the bad use we make of our free will. They never think of what we are taught by Christian doctrine; namely, that we are also instigated to sin by a wicked being whose power is as great as is the hatred he bears us. And yet, they know, they believe, with a firm faith, that Satan conversed with our First Parents, and persuaded them to commit sin, and showed himself to them under the form of a serpent. They believe that this same Satan dared to tempt the Incarnate Son of God, and that he carried him through the air and set him first upon a pinnacle of the Temple, and then upon a very high mountain. Again: they read in the Gospel, and they believe, that one of the Possessed, who were delivered by our Savior, was tormented by a whole legion of devils who, upon being driven out of the man, went by Jesus’ permission, into a herd of swine, and the whole herd ran violently into the see of Genesareth, and perished in the waters. These and many other such like facts are believed by the persons of whom we speak, with all the earnestness of faith; yet, notwithstanding, they treat as a figure of speech, or a fiction, all they hear or read about the existence, the actions or the craft of these wicked spirits. Are such people Christians, or have they lost their senses? One would scarcely have expected that this species of incredulity could have found its way into an age like this, when sacrilegious consultations of the devil have been, we might almost say, unfashionable. Means which were used in the days of paganism have been resorted to for such consultations; and they who employed them seemed to forget or ignore that they were committing what God, in the Old Law, punished with death, and which for many centuries was considered by all Christian nations as a capital crime.

But if there be one Season of the Year more than another in which the Faithful ought to reflect upon what is taught us by both Faith and experience, as to the existence and workings of the wicked spirits—it is undoubtedly this of Lent, when it is our duty to consider what have been the causes of our past sins, what are the spiritual dangers we have to fear for the future, and what means we should have recourse to for preventing a relapse. Let us, then, hearken to the holy Gospel. Firstly, we are told that the devil had possessed a man, and that the effect produced by this possession was dumbness. Our Savior cast out the devil, and immediately the dumb man spoke. So that, the being possessed by the devil is not only a fact which testifies to God’s impenetrable justice; it is one which may produce physical effects upon them that are thus tried or punished. The casting out the devil restores the use of speech to him that had been possessed. We say nothing about the obstinate malice of Jesus’ enemies, who would have it that his power over the devils came from his being in league with the prince of devils;—all we would now do is to show that the wicked spirits are sometimes permitted to have power over the body, and to refute, by this passage from the Gospel, the rationalism of certain Christians. Let these learn, then, that the power of our spiritual enemies is an awful reality; and let them take heed not to lay themselves open to their worst attacks by persisting in the disdainful haughtiness of their Reason.

Ever since the promulgation of the Gospel, the power of Satan over the human body has been restricted by the virtue of the Cross, at least in Christian countries: but this power resumes its sway as often as the faith and the practice of Christian piety lose their influence. And here we have the origin of all those diabolical practices which, under certain scientific names, are attempted first in secret, and then are countenanced by being assisted at by well-meaning Christians. Were it not that God and his Church intervene, such practices as these would subvert society. Christians! remember your Baptismal vow; you have renounced Satan: take care, then, that by a culpable ignorance you are not dragged into apostasy. It is not a phantom that you renounced at the Font; he is a real and formidable being who, as our Lord tells us, was a Murderer from the beginning.

But if we ought to dread the power he may be permitted to have over our bodies; if we ought to shun all intercourse with him and take no share in practices over which he presides, and which are the worship he would have men give him—we ought, also, to fear the influence he is ever striving to exercise over our souls. See what God’s grace has to do in order to drive him from your soul! During this holy Season, the Church is putting within your reach those grand means of victory—Fasting, Prayer, and Almsdeeds. The sweets of peace will soon be yours, and once more you will become God’s temple, for both soul and body will have regained their purity. But be not deceived; your enemy is not slain. He is irritated; penance has driven him from you, but he has sworn to return. Therefore, fear a relapse into mortal sin; and in order to nourish within you this wholesome fear, meditate upon the concluding part of our Gospel.

Our Savior tells us that when the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through places without water. There he writhes under his humiliation; it has added to the tortures of the hell he carries everywhere with him, and to which he fain would give some alleviation, by destroying souls that have been redeemed by Christ. We read in the Old Testament that sometimes, when the devils have been conquered, they have been forced to flee into some far-off wilderness: for example, the holy Archangel Raphael took the devil that had killed Sara’s husbands, and bound him in the desert of Upper Egypt. But the enemy of mankind never despairs of regaining his prey. His hatred is as active now as it was at the very beginning of the world, and he says: I will return into my house, whence I came out. Nor will he come alone. He is determined to conquer; and therefore, he will, if he think it needed, take with him seven other spirits, even more wicked than himself. What a terrible assault is this that is being prepared for the pour soul unless she be on the watch, and unless the peace which God has granted her be one that is well armed for war! Alas! with many souls, the very contrary is the case; and our Savior describes the situation in which the devil finds them on his return: they are swept and garnished, and that is all! No precautions, no defense, no arms. One would suppose that they were waiting to give the enemy admission. Then Satan, to make his repossession sure, comes with a seven-fold force. The attack is made;—but there is no resistance, and straightways the wicked spirits entering in, dwell there; so that, the last state becometh worse than the first; for before, there was but one enemy, and now there are many.

In order that we may understand the full force of the warning conveyed to us by the Church in this Gospel, we must keep before us the great reality that this is the acceptable Time. In every part of the world, there are conversions being wrought; millions are being reconciled with God; divine Mercy is lavish of pardon to all that seek it. But will all persevere? They that are now being delivered from the power of Satan—will they all be free from his yoke when next year’s Lent comes around? A sad experience tells the Church that she may not hope so grand a result. Many will return to their sins, and that too before many weeks are over. And if the Justice of God overtake them in that state—what an awful thing it is to say it, yet it is true;—some, perhaps many, of these sinners will be eternally lost! Let us, then, be on our guard against a relapse; and in order that we may ensure our Perseverance, without which it would have been to little purpose to have been for a few days in God’s grace—let us watch, and pray; let us keep ourselves under arms; let us ever remember that our whole life is to be a warfare. Our soldier-like attitude will disconcert the enemy, and he will try to gain victory elsewhere.

The Third Sunday of Lent is called Oculi from the first word of the Introit. In the primitive Church, it was called Scrutiny Sunday, because it was on this day that they began to examine the Catechumens, who were to be admitted to Baptism on Easter night. All the Faithful were invited to assemble in the Church, in order that they might bear testimony to the good life and morals of the candidates. At Rome, these examinations, which were called the Scrutinies, were made on seven different occasions, on account of the great number of aspirants to Baptism; but the principal Scrutiny was that held on the Wednesday of the Fourth Week. We will speak of it later on.

The Roman Sacramentary of St. Galasius gives us the form in which the Faithful were convoked to these assemblies. It is as follows. “Dearly beloved Brethren: you know that the day of Scrutiny, when our elect are to receive the holy instruction, is at hand. We invite you, therefore, to be zealous and to assemble on N., (here, the day was mentioned), at the hour of Sext; that so we may be able, by the divine aid, to achieve, without error, the heavenly mystery, whereby is opened the gate of the kingdom of heaven, and the devil is excluded with all his pomps.” The invitation was repeated, if needed, on each of the following Sundays. The Scrutiny of this Sunday ended in the admission of a certain number of candidates: their names were written down and put on the Diptychs of the Altar, that they might be mentioned in the Canon of the Mass. The same also was done with the names of their Sponsors . . . .

[Dom Prosper discoursed on the meaning of the Gospel read at Holy Mass on the Third Sunday of Lent]

As Son has Jesus had cast out the devil, the man recovered his speech, for the possession had made him dumb. It is an image of what happens to a sinner who will not, or dare not, confess his sin. If he confessed it, and asked pardon, he would be delivered from the tyranny which now oppresses him. Alas! how many there are who are kept back by a dumb devil from making the Confession that would save them! The holy Season of Lent is advancing; these days of grace are passing away; let us profit by them; and if we ourselves be in the state of grace, let us offer up our earnest prayers for sinners, that they may speak, that is, may accuse themselves in Confession, and obtain pardon.

Let us also listen, with holy fear, to what our Savior tells us with regard to our invisible enemies. They are so powerful and crafty that our resistance would be useless, unless we had God on our side, and his holy Angels, who watch over us and join us in the great combat. It was to these unclean and hateful spirits of hell that we delivered ourselves when we sinned: we preferred their tyrannical sway to the sweet and light yoke of our compassionate Redeemer. Now we are set free, or are hoping to be so; let us thank our Divine Liberator; but let us take care not to re-admit our enemies. Our Savior warns us of our danger. They will return to the attack; they will endeavor to force their entrance into our soul, after it has been sanctified by the Lamb of the Passover. If we be watchful and faithful, they will be confounded, and leave us: but if we be tepid and careless, if we lose our appreciation of the grace we have received, and forget our obligations to Him who has saved us, our defeat is inevitable; and as our Lord says, our last state is to be worse than the first.

Would we avoid such a misfortune? Let us meditate upon those other words of our Lord, in today’s Gospel: He that is not with me is against me. What makes us fall back into the power of Satan, and forget our duty to our God, is that we do not frankly declare ourselves for Jesus, when occasions require us to do so. We try to be on both sides, we have recourse to subterfuge, we temporize: this takes away our energy; God no longer gives us the abundant graces we received when we were loyal and and generous; our relapse is all but certain. Therefore, let us be boldly and unmistakeably with Christ. He that is a soldier of Jesus should be proud of his title! (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., Third Sunday of Lent, The Liturgical Year.)

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Apostasy Continues to Have Consequences

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