Bruno's Forte is Apostasy

Bruno’s forte is apostasy.

What am I talking about?

Well, as is ever the case, you, good readers always seem to ask the most pertinent questions. Thus, I shan’t keep you in suspense.

I am talking about Bruno Forte, the conciliar “archbishop” of Chieti-Vasto, Italy, since 2004, who first came to my attention a short time after he was personally “consecrated” by none other than the then prefect of the misnamed Congregation for the Faith Joseph Alois “Cardinal” Ratzinger over the objections of most of the members of Italian conciliar hierarchy because of Forte’s explicit rejection of the actual, bodily Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday:

Another example of this alarming situation, which threatens to make the Pope’s disciplinary laxity seem strictly conservative by comparison, is the little-noticed story of how Bruno Forte, a priest of the Archdiocese of Naples, was suddenly made a bishop five months ago.

Forte, who last year was brought to the Vatican to preach a Lenten retreat to an already incapacitated Pope, is rumored to be Cardinal Ratzinger’s replacement as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  How this happened is anybody’s guess.  The rumor has caused a great deal of consternation for one simple reason: Forte is a flaming neo-modernist.  As noted in the Winter 2005 issue of The Latin Mass in a report by its Italian correspondent, Alessandro Zangrando, Forte was a pupil of none other than the infamous Cardinal Walter Kasper.  (In yet another sign of things falling apart at the top, immediately after Kasper’s own elevation to the rank of cardinal he publicly declared to the press that the Old Covenant remains in force and is salvific for the Jews, and that Protestants are under no obligation to convert and become Catholics.) 

Worse still, Zangrando, a respected journalist not given to reckless claims, relates that Forte’s 1994 essay Gesu di Nazaret, storia di Dio, Dio della storia (Jesus of Nazareth, history of God, God of history) reveals Forte as nothing less than “the standard-bearer of theories so radical as to the point of putting in doubt even the historicity of the resurrection of Christ.  The empty tomb, he argues, is a legend tied into the Jewish-Christian ritual performed at the place of Jesus’ burial. It is a myth inherited by the Christians from Jesus’ early disciples. Therefore, the empty tomb, along with other details surrounding the resurrection, is nothing but a ‘proof’ made up by the community. In other words, Forte is trying to change the resurrection of Christ into a myth, into a kind of fairy tale that cannot be proven.”

Forte’s elevation to bishop was rather mysterious. Zangrando notes that Forte’s name did not appear in any list of possible candidates submitted to the Italian Nunciature, and even his ordinary, Cardinal Michele Giordano, Archbishop of Naples, “was reportedly against that appointment.” But, “in an apparent attempt at putting to rest a growing controversy” over Forte’s candidacy, he was personally consecrated a bishop by none other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the very man Forte will succeed as head of the CDF, according to the rumors.  Yes, “our only friend in the Vatican” has struck again.  More and more it becomes apparent that this man is perhaps the most industrious ecclesial termite of the post-conciliar epoch, tearing down even as he makes busy with the appearance of building up.  The longer Ratzinger “guards” Catholic doctrine, the more porous the barriers that protect it become.

Indeed, as I have pointed out more than once on these pages, it was Ratzinger who wrote in 1987 (in the second edition of his Principles of Catholic Theology) that the “demolition of bastions” in the Church is “a long-overdue task.”  The Church, he declared, “must relinquish many of the things that have hitherto spelled security for her and that she has taken for granted. She must demolish longstanding bastions and trust solely the shield of faith.” Now it seems that with the bastions all but demolished, even the shield of faith is about to clatter to the ground. 

There is no doubt the Holy Ghost will save the Church from extinction and bring about her restoration. In the end, no other result is possible. 

Before this happens, however, the difference between extinction and non-extinction may come to be far smaller than even traditionalists might have supposed. On the other hand, the very next Pope could be another Saint Pius X, who will finally take arms against our enemies and impose immediate restorative measures we could scarcely have imagined.   Who knows which way it will go?   All we can do is continue our loyal opposition, pray for the advent of a kingly, militant pope, and hope that the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary will soon be upon us. (Christopher A. Ferrara, Ratzinger Personally Consecrates Neo-Modernist Bishop.) 

Although tempted to say a word or two about how an ecclesiastical termite can become a “restorer of tradition,” I shall simply point out that, after having received a copy of Forte’s book in the original Italian edition and run the pertinent text through a translation, yes, Bruno Forte really denied the actual, bodily Resurrection of Our Lord on Easter Sunday, a heresy that he shared with the late German New Theologian who consecrated him:

The raising of Jesus from the dead is portrayed as his elevation over all the powers of this world, including the hitherto invincible power of death, and as his investiture in the eschatological kingdom of God, toward which all the hope of the Old Testament is directed. The sentence "Jesus has risen" thus expresses the primitive experience on which all Christian faith is grounded; all further confessions are interpretations of this original one, including the confession of Jesus as the Messiah, of the "Christ-ness" of Jesus, however the historical Jesus as it is later remembered may be operative here. "Jesus has risen"--this sentence is thus, above all, the true articulus stantis et cadendtis ecclesiae by which the structure of faith and theology are chiefly to be determined.

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With this statement we seem to be again at the heart of the conflict with which we started, since the Resurrection is understood by one group as a historical event and as part of the long line of salvation history but by the other as the eschatological event that transcends all history, that leaves history shattered in its wake and is present in the kerygma as the totally other. Although the futility of expecting an unqualified interpretation where there is question of what is ultimate and essential has thus again been confirmed, I believe, nonetheless, that, in the last part of these reflections, I can draw from the doctrinal core we have defined a few guidelines for the course theology should take between salvation history and metaphysics, between salvation history and eschatology. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 1987, p. 184.)

There is a "conflict" here only because Joseph Ratzinger accepted as credible the views of those who want to make Our Lord's Resurrection appear to have taken place outside of the context of actual history, posing the old Modernist conflict between the "Jesus of history" and the "Jesus of Faith." "Theology" has no course to take here except to submit to the Received Teaching that the God-Man has entrusted to His true Church: that He rose again from the dead on the third day, which was actually the first Easter Sunday, some forty hours after He gave up His spirit on the wood of the Holy Cross to effect our redemption. You see, Joseph Ratzinger cannot insist that others submit to a Deposit of Faith which he himself does not believe has been "clarified" sufficiently to answer all objections to its traditional formulations. This is of the essence of Modernism.

Ratzinger went on to write:

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From what has been said, it is clear that all Christian theology, if it is to be true to its origin, must be first and foremost a theology of the Resurrection. It must be a theology of the Resurrection before it is a theology of the justification of the sinner; it must be a theology of the Resurrection before it is a theology of the metaphysical Sonship of God. It can be a theology of the Cross but only as and within the framework of a theology of the Resurrection, its first and primordial statement in the good tidings that the power of death, the one constant of history has thus been imbued with an entirely new hope. In other words, the core of the gospel consists in the good tidings of the Resurrection and, consequently, in the good tidings of God’s action, which precedes all human doing. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 184.)

This is the old Modernist line, repeated constantly in Modernist-oriented "Scripture" courses (which I had to endure as a seminarian, believe me): that believers did not realize Our Lord was God until the Resurrection. Some Modernists contend that He did not know Who He was until the Resurrection. This is a lie. The Incarnation of Our Lord proves His Divine Sonship. at the essence of Catholic theology, the belief that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became Man in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb at the Annunciation precisely in order to redeem us on the wood of the Holy Cross to pay back the blood debt of Adam's sin, thus reopening the Gates of Heaven and destroying the power of sin and death forever.  He Who is above all time entered time at the Incarnation, not at the Resurrection.

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Our Lord was worshiped as God by the Three Kings of the Orient at the Epiphany. Saint Peter confessed Him to be the Messiah in the region of Caeseria Philippi. Our Lord manifested the glory of His Sacred Divinity atop Mount Thabor to Saints Peter and the sons of Zebedee, James the Greater and John the Evangelist. He performed numerous miracles attesting to the fact that He is God. The Resurrection, while indeed a central truth of our Faith without which our Faith would be pointless, is the manifestation of Our Lord's victory over the power of sin and death. He had proclaimed Himself to be Who He is, God Incarnate, before His Crucifixion, before His Resurrection., which was an actual historical occurrence.

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The paragraph cited above is important also as it reflects Benedict/Ratzinger's views on the liturgy, developed in The Spirit of the Liturgy, that essence of the Mass is the Paschal Banquet, not the unbloody re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross. The Sacrifice of the Cross is secondary to the joy of the Resurrection, inverting the reality that there would no Resurrection if Our Lord had not paid back in His Sacred Humanity the blood debt of human sins that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God.

After "developing" his thesis about the Resurrection, resolving yet another "thesis-antithesis" conflict, Ratzinger arrived at his conclusion, his own synthesis:

The starting point is the fact that Israel awaited the awakening of the dead as the end of history, that is, quite literally as the eschaton, as the final action of God. Using the stylistic devices of the apocalyptic writers, therefore, the Evangelists, and especially Matthew, described Christ's Cross and Resurrection as the final hour; they wanted it make it plain that this was not just any resurrection, such as Elias or some other miracle-worker might have brought about, but a resurrection of a kind never before known, after which death would be no more. That means also, then, that in this awakening the realm of history has been transcended, that he who arose from the dead did not return, as anyone else might have done, to a this-worldly-history but stands above it, though by no means without relationship to it. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 186.)

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An interjection before the quotation proceeds. Our Lord did not resurrect to a "this-worldly history"? He arose with a glorified Body in time on Easter Sunday. This is a de fide dogma of the Catholic Church. No so for Joseph Alois Ratzinger, who said that the Resurrection was not the same sort of historical event as the Crucifixion, meaning that its exact time and nature is unknown:

Thus the Resurrection cannot be a historical event in the same sense as the Crucifixion is. For that matter, there is no account that depicts it as such, nor is it circumscribed in time otherwise than by the eschatological symbolical expression "the third day." On the one hand, it belongs intrinsically to the totality and ultimate greatness of the event that is "eschatological", that is, that is transcends history; on the other hand, is belongs just as intrinsically to its inherent importance that it also touches upon history, that is, that this person who was dead is now no longer dead: he--really he himself and as such--is eternally alive in his individuality and uniqueness. Thus, it belongs, at the same time, to this event that it both reaches above history and is founded and anchored in history. Indeed, we could almost say that the definitive transformation that eschatology underwent by virtue of the Christian belief in the Resurrection is its transposition into history. For late Judaic expectation, expectation, eschatology lay at the end of history. To believe in the Resurrection of Jesus means, on the contrary, to believe in the eschaton in history, in the historicity of God's eschatological action.

If what we have said thus far is correct, it is means that, as God's eschatological action, the Resurrection has both a cosmic and a future-oriented character and that the corresponding Christian faith is a faith of hope in the fullness of a promise that encompasses the whole cosmos. That means, in turn, a rejection of the individualization of man, the ordering of the "I" to the "we", the orientation of Christianity to the future as much as to the past. In less academic language, we might say: Christology is concerned not just with the freeing the individual qua individual from his sins in a way that can then only be described in a highly qualified manner; it is most deeply concerned with the future of man, which can be accomplished only as the future of the whole human race. It is concerned with the future of the whole human race, which can become itself only by rising above itself. . . . . And it means, certainly, that any theology is to be rejected as inadequate that confines salvation to a pure, nonobjectifiable subjectivity, when, in reality, it is precisely a liberation from isolation into subjectivity in the service of the whole. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 186-188.)

Yes, we depend upon the eyewitness account of the Apostles concerning Our Lord's Resurrection. Are we, however, to consider them unreliable witnesses to the historical fact of the Resurrection of Our Lord on Easter Sunday? Did the Ascension actually take place forty days after Our Lord's Resurrection? No time in history is given? Who is Benedict/Ratzinger trying to kid? The time frame is there for all to see. Those who reject it reject Our Lord's Divine Revelation. They reject Him, in other words.

Ratzinger's thoroughly Modernist propositions were condemned in Lamentabili Sane, issued by the Holy Office on July 3, 1907, and approved by Pope Saint Pius X:

36. The Resurrection of the Savior is not properly a fact of the historical order. It is a fact of merely the supernatural order (neither demonstrated nor demonstrable) which the Christian conscience gradually derived from other facts.

37. In the beginning, faith in the Resurrection of Christ was not so much in the fact itself of the Resurrection as in the immortal life of Christ with God. (Lamentabili Sane, July 3, 1907.)

Do you want more?

Sure, here is what Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger wrote in Introduction to Christianity, 1971:

To recapitulate, Paul teaches not the resurrection of physical bodies but the resurrection of persons, and this not in the return of the “fleshly body”, that is, the biological structure, an idea which he expressly describes as impossible (“the perishable cannot become imperishable”), but in the different form of the life of the resurrection, as shown in the risen Lord.” (Father Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 1971, p. 277.)

This is heresy, but it is why “Cardinal” Ratzinger “consecrated” Bruno Forte, who played a very a prominent role at the “extraordinary synod” on the family in 2014 and 2015 and is said to have been the author of the following infamous mid-term report during the 2015 meeting of the Raccoon Lodge:

Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?

The question of homosexuality leads to a serious reflection on how to elaborate realistic paths of affective growth and human and evangelical maturity integrating the sexual dimension: it appears therefore as an important educative challenge. The Church furthermore affirms that unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman. Nor is it acceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.

Without denying the moral problems connected to homosexual unions it has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasizing that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority. (Synod on Family: Midterm report presented, 2015 Synod announced.)

Indeed, the late Jorge Mario Bergoglio specifically thanked Bruno Forte for the work he did at the 2015 synod that resulted in the issuance of Amoris Laetitia, March 19, 2016, which Forte defended as follows:

“It's not a new doctrine, but a merciful application of the ‘old wine’, which, as you know, is always the best.” Thus spoke Mgr. Bruno Forte, archbishop of the diocese of Chieti-Vasto, during a meeting at Rossetti Theatre, on Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation “Amoris laetitia”, which marked a crucial step with regard to the family, “between crisis and desire”. Crisis, for what the same Archbishop Forte noted was a decrease in marriages and an increase in cohabitation, but also the desire for the family that would be the “womb and school of humanity”. Present at the meeting were Don Nicola Del Bianco, Director of Office for the Family of the Archdiocese of Chieti-Vasto, and the married couple Maria Antoinetta and Franco Silvestri, who gave testimony of their own life, as a family, and as collaboraters of the Office for the Family.

In Mgr. Forte’s reflection, the causes of the “crisis of the family” ranged from a lack of jobs to housing problems, from migration, to the difficulties relating to “material and human misery”. In this context, the meaning of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation is: “Do not judge, but reach all with the gaze of mercy, but without giving up the truth of God. It is easy to say ‘this family has failed’, but it is more difficult to help it not to fail. No one should feel excluded from the Church”.

This approach, naturally, also has direct “practical” repercussions with regard to the guidelines given to pastors and the ecclesial community. Archbishop Forte in fact gave a special “behind-the-scenes” look at [what Francis said at] the Synod: “If we speak explicitly of Communion for the divorced-and-remarried — Archbishop Forte said, quoting Pope Francis joking(*) — we don’t know what a mess [casino] will result. So let’s not mention it directly. Make sure the premises are there, and I will draw the conclusions”. “Typical for a Jesuit”, Archbishop Forte joked, attributing to this guideline a wisdom that has allowed for the maturing necessary that resulted in “Amoris laetitia”, which, as stated by Monsignor Bruno Forte, does not represent new doctrine but rather a “merciful application” of what has always been [believed].

After the presentation of the exhortation came a “blueprint for the family” in the testimony of the Silvestri spouses, [their] four children plus seven foster children: “We raised our family with great sacrifices, because we did not want to delegate to anyone the upbringing of our children, but of course we also had the distraction of work [to deal with]. It was a difficult choice, but the Lord helped us. We are not better than others, we simply took into account the most important person, the one to whom we said yes: our Lord. And the fact that we have the Lord at the center of our lives has given us the strength to go on”. The “basis”, then, on which we solidly built the “practice” of forgiveness is the key words “thank you, sorry, excuse me”, as mentioned by Pope Francis, the importance of prayer, as well as family time and time alone together as a couple.

At the end of the testimony, there was a chance for remarks and questions from the large audience that attended the meeting.

(*) Translator’s Note: The “joke” is merely in Francis’ colloquial use of the term casino, which literally translates as “brothel”.   (“Nessuno si deve sentire escluso dalla Chiesa”, Zonalocale.it, May 3, 2016; our translation; underlining added.) (As found at Novus Ordo Watch Wire.)

Yes, you see, Bruno’s forte is apostasy.

“All right,” I hear you say, “why is this relevant now when almost every Catholic in the world is a sedevacantist?” (There are a few stray “popes” running around these days, I suppose.)

This is relevant because “Archbishop” Bruno Forte is on the warpath against Catholics in his “archdiocese” who dare to receive what they think is Holy Communion in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic liturgical abomination on the tongue:

“And let me clarify one point, there were three people who did not want Communion in their hands. So, first of all, in the New Testament, Jesus says, ‘Lambante.’ The verb ‘lambano’ in Greek means to take in (the) hand. For centuries, the Church has taken Communion in (the) hand. Only in some dark centuries, (the Church) fearing lack of hygiene, replaced this gesture with that of taking (Communion) in (the) mouth,” the archbishop said. . . .

“But thank God today we are all grown up, the hands give (the Eucharist) to us slowly. So Communion is taken in the hand, with the humble gesture of extending the hand and receiving (the host).  Those who do not (receive communion on the hand commit) an act of pride. He thinks he is wiser than the pope and the bishops who have decided that communion is taken in the hand. Please be humble and obedient to the Church. At least when you take communion and receive Jesus, doing His will, which is the will expressed in the Church by the pope and the bishops,” he said. (As found at: Italian archbishop scolds 'disobedient,' 'prideful' parishioners for receiving Communion on tongue.)

Although I discuss the issue of “Communion in the hand” at length in  G.I.R.M. Warfare: The Conciliar Church's Unremitting Warfare Against Catholic Faith and Worship, suffice it to say that conciliar liturgical revolution gave a de facto “green light” to “bishops” and priest/presbyters to “experiment with the new liturgy even as hamlet on the Tiber, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI and Karol Joszef Wojtyla/John Paul reminded “bishops” that the faithful had the right to receive what purported to be Holy Communion on the tongue.

Montini/Paul VI gave permission for “Communion in the hand” after bishops (validly consecrated and invalidly consecrated at the time in the first years after the implementation of the Novus Ordo travesty on Sunday, November 30, 1969) and priests/presbyters began doing so on an “unauthorize basis, providing bishops the excuse to appeal the frequenter of Milan train stations to “regularize” what had become a standard practice.

Most of the rest of this article will provide a discussion of the Protestant origins of "Communion in the hand" and how Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul the Sick sought to further eradicate belief in the sacerdotal, hierarchical nature of the Holy Priesthood and in the sacrificial nature of Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as a matter of practical sacramental theology, admitting that entire conciliar liturgical revolution was designed to accomplish such an eradication from its very outset.

Before doing this, however, it might be useful to recount once again the very first time I saw the “relay” system for the distribution of what purported to be Holy Communion at a “papal” extravaganza liturgy.

It was on Thursday, October 4, 1979, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that I saw a laywoman take it upon herself to relay “Holy Communion” when it was being distributed during Wojtyla/John Paul II’s extravaganza service at Logan Circle.  A presbyter who had been distributing the purportedly consecrated hosts saw this woman relaying what we all believed to be the Real Presence of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, screamed, “Hey, lady, you can’t do that!”

There is a further irony represented by this story as the laywoman’s relaying of purportedly consecrated hosts occurred came just less than two years after Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/VI had given permission for the distribution of “Communion in the hand” after one conciliar “episcopal” conference after another petitioned the conciliar the Vatican to regularize what began without “official” approval in various dioceses and parishes. What was considered to be an “abuse” became an “accepted practice” that had to receive “official” sanction from Paolo Sicko in the days when the conciliar “pontiffs” actually lived in the Apostolic Palace, leading to an unparalleled era of commonplace acts of desecration and sacrilege being committed against what is purported to be the Most Blessed Sacrament in formerly Catholic churches around the world almost every day of the year.

Indeed, it was just two days before I witnessed the “relay system” being used for the first time that a priest, who shall not be named, in the conciliar structures reported in the late-1990s in what was then called The Latin Mass magazine that he began to question the conciliar agenda when he saw what he believed (and probably still believes) were validly consecrated hosts "consecrated" at Karol Joszef Wojtyla/John Paul II's "papal" liturgy at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, October 2, 1979, being carried away in burlap sacks after the extravaganza was over. The priest's eyes moistened quite a bit when he recounted this story in various talks that he gave over the years. He was truly sorrowful over the profane, sacrilegious way that Our Lord's Real Presence, which he presumed to be in the Novus Ordo hosts, was treated.

There was another such incident involving the strewing of supposedly consecrated hosts on the Via della Conciliazione in Rome, Italy, during and after the Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's "canonization" of Padre Pio of Pietriclina on June 16, 2002.

Mind you, I have no doubt that Padre Pio is in Heaven. Unfortunately, though, there needs to be a true pope to canonize him. This having been noted, therefore, we learned from two eyewitnesses, twin brothers who live on the East Coast and are very devoted to Padre Pio, that there were scores upon scores of supposedly consecrated hosts on the thoroughfare that was built by Benito Mussolini after the Lateran Concordat of 1929 to connect Saint Peter's Square with the Tiber River directly.

Presuming that the hosts were truly consecrated and thus were the Body, Blood, Soul and Divnity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, our friends consumed as many of the hosts as possible. "Doc," one of them told me, “It was heartbreaking. Scandalous." The conciliar method of praying has produced a fundamental loss of belief in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament, leaving aside the fact that He is not present on the altars or in the tabernacles where the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service is stage.

That travesty occurred six years before the so-called “pope of tradition,” Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, presided over a “papal” extravaganza liturgy at the same place, the now-demolished Yankee Stadium II (which consisted of a renovated grandstand area inside of the shell of the original structure that opened on April 18, 1923), that the burlap sacks scandal had occurred eighteen and one-half years earlier. Here is how “leftover” “hosts” were hauled out of the Stadium that George Herman Ruth built and John Vliet Lindsay rebuilt:

Catholics believe that the altar bread, once consecrated and transubstantiated into the body of Christ, must be consumed. So leftover wafers will be put in fabric-lined carts in the stadium concourse and consumed, eventually, during regular Masses. (Candles, Clergy, and Communion for 57,000.)

The only consolation in all of this was that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was not present in those hosts, although He was greatly offended by the travesties that were represented to the public, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, in His Holy Name and under what is alleged to be the authority of His One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Countless are the stories of supposedly consecrated hosts have been found in the pews of Catholic churches that have been in conciliar captivity for so very long now. Such hosts have turned up in the pages of missalettes and hymnals. They have been put into purses or pockets by Catholics who have not been “officially authorized” “extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist.” One even wound up on eBay twenty years ago now:

Earlier Friday, Monsignor Roger J. Augustine, administrator of the Diocese of Sioux City, met with the seller and was advised that the sale would not be consummated.  According to Msgr. Augustine, the seller deeply regretted the effort to sell the Eucharist and extended a personal apology to him, the diocese and any others who had been offended by the eBay listing.  Because the transaction never materialized, there was no money exchanged or received.

"The Eucharist detailed in the eBay auction was given to Msgr. Augustine and has been properly disposed of according to the dictates of Catholic Church law," states a diocesan press release. "'As I said earlier this week, the Eucharist represents the true presence of Jesus Christ to Catholics,' said Msgr. Augustine.  'I am most grateful that the seller agreed that it was in everyone's best interest to bring this issue to a positive conclusion.'"

Continues the press release: "The issue of the attempted sale of the Eucharist has attracted both national and international attention with e-mails and fax messages coming into the diocesan office from countless communities. Although this specific issue has been resolved, the diocese still has differences with eBay and its policy governing the listing of items that are offensive to people of faith.  E-Bay officials contend they see nothing offensive with the sale of such items on their website. Many Catholic organizations and individuals have taken issue with that policy and apparently are making their opinions known to eBay officials."

Meanwhile, the man who purchased the Host, a member of the Knights of Columbus, told us that he is more than pleased with the outcome. "I'm overwhelmed with the silent majority and how they spoke up and took action in this case," he told us, referring to the many who voiced outrage [see secular report ].

There were two bids before he placed his $2,000 offer, one for $120 and one for $150.

"I am not a Catholic and do not believe I'm going to hell for selling this collectible," said the owner in his original advertisement. "It's a memento from that great afternoon with Pope John Paul II. Yes, this is the actual Eucharist I saved during the Mass that I participated in on October 18th, 1998. I ate one wafer then I went back and got another one to save and he gave me another one, but I did get a very dirty look! I was studying in Florence that semester and a bunch of us went down to Rome that week to partake. I'm not Catholic, but I found it all very interesting. Along with the Eucharist, I have the program from that day and a little bulletin. It's all in Italian. I also have four stamps from the Vatican that year and a bottle opener that I bought when I was in Rome way back in 1992. From what I understand, if you're holding something in your hand during a certain moment when Pope John Paul II spoke during his Mass, it becomes blessed. I was holding this bottle opener during Mass with him in 1992. It has his picture on one side and a picture of the Trevi Fountain on the other."

The seller went on to explain that everything from 1998 (Eucharist, bulletin, program, and stamps) were encased in plastic in his "scratch book" and all were in "awesome condition." Photos authenticating his presence there that day were also to be included (although we cannot verify any of his claims). (This report appeared on The Spirit Daily website and had been sent to me by a then-colleague of mine.)

All the eBay seller got was a “dirty look” when he took two supposedly consecrated hosts in Florence, Italy, in 1998.

Stories of Novus Ordo hosts being taken outside of Catholic churches in conciliar captivity that I did not even bother to make a comment on an incident that was brought to my attention eleven years ago about the efforts of a conciliar pastor’s well-intentioned efforts to warn his parishioners not to remove hosts from the church after one of those hosts had made its way onto the windshield of a parked car, something that distressed the pastor, who has been traditionally minded for nearly forty years, greatly. In the revolutionary world of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, though, even rightly-intentioned pastors cannot stop that which the “pope” and his “bishops” have approved and which the laity have come to accept as a “traditional” practice in what is believed to be the Catholic Church.

The words of the late Father Frederick Schell, S.J., come to mind at this point.

Father Schell, who had left the Jesuits in the 1970s and was assisting parishes in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Diocese of Orange, was told in 1977 that he would have to distribute Holy Communion in the hand. His response was direct and to the point, "It's a sacrilege. They can't make me do it." He preached against it from the pulpit on November 20, 1977. He was gone by the next week, one week before the "implementation" of this "restoration" on the First Sunday in Advent on November 27, 1977, eventually returning to the offering of the Traditional Latin Mass in order to provide the people of southern California with the safe haven provided by the stability of the glories of a liturgical rite that communicates in all of its parts the absolute and firm distinction between the hierarchical priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the lay faithful (whereby he laity help to sanctify the world by cooperating with the graces made available to us in the sacraments to give honor and gtlory to God in all that we do and by uniting our petitions interiorly with those of the priest as He offers the ineffable Sacrifice of the altar that is Holy Mass).

[Father Schell died on September 28, 2002, the Feast of Saint Wenceslaus, at the age of eighty-six. He had told us four months previously that he was praying for a “quick exit” after he had handed over his work to younger man, noting that “Our Lady usually gives me whatever I ask her.]

The late Monsignor George A. Kelly told me in February of 1983 in his offices at Bent Hall on the campus Saint John’s University, Jamaica, Queens, New York, that the American "bishops" were so pleased as punch that their strategy of securing “Communion in the hand” worked, so well that they used it again to expand the conciliar practice of distributing what purports be Communion under both kinds, thereby creating a "need" for so-called Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist to further blur the distinction between the priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the lay faithful.

The strategy of encouraging an “unapproved” practice on a de facto basis in order to have it recognized de jure by the conciliar Vatican used it yet again to secure permission in 1994 from Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II for "altar girls" in 1994. Wojtyla/John Paul II was not serious about enforcing the ban against altar girls that was reiterated in various postconciliar documents, including Inaestimabile Donum, April 17, 1980, which was issued by the then named Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship as a follow-up to Wojtyla/John Paul II's Holy Thursday letter to conciliar priests/presbyters, Dominicae Cenae, February 24, 1980, a document wherein he also rued the “abuses” associated with “Communion in the hand.”

Then again, all of this stemmed from a deliberate, concerted effort on the part of the liturgical revolutionaries to destroy the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church in order to accustom Catholics to a Protestantized version that is no more valid than liturgies staged, say, in the Anglican or Lutheran sects:

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants." (Annibale Bugnini, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.)

“Certainly we will preserve the basic elements, the bread, the wine, but all else will be changed according to local tradition: words, gestures, colors, vestments, chants, architecture, decor. The problem of liturgical reform is immense.” (Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, 1965, Quoted and footnoted in Assault on the Roman Rite. This has also been noted on this site in the past, having been provided me by a reader who had access to the 1980 French book in which the quote is found.)

"[T]he intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should coincide with the Protestant liturgy.... [T]here was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and I, repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass" (Dec. 19, 1993), Apropos, #17, pp. 8f; quoted in Christian Order, October, 1994. (Jean Guitton, a close friend of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI. The quotation and citations are found in Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Great Facade, The Remnant Publishing Company, 2002, p. 317.)

Let it be candidly said: the Roman Rite which we have known hitherto no longer exists. It is destroyed. (Father Joseph Gelineau, an associate of Annibale Bugnini on the Consilium, quoted and footnoted in the work of a John Mole, who believed that the Mass of the Roman Rite had been "truncated," not destroyed. Assault on the Roman Rite)

Make no mistake about it, though, the introduction of practices as “Communion in the hand” on a de facto basis was meant to further Protestantize the conciliar liturgy as this practice, which existed in some places in some circumstances in the first millennium of the Church, even though it had been prohibited by the Church over time precisely because of the sorts of abuses and sacrileges that have been happening on a much wider scale in the past forty years, given the near-universality of "Communion in the hand" in the conciliar sect today. Holy Mother Church, guided infallibly by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, came to preserve the privilege of ordained priests and deacons as being able to touch the Sacred Species.

The eventual disappearance of the practice of Communion in the hand by the late Seventh Century reflected Our Lord's command to the first pope, Saint Peter, to "Feed my lambs," "Feed my lambs," Tend my sheep. We, the sheep of Christ's true Flock, must have the humility to fed by an alter Christus, an image of the Good Shepherd Himself, as a shepherd would feed his flock: on the tongue. Sheep cannot feed themselves. They need to be fed. It is not an uncommon practice for children to place bits of feed on a sheep's tongue at a petting farm. Sheep are dependent upon the shepherd. We must be dependent upon the Good Shepherd. This is a sign of our humility and our dependence upon the One Who is feeding us with His own Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Most Blessed Sacrament.

Pope Pius XII noted in Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947, his Encyclical Letter on the Sacred Liturgy that preceded the “Second” Vatican Council’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, November 1, 1963, by sixteen years (and which was referenced precisely once, at Paragraph 22, in that first document issued by this false council), that Catholics should not desire to "restore" obsolete rites and practices in the name of "simplicity," ignoring the fruits for the Church and thus for souls that had been borne as a result of the abandonment of ancient practices (such as Communion in the hand and Communion under both kinds):

The same reasoning holds in the case of some persons who are bent on the restoration of all the ancient rites and ceremonies indiscriminately. The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world. [52] They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man.

Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer's body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.

Clearly no sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine more recently elaborated and proclaimed as dogmas by the Church, under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit with abundant fruit for souls, because it pleases him to hark back to the old formulas. No more can any Catholic in his right senses repudiate existing legislation of the Church to revert to prescriptions based on the earliest sources of canon law. Just as obviously unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation.

This way of acting bids fair to revive the exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism to which the illegal Council of Pistoia gave rise. It likewise attempts to reinstate a series of errors which were responsible for the calling of that meeting as well as for those resulting from it, with grievous harm to souls, and which the Church, the ever watchful guardian of the "deposit of faith" committed to her charge by her divine Founder, had every right and reason to condemn.[53] For perverse designs and ventures of this sort tend to paralyze and weaken that process of sanctification by which the sacred liturgy directs the sons of adoption to their Heavenly Father of their souls' salvation. (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947.)

It must be remembered, therefore, that the appeal to "antiquity" by the Catholic leaders of the "Liturgical Movement" throughout the Twentieth Century sought to make the antiquarian claims of the Protestant Revolutionaries "respectable" in the eyes of the hierarchy and thus serve as the foundation for what was claimed to be a "much needed" reform of the Sacred Liturgy.

The late Michael Davies, who, of course, was very much opposed to sedevacantism, wrote a very good scholarly essay on "Communion in the Hand and Other Frauds" in 1990. He provided a solid historical background before explaining how the conciliar "permission" for the distribution of Communion in the hand could be understood only in light of a general desire to "learn from" Protestantism and to appeal to Protestants:

The key issue of the debate concerning the escalating imposition of Communion in the hand is not whether it was once widespread in the early Church, but whether it should be introduced in the present day. In order to simplify the debate, let it be conceded, for the sake of argument, that for some centuries it was considered acceptable for the priest to place the host in the hand of the communicant. There is, however, definite evidence that, in at least some regions, the laity were receiving Communion on the tongue by the end of the sixth century.

The Roman Ordo of the ninth century accepts Communion on the tongue as the normal practice.

The Synod of Rouen in the year 650 condemned the reception of Communion in the hand by the laity as an abuse. This indicates that the reception of Holy Communion upon the tongue must have already become the established practice.

Scholars are not clear why the transition took place—differing explanations are given and there is probably some truth in most of them. The precise reason is not important, however. What is important is that the change must have been made for good reason under the influence of the Holy Ghost. The change to unleavened bread is given as one reason; the fear of abuse is another; Fr. Jungmann cites “growing respect for the Eucharist” as the decisive reason. . . .

The Protestant Reformers were particularly sensitive concerning the symbolism of liturgical ceremonies, and particular attention was therefore paid to eliminating anything which could perpetuate belief in a sacrificing priesthood possessing powers denied to the laity or in the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament. In his 1549 Communion Service, Cranmer allowed the Sacrament to be placed on the tongue of the communicant by the minister. This was severely criticized by Martin Bucer, who demanded that Communion should be given in the hand. Cranmer complied and changed the rubric for his 1552 Prayer Book, to bring it into line with Protestant practice on the Continent. The reasons Bucer gives for insisting on this change are quite unambiguous:

I cannot see how the seventh section requiring the bread of the Lord to be put not in the hand, but in the mouth, of the recipient, can be consistent. Certainly the reason given in this section, namely, lest those who receive the read of the Lord should not eat it but take it away with them to misuse it for superstition or horrible wickedness, is not, it seems to me, conclusive; for the minister can easily see, when he puts the bread in the hand, whether it is eaten or not. In fact, I have no doubt that this usage of not putting these sacraments in the hands of the faithful has been introduced out of a double superstition; firstly, the false honour they wished to show to this sacrament, and secondly the wicked arrogance of priests claiming greater holiness than that of the people of Christ, by virtue of the oil of consecration. The Lord undoubtedly gave these, His sacred symbols, into the hands of the Apostles, and no one who has read the records of the ancients can be in doubt that this was the usage observed in the churches until the advent of the Roman Antichrist.

As, therefore, every superstition of the Roman AntiChrist is to be detested, and the simplicity of Christ, and the Apostles, and the ancient Churches, is to be recalled, I should wish that pastors and teachers of the people should be commanded that each is faithfully to teach the people that it is superstitious and wicked to think that the hands of those who truly believe in Christ are less pure than their mouths; or that the hands of the ministers are holier than the hands of the laity; so that it would be wicked, or less fitting, as was formerly wrongly believed by the ordinary folk, for the laity to receive these sacraments in the hand: and therefore that the indications of this wicked belief be removed—as that the ministers may handle the sacraments, but not allow the laity to do so, and instead put the sacraments into the mouth—which is not only foreign to what was instituted by the Lord but offensive to human reason.

In that way good men will be easily brought to the point of all receiving the sacred symbols in the hand, conformity in receiving will be kept, and there will be safeguards against all furtive abuse of the sacraments. For, although for a time concession can be made to those whose faith is weak, by giving them the Sacraments in the mouth when they so desire, if they are carefully taught they will soon conform themselves to the rest of the Church and take the Sacraments in the hand.

It will be noted here that the consecration of the priest’s hands is seen as indicating the privilege of handling the Host, something denied in such propaganda tracts as Take and Eat [a pamphlet that propagandized in behalf of Communion in the hand]. The fact that the Protestant Reformers introduced Communion in the hand specifically to deny the Catholic doctrines on the priesthood and the Real Presence invested the practice with an anti-Catholic signification from that time onwards. This was a signification it did not possess in the early centuries. This practice is, then, totally unacceptable in Catholic worship, and can never become acceptable. Contemporary Protestants would certainly not change to the reception of Communion on the tongue to accommodate Catholics, and so, in the interests of a spurious ecumenism, Catholics are being made to accept what is now a specifically Protestant practice in order to remove any remaining vestige of external respect for the Blessed Sacrament which those who consider it to be no more than bread would find offensive. This is something which should not surprise us—it is simply a logical continuation of the pattern which began with the destruction of the Mass of St. Pius V.  (Communion in the Hand.)

Such destruction, of course, cannot come from the hand of Holy Mother Church. This is impossible.

Sadly, there continue to be otherwise intelligent people who continue to justify the liturgical revolution by ignoring the dispassionate scholarship that has disproved the antiquarian presuppositions of the Augustinian liturgist Pius Parsch and Dom Lambert Beaudoin that were at the foundation of Sacrosanctum Concilium and who refuse to acknowledge that the intention of the conciliar revolution was the destruction of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church in order to accustom Catholics to a Protestantized liturgy, which itself would serve as the singular vessel of perdition to accustom them to the false doctrines and corrupt pastoral practices of a false church. 

The late Monsignor Klaus Gamber, who was not a traditionalist, said almost precisely this in The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, noting that he believed the conciliar church to be the Catholic Church recognizing a new liturgy was necessary to accustom people to a new faith:

The "traditionalist" priest will always stand in front of the altar, as has been commonly done in the Eastern Church and in the Western Church throughout history. They are priests offering a sacrifice who, together with the faithful, face God.

The other priests function as presiders over a Eucharistic meal, and from their seats, or from behind the altar facing the people, which has become a table, they direct their gaze towards the assembled faithful. They are, apparently, not troubled in the least by the fact that their backs on turned on the former High Altar and on the tabernacle--the altar at which, only a few years ago, the holy sacrifice of the Mass was offered and on which the eyes of the praying faithful had been focused.

In the years before the reform, no Catholic could have imagined that the Roman Church, founded on the Rock of Peter, would undergo such changes and at the same time cause such confusion among its members.

Of course, it is true that there have been progressives, particularly during the Age of Enlightenment, who, in part because of erroneous interpretations of history, in part because of "modern" theological views, pressed for changes in the liturgy as it was then practiced. In the past, the Church's teaching Magisterium has carefully guarded against such developments and has always been able to control the emergence of radical ideas.

Now, all this has fundamentally changed. Today, those who out of a sense of personal belief hold firm to what until recently had been strictly prescribed by the Roman Church are treated with condescension by many of their own brothers. They face problems if they continue to nurture the very rite in which they were brought up and to which they have been consecrated. That theirs was a decision made as a matter of conscience and that their conscience is being sorely tested is of little consequence to those who oppose them.

On the other side, the progressives who see little or no value in tradition can do almost no wrong, and are usually given the benefit of the doubt, even they defend opinions which clearly contradict Catholic teaching.

To add to this spiritual confusion, we are also dealing with the satiated state of mind of modern man who, living in our consumer society, approaches anything that is holy with a complete lack of understanding and has no appreciation of the concept of religion, let alone of his own sinful state. For them God, if they believe in Him at all, exists only as their "friend."

At this critical juncture, the traditional Roman rite, more than one thousand years old and until now the heart of the Church, was destroyed. A closer examination reveals that the Roman rite was not perfect and that some elements of value had atrophied over the centuries. Yet, through all the periods of unrest that again and again shook the Church to her foundations, the Roman rite always remained the rock, the secure home of faith and piety . . . .

Liturgy and faith are interdependent. That is why a new rite was created, a rite that in many ways reflects the bias of the new (modernist) theology. The traditional liturgy simply could not be allowed to exist in its established form because it was permeated with the truths of the traditional faith and the ancient forms of piety. For this reason alone, much was abolished and the new rites, prayers and hymns were introduced, as were the new readings from Scripture, which conveniently left out those passages that did not square with the teachings of modern theology--for example, references to a God who judges and punishes.

At the same time, the priests and the faithful are told that the new liturgy created after the Second Vatican Council is identifical in essence with the liturgy that has been in use in the Catholic Church up to this point, and that the only changes introduced involved reviving some earlier liturgical forms and removing a few duplications, but above all getting rid of elements of no particular interest.

Most priests accepted these assurances about the continuity of liturgical forms of worship and accepted the new rite with the same unquestioning obedience with which they had accepted the minor ritual changes introduced by Rome from time to time in the past, changes beginning with the reform of the Divine Office and the liturgical chant introduced by Pope Saint Pius X.

Following this strategy, the groups pushing for reform were able to take advantage of and at the same time abuse the sense of obedience among the older priests, and the common good will of the majority of the faithful, while, in many cases, they themselves refused to obey.

The pastoral benefits that so many idealists had hoped the new liturgy would bring did not materialize. Our churches emptied in spite of the new liturgy (or because of it?), and the faithful continue to fall away from the Church in droves.

Although our young people have been literally seduced into supporting the new forms of liturgical worship, they have, in fact, become more and more alienated from the faith. They are drawn to religious sects--Christian and non-Christian ones--because fewer and fewer priests teach them the riches of our Catholic faith and the tenets of Christian morality. As for older people, the radical changes made to the traditional liturgy have taken from them the sense of security in their religious home.

Today, many among us wonder: Is this the Spring people had hoped would emerge from the Second Vatican Council? Instead of a genuine renewal in our Church, we have seen only novelties. Instead of our religious life entering a period of new invigoration, as has happened in the past, what we see now is a form of Christianity that has turned towards the world.

We are now involved in a liturgy in which God is no longer the center of our attention. Today, the eyes of our faithful are no longer focused on God's Son having become Man hanging before us on the cross, or on the pictures of His saints, but on the human community assembled for a commemorative meal. The assembly of people is sitting there, face to face with the "presider," expecting from him, in according with the "modern" spirit of the Church, not so much a transfer of God's grace, but primarily some good ideas and advice on how to deal with daily life and its challenges.

There are few people left who speak of the Holy Mass as the Sacrifice of the New Covenant which we offer to God the Father through Jesus Christ, or of the sacramental union with Christ that we experience when we receive Holy Communion. Today, we are dealing with the "Eucharistic feast," and with the "holy bread"to be shared among us as a sign of our brotherhood with Jesus.

The real destruction of the traditional Mass, of the traditional Roman rite with a history of more than one thousand years, is the wholesale destruction of the faith on which it was based, a faith that had been the source of our piety and of our courage to bear witness to Christ and His Church, the inspiration of countless Catholics over so many centuries. Will someone, some day, be able to say the same thing about the new Mass? (Monsignor Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Rite.)

Unfortunately, Monsignor Gamber believed that an absolute return to the integrity of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition before it was attacked by Bugnini in 1955 was probably not desirable. He believed in what has been called "the reform of the reform." That having been noted as a matter of intellectual honesty, Gamber's analysis of the actual state of the so-called liturgical "renewal" was founded on a rejection of the claim that the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service was a continuation of Tradition. It is not. The Novus Ordo  has devastated the Catholic Faith and is responsible for giving rise to the "restoration" of one formerly and properly abandoned practice of antiquity after another, thus creating the very conditions in which Catholics have come to believe in the "egalitarian" spirit of a false litugy that was inspired by the devil himself in the mode of the liturgies used by the Protestant revolutionaries into whose prideful ears he whisphered nearly five hundred years ago now.

Perhaps it is good to review the following sentences quoted above from The Reform of the Roman Liturgy to see how perfectly they describe the condescending treatment that Bruno Forte has accorded believing Catholics who are attached to the structures of his counterfeit church of conciliarism while he himself presides over some of the grossest liturgical sacrileges that the world has even seen, sacrileges that would have made even the pagans of Ancient Rome, Green and Egypt blush with shame:

Today, those who out of a sense of personal belief hold firm to what until recently had been strictly prescribed by the Roman Church are treated with condescension by many of their own brothers. They face problems if they continue to nurture the very rite in which they were brought up and to which they have been consecrated. That theirs was a decision made as a matter of conscience and that their conscience is being sorely tested is of little consequence to those who oppose them.

On the other side, the progressives who see little or no value in tradition can do almost no wrong, and are usually given the benefit of the doubt, even they defend opinions which clearly contradict Catholic teaching. (Monsignor Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Rite.)

Yes, you see, Bruno’s forte is apostasy. It is also sacrilege.

Today, May 3, 2021, is the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross by Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, who saw the Sign of the Cross in the sky along with the words "in this sign, you shall conquer" (In hoc signo vinces).

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., provided a moving account of the Fiding of the Cross, the very instrument upon which Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ paid back in His own Sacred Humanity the debt owed to Him in His Sacred Divinity for the sins of us all:

It was most just that our divine King should show himself to us with the sceptre of his power, to the end that nothing might be wanting to the majesty of his empire. This sceptre is the Cross; and Paschal Time was to be the season for its being offered to him in glad homage. A few weeks back, and the Cross was shown to us to be the instrument of our Emmanuel's humiliation and as the bed of suffering whereon he died; but has he not since then conquered Death? and what is his cross now but a trophy of his victory? Let it then be brought forth to our gaze and let every knee bend before this sacred Wood, whereby our Jesus won the honour and praise we now give him!

On the day of his birth at Bethlehem we sang these words of the Prophet Isaias: A child is born unto us, and a son is given unto us, and his government is upon his shoulder. We have seen him carrying this Cross upon his shoulder; as Isaac carried the wood for his own immolation; but now it is no longer a heavy burden. It is shining with a brightness that ravishes the eyes of the angels; and after having received the veneration of man as long as the world lasts, it will suddenly appear in the clouds of heaven, near the Judge of the living and the dead--a consolation to them that have loved it, but a reproach to such as have treated it with contempt or forgetfulness.

Our Saviour did not think the time between his Resurrection and Ascension a fitting one for glorying the instrument of his victory. The Cross was not to be brought into notice until it had subjected the world to him whose glory it so eloquently proclaimed. Jesus was three days in the tomb; his Cross is to lie buried, unknown to men, for three centuries: but it is to have its resurrection, and the Church celebrates this resurrection to-day. Jesus would, in his own good time, add to the joy of Easter by miraculously revealing to us this sacred monument of his love for mankind. He entrusts it to our keeping--it is to be our consolation--as long as the world lasts: is it not just that we should love and venerate it?

Never had Satan's pride with such a humiliation as when he saw the instrument of our perdition made the instrument of our salvation. As the Church expresses it in her Preface for Passiontide: 'He that overcame mankind by a Tree, was overcome by a Tree." Thus foiled, he vented his fury upon this saving Wood, which so bitterly reminded him both of the irresistible power of his conqueror and of the dignity of man who had been redeemed at so great a price. He would fain have annihilated the Cross; but knowing that this was beyond his power, he endeavoured to profane it, and hide it from view. He therefore instigated the Jews to bury it. At the foot of Calvary, not far from the sepulchre, was a deep hole. Into this was the Cross thrown, together with those of the two thieves, the Nails, the Crown of Thorns, and the Inscription or Title written by Pilate. The hole was then filled up with rubbish and earth, and the Sanhedrin exulted in the thought its having effaced the memory of the Nazarene. who could not save himself from the ignominious death of the Cross.

Forty years after this, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, the instruments of God's vengeance. The Holy Places were desecrated by idolaters. A small temple to Venus was erected on Calvary, and another to Jupiter over the Holy Sepulchre. By this, the pagans intended derision; whereas, they were perpetuating the knowledge of two spots of most sacred interest. When peace was restored under Constantine, the Christians had but to remove these pagan monuments, and their eyes behold the holy ground that had been bedewed with the Blood of Jesus, and the glorious Sepulchre. As to the Cross, it was not so easily found. The sceptre of our divine King was to be raised up from its tomb by a royal hand. The saintly Empress Helen, Constantine's mother, was chosen by heaven to pay to Jesus--and that, too, on the very spot where he had received his greatest humiliations--the honours which are due to him as the King of the world. Before laying the foundations of the Basilica of the Resurrection, this worthy follower of Magdalen and the other holy women of the sepulchre was anxious to discover the instrument of our salvation. The Jews had kept up the tradition of the site where it had been buried: the Empress had the excavations made accordingly. With what holy impatience she must have watched the works! and with what ecstasy of joy did she behold the redeeming Wood, which, though not at first distinguishable, was certainly one of the three Crosses that were found! She addressed a fervent prayer to the Saviour, who alone could reveal to her which was the trophy of his victory; the bishop, Macarinus, united his prayers with hers; and their faith was rewarded by a miracle that left them no doubt as to which was the true Cross.

This glorious work was accomplished and the Church was put in possession of the instrument of the world's Redemption. Both East and West were filled with joy at the news of this precious discovery, which heaven had set on foot, and which gave the last finish to the triumph of Christianity. Christ completed his victory over the pagan world by raising thus his standard--not a figurative one, but his own real standard--the Cross, which, up to that time, had been a stumbling-block to the Jews, and foolishness to the Gentiles; but before which every Christian is henceforth to bend his knee.

Helen placed the Holy Cross in the Basilica that had been built by her orders, and which covered both the glorious Sepulcher and the hill of the Crucifixion. Another Church was erected on the site, where the Cross had lain concealed for three hundred years, and the Faithful are enabled, by long flights of steps, to go down into the deep grotto which had been its tomb. Pilgrims came from every part of the world to visit the hallowed places where our Redemption had been wrought, and to venerate the sacred Wood of the Cross. But God’s merciful providence willed not that the precious pledge of Jesus’ love for mankind should be confined to one only Sanctuary, however venerable it might be. Immediately after its discovery, Helen had a very large piece cut from the Cross; and this fragment she destined for Rome, the new Jerusalem. The precious gift was enshrined in the Basilica built by her son Constantine in the Sessorian garden, and which was afterwards called the Basilica of Holy-Cross-in-Jerusalem., other places were honored by the presence of the Wood of the Holy Cross. So far back as the 4th Century, we have St. Cyril of Jerusalem attesting that many of the Pilgrims used to obtain small pieces of it, and thus carried the precious Treasure into their respective countries; and St. Paulinus of Nola, who lived in the same Century, assures us that these many gifts lessened not the size of the original Relic. In the 6th Century, the holy Queen, St. Redegonde, obtained from the Emperor Justin 2nd a large piece from the fragment that was in the imperial treasury of Constantinople. It was for the reception of this piece of the True Cross into France that Vanantius Fortunatus composed the Vexilla Regis,—that beautiful Hymn which the Church uses in her Liturgy, as often as she celebrates the praises of the Holy Cross. After several times losing and regaining it, Jerusalem was, at length, forever deprived of the precious Relic. Constantinople was a gainer by Jerusalem’s loss. From Constantinople, especially during the Crusades, many Churches of the West procured large pieces. These again supplied other places; until, at length the Wood of the Cross was to be found in almost every town of any importance. There is scarcely to be a found a Catholic, some time or other in his life, has not had the happiness of seeing and venerating a portion of this sacred object. How many acts of love and gratitude have not been occasioned by this? And who could fail to recognize, in this successive profusion of our Jesus’ Cross, a plan of divine providence for exciting us to an appreciation of our Redemption, on which rest all our hopes of eternal happiness?

How dear, then, to us should this day be, which blends together the recollection of the Holy Cross and the joys of the Resurrection of that Jesus who by the Cross has won the throne to which we shall soon see him ascend! Let us thank our Heavenly Father for his having restored to mankind a treasure so immensely precious as is the Cross. Until the day comes for it to appear with himself in the clouds of heaven, Jesus has entrusted it to his Spouse, as a pledge of his second coming. On that day, he will collect together all the fragments by his divine power; and the tree of Life will then gladden the elect with its dazzling beauty, and invite them to eternal rest beneath its refreshing shade. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross, May 3.)

The readings for Matins in the Divine Office for today's Feast contains the following description of the remarkable, miraculous events that took place on this day, which was abolished as as a feast by the Rosicrucian Mason named Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII:

After the great victory gained over Maxentius by the Emperor Constantine, under the standard of our Lord’s Cross, which had been miraculously shown to him—Helen, his mother, was told in a dream to repair to Jerusalem and search for the true Cross. Upon her arrival, she ordered to be taken down a marble statue of Venus, which had been erected by the Pagans, some hundred and eighty years before, in order that all memory of our Lord’s Passion might be obliterated. She did the same for the place where there reposed the Savior’s Crib, as also for the site of the Resurrection; removing from the former an idol of Adonis, and from the latter an idol of Jupiter.

The place, where the Cross was supposed to be, having been excavated, three crosses were discovered at a great depth below the surface; and with them, though not attached, the Title that had been fastened to our Lord’s Cross. The doubt as to which of the three Crosses the Title belonged to was removed by a miracle. After having prayed to God, Macarius, the Bishop of Jerusalem, applied each of the Crosses to a woman, who was afflicted with a dangerous malady. The first two produced no result; the third was then applied, and the woman was restored to perfect health.

The Holy Cross being thus found, Helen built a magnificent Church in Jerusalem, in which she placed a portion of the Cross, enshrined in a silver case; the remaining part she took to her son Constantine, and it was put in the Church called Holy-Cross-in-Jerusalem, which was built on the site of the Sessorian palace. She also took to her son the Nails, wherewith the most holy Body of Christ Jesus had been fastened to the Cross. Constantine passed a law, that from that time forward, a cross should never be used as an instrument of punishment; and thus, what hitherto had been an object of reproach and derision, became one of veneration and glory. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross, May 3.)

Dom Prosper Gueranger providing a fitting tribute to this glorious feast day as follows:

Christ Crucified is the power and wisdom of God. Thus spoke thine Apostle, O Jesus! and we are witnesses of the truth of his words. The Synagogue thought to dishonor thee by nailing thee to a Cross, for it was written in the Law: Cursed is he, that hangeth on a tree. But, lo! this gibbet, this Tree of infamy, is become the trophy of thy grandest glory! Far from dimming the splendor of thy Resurrection, the Cross enhances the brilliancy of thy magnificent triumph. Thou wast attached to the Wood—thou tookest on thyself the curse that was due to us; thou wast crucified between two thieves; thou wast reputed as an impostor, and thine enemies insulted thee in thine agony on this bed of suffering. Hadst thou been but man, O Son of David! all this would have disgraced thy name and memory; the Cross would have been the ruin of thy past glory—but thou art the Son of God, and it is the Cross that proves it. The whole world venerates thy Cross. It was the Cross that brought the world into submission to thee. The honors that are now paid it, more than make amends for the insults that were once offered it. Men are not wont to venerate a Cross; but if they do, it is the Cross on which their God died. Oh! blessed be he that hung upon the Tree! And do thou, dearest Crucified Jesus! in return for the homage we pay to thy Cross, fulfill the promise thou madest us: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things unto myself.

That thou mightest the more effectually draw us, thou this day permittedst us to find the very Wood, whereon thou stretchedst forth thy divine arms to embrace us. Thou deignedst to give us this holy instrument of thy victory, and which is to shine near thee in the heavens on the day of judgment; thou mercifully confidest it to our keeping, in order that we might thence derive a salutary fear of Divine Justice, which demanded thy death on this Wood, so to atone for our sins. Thou also gavest us this most precious relic, that it might excite us to a devoted love for thee, O Divine Victim! who, that we might be blessed, didst take upon thyself the maledictions due to our sins. The whole world is offering thee, today, its fervent thanks for so inestimable a gift. Thy Cross, by being divided into countless fragments, is in all places, consecrating and protecting, by its presence, every country of the Christian world.

Oh! that we had St. Helen’s spirit, dear Jesus, and knew, as she did the breadth, and length, and height, and depth of the mystery of thy Cross. Her love of the mystery made her so earnest in her search for the Cross. And how sublime is the spectacle offered to us by this holy Empress! She adorns thy glorious Sepulcher; she unburies thy Cross from its grave—who was there, that ever proclaimed with such solemnity as this, the Paschal Mystery? The Sepulcher cries out to us: “He is risen: He is not here!” The Cross exclaims: “I held him captive but for a few passing hours: He is not here! He is resplendent in the glory of his Resurrection!” O Cross! O Sepulcher! how brief was the period of his humiliation, and how grand the kingdom he won by you! We will adore, in you where his feet stood, making you the instruments of our Redemption, and thereby endearing you ever to our respectful love. Glory, then, be to thee, O Cross! dear object of this day’s festival! Continue to protect this world, where our Jesus has left thee. Be its shield against Satan. Keep up within us the twofold remembrance, which will support us in all our crosses—the remembrance of Sacrifice united with Triumph; for it is by thee, O Cross! that Christ conquers, and reigns, and commands. Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross, May 3.)

May we cling to the Cross of Our Divine Redeemer, praying as many Rosaries each day in this month of May, the month of Our Lady, she who is the very fairest flower of the human race, as our state-in-life permits.

The sufferings of this present life will pass.

Christ the King will triumph over His enemies in our world of naturalism and in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Every extra moment we spend in prayer before Our King in the Most Blessed Sacrament (in those relatively few places where Our Lord is to be found abiding in tabernacles awaiting our praise, thanks, actions of reparation and petitions_), and every extra set of mysteries of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary that we pray will help us to be more and more conformed to the likeness of Our Divine Redeemer, Who endured the Cross, heedless of Its shame, to redeem us and to make us members of His Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

Ave Crux, Spes Unica!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

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 Mark the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, 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.

Saint Helena, pray for us.

Pope Saint Alexander and Saints Juvenal, Eventius, and Theodulus, pray for us.