Life, Death, and Truth: Still Under Constant Attack by Medicine and Law

As has been noted several times before on this website, including in Chronicling the Adversary's Global Takeover of the Healthcare Industry nine years ago, which is included in a book published six years ago, Life, Death, and Truth: Under Attack by Medicine and Law, the combined diabolical forces of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and various groups funded by the Soros Foundation have engaged in what former president Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro would call a “transformational vision” to shift the emphasis of the global healthcare industry from the treatment and healing of patients to the rationing of healthcare according to the conclusions reached by a “team” of “professionals” who are trained to view a patient in terms of what they, the so-called “professionals,” consider is his “quality of life” and not as they would treat Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the very Flesh.

Every aspect of the education, internship, residency and “continuing education” programs of physicians (and every medical specialty) is based upon assessing a patient’s “quality of life” according to utilitarian standards that, in plain English, arrogate unto mere men to determine who is “deserving” to life and who must be put on path to “ease” them out of them pain and then into the grave according to a “plan” that they have convinced the patients and/or his relatives to accept after using an entire range of psychological pressure, subtle and overt depending upon the level of acceptance or resistance, to secure their consent and their submissive compliance.

To give just one example of how pervasive the system of “palliative care” has become, it is very commonplace for patients suffering from old-fashioned vascular dementia or from Alzheimer’s Disease to be pressured by “healthcare” providers to convince spouses, children or other relatives to dispense what can be called the “palliative care package” of pills and potions designed to make the victim patient “comfortable” but are designed to send their loved one into a coma, whereupon another set of pills are prescribed that finish him off once and for all.

As this is just standard procedure across the world, those who have are suffering from dementia of one sort or another are especially susceptible to having their lives ended when their lives are considered to have lost “meaning.” Elderly people suffering from declining cognitive abilities are likely to have their lives ended in their “merciful” manner. However, believing, informed Catholics know that this is murder, plain and simple, disguised to look like an act of “compassion” to alleviate human suffering. It is no such thing. 

The situation is so very bad that almost everyone over the age of seventy, a group that includes this writer, of course, is being scrutinized he has the misfortune of walking into a conventional physician or specialist’s office. This scrutiny usually starts with the medical records assistant, whose job it is to talk to the patient to make a psychological assessment as to his “quality of life.”

Does the patient feel “safe” at home?

Does the patient get his vaccinations regularly like a good, compliant lemming?

Is the patient aware of his surroundings?

Is he deemed to be suffering from financial distress, conflict at home or other signs of agitation?

Is the patient likely to be accepting of or resistant to the course of treatment recommended by the “healthcare” team?

Is the patient overweight or underweight, unkempt, disheveled, overly fussy, or fidgety?

Do you think that I am making this up?

Hardly.

Here is an example of how one is assessed when one visits an orthopedist to receive a diagnosis of “end stage” osteoarthritis of his knees:

General, neuro, psychiatric, respiratory, cardiovascular, GI, GU, blood and lymph, EENT musculoskeletal, skin, and endocrine systems are normal.

How can a determination be made about one’s psychiatric condition from a casual observation during a visit to an orthopedist, no less make medical judgments about bodily systems that have not been examined during the visit? 

Medical professionals believe that they are competent to make such snap judgments, which become part of a patient’s permanent medical record, and it is an everyday occurrence for these professionals to determine that patients who have some chronic condition that is not life-threatening must be eased into “comfort care,” thereby making patient an unknowing accomplice in his own execution over the course of time.

The judgments of healthcare professionals about human beings alleged “quality of life” is accepted as unquestionably infallible truths by judges in cases brought by patients and/or family members to prevent hospital administrators and staff from imposing death sentences upon those with chronic conditions or terminal illnesses are believed to be of no “value” to the patients, their family members, or to society. This is case here in the United States of America and around the world, including in the country whose medical and legal professions oversaw the execution of young Charlie Gard in 2017, the United Kingdom, where a judge also sentenced a fully conscious nineteen year old woman to death because “medical professionals” decided that she was “incapable” of making her own decisions even though she said that she wanted to live:

A UK court has ruled a 19-year-old critically ill female patient with a rare disorder cannot make her own decisions about continuing her medical care, as her family battles her doctors' desire to stop treatment and pursue end-of-life care.

The teen, whose identity has been anonymized as "ST" by the court, has a rare genetic mitochondrial disease that is progressively degenerative, according to court documents. Her condition is similar to that of Charlie Gard, the infant whose story drew global headlines in 2017. Charlie's parents lost a bid to bring him to the U.S. for an experimental treatment for his critical condition and he died after the hospital withdrew life-saving care after a months-long high profile legal battle.

Despite previously being a student studying for her A-levels (short for advanced levels), the 19-year-old girl has spent the past year in the ICU, dependent on a ventilator and a feeding tube. She requires regular dialysis due to chronic kidney damage from her disease. "ST" is currently fighting the hospital to be allowed to travel to Canada for an experimental treatment to treat her disease.

The Christian Legal Centre, which is advocating for the patient, argues her case is different than Gard's because she is conscious and able to communicate and argue in her defense.

But her doctor believe "ST" is "actively dying" and has no hope of a cure to resume life outside intensive care. They are asking the court to end her dialysis treatments and pursue palliative care instead. The hospital told the court the 19-year-old is incapable of making decisions about her future medical care because she is under the "delusion" that her death is not imminent.

The teen, who comes from a strong Christian family, confessed she realizes the treatment may not help extend her life but wants to keep fighting.

"This is my wish. I want to die trying to live. We have to try everything," she told clinicians, according to court documents.

Her family has spent their entire life savings to treat the girl, the Christian Legal Centre said, and wants to go to the public to raise funds for the expensive treatment, but cannot due to a "transparency order" requested by the hospital which bars reporting any information which might identify "ST", her family, or the hospital.

The girl's family described the long battle with the hospital as "a year of continuous torture" for them.

"Not only are we anxious about our beloved daughter’s fight for survival, but we have also been cruelly gagged from being able to speak about her situation. We are not allowed to ask people for prayers or for help which she desperately needs. It is a matter of life and death for our daughter to raise money for treatment in Canada, so these arbitrary reporting restrictions are literally killing her," they said via legal representation.

In court this week, a judge determined the teen "is able to communicate reasonably well with her doctors with assistance from her mother and, on occasion, speech therapists." Two psychiatrists assessed the teen was capable of making decisions about her future care for herself.

However, the judge said that, "ST" was mentally incapable of making decisions for herself because "she does not believe the information she has been given by her doctors." The judge ruled that decisions about ST's further care should be determined by the Court of Protection based on an assessment of her best interests.

"We are shocked to be told by the judge that our daughter does not have capacity to make decisions for herself after all the experts have said that she does. We are very distressed by this injustice, and we hope that, by Jesus’s grace, this will be corrected on appeal," the family of the patient said. 

Andrea Williams, the Chief Executive of Christian Legal Centre, blasted the transparency order and called the case "profoundly disturbing."

"This profoundly disturbing case demonstrates the urgent need for an overhaul into how end-of-life decisions are made in the NHS and the Courts," she said.

"What can be more natural or rational for a seriously ill 19-year-old than to leave no stone unturned and to take every chance of survival? ST has wanted to tell her story to the world in order to try and access further treatment but has been prevented from doing so by the ironically named Court of Protection," she said in a statement.

The NHS did not respond to a request for comment. (UK court rules teen with rare disorder incapable of making decisions about care despite begging to live.)

So much for “personal autonomy.”

So much for the empty slogan, “My body, my choice.”

Anyone who has been reading my work for the past thirty years or so, dating back to my days when anywhere from one to three columns of mine would appear in The Wanderer each week, knows that such monstrously heartless decisions do not belong to the station of man to make but are the inevitable consequence of the “Brexit” that began in 1534 when the lecherous drunkard bigamist named Henry VIII sought to divorce his true wife, Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry his own illegitimate daughter, Anne Boleyn, in the quest to produce a male heir, thereby breaking with the true Church and commencing a bloody persecution against the Catholics of England and Ireland who remain steadfast in their fealty to the one and only true Church founded by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church.

The heretical and schismatic Anglican sect has gone from denying Papal Primary and other revealed doctrines to endorsing one immoral act after another, starting with divorce in the Sixteenth Century, of course, and from there to the denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of Holy Matrimony by means of contraception, to the support for the surgical execution of innocent preborn children in the sanctuaries of their mothers’ wombs, sodomy and all its ever evolving, ever mutating variations, up to and including so-called “transgenderism,” which is now considered such a “fundamental right” that the forcible indoctrination into this diabolical nightmare is considered beyond a parent’s right to intervene before his child is surgically mutilated and chemically poisoned. The Anglican sect has devolved to the point where many of its so-called ministers (who are nothing other than lay people dressed up in clerical garb) do not believe in the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture while there are some among their wretched numbers who do not even believe in the generic Judeo-Masonic notion of a deity. Court-ordered euthanasia is one of the many inevitable consequences of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His Catholic Church, and it is this is exact same path of auto-destruction upon which the entire false conciliar religion itself has been set upon repeating.

No one is safe any longer.

Although I have used the quotation from a 1941sermon given by the courageous Bishops Clemens von Galen in Muenster, Germany many times in the past, it is good to do so once again in order to remind readers that one must exercise extraordinary caution when dealing with most medical professionals unless dealing with a personal friend who is aware of the “palliative care” agenda that is woven so seamlessly throughout the entirety of the healthcare industry today:

We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offence justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate self-defence to meet violence with violence. In such a case the use of violence leading to death is permitted and may be called for, as it is in the case of killing an armed enemy.

No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live,” because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community”.

The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow?

I will not pursue the comparison to the end, so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power.

But we are not here concerned with pieces of machinery; we are not dealing with horses and cows, whose sole function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for mankind. They may be broken up; they may be slaughtered when they no longer perform this function.

No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognised by others as productive?

If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm! If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients ” then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished! (Three Sermons of Bishop Clemens von Galen.)         

These words were spoken at the height of the Nazi regime’s enforcement of Adolf Hitler’s 1935 Nuremburg Laws, which institutionalized the sort of eugenic social engineering that had been envisioned—and was in use on a de facto basis—in Germany’s Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1933 and in which, interestingly enough, Jewish eugenicists played an active role:

Support for eugenics came from a remarkable array of the ruling elite and the walls of the exhibition are lined with quotes in support of the movement. President Coolidge stated that "racial considerations" were "too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons." Squiers notes, "The people who saw themselves as uniquely fit to exert control wanted to exert it."

The second half of Squiers' exhibition heads to Germany, where Galton's ideas fed a centuries-old notion of the purity and virtue of the German "Volk." In the aftermath of World War I, the Weimar Republic employed a number of German and Jewish eugenicists to create a genetic blueprint for rebuilding a devastated Germany. Copies of slides used in a lecture identify degenerates: "Three Idiots," "Paranoid Alcoholic" and a young woman labeled "Good-natured manic state." (Eugenics in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany: A Photographic Exhibit.)

One should also remember that the removal of the “unfit” from “civilized” nations was the chief goal of the nefarious Margaret Sanger and her Birth Control League:

Here is Sanger’s “Plan for Peace,” which was published in the Birth Control Review in April of 1932:

First, put into action President Wilson's fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918.

Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals. The main objects of the Population Congress would be:

a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.

b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.

c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.

f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.

g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.

The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.

The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.

Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense---defending the unborn against their own disabilities.

The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers' health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives---thus reducing maternal mortality.

The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.

With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.

There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.

In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace. (Black Genocide.org | The Truth About Margaret Sanger.)

Here is what Pope Pius XI told us was the foundation of true peace:

It is possible to sum up all We have said in one word, "the Kingdom of Christ." For Jesus Christ reigns over the minds of individuals by His teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one's life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example. Jesus reigns over the family when it, modeled after the holy ideals of the sacrament of matrimony instituted by Christ, maintains unspotted its true character of sanctuary. In such a sanctuary of love, parental authority is fashioned after the authority of God, the Father, from Whom, as a matter of fact, it originates and after which even it is named. (Ephesians iii, 15) The obedience of the children imitates that of the Divine Child of Nazareth, and the whole family life is inspired by the sacred ideals of the Holy Family. Finally, Jesus Christ reigns over society when men recognize and reverence the sovereignty of Christ, when they accept the divine origin and control over all social forces, a recognition which is the basis of the right to command for those in authority and of the duty to obey for those who are subjects, a duty which cannot but ennoble all who live up to its demands. Christ reigns where the position in society which He Himself has assigned to His Church is recognized, for He bestowed on the Church the status and the constitution of a society which, by reason of the perfect ends which it is called upon to attain, must be held to be supreme in its own sphere; He also made her the depository and interpreter of His divine teachings, and, by consequence, the teacher and guide of every other society whatsoever, not of course in the sense that she should abstract in the least from their authority, each in its own sphere supreme, but that she should really perfect their authority, just as divine grace perfects human nature, and should give to them the assistance necessary for men to attain their true final end, eternal happiness, and by that very fact make them the more deserving and certain promoters of their happiness here below.

It is, therefore, a fact which cannot be questioned that the true peace of Christ can only exist in the Kingdom of Christ -- "the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." It is no less unquestionable that, in doing all we can to bring about the re-establishment of Christ's kingdom, we will be working most effectively toward a lasting world peace. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Margaret Sanger’s prescriptions for “peace” were founded on making warfare upon the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, thus helping to predispose men to be at war with each other at a moment’s notice in the domestic cell that is the family, in their neighborhoods and their cities and in their country. Yes, there is a direct line from Father Martin Luther to Margaret Sanger to the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Sanger was one of the most successful evangelists of evil that the world has ever known, more successful than the man under whose auspices Ernst Rudin worked, none other than the murderous Adolf Hitler himself (see Meet Some Catholics Truly Worth Admiring, part one and Meet Some Catholics Truly Worth Admiring, part two).

Margaret Sanger and her cohorts were not the only ones who were on the cutting edge of “progressive” social thought in the 1920s and 1930s. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) sought to curb the procreation of “undesirables,” most especially blacks and “imbeciles,” and to convince Catholics to rebel against a “rigid” teaching of Holy Mother Church that kept them from “enjoying” the “freedom” that supposedly was to be found in a debased use of that which is proper to the married state. It should come as no surprise that the utilitarian spirit of “racial purity” and supposed “social stability” pioneered by Margaret Sanger and her allies is what prevails in the global healthcare industry, where traps aplenty have been set to lure people into agreeing to a “care plan” that winds up killing them.

Those traps are many, including the starvation and dehydration of innocent human beings said to be “brain damaged” and almost universal program to convince people to sign up to be “organ donors” to make their vital organs part of the global, money-making global “body parts maket that is based on the medical industry’s manufactured myth of “brain death.” The clever merchants of death that dress up in white or blue smock thus make people materially complicit in their own vivisection at the hands of our modern Aztecs in order to “give the gift of life.” The traps are everywhere. Everywhere. We walk a minefield when one enters into any kind of medical facility today. Only those with a thorough understanding of what is happening and/or those who desire to take the time and expend the care and expense that is necessary to treat a living human being as they would treat Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the very Flesh.

There is almost no refuge anywhere in the world from today’s medical and moral monsters, including in once proud Catholic Spain, where the anti-life, anti-family, anti-Christ agenda of its parliamentary-ministerial and judicial tyrants, intent as they are on “replacing” Spain’s indigenous Catholic population with Mohammedan immigrants, which is why King Felipe VI himself issues a royal decree to “regularize” over 500,000 “migrants,” a goal for which the conciliar revolutionaries in Spain have lobbied long and hard:

A short video clip from Spain has reverberated far beyond, exposing a fault line in Europe’s migration debate and fueling claims that parts of the continent’s far left view immigration not only as a social policy but as an electoral instrument.

The footage shows Irene Montero, a senior figure in Spain’s hard-left Podemos, former equality minister and currently serving as an MEP, addressing a public event. In it, Montero expresses her hope that immigration will help “sweep this country of fascists and racists,” a remark widely interpreted by critics as endorsing demographic change to alter voting outcomes. 

Since circulating on X, the video has surpassed five million views, rapidly becoming a focal point in international political commentary.

What might once have remained a domestic controversy instead exploded onto the global stage after being amplified by prominent international voices. Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek framed the clip as a rare moment of candor from Europe’s radical left, arguing that it confirms long-held suspicions about demographic engineering being used as a political strategy.

The debate escalated further when Elon Musk, owner of X, weighed in, condemning the remarks in stark terms and accusing Montero of advocating the elimination of a political group through demographic means. His intervention ensured that the controversy reached audiences well beyond European policy circles.

In the United States, conservative intellectual Jared Taylor described the applause Montero received at the event as “chilling,” underscoring how normalized such rhetoric can become within certain ideological spaces.

Podemos as a case study of Europe’s radical left

For critics, the episode has become emblematic of a broader phenomenon across Europe’s far left: the convergence of pro-migration advocacy with explicit electoral calculations. Parties like Podemos argue that increased immigration strengthens diversity, social justice and economic sustainability. Opponents counter that this language often masks a more instrumental logic — one in which demographic change is openly welcomed as a way to reshape the electorate.

While mainstream center-left parties typically emphasize integration and labor-market needs, Podemos has long positioned itself at the ideological edge of European politics. Its discourse frequently blends identity politics with structural critiques of capitalism and nationalism, placing it in line with similar movements in France, Germany and parts of the Nordic left.

Supporters of Montero insist her words were metaphorical, aimed at denouncing racism rather than calling for the replacement of native populations. Yet the choice of language—invoking “replacement” in a continent already sensitive to demographic anxiety—has proven politically combustible.

Irene Montero’s comments have provided critics with a powerful example to argue that parts of Europe’s extreme left no longer merely tolerate demographic change but actively welcome it as a political lever. For international observers, Podemos now serves as a case study in how migration policy, identity politics and electoral strategy can merge—and how quickly such moments can escape national boundaries.

As Europe heads into another cycle of elections marked by polarization and distrust, the controversy underscores a central question: can democratic societies sustain open migration debates without sliding into rhetoric that treats populations as tools rather than citizens? (The Mask Is Off? Spain’s Far-Left Leader Calls For “Replacement” of Native Population. Montero’s beliefs, which echo those of many “progressives” here in the United States of Americas, were mentioned by secular commentator Victor Davis Hanson recently in Here's the REAL reason the left favors a wide-open southern US border).

While Spain is busy “regularizing” over half a million “migrants,” though, it is also refusing the entreaties of parents who want to save their grown children from being killed by means of the country’s “assisted dying—“suicide”—program that has taken root in so many countries, especially in Canada and here in some parts of the United States of America (Governors Jay Robert “Slim Pickens for a brain” Pritzker of Illinois and Kathleen Hochul of New York have signed so-called “medial assistance in dying” bills into law within the past three months; Hochul did so only a few weeks ago):

MADRID, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Spain's Constitutional Court has rejected an appeal by the father of a 25‑year‑old paraplegic woman who opposes her access to euthanasia, the court said in a statement on Friday.

In 2021, Spain became the fourth European Union country to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide for people with incurable or severely debilitating conditions who wish to end their lives. In 2024, 426 people received assistance in dying, according to government data.

According to legal rulings, the woman, who is suffering from a psychiatric illness, attempted suicide several times by overdosing on medication before jumping from a fifth‑floor window in October 2022, an act that left her paraplegic and in chronic pain.

In July 2024, a specialised expert committee in her region, Catalonia, approved her request for euthanasia. The procedure was scheduled for August 2, 2024, but her father has blocked it ever since.

Medical case reports state that the patient is suffering from severe, chronic and incapacitating pain from her injury, with no possibility of improvement.

The father, supported by the ultra‑conservative advocacy group Abogados Cristianos ("Christian Lawyers"), argued that his daughter's mental illness could impair her ability to make a free and informed decision about ending her life.

Several lower courts backed her case, and on Friday the Constitutional Court, Spain's highest tribunal, ruled there had been no violation of fundamental rights.

Although the country broadly supports the right to assisted dying, the euthanasia law was enacted after years of fierce opposition from conservative parties and the Catholic Church, which has historically shaped public attitudes on end‑of‑life issues.

Abogados Cristianos said on Friday it would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

"We will not abandon these parents. We will continue to fight to the end to defend their right to save their daughter's life," the group's head, Polonia Castellanos, said in a statement. (Spain's top court rejects father's bid to halt daughter's euthanasia.)

Protestantism did away with the image of the Crucified Christ on the Cross and thus did away with the theology of redemptive suffering, making it more possible for anti-life, Christophobic utilitarians to kill off life after birth following their century-long efforts to prevent the conception of children by chemical and surgical means, to execute children in the womb before they can be born (and even after in many places today), and to dispense with life by using the pretexts as the medical industry’s manufactured, money-making myth called “brain death” for purposes of vital organ vivisection and transplantation as well as by means of starvation and dehydration and, of course, “palliative care.” Each of these evil practices in defiance of the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment accustom people to “plan” for their futures and convinces them that they are completely autonomous over life and death decisions without regard for the immutable laws of God Himself.

The overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King is what this all possible, proximately speaking, as men and their governments no longer have any understanding that public policy must be pursued in light of man’s Last End and that it is the duty of a just government to do nothing that would be deleterious to the sanctification and salvation of souls.

Canada’s own “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) program, which was the subject of To the Precipice and Over the Cliff of Nihilism and Self-Annihilation six months ago, continues to claim more and more of the lives of vulnerable people who do not see any “purpose” to live with  chronic diseases, pain, or the slightest bit of suffering:

Kiano Vafaeian was euthanized on Dec. 30, 2025, in British Columbia. His family says he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 4 and began struggling with mental health after a car accident at 17. 

His mother, Margaret Marsilla of Ontario, said his depression was often seasonal, yet he became "obsessed" with MAID after losing vision in one eye in 2022.

MAID was legalized in Canada in June 2016. The law allows patients with "grievous and irremediable" medical conditions to request a lethal drug that is either physician or self-administered, to end their lives.

In 2022, after a Toronto doctor initially approved Vafaeian’s request, the family launched a public pressure campaign on social media to voice their opposition. The outcry led the doctor to withdraw approval. While Vafaeian was initially angry, his family said he showed signs of improvement over the following year, even moving in with them in 2024.

"He tried his best when he was in one of those good highs of life," Marsilla said. "Then winter, fall started coming around, he started changing and then everything that we had worked for from spring and summertime just disappeared… he would start talking about MAID again."

The family said Vafaeian was rejected by multiple doctors in Ontario before he sought out Dr. Ellen Wiebe, a prominent MAID provider, in British Columbia. Marsilla believes Wiebe "coached" her son on what to say to meet the criteria for "Track 2" patients — those whose natural deaths are not reasonably imminent.

"We believe that she was coaching him... on how to deteriorate his body and what she can possibly approve him for and what she can get away with approving him for," Marsilla said. "Because if he had spoken back in 2024, and he was a good candidate for approving Marsilla has shared her son's story on social media, describing the situation as "disgusting on every level." 

On Facebook, she wrote, "No parent should ever have to bury their child because a system—and a doctor—chose death over care, help, or love."

Vafaeian’s parents say they were not notified of the approval and only learned of his death days after it occurred. They noted his medical records did not substantiate the "severe peripheral neuropathy" listed on his death certificate as a qualifying factor.

"This whole process came to us as a shock," said Joseph Caprara, Vafaeian’s stepfather.

In 2021, eligibility for MAID was expanded to include applicants with "grievous and irremediable conditions" whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable. The family is now advocating for the repeal of this "Track 2" provision and the passage of Bill C-218, a legislative effort to restrict MAID for patients whose underlying issue is solely mental illness.

"Realistically, safeguards for patients would be reaching out to their family members, giving them a whole bunch of different treatment options," Marsilla said. Instead, she claims the current system allows doctors to approve and euthanize patients within 90 days on Track 2. 

"How is that safe for patients?" she asked.

Caprara said their family hopes sharing their story will expose the risks these laws pose to the "vulnerable and disabled" and give states and other countries pause before implementing similar legislation.

"We don't want to see any other family member suffer, or any country introduce a piece of legislation that kills their disabled or vulnerable without appropriate proper treatment plans that could save their lives," he said.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Dr. Wiebe said, "Like my colleagues, every patient I approve for Track 2 has unbearable suffering from a grievous and irremediable medical condition (not psychiatric) with an advanced state of decline in capability and consents to MAID fully informed about treatments to reduce the suffering."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an assisted suicide bill into law on February 6, making New York the 13th state, plus the District of Columbia, to legalize allowing physicians to aid terminally ill adults in dying by suicide. The law will go into effect in six months. (Parents slam MAID laws after son, 26, with mental illness, euthanized.)

The Hippocratic Oath has been replaced by the devil’s hatred of human life to create despair in the souls of the merely sick and heartbreak among their parents and relatives who have lived long enough to see killers in white robes act with legal impunity to check off various boxes to apply use an evil to kill off as many people as they can.

It should be remembered in this regard, however, that most of the cases about these evil practices become publicly known only because there are relatives who are opposed to them. Most of the time, though, patients and their loved ones are in total agreement about the “necessity” of being executed by so-called doctors in the face of “irremediable” conditions.

Another case in Canada that has come to light recently involves an elderly woman in Vancouver, British Columbia who was euthanized against her will after she had changed her mind to request “hospice” care, which would, she did not realize, have accomplished the same end but not as immediately as getting one intravenous mixture to kill her off instantly:

A former Canadian provincial premier known for a fairly staunch pro-life record said that news of a recent Canadian woman who was euthanized against her will amounts to a cold-blooded “murder.”

In a statement Monday on X, former Alberta Premier and Conservative MP Jason Kenney reacted to reports of the death of a woman in her 80s known as Mrs. B.

“‘Euthanized against her will’ = cold blooded murder,” Kenney wrote.

“This is the inevitable result of Canada’s dystopian ‘assistance in dying’ regime.”

Kenney, who was for years known as one of Canada’s most avid pro-life politicians before he caved to COVID dictates as Alberta’s premier, said he “predicted” this would happen.

“When I predicted this outcome over years of debates in Parliament, pro-euthanasia advocates would dismiss it as ‘fear mongering,’” he noted.

“It turns out that fear of desacralizing human life is entirely rational.”

As reported by LifeSiteNews, the elderly woman known as Mrs. B was euthanized within hours despite changing her mind.

Reports from U.S. senior investigations reporter Nic White said that the woman got what is known as “same-day” euthanasia despite changing her mind.

“One case study was that of a woman in her 80s referred to as ‘Mrs. B’ who had complications after a coronary artery bypass graft surgery,” White wrote.

“She went into severe decline and opted for palliative care and was sent home from the hospital with palliative support and her husband caring for her. But as her condition got worse, her elderly husband struggled to care for her even with the help of visits by nurses.”

According to the family, Mrs. B said she wanted euthanasia. Her overworked husband contacted a “referral service” immediately. Mrs. B, however, changed her mind when the assessor arrived, stating that she “wanted to withdraw her request, citing personal religious values and beliefs.” She said that inpatient hospice care was what she wanted in place of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

As reported by LifeSiteNews, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Jim O’Neil warned that Canada’s MAiD program, as it’s known, has crossed a new line in unethical practices.

The Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized in 2016. Canada now has the fastest-growing assisted suicide program in the world. Meanwhile, Health Canada released a series of studies on advanced requests for assisted suicide.

Current Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has not made known an official stance on euthanasia. She took over the United Conservative Party (UCP) on October 11, 2022, from Kenney after winning the leadership of the party. The UCP then won a general election in May 2023. Kenney was ousted due to low approval ratings and for reneging on promises not to lock Alberta down.

Under Kenney, thousands of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare and government workers lost their jobs for choosing to not get the jabs, leading Smith to say – only minutes after being sworn in – that over the past year the “unvaccinated” were the “most discriminated against” group of people in her lifetime. (Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney calls euthanizing woman against her will ‘murder’.)

Yes, as mentioned earlier, there is a direct continuum from Martin Luther’s attack on the inviolability of a ratified and consummated marriage, to the rise of Judeo-Masonry’s promotion of the liberalization of existing divorce laws in the Nineteenth Century, especially in the State of North Dakota after it gained statehood in 1889, to the popularization of Sangerism during and after World War I, to the promotion of abortion-on-demand as a consequences of Sangerism’s war on conception, to sodomy and its never-ceasing permutations of perversity, to “brain death”/vital organ vivisection, the starvation and dehydration of patients, to “palliative care”/hospice and now, of course, “euthanasia,” whether by private “choice” (no one has the right to “choose” to end his own life or to end the life of another innocent human being) or forced upon patients by unjust court orders.

Also involved in this continuum was the entire plandemic’s effort to use the Wuhan Virus to engage in a grand experiment of social control and engineering that denied infected patients with early treatment protocols based upon their own individual case histories and not the mandated use of cookie-cutter treatments that resulted in many needless deaths, deaths and injuries that are still occurring because the poisoned jabs developed under President Donald John Trump’s warped, death-dealing Operation Warp Speed in 2020:

A newly published peer-reviewed case report examines the relationship between COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations and increased cases of cancers — including highly aggressive cancers, and the unexpected recurrence of cancers after decades of remission — that have been independently noted by oncology experts and researchers worldwide. 

Although anti-COVID mRNA “vaccines” are gene therapy products (GTP), during the pandemic they were marketed as “vaccines” in order to gain the trust and acceptance of the global public. The rise in concerns about the increase of cancer following the mRNA jabs was preceded by considerable evidence that the COVID-19 mRNA gene therapies routinely injured the heart, triggering a troubling spike in myocarditis in healthy teens.

Of particular concern are the lipid nanoparticles that serve to deliver the “vaccine,” which can circulate beyond the injection site and reach internal organs, including bone marrow. 

The new report focuses on a 38-year-old healthy, athletic woman who began experiencing immune-related symptoms the day after receiving a second COVID-19 mRNA vaccine dose. 

According to a summary of the study:

Within months, she was diagnosed with an aggressive blood cancer affecting early-stage lymphocytes. While she initially achieved complete remission through chemotherapy, she later experienced a central nervous system relapse and underwent a stem cell transplant. The sequence of events raises questions about whether the vaccine-induced immune response may have contributed to disease onset or progression.

“Emerging evidence suggests that the biodistribution and persistence of modRNA, facilitated by lipid nanoparticles, can affect various tissues and organs, including the bone marrow and other blood-forming organs. Notably, modRNA vaccines exhibit a particular affinity for the bone marrow,” wrote the study’s authors. 

The researchers note that the rollout of the COVID-19 “vaccines” was associated with an increase of excess mortality worldwide. They note several studies:

• “According to a recent study performed in Japan, the age-adjusted death rates for leukaemia, breast, pancreatic, and lip/oral/pharyngeal cancers increased significantly in 2022 after a large portion of the Japanese population had received the third dose of the modRNA vaccine, as compared to 2020, the first year of the pandemic, when no mass global genetic vaccinations were given.”
• “A long-term population-wide cohort study in Pescara province (Italy), analysed nearly 300,000 residents over 30 months (June 2021 to December 2023) and investigated the relationship between COVID-19 vaccination and cancer hospitalizations. The study found that vaccination was associated with a 23% increased risk of cancer hospitalization after receiving one or more doses … Statistically significant increases in risk were observed for breast cancer (+54%), bladder cancer (+62%), and colorectal cancer (+35%) after at least one dose.”
• “A large population-based retrospective cohort study from South Korea, involving over 8.4 million adults from 2021 to 2023, assessed the cancer risks within one year after COVID-19 vaccination. The study found that vaccinated individuals had a 27% higher overall risk of developing cancer compared to those unvaccinated. Significant increases were noted for lung, prostate, thyroid, gastric, colorectal, and breast cancers.”

“Given the expanding use of mRNA technology, thorough preclinical safety assessments, including integration studies, are urgently needed to ensure vaccine safety and public health,” the authors concluded, adding:   

The carcinogenic risk associated with these technologies, which has long been known within the gene therapy field, represents an area of research that cannot be ignored, given the fundamental principle of medicine “primum non nocere” (first, do no harm).  

Titled “Exploring the potential link between mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations and cancer: A case report with a review of haematopoietic malignancies with insights into pathogenic mechanisms,” its authors include Patrizia Gentilini, Janci C. Lindsay, Nafuko Konishi, Masanori Fukushima, and Panagis Polykretis.

Since the outset of the COVID pandemic, LifeSiteNews has authored thousands of reports warning about the dangers of the untested, experimental mRNA COVID-19 “vaccines.” (New study exposes potential cancer risks from mRNA COVID shots - LifeSite.)

This evidence can no longer be denied except by those who have vested, personal, professional, and financial reasons to insist upon the falsity of that which is empirically true and incontestable.

Modern Hospitals Were Established and Operated by the Catholic Church

Most people alive today, including most Catholics, have no knowledge of the fact that Holy Mother Church is the mother of the organized system of healthcare called hospitals. It was from the earliest days of her history that individual Catholics began to provide “hospitality” to the sick and the indigent, and the bishop’s house became known in the place in which the sick could receive care. The wealthiest Catholics would take it unto themselves to care for the sick in their own homes if the bishop’s house became too crowded, and it was after the ascent of Holy Mother Church from the catacombs that hospitals themselves began to be established so that the mercy of the Divine Redeemer could be administered to those suffering from kind of illness or disability, whether acute or chronic, according to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Several of our Church Fathers, including Saint Basil the Great and Saint John Chrysostom, established foundations for the sick and the poor, and another Church Father, Saint Jerome, noted that Fabiola established an institution to provide healthcare to the sick in Rome. Pope Symmachus, who reigned between 498 A.D. and 514 A.D., established hospitals that were connected to the basilicas of Saint Peter, Saint Paul and Saint Lawrence. Indeed, there was a rapid spread of hospitals all throughout what became established as Christendom and Catholic emperors, most notably Charlemagne, endeavored to establish new hospitals and to rebuild those that had fallen into disrepair. The care for the sick and injured was a notable characteristic of Christian life as the Holy Faith was spread into barbaric and pagan lands. (Please see an article on  Hospitals in the Catholic Encyclopedia for a fuller explication of the facts summarized therefrom above.)

Monasteries and convents became the center of civic life after the founding of Monte Cassino by Saint Benedict of Nursia, and each monastery featured a priest or a religious who knew how to use God’s herbs as medicines to treat bodily ills and injuries. It has been only within the past half-century that the knowledge of these holy religious has attracted the attention of those who have come to realize the harmful effects of various food additives, preservatives, artificial sweeteners, flavor enhancers, white sugar, enriched and bleached white flour, chemical substances and other highly processed food products that have no nutritional value but are addictive in se. Many of the health problems, including the spread of cancer and heart disease, have been caused by products that were hitherto unknown, thus creating the “need” for various pharmaceutical products to “treat” afflictions that wind up consigning patients to “palliative care’ programs that feature a cocktail of pharmaceutical products designed to kill them. (For a review of the use of herbs to treat various afflictions, please see  Health Through God's Pharmacy.)

The Middle Ages, which is so hated and disparaged by Protestants, Talmudists, Freemasons and most other non-Catholics, saw the establishment of numerous religious communities whose charism was the care of the sick and the establishment and maintenance of hospitals. One of those communities was the Hospitallers of Saint John of God, although there are very few members of the order today because of the doctrinal, liturgical, and moral bankruptcy of conciliarism (Poland and the Spanish provinces of Andalusia and Castile have the most Hospitallers in comparison to most of the world; there are only seventeen in the United States of America). Saint Aloysius, a professed member of the Society of Jesus, gave up his life to serve those in Rome who had contracted the plague, and our own Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini made sure that the establishment of hospitals was one of the chief works of her own Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (in addition to caring for Italian immigrants to the United States of America and elsewhere in the Americas, establishing schools and orphanages). Mind you, these are only a few examples of the numerous saintly Catholics who took seriously the commands of the Holy Gospel to provide care to others motivated by a love of God as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church and the spiritual and temporal good of the souls for whom His Divine Son shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem.

Rather than the indifference and, in all too many cases, callousness of many medical “professionals’ today who view time with their patients as burdensome, which is why some have taken to delivering messages to patients via video screens displayed on a robot, institutions of mercy established and maintained by the Catholic Church and staffed with believing Catholics took the time to comfort patients in body, mind and soul. Patients received sound medical care in Catholic healthcare institutions of yore, and many priests, consecrated religious, lay Catholic physicians, nurses, nurses’s aides, orderlies and other staff members took the time to sit by the bedside of patients while they prayed Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary together and to recite other prayers with them throughout the day. Those who serve others as though they are serving Our Lord Himself do so with a cheerful demeanor but are also ready to offer sympathy and compassion in times of distress and sorrow according to these words of Saint Paul the Apostle:

[6] And having different gifts, according to the grace that is given us, either prophecy, to be used according to the rule of faith; [7] Or ministry, in ministering; or he that teacheth, in doctrine; [8] He that exhorteth, in exhorting; he that giveth, with simplicity; he that ruleth, with carefulness; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness. [9] Let love be without dissimulation. Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good. [10] Loving one another with the charity of brotherhood, with honour preventing one another.

[11] In carefulness not slothful. In spirit fervent. Serving the Lord. [12] Rejoicing in hope. Patient in tribulation. Instant in prayer. [13] Communicating to the necessities of the saints. Pursuing hospitality. [14] Bless them that persecute you: bless, and curse not. [15] Rejoice with them that rejoice; weep with them that weep.

[16] Being of one mind one towards another. Not minding high things, but consenting to the humble. Be not wise in your own conceits. [17] To no man rendering evil for evil. Providing good things, not only in the sight of God, but also in the sight of all men. [18] If it be possible, as much as is in you, have peace with all men. [19] Revenge not yourselves, my dearly beloved; but give place unto wrath, for it is written: Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. [20] But if thy enemy be hungry, give him to eat; if he thirst, give him to drink. For, doing this, thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.

[21] Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good. (Romans 12: 6-21.)

Yes, there was a time when institutions of mercy provided the Corporal Works of Mercy as befits redeemed creatures, mindful that patients must be prepared to receive to the Sacraments and that those who are not disposed to do would be able to make their peace with the good God in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance on a regular basis, especially before they die, and to receive Holy Communion frequently while hospitalized and as Final Viaticum as death approaches. It is the absence of such care today, especially in institutions formerly administered by the authority of the Catholic Church that have merged with or been taken over by large corporate entities and are operated on an almost purely utilitarian basis without any regard to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and thus of seeing the Divine impress in all that they serve.

A System Taken Over by the Merchants of Death

Now, obviously, this does not mean that there are not good professionals in the healthcare industry who are devoted to healing. Of course not. It would be inaccurate and irresponsible to state such a thing. There are many people who work long, hard hours and who are doing their best on a purely natural level to help patients, including elderly patients who have had heart attacks or strokes or suffer from some long-term, debilitating disease.

Nevertheless, however, it remains the case that, despite the level of care one receives and the dedication of many healthcare providers to the healing of the sick, the ethos of “palliative care” is suffused into every figurative corpuscle of major medical institutions, and it is also true that much of the good care provided on the merely natural level will last as long as does a patient’s insurance or savings accounts. No money, no care, and that is where the “bottom line” matters more than anything else, which is why the notorious “call to hospice” is made when “all is lost,” which in too many instances today means that the money has simply dried up and it is no longer cost-effective to keep someone who is comatose, terminally ill or suffering from some debilitating condition that interferes with his “quality of life.”

The late “Doctor Death,” Jack Kevorkian, was a cardboard caricature of a utilitarian killer who played God in life and then had to face Him in death. Far more dangerous than Jack Kevorkian are the ordinary men and women in the healthcare industry who think nothing of making “quality of life” decisions that are not other than life and death decisions the moment a patient walks through the door and is interviewed by the first member of the “team.” Very few of those in the medical profession see the Divine impress in those they treat as they do not even see it within themselves.

The horrible situations we face in the world, including the traps that exist within the healthcare industry, are but the inevitable results of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and its subsequent institutionalization by the rise of Judeo-Masonry and all of the naturalist myths spread by its adherents. It is nonetheless true that the lords of conciliarism have enabled the regime of “palliative care” that was propagated by the Robert Wood Johnson and Soros foundations. Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his handpicked minions in the revamped “pontifical” academy of life have been very vocal in this regard (see A Mutual Alliance in Behalf of Spiritual and Physical Death: Jorge Mario Bergoglio and George Soros.)

The situation in the so-called “civilized” West is so bad that, as cited above, human beings who want to live are being denied their fundamental right to life by judges in black robes, who have become the “enforcers,” if you will, of the monstrous decisions made by men and women in white coats in full violation of the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”

Utilitarianism is so institutionalized that almost no one sees the immorality of contemporary “palliative care,” which is euthanasia by means of euphemisms, contemporary palliative care, hospice, the starvation and dehydration of innocent human beings, the medically manufactured myth of “brain death” and human vivisection, suicide, assisted-suicide, physician-assisted suicide, and direct euthanasia.

Even many Catholics know nothing of the theology of redemptive suffering, making them prone to reacting to their own illnesses—as well as those of others—in terms of sentimentality and emotionalism rather to recognize that is a blessing to be given crosses by which we can give honor and glory to the Most Blessed Trinity as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and thus be able to repay a small part of the debt we owe to Him for our forgiven Mortal Sins, our forgiven Venial Sins, and our general attachment to sin and worldliness.

There is no political, constitutional, or social way out of this mess. The only way out of this mess runs through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as we lift high the Holy Cross of her Divine Son, Christ the King, and fly unto her patronage with every beat of our hearts as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.

Several Distinctions and Qualifications

Although I have featured the distinctions and qualifications several times before, it is nevertheless good to do so again as there are new readers to this site now and again, recognizing also that some of those who have read the material previously may have forgotten it given the mind-boggling, mind-numbing amount of reading material available online.

These distinctions and qualifications are important to reiterate as so many Catholics have fallen prey to the merchants of death, who have cleverly manipulated them into believing that it was “necessary” to “let go” of their loved ones and to do nothing to question the “process” or to intervene to stop it.

First, the spiritual and emotional duress that patients and their loved ones experience during times of illness, injury and disability is exploited by the merchants of death in a variety of cleverly-devised manners. Indeed, each member of the “disciplinary team” reinforces a common message of proselytizing in favor of the “process,” but they do so by shrewdly measuring the patient’s condition and the “readiness” of the relatives to “accept” their plans uncritically. As noted in the study quoted above, the “team” endeavors to build “trusting relationships” with patients and relatives to “help” them during the different stages of the “process.”

Second, this use of emotional manipulation means that those who have consented to the “process” without realizing that they were being convinced to become enablers of the willful killing of an innocent being cannot beat themselves over the head once they come to realize what how they were used by the merchants of death.

Thus is it that we can never judge the subject culpability of anyone involved in this monstrous system of death, least of all the relatives of victims who did not realize how they were being manipulated and/or who never understood that it is morally impermissible to cause or to hasten the death of an innocent human being. God alone knows the subjective culpability of the souls of those who believe, albeit erroneously, that they were acting in good faith despite participating or consenting acts that are gravely evil in the objective order of things.

To be sure, the conciliar revolutionaries bear great culpability, objectively speaking, for systematically robbing Catholics of the inability to use right moral principles in matters of life and death. Correction, these revolutionaries bear great culpability, objectively speaking, for systematically robbing Catholics of the sensus Catholicus. Period. 

The conciliar revolutionaries have made it much easier for Catholics within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism to be swayed by the pull of the sentimentality and emotionalism that is entirely unfettered in this world of Protestant rationalism and Judeo-Masonic naturalism. This is all the more difficult because of the fact that those Catholics who participate in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service are not receiving Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in Holy Eucharist as this service is invalid and offensive to God nor do they have access, at least in most cases, to true priests to actually absolve them of their sins. It is the paucity of the superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces, coupled with the revolutionary overthrow of Catholic doctrine on Faith and Morals, that has made Catholics attached to the conciliar structures more suspectible than ever before to the pull of sentimentality and emotionalism of the sort used today in "palliative care" in our system of death.

Consider these words of Father Edward Leen in Why the Cross?

For men, as a rule, have but shown themselves too eager to manage their own temporal affairs. They resent what they call the Church's interference. This resentment culminates in a deliberate exclusion of the Church from the councils of peoples. Even at the best of times, when States were not yet professedly secularist, what jealousy was always manifested with regard to the action of the Church in secular matters! How slow men were to take her advice! How her efforts for procuring the temporal welfare of men were hampered, thwarted and positively resisted!

The gradual silencing of the voice of Christianity in the councils of the nations is the evil cause of the chaotic conditions of modern civilized life. This issue was inevitable. For though the Church's wisdom is primarily in the domain of things of the world to come, yet she is wise, too, with regard to the things of the world that is. She is not for the world, and yet she is able and even ready to act as if she were equipped specially to procure the temporal good of men.  [See Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 134.] She is able and willing to give men directions in temporal matters, which, if followed, will result in temporal prosperity. She is too wise to promote unrealizable Utopias, from which all suffering and toil will be banished. She can give prudent directions how to devise measures for the mitigation of inevitable hardships and the elimination of unnecessary evils. If rulers and ruled alike listened to her voice, the authentic voice of Christianity, what a change would come over the world! It would not cease to be a vale of tears but would cease to be a vale of savage strife. It would not become an earthly Paradise but would become an earth where man's dreams of a satisfying order of things could be realized. (Father Edward Leen, Why the Cross?, originally published by Sheed & Ward in 1938, and republished in 2001 by Scepter Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey,  pp. 14-15.)

Third, none of the documentation above is to suggest that it is impossible to receive good medical care from devoted professionals who have the true spiritual and temporal good of patients and their relatives at heart. Such an inference from the documentation provided in this commentary would be wrongheaded and unjust. There are many dedicated physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals who are aware of the system of death and who attempt to treat rather than to kill living human beings. There also places, such as the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, that advertise the cost of their procedures and are operated by solid professionals, many of them Catholic, who practice medicine according to sound medical principles and while observing the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Nonetheless, however, the system of death that has overtaken the healthcare industry as a result of the hijacking of palliative care by the very same people who support the chemical and surgical execution of innocent preborn babies is hard for the average person to recognize clearly and to reject unequivocally, and this is exactly how the adversary has arranged things as he desires the death of human beings in this life and in the next so that he can torment them for all eternity in hell after the Particular Judgment. One must be very careful, therefore, and make sure to consult with Catholic medical professionals who understand the reality of the system of death that has become institutionalized in the American healthcare system.

Fourth, priests have the obligation to inform themselves about the system of death and to realize that it is (a) designed to kill living human beings; (b) based upon a shifting-narrative and definition of what constitutes “natural death”; (c) designed to make ordinary care to a human being seem “extraordinary” and thus so burdensome that there is no moral obligation to provide it; (d) to anesthetize reality by “staging” the act of killing over the course of time as the circumstances and the patients and their relatives require in the judgment of the “interdisciplinary team.”

Killing is killing, and it is not act of “compassion” for relatives to consent to their being executed by “professionals” in white coats who want to “accompany” them while a loved one is in a very clever process of a carefully-programmed execution. No priest can be any part to this whatsoever, not unless he can justify being on the same side as George Soros and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that is, and they do not have the teaching of Christ the King and good of soul in mind, do they?

Fifth, it is imperative to reject so-called "living wills."

Dr. Paul Byrne worked with a Catholic attorney to devise a set of Advance Medical Directives sixteen years ago that each person who reads this site should read and then sign in front of witnesses other than family members as the form requires to be legally binding even upon the merchants of death. Also attached is a declartion to receive the Last Rites of the Catholic Church by a traditional priest. These documents are linked here: DR. PAUL BYRNE'S MEDICAL DECISIONS’ PROTECTION DOCUMENT (“MDPD”), which also includes the document in its Spanish language translation. I have executed these directives for myself, making it a point to provide them to each healthcare facility that I have visited in recent months. So should the readers of this site as we do not know when some sort of medical incident may occur.

We Must Lift Our Minds and Hearts to Christ the King as His Consecrated Slaves through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary

We must lift our minds and hearts to Heaven as we embrace the Holy Cross, ever conscious of the price that Our Lord paid to redeem us thereon, a price that was shared by His Most Blessed Mother as she stood so valiantly under It. We do not not need hospice or end-life "counseling" sessions. We need the Holy Cross and Our Most Blessed Mother. Period!

Father Benedict Baur, O.S.B., explained how deeply we must always united ourselves to Our Lord's sufferings:

Christ and His members must be one. They must walk the same road, not only during the liturgical service, when they are lifted up together in the mysteries of the sacrifice, but also in every event of life. Christ welcomed suffering, and accepted it freely; He did not flee the hardships of life. He makes suffering in us, His members, serve the spirit; He uses it as a means of freeing us from the world and all that is temporal and thus raises us from things of his world to the thins that are eternal.

Now, during Passiontide, we must begin to live and treasure pain and suffering. In the cross, in suffering, in or crucifixion with Christ, we shall find salvation. For Him and with Him we should bear all the slight injustices committed against us. For Him we should suffer freely and willingly the unpleasant and disagreeable things that occur to us. But our faith is weak. We flee from from the cross instead of holding it dear, instead of loving it and welcoming it our as Savior did.  (Father Benedict Baur, O.S.B., The Light of the World, Volume I, B. Herder Book Company, 1954, p. 595.)

The myth of “brain death” and the practices of the modern "palliative care" industry are founded upon a rejection of the Holy Cross. So is most of modern medicine, especially for the chronically or terminally ill. We must embrace the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, not flee from It, the very instrument of our salvation.

The only thing that must matter to us to remain faithful until we die and to be ready to suffer all, including actual martyrdom. Nothing we lose in this world, including our very lives at the hands of the evil men and women and mutants who make up the fascistic administration of the corrupt, physically decrepit, morally sick, and intellectually dishonest statist named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., that is intent on crushing all opposition, matters if we persevere until the end in a state of Sanctifying Grace as members of the true Church, the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. Without Our Lady’s graces, though, we will be lost, which is why we had better be quite intent on praying her Most Holy Rosary daily.

In all the difficulties of these times, though, we must remember that we have nothing to fear as the graces won for us by the shedding of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, will be ever sufficient for us to carry whatever crosses in whatever circumstances of whatever time God has from all eternity appointed them to live and to work out their salvation in fear and in trembling.

The following prayers, found in The Raccolta, should fill us with peace in the midst of the difficult times in which we live:

Lord Jesus Christ, who didst say unto Thine Apostles: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I gve unto you,” regard not our sins but Thy merits, and grant unto Thy servants, that they whom the Almighty Father hath created and governeth, and whom Thou hast ordained unto everlasting life, may love one another with all their hearts for Thy sake, and may be made one in spirit and rejoice in Thy perpetual peace. Lord Jesus Christ, concerning whom the Prophet hath said: “And all kings of the earth shall adore Him, all nations shall serve Him,” extend thy reign upon the whole human race. Send upon all men the light of Thy faith, deliver them from all the snares and bonds of passion, and direct them to heavenly things; and graciously grant, that the states and nations may be united by means of Thine immaculate Bride, Holy Church, and through the intercession of the blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Peace, may serve Thee in all humility; and that all tongues and peoples may form one great choir, to praise Thee both day and night, to bless Thee, to exalt Thee, O King of the nations and the Ruler thereof, O Prince of prince immortal King of ages. Amen. (The Raccolta: A Manual of Indulgences, Prayers and Devotions Enriched with Indulgences, approved by Pope Pius XII, May 30, 1951, and published in English by Benziger Brothers, New York, 1957, Number 703, pp. 558-559.)

O God, who art the author and lover of peace, in knowledge of whom is eternal life, whose service is a kingly state; defend us Thy humble servants from all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in Thy defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen. (The Raccolta: A Manual of Indulgences, Prayers and Devotions Enriched with Indulgences, approved by Pope Pius XII, May 30, 1951, and published in English by Benziger Brothers, New York, 1957, Number 703, pp. 559-560.)

O merciful Queen of the Rosary of Pompeii, thou, the Seat of Wisdom, hast established a throne of fresh mercy in the land that once was pagan, in order to draw all nations to salvation by means of the chaplet of thy mystic roses: remember thy divine Son hath left us this saying: “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also must I bring, and they shall hear  voice; and there shall be one fold, and one Shepherd.” Remember likewise that on Calvary thou didst become our Co-Redemptrix, by virtue of the crucifixion of Thy heart cooperating with Thy Crucified Son in the salvation of the world; and from that day thou didst become the Restorer of the human race, the Refuge of sinners, and the Mother of all mankind. Behold, dear Mother, how man souls are lost every hour! Behold, how countless millions of those who dwell in India, in China, and in barbarous regions do not yet know our Lord Jesus Christ! See, too, how many others are indeed Christians and are nevertheless far from the bosom of Mother Church which is Catholic, Apostolic and Roman! O Mary, powerful mediator, advocate of the human race, full of love for us who are mortal, the life of our hearts, blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii, where thou dost nothing else save dispense heaven’s favors upon the afflicted, grant that a ray of thy heavenly light may shine forth to enlighten those many blinded understanding and to enkindle so cold hearts. Intercede with thy Son and obtain grace for all the pagans, Jews, heretics and schismatics in the whole world to receive supernatural light and to enter with joy into the bosom of the true Church. Hear the confident prayer of the Supreme Pontiff [of Holy Church in these times of papal vacancy], that all nations may be joined in the one faith, may know and love Jesus Christ, the blessed fruit of thy womb, who liveth and reigneth with the Father and the Holy Spirit world without end. And then all men shall love thee also, thou who art the salvation of the world, arbiter and dispenser of the treasures of God, and Queen of mercy in the valley of Pompeii. And glorifying thee, the Queen of Victories, who by means of thy Rosary, dost trample upon all heresies, they shall acknowledge that thou givest life to all the nations, since there must be a fulfillment of the prophecy in the Gospel: “All generations shall call me blessed.” ((The Raccolta: A Manual of Indulgences, Prayers and Devotions Enriched with Indulgences, approved by Pope Pius XII, May 30, 1951, and published in English by Benziger Brothers, New York, 1957, Number 628, pp. 501-503.)

There is a whole lot of good, solid Catholic theology in the prayer just above.

Our Lady is the Co-Redemptrix of the human race.

Our Lady is the Seat of Wisdom.

Our Lady is our Refuge of Sinners.

Our Lady is the Treasurer of all the graces won for us by her Divine Son on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Our Lady is also our Immaculate Queen to whose Immaculate Heart has been entrusted the cause of world peace and the restoration of all things in her Divine Son, Christ the King, something that Pope Pius XII noted in his prayer consecrating the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she who is the Queen of Heaven and Earth:

Queen of the most holy Rosary, help of Christians, refuge of the human race, victorious in all the battles of God, we prostrate ourselves in supplication before thy throne, in the sure hope of obtaining mercy and of receiving grace and timely aid in our present calamities, not through any merits of our own on which we do not rely, but only through the immense goodness of thy mother’s Heart. In Thee and in thy Immaculate Heart, at this grave hour of human history, do we put our trust; to thee we consecrate ourselves, not only with all of Holy Church, which is the mystical body of thy Son Jesus, and which is suffering in so many of her members, being persecuted, but also with the whole world, torn by discords, agitated with the hatred, the victim of its own iniquities. Be thou moved by the sight of such material and moral degradation, such sorrows, such anguish, so many tormented souls in danger of eternal loss! Do thou, O Mother of mercy, obtain for us from God a Christ-like reconciliation of the nations, as well as those graces which can convert the souls of men in an instant, those graces which prepare the way and make certain the long desired coming of peace on earth. O Queen of peace, pray for us, and grant unto the world in the truth, the justice, and the charity of Christ. Above all, give us peace in our hearts, so that the kingdom of God, may spread it the tranquility of order. Accord thy protection to unbelievers and to all those who lie in the shadow of death; cause the Sun of Truth to rise upon them; may they enabled to join with us in repeating before the Saviour of the world: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to men of good will.” Give peace to the nations that are separated us from error or discord, and in a special manner to those peoples who profess a singular devotion toward thee; bring them back to Christ’s one fold, under the one true Shepherd. Obtain full freedom for the holy Church of God; defend her from her enemies; check the ever-increasing torrent of immorality; arouse in the faithful a practical love of purity, a practical Christian life, and an apostolic zeal, so that the number of those who serve God may increase in merit and in number. Finally, even as the Church and all mankind were once consecrated to the Heart of thy Son Jesus, because He was for all those who put their hope in Him an inexhaustible source of victory and salvation, so in like manner do we consecrate ourselves forever to thee also and to thy Immaculate Heart, Of Mother us and Queen of the world; may thy love and patronage hasten the day when the kingdom of God shall be victorious and all the nations, at peace with God and with one another, shall call thee blessed and intone with thee, from the rising of the sun to its going down, the everlasting “Magnificat” of glory, of love, of gratitude to the Heart of Jesus in which we alone can find truth, life, and peace. (Pope Pius XII, Rescript from the Secretariat of State, November 17, 1942, document exhibited, November 19, 1942, The Raccolta: A Manual of Indulgences, Prayers and Devotions Enriched with Indulgences, approved by Pope Pius XII, May 30, 1951, and published in English by Benziger Brothers, New York, 1957, pp. 345-347.)

The restoration of all things in Christ, a restoration that will include China, of course, will occur as a result of the fulfillment of her Fatima Message after the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter, which will occur miraculously at a time of God’s choosing. All we have to do is persist in our prayers as we maintain a joy-filled hope that we might, by virtue of the graces Our Lady sends to us, be able to plant a few seeds for the restoration of all things in Christ the King as a result of the Triumph of her own Immaculate Heart.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

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 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 Peter Damian, pray for us.

Appendix 

Dom Prosper Gueranger on Saint Peter Damian

It is the Feast of the austere reformer of the 11th century, Peter Damian, the precursor of the holy Pontiff Gregory VII, that we are called upon to celebrate today. To him is due a share of that glorious regeneration which was effected at that troubled period when judgment had to begin at the House of God. (1 Peter 4:17) The life he had led under the Monastic Rule had fitted him for the great contest. So zealously did he withstand the disorders and abuses of his times that we may attribute to him, at least in great measure, the ardent faith of the two centuries which followed the scandals of the 10th. The Church ranks him among her Doctors, on account of his admirable Writings; and his penitential life ought to excite us to be fervent in the work we have in hand—the work of our Conversion.

The following Lessons, read by the Church on this Feast, give us a sketch of our Saint’s Life.

Peter was born at Ravenna, of respectable parents. His mother, wearied with the care of a large family, abandoned when a babe; but one of her female servants found him in an almost dying state and took care of him, until such time as the mother, repenting of her unnatural conduct, consented to treat him as her child. After the death of his parents, one of his brothers, a most harsh man, took him as a servant, or more truly as his slave. It was about this period of his life that he performed an action which evinced his virtue and his filial piety. He happened to find a large sum of money; but instead of using it for his own wants, he gave it to a priest, begging him to offer up the Holy Sacrifice for the repose of his father’s soul. Another of his brothers, called Damian (after whom, it is said, he was named), had him educated; and so rapid and so great was the progress he made in his studies, that he was the admiration of his masters. He became such a proficient in the liberal sciences, that he was made to teach them in the public schools, which he did with great success. During all this time, it was his study to bring his body into subjection to the spirit; and to this end, he wore a hairshirt under an outwardly comfortable dress, and practiced frequent fasting, watching, and prayer. Being in the very ardor of youth, and being cruelly buffeted by the sting of the flesh, he, during the night, would go and plunge himself into a frozen pool of water, that he might quench the impure flame which tormented him; or, he would make pilgrimages to holy sanctuaries, and recite the entire Psaltery. His charities to the poor was unceasing, and when he provided them with a meal, which was frequently, he would wait upon them himself.

Out of the desire to lead a still more perfect life, he became a religious in the Monastery of Avellino, in the diocese of Gubbio, of the Order of the Monks of Holy Cross of Fontavellana, which was founded by the blessed Ludolphus, a disciple of St. Romuald. Being sent by his Abbot, not very long after, first to the Monastery of Pomposia, and then to that of Saint Vincent of Pietra-Pertusa, he edified both Houses by his preaching, admirable teaching, and holy life. At the death of the Abbot of Avellino, he was recalled to that Monastery, and was made its superior. The institute was so benefited by his government, not only by the new Monasteries which he founded in several places, but also by the very saintly regulations he drew up, that he was justly looked upon as the second Founder of the Order, and its brightest ornament. Houses of other Orders, Canons, yea entire congregations of the Faithful, were benefited by Peter’s enlightened zeal. He was a benefactor, in more ways than one, to the diocese of Urbino: he aided the Bishop Theuzo in a most important suit, and assisted him, both by advice and work, in the right administration of his diocese. His spirit of holy contemplation, his corporal austerities, and the saintly tenor of his whole conduct, gained for him so high a reputation that Pope Stephen IX, in spite of Peter’s extreme reluctance, created him Cardinal of the holy Roman Church and Bishop of Ostia. The saint proved himself worthy of these honors by the exercise of the most eminent virtues, and by the faithful discharge of his Episcopal office.

It would be impossible to describe the services he rendered to the Church and the Sovereign Pontiffs, during those most trying times, by his learning, his prudence as Legate, and his untiring zeal. His life was one continued struggle against simony, and the heresy of the Nicolaites. He purged the Church of Milan of these disorders, and brought her into subjection to the Holy See. He courageously resisted the anti-popes Benedict and Cadolaus. He deterred Henry IV, king of Germany, from an unjust divorce of his wife. He restored the people of Ravenna to their allegiance to the Roman Pontiff, and absolved them from interdict. He reformed the abuses which had crept in among the Canons of Velletri. There was scarcely a single Cathedral Church in the Province of Urbino that had experienced the beneficial effects of Peter’s holy zeal: thus, that of Gubbio, which was for some time under his care, was relieved by him of many evils; and other Churches that needed his help found him as earnest for their welfare as though he were their own Bishop. When it obtained permission to resign his dignity as Cardinal and his Bishopric, he relented nothing of his former charity, but was equally ready in doing good to all. He was instrumental in propagating many devout practices; among these may be mentioned fasting on Fridays in honor of the Holy Cross; the reciting the Little Office of our Lady; the keeping the Saturday as a day especially devoted to Mary; the taking the discipline in expiation of past sins. At length, after a life which had edified the world by holiness, learning, miracles, and glorious works—on his return from Ravenna, whither he had been sent as Legate, he slept in Christ, on the eighth of the Calends of March (February 23rd), at Faënza. His relics, which are kept in the Cistercian Church of that town, are devoutly honored by the Faithful, and many miracles are wrought at the holy shrine. The inhabitants of Faënza have chosen him as the Patron of their City, having several times experienced his protection when threatened by danger. His Mass and Office, which were kept under the rite of Confessor and Bishop, had been long observed in several Dioceses, and by the Camaldolese Order; but they were extended to the whole Church by a decree of the Congregation of Sacred Rites, which was approved by Pope Leo XII, who also added to the name of the Saint that of Doctor.

Thy soul was inflamed by the zeal of God’s House, O Peter! God gave thee to his Church in those sad times when the wickedness of the world had robbed her of well-nigh all her beauty. Thou hadst the spirit of an Elias within thee, and it gave thee courage to waken the servants of the Lord: they had slept, and while they were asleep, the enemy came, and the field was oversown with tares. (Matthew 13:25) Then did better days dawn for the Spouse of Christ; the promises made her by our Lord were fulfilled; but who was the Friend of the Bridegroom? (John 3:29) who was the chief instrument used by God to bring back to his House its ancient beauty? A Saint who bore the glorious name of Peter Damian! — In those days, the Sanctuary was degraded by secular interference. The Princes of the earth said: Let us possess the Sanctuary of God for an inheritance. (Psalm 82:13) The Church, which God intended to be Free, was but a slave, in the power of the rulers of this world; and the vices, which are inherent to human weakness, defiled the Temple. But God had pity on the Spouse of Christ, and for her deliverance he would use human agency: he chose thee, Peter, as his principal cooperator in restoring order. Thy example and thy labors prepared the way for Gregory, the faithful and dauntless Hildebrand, into whose hands the Keys once placed, and the work of regeneration was completed. Thou hast fought the good fight; thou art now in thy rest; but thy love of the Church, and thy power to help, are greater than ever. Watch, then, over her interests. Obtain for her Pastors that Apostolic energy and courage which alone can cope with enemies so determined as hers are. Obtain for her Priests the holiness which God demands from them that are the salt of the earth. (Matthew 5:13) Obtain for the Faithful the respect and obedience they owe to those who direct them in the path of salvation. Thou was not only the Apostle, thou wast moreover the model of penance in the midst of a corrupt age; pray for us, that we may be eager to atone for our sins by works of mortification. Excite within our souls the remembrance of the sufferings of our Redeemer, that so his Passion may urge us to repentance and hope. Increase our confidence in Mary, the Refuge of Sinners, and make us, like thyself, full of filial affection towards her, and of zeal that she may be honored and loved by those who are around us. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Saint Peter Damian, February 23.)

Appendix B

Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J., on the Feast of Saint Peter Damian

In the latter part of the tenth century was born, at Ravenna, in Italy, St. Peter Damian. Left an orphan at an early age, his elder brother took him into his house, where he was treated, not like one so nearly related, but as the lowest servant. The poor boy had neither enough to eat nor decent clothes to wear, and at last he was compelled by his brother to attend to the swine. He, however, complained to no one of treatment so heartless, but obeyed his brother in all things. When in the fields, he occupied most of his time in praying.

One day he found a piece of money, without knowing to whom it belonged. He had a strong desire to buy with it something to eat, or better clothes, but he overcame these wishes, and, instead of sodoing, he had a Mass said for his departed parents. This pious deed was soon richly rewarded, for when another brother, who had been long away from Ravenna, returned and saw how cruelly Peter was treated, he took pity on him, gave him food and clothes, and sent him to a school, that he might not grow up ignorant. The unusual talent with which nature had endowed him, his untiring diligence, combined with true piety, made Peter progress so rapidly in all his studies that from a pupil he soon rose to be an excellent teacher, and made himself honored and respected by every one. This, by degrees, influenced his mind in such a manner that he began to be less fervent in his devotional exercises.

One day, however, by Divine inspiration, came the thought: "What does it avail in the end to be loved, honored, and praised by man? Does it bring true happiness? Why do you not think more earnestly on your salvation? Will you defer it to future years? Who knows whether you will live so long that you can make up for what you now neglect? Human life is short and uncertain. Is it not better, without delay, to begin what we ought to do?" Actuated by these wholesome thoughts, Peter resolved earnestly to turn his mind from earth to heaven. He therefore devoted himself to prayers and mortifications, in the hope that God would inspire him in what way to direct his life. Providence so ordered it, that two hermits from the Hermitage of the Holy Cross, at Font-Avellana, came to the city. Peter, having become acquainted with them, inquired into their mode of living, and was soon filled with the ardent wish to follow their example. As, however, their manner of life was extremely austere, he first tried himself in all those exercises which seemed to him hard to execute, such as fasting, watching, long prayers, retirement from all society, and the like; after which he repaired secretly to the hermitage, and was unhesitatingly received by the Superior. The zeal with which Peter commenced and continued his new life! was very great, and he became, in a short time, a perfect model of spiritual perfection, while, at the same time, he acquired almost more than human wisdom.

On account of his great endowments, his superior appointed him to guide the religious, by his advice and exhortations, in the path of sanctity. In this he evinced so much ability that his fame soon spread to other monasteries, whose religious humbly begged that this preacher might be sent to them, that they also might have the benefit of his instructions. This request was granted, and Peter continually travelled from one monastery to another, preaching and exhorting the religious to strive after holiness. In the course of time he was chosen Abbot, or Superior, which office he filled with great benefit to those in his charge, as well as to their great satisfaction. It also pleased Almighty God further to glorify His faithful servant by the gift of miracles. The fame of these, and still more of his heavenly wisdom, reached Rome; and Stephen IX., then Pope, sent for him, and, after sufficient proofs of his virtue and wisdom, made him Cardinal and Bishop of Ostia. Nothing but obedience could prevail on the humble servant of God to leave his monastery, and it would be no easy task to relate the works of this holy man, not only in Rome, but in other cities to which he was sent on affairs of importance, for the benefit of the Church and the salvation of souls.

One day, several years after his nomination as Cardinal, having happily concluded some business upon which the Pope had sent him to Milan and Parma, he was permitted to ask a favor as a recompense for the many great services he had rendered to the Pontiff. The Saint requested to be allowed to return to the desert, and quietly to employ the remainder of his life in preparing himself for the next world. It cost him, however, many prayers and tears before the permission could be obtained. As soon as he had received it, he went back to the desert, not to live there as a great Prelate, but in the same manner as the other hermits. He was even much more exact in keeping the rules, much more austere in fasting, praying, and watching, than the others. It was observed that often, for forty days, he partook of no prepared food, all his sustenance at such times consisting of some herbs and water. While he was indulging in the hope of continuing so peaceful a life, he received a sudden order from the Pope to undertake a journey upon some affairs of the Church. He obeyed the order, but, as he was returning to his beloved hermitage, having happily concluded the business on which he had been sent, he fell sick on the route near Faenza. He, however, reached the city, and, having been brought to the Convent of St. Mary, he received the holy Sacraments, and died on the feast of the See of St. Peter, for whose honor and advancement he had so zealously labored. His death took place in the year 1072, and the 84th of his age. The works that he left for the benefit of posterity contain the most wholesome advice, and are, to our day, proofs of the greatness of his virtue and learning.

Practical Considerations

"Why do you not think more earnestly on working out your salvation?" It was thus that God asked St. Peter Damian, by inspiration, when he became neglectful in the exercise of virtue. Put the same question to yourself. What will be your answer? You pay so much attention to other business: why so little to the business of your salvation? It is by far the most important, as everything depends upon it. If it be well done, eternal happiness will be your portion; if not, you will be lost for all eternity. It is your own affair; the benefit is yours if you do it well; the loss is also yours, and yours alone, if you neglect to do it. It is the only object for which you were placed upon this earth, for you were not created to be rich, happy, or honored, but that you should serve God and eventually go to heaven.

Attend, therefore, in future, as Peter did, more carefully to this work than to any other. "Thou art careful and art troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary" (St. Luke, x.). Thus spoke Christ our Lord to the much concerned Martha. Cannot the same be just as truthfully said of you? You are occupied with many affairs, and you think of them day and night. But there is one care that should employ your time most, namely, the care for your salvation. St. Paul writes of this: "But we entreat you, brethren, that you abound more, and that you use your endeavor to be quiet, and that you do your own business " (I. Thess. iv.). Heed it well. "Your business." The business of salvation is your business, and the only one for which you are in the world. Let it concern you before all others, and more than all others. "The greatest care," says St. Eucherius, "should be the care for our salvation, as it is our greatest and most important business." "Life is short and uncertain:" thus we are admonished by the Holy Ghost. Yes, it is surely so. Life is short; it flies quickly; sometimes lasts only a few years; and even if it continued thousands of years, it would still be considered short in comparison with eternity, because all that ends in the course of time must in truth be regarded as short. Life is short. It is also uncertain, because you know not how long it will last. You count, perhaps, on many years, and who knows if you have even many more days to live?

In the course of this year, in this month, on this very day, your life may end. What follows from this? Do as St. Peter did: be solicitous for your salvation. Employ well the short and uncertain time. What you think necessary for your salvation defer not to a future, uncertain time. The hope of having plenty of time to work out their salvation has deceived many, to their eternal ruin. Keep watch that you do not deceive yourself by such a doubtful, dangerous hope. Life is short and uncertain. "Man knoweth not his own end: but as fishes are taken with the hook, and birds are caught by the snare, so men are taken in the evil time, when it shall suddenly come upon them." Thus speaks Holy Writ. Again, what have we to deduce from this? Nothing, but what is further said: "Whatsoever thy hand is able to do, do it earnestly; for neither work, nor reason, nor wisdom, nor knowledge, shall be in the grave, whither thou art hastening" (Eccl. ix.). This plainly declares that when you are dead you can no longer work out your own salvation. Therefore, set to work now, without loss of time, without delay, without hesitation, as it is unknown to you when your end will come. Take this admonition of God to your inmost heart. Add to it the words of St. Paul: "Therefore, whilst we have time, let us work good" (Gal. vii.). Why? "Time is short," says the same holy Apostle. And when you have trifled away this time, you cannot, in all eternity, repair the loss; as time, once gone, is irrecoverable. "If the time which Divine goodness has bestowed upon us to do penance and work out our salvation is once lost," says St. Bonaventure, "it cannot be recalled in all eternity." (Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J., Sermon for the Feast of Saint Peter Damian, February 23.)