Modernity's Religion of the Brave New World Has No Room for Dissenters

Anyone who believes that “things” are going to get “better” anytime soon ought not to read this commentary.

A world bereft of a due submission to the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls is a world that will descend into the depths of madness, a world in which contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave have determined that they can play God with impunity and, quite indeed, be heralded for their being “champions” of scientific research. No one, of course, is supposed to notice that the “research” being conducted at this time is identical to what was being done by mad scientists in the German “Weimar Republic” between 1919-1933 and under the so-called “Third Reich” of Adolph Hitler between 1933 and 1945.

Most of the people alive today are so distracted with bread and circuses that they have grown “comfortable” with and/or “indifferent” to the daily slaughter of the innocent preborn by surgical means and completely ignorant of the fact that, to quote the late Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., “most contraceptives abort, and most contraceptives abort all the time.” There is near-universal support for the myth of “brain death”/human organ vivisection and transplantation and “palliative”/hospice “care.” Even sadder still, most people alive today think nothing of blasphemy, immodesty, indecency, impurity, or “little” acts of dishonesty in their own daily lives.

Support for and indifference to that which is offensive to God and thus destructive of the good order of the souls of men provides mad hatters in white cloaks who peer into microscopes admired as “demigods” whose decisions must be accepted in the name of “following the science.” Politicians of this country’s two organized crime families of naturalism know that this is so, which is why three supposedly “pro-life” Senators, Thomas Roland Tillis (R-NC), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) did not vote on a Senate amendment that would have banned Federal government funding of human-animal chimera hybrid experiments. This is nothing other than moral cowardice in the midst of the brave new world that has opened before our eyes because of the plandemic and all that has followed in its carefully orchestrated wake:

The Senate narrowly rejected an amendment geared toward criminalizing participation in research that created certain chimeras, or human-animal hybrids, in expectation that the federal government could lift a moratorium on funding for those projects.

A party line vote saw 48 Republicans supporting the measure. The 49 nays included 47 Democrats and two left-leaning independents --Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Angus King, I-ME. Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., didn't vote. 

Proposed this week, the Endless Frontier Act also contained language barring the transfer of a human embryo to a non-human womb and vice versa. 

"We shouldn't need to clarify in law that creating animal-human hybrids or ‘chimeras’ is ethically unthinkable, but sadly the need for that very clear distinction has arrived," said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who co-sponsored the bill with Sens. Mike Braun, R-Ind., and Steve Daines, R-Mont.

Braun said: "Human life is distinct and sacred, and research that creates an animal-human hybrid or transfers a human embryo into an animal womb or vice versa should be completely prohibited, and engaging in such unethical experiments should be a crime."

The legislation would impose penalties as high as $1 million or "the amount equal to twice the amount of the gross pecuniary gain." It also provided for up to 10 years in prison.

The bill was intended as a check on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) potentially lifting its moratorium on research utilizing chimeras.

On Wednesday, the International Society for Stem Cell Research released guidance backing chimeric research.

"Chimeric embryo and in utero research … should proceed for the minimum time necessary to achieve the scientific aim," the organization's guidelines read.

"This research must proceed incrementally, stopping at well-defined timepoints to assess the degree and scope of chimerism during development before proceeding to full gestation, if full gestation is among the well-justified goals of the research. To avoid unpredictable and widespread chimerism, researchers should endeavor to use targeted chimerism strategies to limit chimerism to a particular organ system or region of the gestating chimeric animal."

Thursday's vote came against the backdrop of a growing debate about the use of fetal tissue in scientific research. 

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's legislature held hearings discussing, in part, the University of Pittsburgh's fetal tissue practices. Amid a raging debate about fetal cell lines and COVID-19 vaccines, a Pitt study gained attention for grafting fetal scalps onto mice.  (Senate Narrowly Rejects Ban on Human-Animal Chimera Experiments.)

I, for one, do not see how Catholic cannot act but with revulsion after reading about such monstrous crimes against God and His omnipotence. Although we must accept all as happening within the Providence of God, Who takes His time in meting out His justice to such scientific malefactors and politically moral cowards, we must also recognize the signs of the times as they are, not as we would like them to be. The mainstreaming of so-called scientific experiments involving the creation of human-animal chimeras is just another of the never-ending consequences of what must befall the world when men and their nations reject the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Holy Church, the Catholic Church, the one and only means of human salvation whose infallible teaching and supernatural helps are the necessary preconditions for a just social order.

Very few people alive today think in supernatural terms, including most Catholics no matter where they happen to fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide in this time of apostasy and betrayal. Fewer still are the Catholics in public life who think in supernatural terms, including those who say that they are “pro-life” even though they believe that “exceptions” to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment’s prohibition against the direct, intentional taking of human life are both morally permissible and politically expedient.

As I will never tire telling the few people who read these articles, no one is “pro-life” who supports the denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and the fecundity of marriage by means of contraception and/or who supports one or more of the three “exceptions” to the inviolability of all innocent human life. Indeed, I will take this a step further to note that no one is “pro-life” who supports “natural family planning,” the medical industry’s manufacture, profit-making myth of “brain death” or “palliative”/hospice “care.” To be “pro-life” one must permit his mind to be enlightened by Catholic principles and not be the falsehoods of naturalism, including the ever-present means of temptation posed by sentimentality.

In this regard, therefore, it is useful to point out that Senator Joseph Manchin (D-West Virginia), who claims to be a “pro-life” Catholic, displayed great moral cowardice in refusing to vote on the amendment to ban government funding of the thoroughly immoral creation of human-animal chimeras that are derived in part from aborted babies. Senator Joseph Manchin, whose daughter is the chief executive officer of a pharmaceutical company, Mylan, that was founded in his home state of West Virginia in 1961, always seem to put loyalty to his statist party before loyalty to Christ the King whenever there is a chance that his vote will advance a supposedly Republican “talking point.” Putting aside the fact that Manchin is well aware that he will suffer no consequences from the conciliar “bishops” or from “Pope Francis” himself, it is important to note that it would appear that Manchin made a political calculation not to go on record in favor of a just and morally necessary piece of legislation in order to avoid “embarrassing” his political party’s amoral and completely hypocritical Senate Majority Leader, United States Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York).

This conjecture on my part was confirmed after this commentary was first published. None other the aforementioned Charles Ellis Schumer said he was prepared to block the amendment to prevent a vote if could ensure that Manchin would have joined Republicans to pass the amendment, which was sponsored by United States Senators Joseph Braun (R-Indiana) and James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), if it were necessary to conduct a filibuster to do do so:

This is quite reminiscent, at least to me, of what happened a little over eleven years ago when another “pro-life” Democrat, Bartholomew Thomas Stupak (D-Michigan), who had offered an amendment, co-sponsored by United States Representative   in the United States House of Representative to ban coverage for the surgical execution of some innocent preborn children in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaDeathCare) before caving when then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro promised that he would issue an executive order to ban such funding, which, of course, never occurred.

However, the Stupak-Pitts Amendment was never a genuine “pro-life” effort, something that Mrs. Judie Brown, the founder and president of the American Life League, pointed out in December of 2009:

Congressman Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat and the darling of many American pro-life organizations, recently wrote a commentary for the New York Times that literally took my breath away. Entitled “What My Amendment Won’t Do,” Stupak panders to the abortion culture while attempting to defend his ethically deficient health care reform amendment.  Regardless of public statements to the contrary, his amendment would not ban taxpayer dollars for all abortions. If the preborn child is scheduled for execution for reasons of rape, incest or life of the mother, that’s fine, according to the Stupak language. And that’s not the worst of it.

In his editorial, Stupak provides public assurances to those who argue that health care reform proposals must include preborn child murder because such programs must protect every aspect of women’s so-called reproductive health choices.

Disgusting as Stupak’s remarks are, I must share a portion of them in order to make my point perfectly clear:

Under our amendment, women who receive federal subsidies will be prohibited from using them to pay for insurance policies that cover abortion. The amendment does not prevent private plans from offering abortion services and it does not prohibit women from purchasing abortion coverage with their own money. The amendment specifically states that even those who receive federal subsidies can purchase a supplemental policy with private money to cover abortions.

If you were to read this paragraph with a proper understanding of the fact that abortion is an act of killing, rather than a simple surgical procedure similar to a nose piercing, you would have to admit that Stupak’s political posturing is anything but pro-life. Here is how that paragraph should read, if Stupak were honest about it:

Under our amendment, women who receive federal subsidies will be prohibited from using such funds to pay for insurance policies that cover any act that would result in the death of their baby prior to birth. The amendment does not prevent private plans from offering surgical, medical or chemical killing services, and it does not prohibit women from purchasing insurance coverage that would pay for the killing as long as they pay for such coverage with their own money. The amendment specifically states that even those who receive federal subsidies can purchase a supplemental policy with private money to pay those who would perform acts that would result in the death of their child or children prior to birth.

Stupak continues,

Some opponents of the amendment have tried to argue that it would effectively end health insurance coverage of abortion in both the private and public sectors. This argument is nothing more than a scare tactic.

The language in our amendment is completely consistent with the Hyde Amendment, which in the 33 years since its passage has done nothing to inhibit private health insurers from offering abortion coverage. There is no reason to believe that a continuation of this policy would suddenly create undue hardship for the insurance industry—or for those who wish to use their private insurance to pay for an abortion.

Reading such deluded jabber sickens me beyond belief. But it also reminds me of the biblical story of 1 Kings: 3, in which two women who lived together had a devastating experience because one of them lied. To reprise the story, each of them bore a child within three days of each other. As it turned out, one of them apparently inadvertently rolled over onto her baby, who was consequently suffocated to death. This woman proceeded to sneak into the other mother’s room in the middle of the night, place the dead baby on her bosom and take that mother’s child. She subsequently claimed the living child was her own, and the two women wound up in King Solomon’s court, begging him to resolve the conflict.

King Solomon, being the wise man that he was, made a startling recommendation for resolving the dilemma: Simply cut the baby in half and give each woman half of the body. Oh, the baby would be dead, of course, but then both women would be satisfied! This prompted the real mother to plead for her son’s life, and that is how the king knew who the rightful mother was.

Stupak’s double-talk, obviously designed to reassure his pro-abortion colleagues, reminds me of the mother whose child died at her own hand. She lied in order to get her own way. But at the last moment, it was her own lies that exposed her.

No matter how you look at it, a lie is a lie and telling the truth is the only way one can achieve genuine peace, whether one is a politician, a deceptive woman standing in King Solomon's presence or an abortionist.

Stupak created the slippery ground on which he is now standing; his dilemma is of his own making. Had he been honest from the start, he would have made it clear that as a pro-life politician, he would insist that there is no reason why any insurance policy, government program or charity should be paying for or providing murder as a service to an expectant mother. The problematic nature of positions such as Stupak’s exposes the sordid underbelly of the political compromising that frequently occurs in the highly deceptive political pro-life movement.

The Stupak Amendment has received rave reviews from the National Right to Life Committee, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and many others. It has been touted as totally pro-life, as an absolute ban on tax-funded abortion and so on. It makes good fundraising copy to make such claims, but look where it is taking us! Who will be cutting those babies in half if any sort of "health care reform" actually comes to pass in this nation?

And why is a halfhearted half-measure proclaimed a victory? There is no logical response to this rhetorical question, but there is a comparison I would like to offer for thoughtful reflection.

Today I listened to a Planned Parenthood abortionist tell a young expectant mother (actually a very good actress) that her baby was not really a baby “or anything like that.”  Thanks to the creative genius of Lila Rose and Live Action Films, the world can listen to this abortionist’s lie and the many other lies contained in this just-under-six-minutes-long video.

But I have to ask, what is so different about this abortionist’s lie and the Stupak lie? When is an abortion not really an act of murder? When private money pays for it? When it is alleged to be needed because of rape, incest or the life of the mother?

Come on, people! Wake up and smell the coffee! We are talking about babies, not politically motivated vacuous rhetoric.

Until we pro-life Americans, as a group, come face to face with our own cowardice, our own lack of resolve, our own inability to stand for truth and never back down, regardless of what it might cost us, this sort of atrocious, mind-bending gibberish will continue to be passed off as pro-life!

And all the while, the killing and the profiteering will continue. (STUPAK REDUX: POLITICAL LIES AND MANIPULATION.)

It is never any kind of victory for the cause of fundamental justice founded in the splendor of Truth Incarnate to concede as a matter of principle that a particular course of legislative action is justified because it will not interfere with the ability of people to engage in evil acts under cover of the civil law that are illicit of their very nature.

The Stupak-Pitts Amendment was an attempt from its very beginning to make ObamaDeathCare palatable to left-leaning Catholics and the left-leaning conciliar "bishops" as its sponsors sought to justify a limitation on the use of Federal taxpayer dollars for the surgical assassination of babies on an elective basis on the basis that women would still be able to kill their babies with the private monies of insurance companies. The Stupak-Pitts Amendment was simply a means to provide cover for "pro-life" Democrats to vote for ObamaDeathCare, and the fact that Representative Stupak surrendered the votes he controlled, which would have been enough to sink the statist monstrosity from being passed in the United States House of Representatives on Passion Sunday, March 21, 2010, on the promise of a legally worthless Executive Order that never did annul the baby-killing provisions in ObamaCare is proof that the former Michigan representative had no intention to stake his career on a principled defense of the absolute inviolability of innocent preborn life. He is now a highly paid lobbyist and without a qualm of his betrayal that could have stopped ObamaDeathCare in its deadly tracks.

Senator Joseph Manchin’s refusal to vote on an amendment that any rational, sane Catholic would vote inarguable demonstrates once again that the monsters of the brave new world’s apocalypse will never face any political obstacles to continue pushing the envelope to the point of creating actual monsters who will indeed prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls and bodies.

The Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King let loose the forces of anti-Incarnational forces of naturalism upon the world that gave us, in successive turn, divorce, contraception, abortion, the promotion of sodomite and its ever-increasing spectrum of perverse vices, in vitro fertilization, “brain death”/vital organ vivisection and transplantation, the starvation and dehydration of innocent human beings, “palliative care”/hospice, legally sanctioned infanticide, euthanasia, suicide and doctor-assisted suicide and, of course, the curse of human fetal stem-cell research that has spawned the cottage industry of mad scientists who believe that there are no God-given limits on their work and that they will never have to answer to God, in whom most do not believe, for daring to mock His omnipotence.

There is no distinction whatsoever between the moral lawlessness of mad-hatter scientists in the United States of America and elsewhere in the rest of the world, including, of course, Red China itself, whose scientists have long been in the forefront of the contemporary pagan exploitation of human beings for evil purposes, including one who claimed three years ago to have created “gene-edited babies” (see Chinese Scientist Claims Gene-Edited Twins Have Been Born.) It was also in Red China that human-animal chimeras were created as early as 2003:

The Chicom authorities doth protest a bit too much as it was in Red China that the first human-rabbit hybrid embryo was developed fifteen years ago:

Scientists in China have, for the first time, used cloning techniques to create hybrid embryos that contain a mix of DNA from both humans and rabbits, according to a report in a scientific journal that has reignited the smoldering ethics debate over cloning research.

More than 100 of the hybrids, made by fusing human skin cells with rabbit eggs, were allowed to develop in laboratory dishes for several days before the scientists destroyed them to retrieve so-called embryonic stem cells from their interiors. Although scientists in Massachusetts had previously mixed human cells and cow eggs in a similar attempt to make hybrid embryos as a source of stem cells, those experiments were not successful.

Researchers said yesterday they were hopeful that the rabbit work would lead to a new and plentiful source of embryonic stem cells for research and, eventually, for medical use. But theologians and others decried the work as unethical.

Some wondered aloud what, exactly, such a creature would be if it were transferred to a womb to develop to term.

The vast majority of the DNA in the embryos is human, with a small percentage of genetic material -- called mitochondrial DNA -- contributed by the rabbit egg. No one knows if such an embryo could develop into a viable fetus, though some experiments with other species suggest it would not.

Congress has been mulling legislation for years that would outlaw certain human cloning experiments, with some opposed to any creation of cloned embryos for research and others sympathetic to research uses as long as the embryos are not allowed to grow into cloned babies. No law has been passed, however, in part because of researchers' warnings that the proposed restrictions are so far-reaching that they would hobble development of new medical treatments.

The new work, led by Hui Zhen Sheng of Shanghai Second Medical University, appears in the latest issue of Cell Research and was highlighted in a news report in the journal Nature. Cell Research is a peer-reviewed -- if little-known in the United States -- bimonthly scientific journal affiliated with the Shanghai Institute of Cell Biology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Some researchers yesterday said they were frustrated by the lack of details in the paper.

The team said it retrieved foreskin tissue from two 5-year-old boys and two men, and facial tissue from a 60-year-old woman, as a source of skin cells. They fused those cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed. More than 400 of those new, fused entities grew into early embryos, and more than 100 survived to the blastocyst stage -- the point at which coveted stem cells begin to form.

The approach could help scientists wishing to mass-produce human embryos as sources of human embryonic stem cells. Stem cells can morph into all kinds of tissues and may be able to reverse the effects of various degenerative diseases. But to make cloned embryos, scientists need both normal body cells -- such as skin cells -- and egg cells, which have the unique capacity to "reprogram" the genes in body cells and make them behave as though they were embryo cells. (Human-Rabbit Produced by Cloning in Red China. See also First Human-Mouse Brain Hybrid Created, Human-Pig Hybrid Created. First human-monkey chimera raises concern among scientists. Animal-hybrid embryos are a reality, and Embro Experiments take baby steps toward growing human organs livestocks).

As bad as things are now, they will only get worse and worse. They have gotten worse in the past forty-five years since the wellsprings of a superabundance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces began to dry up after the institutionalization of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service on Sunday, November 30, 1969.

The downward spiral, though, was over four centuries in the making, longer yet if one considers how certain elements of the Renaissance helped to undermine the integrity of Faith and Morals in various intellectual and artistic circles in the century before the rise of Martin Luther, but we are seeing the tragic consequences of this spiral into the abyss right before our very eyes.

Contraception, of course, resulted in widespread adultery, divorces, broken families, the feminization of poverty and, ultimately, the “legalization” of surgical abortion up to and including the day of birth. This denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage has produced a mentality of selfishness between spouses, most of whom view children as something to be “planned” or “wanted” and not the first end of their married lives. The belief that one can “plan” to have children was followed by the belief that married couples have a “right” to have a child if a wife (or the husband) is infertile. Those who do not accept that it is part of God’s Holy Providence for men and women to join together in Holy Matrimony to welcome as many or as few children as He sees fit to send them will not accept His Holy Will if they are incapable of having children.

There is a long history of infertile couples over the centuries who have chosen to adopt children. Some of these couples continue to do so quite generously in our day. The logic of contraception is such, however, that the desires of the couple, whether married or not these days, are the sole determinant of how many children to have and what to do if even morally acceptable surgical remedies are incapable of rendering an infertile man or woman fertile.

It is this narcissistic and sentimentally-driven belief that led certain scientists who have no regard for the laws of God to create a “market” for the infertile by means of in vitro fertilization. This immoral process of creating a human being outside of the laws ordained by God was based on the expectation that untold thousands of fertilized human embryos, who are human beings, will die before being implanted within a woman’s uterus. Perhaps it should be noted that it came to pass that artificially fertilized human beings were implanted in the wombs of “surrogate” mothers. A very profitable money-making industry was created to cater to human sentiment in an era when people are indifferent to, ignorant or just plain hostile to the laws ordained by God.

The first such “petri dish” baby, Louise Brown, was born forty years ago. A 2015 news story about this supposed biological breakthrough that represented another phase in the realization of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World recounted the story, which includes a matter-of-fact statement that in vitro fertilization has made it possible for “same sex” couples and “single mothers” to have children:

In July 1978 Louise Brown was hailed as the world's first "test-tube baby", born through the fertility treatment IVF. But how does her story compare with modern procedures?

"On the day I was born, my mum had to be taken to the operating theatre for her Caesarean section in pitch darkness, with just a torchlight showing the way," Louise Brown explains.

"Only a few staff knew who she was, and my parents didn't want others realising her identity and tipping off the newspapers."

Louise's birth was cloaked in secrecy. Even her father John's first visit to see her in Oldham General Hospital was under the eye of police officers, who lined the corridor outside.

The reason was that his daughter, from Bristol, had become the world's first "test-tube baby", as the press hailed her.

More accurately, she was the first to be born through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), a process in which an egg is removed from the woman's ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory, before being implanted into the uterus.

It is a treatment used to enable couples with a range of fertility problems to conceive a child, and now allows same-sex couples and single mothers to have children too.

Technological advancements mean - according to 2013 estimates - more than five million people worldwide have been born through this process.

But in 1978 it was highly experimental, and Dr Mike Macnamee, chief executive at the world's first IVF clinic - Bourn Hall in Cambridge - believes Louise "really was a miracle".

The two men who pioneered the treatment - gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Robert Edwards - "had gone through hundreds of embryo transfers before Louise was conceived", he adds.

The pair had joined forces a full 10 years earlier, with skills that perfectly complemented one another - Edwards having developed a way to fertilise human eggs within the laboratory and Steptoe having devised a method for obtaining the eggs from the ovaries.

When Louise's mother Lesley was put in contact with Steptoe by her doctor, she was warned there was a "one in a million" chance of success.

So when it worked, it was such a momentous scientific advancement that the birth had to be filmed - under agreement with the government - to give documented evidence that Louise was indeed her mother's.

Even before her mother was able to hold her newborn, Louise had undergone around 60 different tests to ensure she was "normal".

This is a far cry from modern procedures, which - owing much to the work of Bourn Hall in the 1980s - follow a refined and well-established clinical process.

"Once they [Steptoe and Edwards] worked out how to fertilise the egg, they very soon wanted to restrict the number of embryos they transferred into women - so they didn't have too many multiple births," Dr Macnamee explains.

"Development of the freezing technique in the mid-80s meant they could implant one or two embryos [into the would-be mother] and then freeze other embryos for future use, saving her the uncomfortable procedure of having the eggs removed again."

Progress can also be seen in the modern use of ultrasound imaging to harvest the eggs under a mild sedation, rather than the form of keyhole surgery known as laparoscopy that was previously employed.

Techniques developed in the late 1980s also made a big difference in treating male infertility by injecting single sperm directly into the egg.

These, and other, small incremental steps mean the success rate for each round of IVF has grown from 10% to 40% since the early 80s, when Dr Macnamee's first role included the hands-on task of mixing the eggs and sperm in a petri dish.

The chances of successfully conceiving through IVF decline with age, but the process is now more effective per cycle than natural reproduction. It does not, however, have approval from all quarters.

In November, Pope Francis said the process promoted children as "a right rather than a gift to welcome" and was "playing with life".

Yet in August 1978, Cardinal Albino Luciani - shortly to become Pope John Paul I - unexpectedly refused to criticise Louise's parents for using IVF, saying they had simply wanted to have a baby.

"It helped to counteract some of the negative things people were saying," Louise says.

"My mum got loads of letters from people. They were mostly positive, but there was some hate mail. (Louise  Brown Reflects at thirty-five.)

Ignoring this news report’s celebration of a violation of the laws of God that the adversary has used to further destroy the family and to convince a large percentage of people worldwide to accept any kind of “family” as perfectly legitimate as long as those involved are “happy,” the section in bold just above should disprove any lingering myths that Archbishop Albino Luciani, who was a true bishop, was any kind of “traditionalist.” He was not. He was a heretic, and he believed that there could be instances in which married couples could use contraception licitly, which is why he could accept in vitro fertilization so blithely.

Alas, the pull of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic sentimentality is such that even most Catholics alive today have the sensus Catholicus of the late Albino Luciani/John Paul I, which is to say that they believe there is no conflict between doing what one wants for “good motives” and doing what God commands. After all, a “merciful God” wants people to be “happy.” Why shouldn’t they use contraception and/or in vitro fertilization? The temptations to go along with everyone else in a pluralist culture are so strong that it gets easier and easier over time for even believing Catholics to grow silent in the face of evil and to sublimate even any attenuated sense of serving as a soldier in the Army of Christ the King to openly oppose the incremental advance of that which is offensive to God and injurious to souls—and thus to the common good of one’s own nation and the world-at-large.

This is why even most supposedly “pro-life” Catholics were deaf, dumb and blind as then President George Walker Bush, the son of the recently deceased President George Herbert Walker Bush, increased the Federal funding for “family planning” programs, permitted his Food and Drug Administration to authorize the over-the-counter sale of the “Plan B” baby-killing pill and decided to continue Federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Indeed, Dubya Bush was proud of the fact that his administration increased the amount of money being spent by our tax dollars on domestic and international "family planning" programs, which, of course, dispatched innocent preborn babies to death by chemical means. Here is a letter sent in behalf of then President Bush to United States Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) on May 25, 2006:

The Honorable Carolyn B. Maloney
House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Ms. Maloney:
Thank you for your letter to President Bush to request his views on access to birth control. The President has asked that I respond on his behalf. This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception.

The Department of Health and Human Services faithfully executes laws establishing Federal programs to provide contraception and family planning services. The Title X Family Planning Program and Medicaid are each significant providers of family planning services.

Additionally, this Administration strongly supports teaching abstinence to young people as the only 100 percent effective means of preventing pregnancy, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

I will provide this response to the other signatories of your letter.

Sincerely yours, John O. Agwunobi, Assistant Secretary for Health (Bush Supports Contraception Letter)

Contraception, of course, of its very evil nature, over and above the fact that most contraceptives serve as abortifacients that kill babies chemically or act to expel fertilized human beings from implanting in the uterus, is denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage and has led to the rise of promiscuity, an epidemic of venereal diseases, surgical abortion, broken homes, maladjusted children, the feminization of poverty and to the open proselytizing in behalf of sodomy, one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

As noted just above, George Walker Bush announced at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, August 9, 2001, that he was going to permit the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research on embryonic human beings whose "lines" were created before the time of his announcement. In so doing, of course, Bush authorized the death of those human beings and at the same time justify the immoral, evil practice of in vitro fertilization while doing nothing to stop the privately funded death and destruction of such embryonic human beings on those "lines" created after the date and time of his announcement:

My administration must decide whether to allow federal funds, your tax dollars, to be used for scientific research on stem cells derived from human embryos.  A large number of these embryos already exist.  They are the product of a process called in vitro fertilization, which helps so many couples conceive children.  When doctors match sperm and egg to create life outside the womb, they usually produce more embryos than are planted in the mother.  Once a couple successfully has children, or if they are unsuccessful, the additional embryos remain frozen in laboratories. (Remarks by the President on Stem Cell Research.) 

This is what I wrote at the time in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos:

Indeed, this whole controversy is the direct result of the rejection of the teaching authority of the Church on matters of faith and morals, as well as on matters of fundamental justice. For it is the rejection of the Deposit of Faith our Lord entrusted to Holy Mother Church that gave rise to the ethos of secularism and religious indifferentism, which became the breeding grounds for secularism and relativism and positivism.

A world steeped in all manner of secular political ideologies comes not only to reject the Deposit of Faith but to make war against all that is contained therein, especially as it relates to matters of the sanctity of marital relations and the stability of the family.

Contraception gave rise to abortion. Contraception also gave rise to the mentality which resulted in artificial conception. If a child's conception can be prevented as suits "partners," then it stands to reason that a child can be conceived "on demand" by using the latest technology science has to offer.

The Church has condemned artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization on a number of occasions as offenses to the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity of marital relations. Yet it is the very rejection of the Church's affirmation of what is contained in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law which leads people, including George W. Bush, into thinking that artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization are morally licit to help couples deal with the problem of childlessness, ignoring the simple little truth that no one is entitled to a child.

Children are gifts from God to be accepted according to His plan for a particular couple. If a married couple cannot have a child on their own, they can adopt -- or they can use their time to be of greater service to the cause of the Church in the evangelization of the true Faith. No one, however, is entitled to a child.

Indeed, the whole tragedy of harvesting the stem cells of living human beings has arisen as a result of discoveries made by scientists experimenting on human beings conceived in fertility clinics to help couples conceive artificially.

That George W. Bush endorses this immoral enterprise (which is big business, by the way) and actually commends it as a way to "help" couples is deplorable.

It is as though he is saying the following: "We are not going to kill any more Jews for their body parts. We will only use the body parts of the Jews we have killed already. After all, we have people who will benefit from this research, do we not?"

Living human embryos do not have the "potential" for life, as Bush asserted on August 9, 2001. They are living human beings! To seek to profit from their destruction is ghoulish and will only wind up encouraging the private sector to fund all stem-cell research, creating more "stem cell lines" from the destruction of living human beings. ("Preposterous," Christ or Chaos, September 2001) 

Mrs. Judie Brown, the president and founder of the American Life League, wrote a retrospective on Caesar Georgii Bushus Ignoramus's stem cell decision some years later:

You have probably heard that right at the top of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's agenda is the promise of "hope to families with devastating diseases."

What she is promising, of course, is a Congressional action that will result in tons of federal tax dollars being spent on failed research using the dead bodies of embryonic children.

The White House, of course, is saying "the president has made it clear he believes in stem cell research so much -- the administration has done more to finance stem cell research, embryonic and otherwise, than any administration in history."

You see, Bush never really banned research using the bodies of embryonic children, he merely curtailed how much research could be done using tax dollars. So it would appear that everyone ... Democrat and Republican ... is on the same page.

The tragic reality underlying such statements is that over the course of the last 34 years, politicians and a whole lot of pro-lifers have let the principle of personhood slide away into oblivion for the sake of winning elections. And the result is staring us all in the face. (Embryo Wars.)

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, no one is “pro-life” unless he opposes all offenses against the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity of marriage and the inviolability of all innocent human life without any exception or qualification. In vitro fertilization is monstrous. We will only find out in eternity how many billions of innocent human beings were deprived of the Beatific Vision by being conceived artificially, experimented upon in their embryonic states and then killed off and consigned to Limbo.

The monstrous activities of a scientific world untethered by any respect for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law have been premised upon the acceptance upon the disproved ideology of evolutionism. A veritable race of mad men posing as respectable scientists are rushing to be seen as pioneers in the development of artificial intelligence implanted into robots (one such robot assigned to the International Space Station a few years ago asked a human astronaut not to be “mean” to him—see Cimon Robot Accuses International Space Crew of Being Mean to it.)

We are not yet at the point of mad scientists creating artificial human beings with home-brewed Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). However, we know now Western scientists, including those in the United States of America, have joined their confreres in Red China in developing human-animal chimera. The government of the United States of America will now give taxpayer funding to these monsters, although this, too, is nothing new as private foundations in the United States of America have worked hand-in-glove with the government to engineer all kinds of viruses and diseases that have since embedded themselves to such an extent that “vaccines” were developed to fight the engineered organisms unleased by the monsters of the past.

Consider the case of the following documentation showing how Lyme disease was engineered on Plum Island, New York, in a project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Department of Agriculture that was conducted, at least in part, with the help of a former Nazi scientist, Eric Straub, in the 1950s. What follows is a detailed summary of audio presentations discussing the immoral work that was done on Plum Island, New York:

In the mid-1970’s Lyme Disease broke out in Connecticut and it has since spread through much of the United States. This program examines the possibility that Lyme Disease may have spread as a result of clandestine experimentation on biological warfare on Plum Island—a Department of Agriculture facility that doubled as an Army BW research facility. Dedicated to the study of animal diseases, Plum Island appears to have been the site of experiments with disease-infected ticks conducted by Nazi scientists brought into the United States under Project Paperclip. One of the Nazi scientists who appears to have been involved with Plum Island was Dr. Erich Traub, who was in charge of the Third Reich’s virological and bacteriological warfare program in World War II. Was Traub involved with experiments that led to the spread of Lyme Disease?

Program Highlights Include: Examination of Traub’s studies in the US prior to World War II; Traub’s pro-Nazi activities inside the US before the war; John Loftus’ discovery of references in the National Archives to Nazi scientists experimenting with diseased ticks on Plum Island; Lyme Disease activist Steven Nostrum’s discovery of Loftus’ findings and his work investigating Plum Island; Details of Traub’s involvement with Plum Island; files about Tick Research and Erich Traub that have been purged; Scientific American’s dismissal of the Plum Island/Traub/Paperclip/Lyme Disease link; the Nazi heritage of the Von Holtzbrinck firm—which owns Scientific American; Plum Island experimentation with the disease-carrying “Lone Star Tick”; the fact that the Lone Star Tick—native to Texas—has somehow spread to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut!

1. In order to understand how Erich Traub came to the United States, it is important to understand Project PAPERCLIP. The program begins with a synoptic account of that project and how its prosecution led to Traub’s entry to the United States and his involvement with Plum Island: “Nearing the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union raced to recruit German scientists for postwar purposes. Under a top-secret program code-named Project PAPERCLIP, the U.S. military pursued Nazi scientific talent ‘like forbidden fruit,’ bringing them to America under employment contracts and offering them full U.S. citizenship. The recruits were supposed to be nominal participants in Nazi activities. But the zealous military recruited more than two thousand scientists, many of whom had dark Nazi party pasts.”
(Lab 257: the Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory; by Michael Christopher Carroll; Copyright 2004 by Michael Christopher Carroll; HarperCollins [HC]; p. 7.)

2. “American scientists viewed these Germans as peers, and quickly forgot they were on opposite sides of a ghastly global war in which millions perished. Fearing brutal retaliation from the Soviets for the Nazis’ vicious treatment of them, some scientists cooperated with the Americans to earn amnesty. Others played the two nations off each other to get the best financial deal in exchange for their services. Dr. Erich Traub was troubling on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after the war, and ordered to research germ warfare viruses for the Russians. He pulled off a daring escape with his family to West Berlin in 1949. Applying for Project Paperclip employment, Traub affirmed he wanted to ‘do scientific work in the U.S.A., become an American citizen, and be protected from Russian reprisals.’” (Idem.)

3. The program sets forth Traub’s work for the Third Reich: “As lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island nestled in the Baltic Sea—Traub worked directly for Adolf Hitler’s second-in-charge, SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 7–8.)

4. Traub had studied in the United States before the war (at the Rockefeller Institute) and had been involved in Nazi activities inside the U.S. prior to 1939 (the outbreak of World War II). “ . . . Traub also listed his 1930’s membership in Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, a German-American ‘club’ also known as Camp Sigfriend. Just thirty miles west of Plum Island in Yaphank, Long Island, Camp Sigfried was the national headquarters of the American Nazi movement. . . .Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war. Despite Traub’s troubling war record, the U.S. Navy recruited him for its scientific designs, and stationed him at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.” (Ibid.; p. 8.)

5. Nominally under the jurisdiction of the USDA (Department of Agriculture), Plum Island was also used for military biological warfare research on animal diseases. In that regard, it was involved with Fort Dietrick, the Army’s top chemical and biological warfare facility. Note that Traub was at the foundation of the Plum Island/biological warfare nexus. “Just months into his PAPERCLIP contract, the germ warriors of Fort Detrick, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters, in Frederick, Maryland, and CIA operatives invited Traub in for a talk, later reported in a declassified top-secret summary: Dr. Traub is a noted authority on viruses and diseases in Germany and Europe. This interrogation revealed much information of value to the animal disease program from a Biological Warfare point of view. Dr. Traub discussed work done at a German animal disease station during World War II and subsequent to the war when the station was under Russian control.’ Traub’s detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems, and his activities there during the war and for the Soviets, laid the ground work for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal diseased lab on Plum Island. Traub was a founding father. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 8–9.)

6. It is interesting to note that the Third Reich’s biological warfare program had the cover name of “Cancer Research Program.” (In RFA#16—available from Spitfire—as well as FTR#’s 16, 73, we look at the National Cancer Institute’s Special Viral Cancer Research Program and the evidence suggesting that the project was actually a front for the continuation of biological warfare research. Erich Traub appears to have been involved with the projects related to the SVCRP.) “ . . . Everybody seemed willing to forget about Erich Traub’s dirty past—that he played a crucial role in the Nazis’ ‘Cancer Research Program,’ the cover name for their biological warfare program, and that he worked directly under SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. They seemed willing to overlook that Traub in the 1930’s faithfully attended Camp Sigfried. In fact, the USDA liked him so much, it glossed over his dubious past and offered him the top scientist job at the new Plum Island Laboratory—not once, but twice. Just months after the 1952 public hearings on selecting Plum Island, Doc Shahan dialed Dr. Traub at the naval laboratory to discuss plans for establishing the germ laboratory and a position on Plum Island.” (Ibid.; p. 10.)

7. More about how Traub came to be in a significant position at Plum Island. “Six years later—and only two years after Traub squirmed in his seat at the Plum Island dedication ceremonies—senior scientist Dr. Jacob Traum retired. The USDA needed someone of ‘outstanding caliber, with a long established reputation, internationally as well as nationally,’ to fill Dr. Traum’s shoes. But somehow it couldn’t find a suitable American. ‘As a last resort it is now proposed that a foreigner be employed.’ The aggies’ choice? Erich Traub, who was in their view ‘the most desirable candidate from any source.’ The 1958 secret USDA memorandum ‘Justification for Employment of Dr. Erich Traub’ conveniently omitted his World War II activities; but it did emphasize that ‘his originality, scientific abilities, and general competence as an investigator’ were developed at the Rockefeller Institute in New Jersey in the 1930’s.” (Idem.)

8. The push to employ Traub as the director of Plum Island involved professional recommendations that omitted his work for the Third Reich: “The letters supporting Traub to lead Plum Island came in from fellow Plum Island founders. ‘I hope that every effort will be made to get him. He has had long and productive experience in both prewar and postwar Germany,’ said Dr. William Hagan, dean of the Cornell University veterinary school, carefully dispensing with his wartime activities. The final word came from his dear American friend and old Rockefeller Institute boss Dr. Richard Shope, who described Traub as ‘careful, skill, productive and very original’ and ‘one of this world’s most outstanding virologists.’ Shope’s sole reference to Traub at war: ‘During the war he was in Germany serving in the German Army.’” (Idem.)

9. Traub declined the offer to lead the lab. There is considerable evidence that he was involved with biological warfare research at Plum Island. “Declining the USDA’s offer, Traub continued his directorship of the Tubingen laboratory in West Germany, though he visited Plum Island frequently. In 1960, he was forced to resign as Tubingen’s director under a dark cloud of financial embezzlement. Traub continued sporadic lab research for another three years, and then left Tubingen for good–a scandalous end to a checkered career. In the late 1970’s, the esteemed virologist Dr. Robert Shope, on business in Munich, paid his father Richard’s old Rockefeller Institute disciple a visit. The germ warrior had been in early retirement for about a decade by then. ‘I had dinner with Traub one day—out of old time’s sake—and he was a pretty defeated man by then.’ On May 18, 1985, the Nazis’ virus warrior Dr. Erich Traub died unexpectedly in his sleep in West Germany. He was seventy-eight years old.” (Ibid.; pp. 10–11.)

10. “A biological warfare mercenary who worked under three flags—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States—Traub was never investigated for war crimes. He escaped any inquiry into his wartime past. The full extent of his sordid endeavors went with him to his grave. While America brought a handful of Nazi war criminals to justice, it safeguarded many others in exchange for verses to the new state religion—modern science and espionage. Records detailing a fraction of Eric Traub’s activities are now available to the public, but most are withheld by Army intelligence and the CIA on grounds of national security. But there’s enough of a glimpse to draw quite a sketch.” (Ibid.; p. 11.)

11. An important chapter in the story of how the inquiry into the possible link between Plum Island, Erich Traub’s work on behalf of the US and the spread of Lyme Disease concerns the work of former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus. In his book The Belarus Secret, Loftus referred to work done on Plum Island in the early 1950’s in which Nazi scientists were experimenting on diseased ticks. Might that have referred to Traub?! “ . . . Attorney John Loftus was hired in 1979 by the Office of Special Investigations, a unit set up by the Justice Department to expose Nazi war crimes and unearth Nazis hiding in the United States. Given top-secret clearance to review files that had been sealed for thirty-five years, Loftus found a treasure trove of information on America’s postwar Nazi recruiting. In 1982, publicly challenging the government’s complacency with the wrongdoing, he told 60 Minutes that top Nazi officers had been protected and harbored in America by the CIA and the State Department. ‘They got the Emmy Award,’ Loftus wrote. ‘My family got the death threats.’” (Ibid.; p. 13.)

12. “Old spies reached out to him after the publication of his book, The Belarus Secret, encouraged that he—unlike other authors—submitted his manuscript to the government, agreeing to censor portions to protect national security. The spooks gave him copies of secret documents and told him stories of clandestine operations. From these leads, Loftus ferreted out the dubious Nazi past of Austrian president and U.N. secretary general Kurt Waldheim. Loftus revealed that during World War II, Waldheim had been an officer in a German Army unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia. A disgraced Kurt Waldheim faded from the international scene soon thereafter.” (Idem.)

13. “In the preface of The Belarus Secret, Loftus laid out a striking piece of information gleaned from his spy network: ‘Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950’s. . . .Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that ‘clandestine attacks on crops and animals’ took place at this time.” (Idem.)

14. More pieces of evidence on the tantalizing trail of evidence pointing to a possible Plum Island/Traub/Lyme disease link: “Erich Traub had been working for the American biological warfare program from his 1949 Soviet escape until 1953. We know he consulted with Fort Dietrick scientists and CIA operatives; that he worked for the USDA for a brief stint; and that he spoke regularly with Plum Island director Doc Shahan in 1952. Traub can be physically placed on Plum Island at least three times—on dedication day in 1956 and two visits, once in 1957 and again in the spring of 1958. Shahan, who enforced an ultrastrict policy against outside visitors, each time received special clearance from the State Department to allow Traub on Plum Island soil.” (Ibid.; p. 14.)

15. If in fact Traub was involved with research on Plum Island, this development would have been consistent with programs being conducted at that time involving experimentation on unwitting American citizens with biological and chemical warfare research agents: “Research unearthed three USDA files from the vault of the National Archives—two were labeled TICK RESEARCH and a third E.TRAUB. All three folders were empty. The caked-on dust confirms the file boxes hadn’t been open since the moment before they were taped shut in the 1950’s. Preposterous as it sounds, clandestine outdoor germ warfare trials were almost routine during this period. In 1952, the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for a ‘vigorous, well-planned, large-scale [biological warfare] test to the secretary of defense later that year stated, ‘Steps should be take to make certain of adequate facilities are available, including those at Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground, Fort Terry (Plum Island) and an island field testing area.’ Was Plum Island the island field testing area? Indeed, when the Army first scouted Plum Island for its Cold War designs, they charted wind speeds and direction and found that, much to their liking, the prevailing winds blew out to sea.” (Idem.)

16. “One of the participating ‘interested agencies’ was the USDA, which admittedly set up large plots of land throughout the Midwest for airborne anticrop germ spray tests. Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division ran ‘vulnerability tests’ in which operatives walked around Washington, D.C., and San Francisco with suitcases holding Serratia marcescens—a bacteria recommended to Fort Detrick by Traub’s nominal supervisor, Nazi germ czar and Nuremberg defendant Dr. Kurt Blome. Tiny perforations allowed the germs’ release so they could trace the flow of the germs through airports and bus terminals. Shortly thereafter, eleven elderly men and women checked into hospitals with never-before-seen Serratia marcescens infections. One patient died. Decades later when the germ tests were disclosed, the Army denied responsibility. . . . In the summer of 1966, Special Operations men walked into three New York City subway stations and tossed lightbulbs filled Bacillus subtilis, a benign bacteria, onto the tracks. The subway trains pushed the germs through the entire system and theoretically killed over a million passengers.” (Idem.)

17. “Tests were also run with live, virulent, anti-animal germ agents. Two hog-cholera bombs were exploded at an altitude of 1,500 feet over pigpens set up at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. And turkey feathers laced with Newcastle disease virus were dropped on animals grazing on a University of Wisconsin farm.” (Ibid.; p. 15.)

18. “The Army never fully withdrew its germ warfare efforts against food animals. Two years after the Army gave Plum Island to the USDA—and three years after it told President Eisenhower it had ended all biological warfare against food animals—the Joint Chiefs advised that ‘research on anti-animal agent-munition combinations should’ continue, as well as ‘field testing of anti-food agent munition combinations. . . .’ In November 1957, military intelligence examined the elimination of the food supply of the Sino-Soviet Bloc, right down to the calories required for victory: ‘In order to have a crippling effect on the economy of the USSR, the food and animal crop resources of the USSR would have to be damaged within a single growing season to the extent necessary to reduce the present average daily caloric intake from 2,800 calories to 1,400 calories; i.e., the starvation level. Reduction of food resources to this level, if maintained for twelve months, would produce 20 percent fatalities, and would decrease manual labor performance by 95 percent and clerical and light labor performance by 80 percent.’ At least six outdoor stockyard tests occurred in 1964–65. Simulants were sprayed into stockyards in Fort Worth, Kansas City, St. Paul, Sioux Falls, and Omaha in tests determining how much foot-and-mouth disease virus would be required to destroy the food supply.” (Idem.)

19. “Had the Army commandeered Plum Island for an outdoor trial? Maybe the USDA lent a hand with the trial, as it had done out west by furnishing the large test fields. After all, the Plum Island agreement between the Army and the USDA allowed the Army to borrow the island from the USDA when necessary and in the national interest.” (Idem.)

20. A former employee at Plum Island in the 1950’s has personal recollection of a “Nazi scientist” releasing ticks outdoors on Plum Island. “Traub might have monitored the tests. A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950’s recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. ‘They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951—they were inoculating these ticks,’ and a picture he once saw ‘shows the animal handler pointing to the area on Plum where they released the ticks.’ Dr. Traub’s World War II handiwork consisted of aerial virus sprays developed on Insel Riems and tested over occupied Russia, and of field work for Heinrich Himmler in Turkey. Indeed, his colleagues conducted bug trials by dropping live beetles from planes. An outdoor tick trial would have been de rigueur for Erich Traub.” (Ibid.; pp. 15–16.)

21. Next, the program sets forth the case of Steve Nostrum—an early Lyme Disease victim whose reading of Loftus’ book spurred him to begin inquiring about the Plum Island/Traub connection. “Somebody gave Steve Nostrum a copy of John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret at one of his support group meetings. Steve had long suspected that Plum Island played a role in the evolution of Lyme disease, given the nature of its business and its proximity to Old Lyme, Connecticut. But he never publicly voiced the hunch, fearing a loss of credibility; hard facts and statistics earned him a reputation as a leader in the Lyme disease field. Now in his hands, he had a book written by a Justice Department attorney who not only had appeared on 60 Minutes but also had brought down the secretary general of the United Nations. Nostrum disclosed the possible Plum-Lyme connection on his own television show. He invited local news reporter and Plum Island ombudsman Karl Grossman to help him explore the possibilities in light of the island’s biological mishaps. Asked why he wrote about Loftus’s book in his weekly newspaper column, Grossman says, ‘To let the theory rise or fall. To let the public consider it. And it seemed to me that the author was a Nazi hunter and a reputable attorney—this was not trivial information provided [and it was provided] by some reliable person.’” (Idem.)

22. “In October 1995, Nostrum, fresh off nursing duty (having earned an RN degree to help Lyme disease patients), rushed to a rare public meeting held by the USDA. In a white nurse’s coat, stethoscope still around his neck, Nostrum rose. Trembling, his blond beard now streaked with gray, he clutched his copy of The Belarus Secret as he read the damning passage out loud for the USDA and the public to hear. ‘I don’t know whether this is true,’ he said, looking at the dais. ‘If it is true, there must be an investigation—if it’s not true, then John Loftus needs to be prosecuted.’ People in the audience clapped, and some were astonished. A few gawked, thinking he was nuts. How did the official USDA officials react? ‘If stares could kill, I would have been dead,’ remembers Nostrum.” (Idem.)

23. “Hiding behind the same aloof veil of secrecy they had employed for decades, the USDA brazenly cut him off. ‘There are those who think that little green men are hiding out there,’ the officials responded to Nostrum. ‘But trust us when we say there are no space aliens and no five-legged cows.’ A few laughs erupted in the crowd. ‘It did nothing but detract from what I was saying,’ says Nostrum. ‘But I said it, and I had the documentation to support it.’” (Idem.)

24. The author speculates about the deer and birds that visited Plum Island, and the possibility that some of the infected ticks may well have traveled to the mainland from the island on those vectors. (Carroll explains that white-tailed deer regularly swim the two miles to the island to forage and migrating birds stop on Plum Island on their way North and South during their annual migrations.) “ . . . If Dr. Traub continued his outdoor germ experiments with the Army and experimented with ticks outdoors, the ticks would have made contact with mice, deer, and more than 140 species of wild birds known to frequent and nest on Plum Island. The birds spread their toxic cargo to resting and nesting perches atop the great elms and oaks of Old Lyme and elsewhere, just like they spread the West Nile virus throughout the United States.” (Ibid.; p. 21.)

25. After noting that allegations of the discovery of Bb (the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease) in the late 1940’s coincides with Traub’s arrival on the island, the broadcast sets forth the denials by a USDA spokesperson that there was any BW/Traub/Plum Island link to the spread of the Lyme infection. Note that Scientific American dismissed the possibility of a “Nazi scientist” link to Plum Island. In FTR#240—part of the long FTR series about “German Corporate Control over American Media”–it was noted that the Von Holtzbrinck firm controls that magazine. Like its larger competitor Bertelsmann, the Von Holtzbrinck firm is rooted firmly in the Third Reich. In FTR#226, we examined the Nazi heritage of Von Holtzbrinck and the possibility that they may employed the notorious SS officer and Goebbels protégé Werner Naumann. The possibility that the Von Holtzbrinck/Scientific American link may have had something to do with the magazine’s casual dismissal of the Traub/Plum/Lyme link is not one to be too readily dismissed. “Researchers trying to prove that Lyme disease existed before 1975 claim to have isolated Bb [the bacterium that causes the infection] in ticks collected on nearby Shelter Island and Long Island in the late 1940’s. That timing coincides with both Erich Traub’s arrival in the United States on Project PAPERCLIP and the Army’s selection of Plum Island as its offshore biological warfare laboratory. The USDA’s spokesperson, Sandy Miller Hays, is unconvinced about the possibility of a link between Lyme disease and Plum Island: . . . A PR expert, Hays had Scientific American eating out of her hand in June 2000, when they reported her as saying, ‘ ‘We still get asked about the Nazi scientists,’ . . . [with] the slightest trace of weariness creeping into her voice.’ In their feature story on Plum Island, the prestigious magazine dubbed the intrigue surrounding the island as a ‘fanciful fictional tapestry.’” (Ibid.; pp. 21–22.)

26. The program concludes with examination of Plum Island’s work with the “Lone Star Tick”—native to Texas. The focal point of experimentation on Plum Island in the 1970’s, the Lone Star tick—like Lyme Disease–is now spread throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. How did that happen? “ . . . The lab chief [Dr. Charles Mebus] failed to mention that Plum Island also worked on ‘hard ticks,’ a crucial distinction. A long overlooked document, obtained from the files of an investigation by the office of former Long Island Congressman Thomas Downey, sheds new light on the second, more damning connection to Lyme disease. A USDA 1978 internal research document titled ‘African Swine Fever’ notes that in 1975 and 1976, contemporaneous with the strange outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, ‘the adult and nymphal stages of Abylomma americanum and Abylomma cajunense were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African swine fever virus.’ In laymen’s terms, Plum Island was experimenting with the Lone Star tick and the Cayenne tick—feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs—during the ground zero year of Lyme disease. They did not transmit African swine fever to pigs, said the document, but they might have transmitted Bb to researchers or to the island’s vectors. The Lone Star tick, named after the white star on the back of the female, is a hard tick; along with its cousin, the deer tick, it is a culprit in the spread of Lyme disease. Interestingly, at that time, the Lone Star tick’s habitat was confined to Texas. Today, however, it is endemic throughout New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. And no one can really explain how it migrated all the way from Texas. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 24–25.) (Plum Island the the Erich Traub File.)

It is no wonder that the calculating deceiver who has headed the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Deceivers, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who once sent Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton a note from “her doctor admirer,” said in 2012 that the sort of “gain of function” experiments being conducted by the Biosafety Laboratory in Wuhan, Red China with funding that he provided despite his denials to the contrary, was “worth the risk of a pandemic”:

Dr. Anthony Fauci once argued that conducting experiments on contagious viruses to increase their potency was worth the risk, even if the work could accidentally lead to a pandemic, it was revealed Friday.

The nation’s chief medical advisor wrote in the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 of the public health benefit to gain-of-function viral experiments — which center on manipulating viruses and making them stronger — as long as there is significant oversight.

In the article, first reported by The Australian, Fauci also noted that a pause on such studies should continue until researchers can figure out how to do them more transparently.

Gain-of-function experiments are the sort of work that was being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when the COVID-19 pandemic first started in China in late 2019 and some experts fear a lab accident is what led to the global outbreak that killed 3.4 million.

In the 2012 paper, Fauci acknowledged the risky research could lead to serious lab accidents but the chance is rare and the work is “important” because it helps the scientific community prepare for naturally occurring pandemics.

In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” he wrote at the time. 

“Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”

He wrote that it was “more likely” that a pandemic would occur naturally and “the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.” 

However, he noted the scientific community “must respect that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally.” 

“We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialog about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place,” Fauci wrote. 

“Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully.” 

The ultimate thesis of the commentary piece was to express support for a pause on gain-of-function research related to the transmissibility of the “highly pathogenic” H5N1 influenza virus. Fauci’s abstract noted the moratorium should continue “pending the resolution of critical policy questions concerning the rationale for performing such experiments and how best to report their results.” 

Fauci didn’t immediately return a request for comment. (Fauci once argued viral experiments worth the risk of pandemic.)

Dr. Joseph Mercola provided additional information about Fauci’s links to the Wuhan BSL-4 that were reported on this website in Sin: More Deadly Than the Coronavirus, part four, over a year ago now:

• The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — a division of the National Institute of Health (NIH) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci since 1984 — has, for years, provided grants to the EcoHealth Alliance and others to conduct gain-of-function (GOF) research on coronaviruses.
• In a May 11, 2021, Senate hearing, Fauci denied ever having funded GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This despite clear documentation proving otherwise.
• In March 2021 the WIV deleted mentions of its collaboration with the NIAID/NIH and other American research partners from its website. It also deleted descriptions of GOF on the SARS virus.
• The NIH/NIAID has funded GOF research to the tune of at least $41.7 million. Up until 2014, this research was conducted by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. After 2014, when federal funding of GOF was banned, such research was funneled to the WIV via the EcoHealth Alliance.
• In August 2020, the NIAID announced a five-year, $82-million investment in a new global network of Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases that will conduct GOF experiments to “determine what genetic or other changes make [animal] pathogens capable of infecting humans.”

As reported in several previous articles, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — a division of the National Institute of Health (NIH) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci since 1984 — has, for years, provided grants to the EcoHealth Alliance and others to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.

EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, farmed out some of this research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), from whence SARS-CoV-2 appears to have emerged. In a May 11, 2021, Senate hearing, Sen. Rand Paul questioned Fauci on the NIAID’s funding of GOF research on bat coronaviruses, some of which was conducted at the WIV.

Fauci denied the charge, saying “The NIH has not ever, and does not now, fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute.” It’s a curious denial, considering the NIH’s funding of such research has been thoroughly documented and can be easily double-checked.

When Paul asks Fauci if the NIAID funded Dr. Ralph Baric’s GOF research, Fauci claims Baric “does not do gain-of-function research, and if it is, it is according to the guidelines and is being conducted in North Carolina.” Paul shoots back, saying:

“You don’t think turning a bat virus spike protein, that he got from the Wuhan Institute into the SARS virus, is gain-of-function? You’d be in a minority, because at least 200 scientists have signed a statement from the Cambridge Working Group that it is gain-of-function.”

In the video above, Jimmy Dore reviews the apparent lies dished out by Fauci during the Senate hearing. In the Truth in Media report below, investigative journalist Ben Swann lays out some of the proof, showing Fauci’s dishonesty.

“What’s insane about this exchange is that Fauci is clearly and probably lying … to Congress, which is a crime … and he’s lying to the American public,” Swann says.

As reported by Swann, the NIH/NIAID has funded GOF research to the tune of at least $41.7 million. Up until 2014, this research was conducted by Baric at the University of North Carolina (UNC). In 2014, the U.S. government issued a moratorium on federal gain-of-function research funding due to safety, ethical and moral concerns raised within the scientific community.

It was at this point, in 2014, that funding for GOF research started being funneled through the EcoHealth Alliance to the WIV. Swann reviews documents proving Fauci lied to Congress, including a paper titled “SARS-Like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence,” submitted to PNAS in 2015 and subsequently published in 2016. In this paper, the authors state that:

“Overall, the results from these studies highlight the utility of a platform that leverages metagenomics findings and reverse genetics to identify prepandemic threats.

“For SARS-like WIV1-CoV, the data can inform surveillance programs, improve diagnostic reagents and facilitate effective treatments to mitigate future emergence events. However, building new and chimeric reagents must be carefully weighed against potential gain-of-function (GOF) concerns.”

At the end of that paper, the authors thank “Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology for access to bat CoV sequences and plasmid of WIV1-CoV spike protein.” They also specify that the research was supported by the NIAID under the grant awards U19AI109761 and U19AI107810, which together total $41.7 million.

As noted by Swann, this paper clearly spells out that the NIAID spent $41.7 million on GOF research, with the aim of determining how bat coronaviruses can be made more pathogenic to humans, and that this research continued after the 2014 moratorium on such funding was implemented.

NIAID viewed Baric’s research as GOF

What’s more, a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services to the director of proposals at UNC Chapel Hill, discussing grant U19AI107810, also spells this out in black and white. The October 21, 2014, letter states, in part:

“NIAID has determined that the above referenced grant may include Gain of Function (GOF) research that is subject to the recently-announced U.S. Government funding pause … The following specific aims appear to involve research covered under the pause: Project 1: Role of Uncharacterized Genes in High Pathogenic Human Coronavirus Infect — Ralph S. Baric, Ph.D. — Project Leader.

“Specific Aim 1. Novel Functions in virus replication in vitro. Specific Aim 3. Novel functions in virus pathogenesis in vivo … As your grant is currently funded, this pause is voluntary.”

In other words, the NIAID authorized the continuation of what it admitted was gain-of-function research — simply because the grant had already been funded — and it did so after the ban on such funding was put into place.

NIAID authorized GOF research, bypassing review board

But that’s not all. After the moratorium was lifted in 2017, a special review board, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (the P3CO Review Framework), was created within the DHHS to evaluate whether grants involving dangerous pathogens are worth the risks. The review board is also responsible for ensuring proper safeguards are in place for approved research.

According to Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright, an NIH grant for research involving the modification of bat coronaviruses at the WIV was sneaked through because the NIAID didn’t flag it for review. In other words, the WIV received federal funding from the NIAID without the research first receiving a green-light from the HHS review board.

The NIAID apparently used a convenient loophole in the review framework. As it turns out, it’s the funding agency’s responsibility to flag potential gain-of-function research for review. If it doesn’t, the review board has no knowledge of it.

According to Ebright, the NIAID and NIH have “systemically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review.”

NIAID is also committed to continued GOF research

Lastly, Fauci is also clearly committed to continuing GOF research, seeing how the NIAID, back in August 2020, announced a five-year, $82-million investment in a new global network of Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Peter Daszak‘s EcoHealth Alliance will receive $7.5 million from this grant, and planned research will include GOF-type experiments that the NIAID says will “determine what genetic or other changes make [animal] pathogens capable of infecting humans.”

Wuhan lab deleted documents showing Fauci’s NIAID funding

All of that basically serves as backstory to the latest development. It’s now been discovered that the WIV quietly deleted all mentions of its collaboration with Fauci’s NIAID, the NIH and other American research partners from its website shortly after Fauci testified in a Senate hearing in March 2021, when he went head to head with Sen. Rand Paul on mask-wearing. As reported May 15, 2021, by The National Pulse:

“March 21, 2021, the lab’s website listed six U.S.-based research partners: University of Alabama, University of North Texas, EcoHealth Alliance, Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the United States and the National Wildlife Federation.

“One day later, the page was revised to contain just two research partners — EcoHealth Alliance and the University of Alabama. By March 23, EcoHealth Alliance was the sole partner remaining.

“EcoHealth Alliance is run by long-standing Chinese Communist Party-partner Dr. Peter Daszak, who National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam has repeatedly claimed will be the first ‘fall guy’ of the Wuhan lab debacle …

“Beyond establishing a working relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now-deleted posts from the site also detail studies bearing the hallmarks of gain-of-function research conducted with the Wuhan-based lab.”

Altered WIV page admits GOF research with American partners

Indeed, a now-deleted WIV web page titled “Will SARS Come Back?” stated that:

“Prof. Zhengli Shi and Xingyi Ge from WIV, in cooperation with researchers from University of North Carolina, Harvard Medical School, Bellinzona Institute of Microbiology … examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations.

“Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, the scientists generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

“The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.

“Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein.

“On the basis of these findings, they synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrated robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo …”

Again, while Fauci insists Baric is “not doing any kind of GOF research,” and “if he is,” then he’s doing it at UNC and not in China, the WIV’s web page clearly refutes this. GOF research was done at the WIV, in partnership with UNC researchers, of which Baric is a leading one.

The WIV’s deletions of American research partners from its website (with the exception of EcoHealth Alliance), and its deletion of the article discussing genetic research on the SARS virus raise a host of questions and appears to be yet another attempt at a cover-up. The surprising thing is that they’re now covering up American involvement and not just their own.

Chinese-American GOF research example

The WIV and the Wuhan University School of Public Health are both listed as subcontractors for EcoHealth Alliance under a $3.7-million NIH grant titled, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”

The two institutions also worked as collaborators under another $2.6-million grant to research the “Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats,” and under EcoHealth Alliance’s largest single source of funding, a $44.2 million sub-grant from the University of California at Davis for the PREDICT project (2015-2020).

Part of the PREDICT grant went to funding GOF experiments by WIV scientist Zhengli and Baric with the UNC. In this experiment, Zhengli and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create a “new bat SARS-like virus … that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.” A request by Zhengli and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium on GOF was approved by the NIH. Daszak described Zhengli and Baric’s work in a 2019 interview:

“You can manipulate them [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk. So, you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert it into a backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab.”

The research was published in the journal Nature in 2015. As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires authors to submit novel DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Curiously, the new SARS-like virus Zhengli and Baric published in 2015 wasn’t deposited in GenBank until May 2020.

Fauci has accomplished great deal of harm

It remains to be seen whether Daszak is in fact being groomed as the fall guy in this saga. Clearly, he’s innocent in the lab origin cover-up. He somehow ended up on two separate commissions charged with investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2 — one by the WHO and one by The Lancet — having already played a central role in the plot to obscure the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 by crafting a scientific statement condemning such inquiries as “conspiracy theory.”

Letting Fauci off the hook is not an option, however. Like Daszak, Fauci has spent the last year denouncing the possibility that COVID-19 could be the result of a lab leak, all while knowing the kinds of research his agency funded there.

He’s been a longtime defender and promoter of GOF research on animal viruses in general, saying while he was working on GOF with bird-flu viruses such research is worth the risk because it allows scientists to prepare for pandemics. However, this kind of research clearly has not improved governments’ pandemic responses one whit.

Fauci has also flip-flopped endlessly when it comes to mask recommendations, and helped suppress one of the most effective, safest and least expensive COVID-19 remedies, hydroxychloroquine, despite his knowledge of a 2005 study showing it’s an effective remedy against SARS coronavirus.

The study was published in Virology Journal, which is the official publication of the NIH, so it’s hard to believe he was unaware of it. But rather than protect public health and save lives using hydroxychloroquine, Fauci promoted the ineffective, dangerous and expensive drug remdesivir and COVID-19 gene therapies instead.

Fauci also knew (and has admitted) that using a PCR test with a cycle threshold (CT) above 35 renders it useless because at that point, you’re just detecting dead nucleotides. No live virus can be detected at CTs that high. As early as March 2020, he knew up to 90% of positive PCR tests were false positives and that these people really weren’t sick, yet he said and did nothing.

Now, as COVID-19 vaccines are taking their toll, with vaccine injury reports that show they are possibly disabling and killing tens of thousands around the world, Fauci is defending the universal use of the shots and downplaying their lethality.

According to Fauci, deaths from the vaccines have to be “put into context with the population they occurred in.” What he’s referring to are cases where old people died shortly after receiving their COVID shots. Old people die, so therefore you shouldn’t blame it on the vaccine.

This is hypocrisy at its finest. When seniors die before vaccination, it’s due to COVID-19 and something must be done to prevent it, but when they die after vaccination, they die of natural causes and no preventive action is necessary. Fauci’s dismissal of vaccine deaths also overlooks the fact that many young, healthy people have reported serious adverse reactions or even died within hours or days of their vaccinations.

Gain-of-function research is the real threat

I believe GOF research cooperation and sharing between nations is such that blame will ultimately be shared by multiple parties. The key issue, really, if SARS-CoV-2 did in fact come from a lab, is how do we prevent another lab escape? And, if it turns out to have been a genetically manipulated virus, do we allow gain-of-function research to continue?

I believe the answer is to ban research that involves making pathogens more lethal to humans. As it stands, the same establishment that is drumming up panic by warning of the emergence of new, more infectious and dangerous variants is also busy creating them. They just never tell you about that part.

Already, scientists have figured out a way to mutate SARS-CoV-2 such that it evades human antibodies. Were this mutated virus to ever get out, we’d be in serious trouble. While mankind has created several outbreaks, nature seems to have a way of NOT mutating animal viruses into global killers. So, the hypocrisy needs to end.

World leaders need to realize that funding and defending gain-of-function research is the real threat here. I believe Fauci’s lies are a pathetic attempt to hide his agency’s involvement with GOF research that may have resulted in a global crisis. (Wuhan Lab Deleted Files Showing Fauci Authorized Funding for Risky Coronavirus Experiments. Another important article written by Dr. Joseph Mercola explains the radically dangerous nature of the vaccines that are being administered in response to the plandemicist’s CCP/Wuhan/Red Chinese/Covid-19/Coronavirus can be found at: The Many Ways in which the Covid-19 Vaccines May Harm Your Health. An interview with a credentialed academic physician about the harm of the vaccines being mandated by many businesses with the encouragement of our statist monsters can be seen at: World Renowned Academic Physician Blows Lid Off Covid Vaccines. Another article about the harmful effect of the gene therapy shots that are being marketed as vaccines can be found at Dr. Tenpenny: Covid Shots Start Genetic Process That Is 'Like Having an on Button With No off Button'.)

As can be recognized very readily, of course, Anthony Fauci is just another garden-variety, run-of-the-mill amoral scientist who is guided by nothing other than what is “possible” to do without regard to even the remotest possibility of offending God or having to answer to Him at the time his death. Behold how the world suffers now at the hands of such men, who are being used by Christ the King as the means to chastise us all for our sins, our lukewarmness, our subtle indifference and hidden infidelities, and our silence in the midst of developments that will continue to bring down the wrath of God upon us for decades to come unless He chooses to intervene by sending us a true pope in answer to our pleas we send up each day to His Most Blessed Mother to provide with us with the authoritative voice of the universal shepherd who will, at the very least, speak as a Catholic and will not fear in the least to call cowards and Judases by their proper names.

The funding of human-animal chimera by the government of the United States of America is just par the course for a nation whose founding principles were the result of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic “Enlightenment” falsehoods that placed man at the center of all things without regard to the authority of Christ the King and His true Church. The denial of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Incarnation and of His Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross is at the foundation of both the theory and the praxis of the modern civil state, including the United States of America. Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX explained quite prophetically that a world resting on such falsehoods would wind up crashing upon their rocky shoals:

"This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again? (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

"But, although we have not omitted often to proscribe and reprobate the chief errors of this kind, yet the cause of the Catholic Church, and the salvation of souls entrusted to us by God, and the welfare of human society itself, altogether demand that we again stir up your pastoral solicitude to exterminate other evil opinions, which spring forth from the said errors as from a fountain. Which false and perverse opinions are on that ground the more to be detested, because they chiefly tend to this, that that salutary influence be impeded and (even) removed, which the Catholic Church, according to the institution and command of her Divine Author, should freely exercise even to the end of the world -- not only over private individuals, but over nations, peoples, and their sovereign princes; and (tend also) to take away that mutual fellowship and concord of counsels between Church and State which has ever proved itself propitious and salutary, both for religious and civil interests.

"For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

"And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?" (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

Anything who thinks that these words do not apply to our world today is not thinking very clearly whatsoever.

Father Denis Fahey pointed out that the rejection of the Divine Plan that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the High Priest and King of redeemed mankind, by the modern world results in the divination of humanity, of man, which is what we are witnessing very clearly today:

By the grace of the Headship of the Mystical Body, our Lord Jesus Christ is both Priest and King of redeemed mankind and, as such, exercises a twofold influence upon us. Firstly, as a Priest, He communicates to us the supernatural life of grace by which we, while ever remaining distinct from God, can enter into the vision and love of the Blessed Trinity. We can thus become one with God, not, of course, in the order of substance or being, but in the order of operation, of the immaterial union of vision and love. The Divine Nature is the principle of the Divine Vision and Love, and by grace we are ‘made partakers of the Divine Nature.’ This pure Catholic doctrine is infinitely removed from Masonic pantheism. Secondly, as King, our Lord exercises an exterior influence on us by His government of us. As King, He guides and directs us socially and individually, in order to dispose all things for the reception of the Supernatural Life which He, as Priest, confers.

Society had been organized in the thirteenth century and even down to the sixteenth, under the banner of Christ the King. Thus, in spite of deficiencies and imperfections, man’s divinization, through the Life that comes from the sacred Humanity of Jesus, was socially favoured. Modern society, under the influence of Satan, was to be organized on the opposite principle, namely, that human nature is of itself divine, that man is God, and, therefore, subject to nobody. Accordingly, when the favourable moment had arrived, the Masonic divnization of human nature found its expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. The French Revolution ushered in the struggle for the complete organization of the world around the new divinity–Humanity. In God’s plan, the whole organization of a country is meant to aid the development of a country is meant to aid the development of the true personality of the citizens through the Mystical Body of Christ. Accordingly, the achievement of true liberty for a country means the removal of obstacles to the organized social acceptance of the Divine Plan. Every revolution since 1789 tends, on the contrary, to the rejection of that plan, and therefore to the enthronement of man in the place of God. The freedom at which the spirit of the revolution aims is that absolute independence which refuses submission to any and every order. It is the spirit breathed by the temptation of the serpent: ‘For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened; and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ Man decided then that he would himself lay down the order of good and evil in the place of God; then and now it is the same attitude. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 27.)   

As Pope Leo XIII noted at the beginning of Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae:

The world has heard enough of the so-called "rights of man." Let it hear something of the rights of God. That the time is suitable is proved by the very general revival of religious feeling already referred to, and especially that devotion towards Our Saviour of which there are so many indications, and which, please God, we shall hand on to the New Century as a pledge of happier times to come. But as this consummation cannot be hoped for except by the aid of divine grace, let us strive in prayer, with united heart and voice, to incline Almighty God unto mercy, that He would not suffer those to perish whom He had redeemed by His Blood. May He look down in mercy upon this world, which has indeed sinned much, but which has also suffered much in expiation! And, embracing in His loving-kindness all races and classes of mankind, may He remember His own words: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself" (John xii., 32).  (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

Pope Leo XIII’s successor, Pope Saint Pius X, explained in his first encyclical letter, E Supremi, October 4, 1903, that he, though considering himself unworthy to be a Successor of Saint Peter, accepted the vote of the college of cardinals to do the work of “restoring all things in Christ. His Holiness explained that men had indeed put themselves in the place of God, which is why it was necessary for him to exhort Catholics to pray for the restoration that is to come:

Then again, to omit other motives, We were terrified beyond all else by the disastrous state of human society today. For who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction? You understand, Venerable Brethren, what this disease is — apostasy from God, than which in truth nothing is more allied with ruin, according to the word of the Prophet: “For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish” (Ps. 1xxii., 17). We saw therefore that, in virtue of the ministry of the Pontificate, which was to be entrusted to Us, We must hasten to find a remedy for this great evil, considering as addressed to Us that Divine command: “Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations and over kingdoms, to root up, and to pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant” (Jerem. i., 10). But, cognizant of Our weakness, We recoiled in terror from a task as urgent as it is arduous.

4. Since, however, it has been pleasing to the Divine Will to raise Our lowliness to such sublimity of power, We take courage in Him who strengthens Us; and setting Ourselves to work, relying on the power of God, We proclaim that We have no other program in the Supreme Pontificate but that “of restoring all things in Christ” (Ephes. i., 10), so that “Christ may be all and in all” (Coloss. iii., 2). Some will certainly be found who, measuring Divine things by human standards will seek to discover secret aims of Ours, distorting them to an earthly scope and to partisan designs. To eliminate all vain delusions for such, We say to them with emphasis that We do not wish to be, and with the Divine assistance never shall be aught before human society but the Minister of God, of whose authority We are the depositary. The interests of God shall be Our interest, and for these We are resolved to spend all Our strength and Our very life. Hence, should anyone ask Us for a symbol as the expression of Our will, We will give this and no other: “To renew all things in Christ.” In undertaking this glorious task, We are greatly quickened by the certainty that We shall have all of you, Venerable Brethren, as generous co-operators. Did We doubt it We should have to regard you, unjustly, as either unconscious or heedless of that sacrilegious war which is now, almost everywhere, stirred up and fomented against God. For in truth, “The nations have raged and the peoples imagined vain things” (Ps. ii., 1.) against their Creator, so frequent is the cry of the enemies of God: “Depart from us” (Job. xxi., 14). And as might be expected we find extinguished among the majority of men all respect for the Eternal God, and no regard paid in the manifestations of public and private life to the Supreme Will — nay, every effort and every artifice is used to destroy utterly the memory and the knowledge of God. (Pope Saint Pius X, E Supremi, October 3, 1904.)

Brief Comment Number One:

The enemies of God cry out more “Depart from us” more loudly today than at any time prior to us as the monstrous developments discussed in this commentary amply demonstrate. Every effort has been and continues to be made to destroy “utterly the memory and knowledge of God,” that is, the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity. These enemies of Divine Revelation have been hard at work in the past one hundred seventeen years, and they have been quite successful at preparing the way for the “Son of Perdition,” Antichrist, of whom Pope Saint Pius X wrote in the next paragraph of E Supremi:

5. When all this is considered there is good reason to fear lest this great perversity may be as it were a foretaste, and perhaps the beginning of those evils which are reserved for the last days; and that there may be already in the world the “Son of Perdition” of whom the Apostle speaks (II. Thess. ii., 3). Such, in truth, is the audacity and the wrath employed everywhere in persecuting religion, in combating the dogmas of the faith, in brazen effort to uproot and destroy all relations between man and the Divinity! While, on the other hand, and this according to the same apostle is the distinguishing mark of Antichrist, man has with infinite temerity put himself in the place of God, raising himself above all that is called God; in such wise that although he cannot utterly extinguish in himself all knowledge of God, he has contemned God’s majesty and, as it were, made of the universe a temple wherein he himself is to be adored. “He sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God” (II. Thess. ii., 2). (Pope Saint Pius X, E Supremi, October 4, 1903.)

Extensive Comment Number Two:

The work of the enemies of Christ the King has been so successful in the realm of so-called “public education” and in that of so-called “entertainment” (motion pictures, television, theatre), which that has long been in the control of those who deny His Sacred Divinity, that forty-three percent of the so-called “millennial” generation do not believe in God at all, no less the true God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church:

Younger Americans are reshaping the country with a philosophy of life that rejects faith in God and organized worship at the same time defining success and morality in terms of personal happiness and economic social justice, a survey from the Cultural Research Center (CRC) at Arizona Christian University found.

The American Worldview Inventory (AWVI) 2021, an annual survey that examines the perspectives of adults aged 18 and over in the United States, found that while 57 percent of Millennials (born 1984-2002) consider themselves to be Christian, 43 percent “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.”

Comparatively, 70 percent of Generation X (Gen X) Americans (born 1965-1983), 79 percent of Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), and 83 percent of the Builder Generation (born 1927-1945) consider themselves to be Christian, while 31, 28, and 27 percent, respectively, “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.”

According to the survey, only 48 percent of Millennials say one should “treat others as you want them to treat you,” compared to 53 percent of Gen Xers, 81 percent of Boomers, and 90 percent of Builders.

At the same time, 38 percent of Millennials agree with the statement “you try to get even with people who have wronged you,” while 33 percent of Gen Xers, 12 percent of Boomers, and 10 percent of Builders say the same.

“Gen X and the Millennials have solidified dramatic changes in the nation’s central beliefs and lifestyles,” said sociologist George Barna, CRC director of research. “The result is a culture in which core institutions, including churches, and basic ways of life are continually being radically redefined.”

Barna said the shift in America’s spiritual landscape started almost 60 years ago with progressive changes among Boomers, but that Millennials have aggressively cut ties with core biblical views and lifestyle values.

According to the survey, Millennials are “far more likely” than other generations to:

• Define success in life as happiness, personal freedom, or productivity without oppression
• Consider an abortion performed to reduce personal economic or emotional discomfort to be morally acceptable
• Consider premarital sex with someone expected to be their future spouse to be morally acceptable
• Deem reincarnation a real possibility
• Be liberal regarding fiscal and social policies
• Champion liberal theology
• Be among the “Don’ts”—people who either do not know if God exists, do not believe that He exists, or do not care if He exists

Barna included in his summary of the worldview of Millennials, as presented in his research, their tendency to perceive expansion of government will facilitate a better life and that public programs and policies should have flexible boundaries.

In addition, the sociologist noted the survey suggests younger Americans are seeking “fewer formal marriages” and “the reduced appeal of raising children.”

U.S. Census Bureau data revealed in 2020 that 42 states and Washington, DC, have continued to see their birth rates decline.

Breitbart News reported in December 2019 the U.S. birth rate, overall, has dropped for the fourth consecutive year.

“In 2018, less than 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S. — a drop of two percent, or almost 64,000 births, since 2017,” Breitbart News noted.

Barna said in his comments:

The family unit and traditional family practices have been reshaped, with some long-term, fundamental family ideals and practices outlawed. The responsibilities of government have been significantly broadened and transformed. The influence of the Christian church has diminished while the influence of arts, entertainment, and news media has exploded. As millions of parents discovered during the pandemic, public schools have become indoctrination farms rather than places for teaching basic life skills.

He observed as well the frequent “inconsistency” between the rhetoric of Millennials and their actual behavior:

For example, Millennials champion the concept of tolerating different points of view. Yet we see in the research that their behaviors—such as promoting getting even, situational treatment of other people, or censoring specific viewpoints or policies—conflicts with their alleged embrace of tolerance and diversity. In fact, Millennials are twice as likely as older adults to specify that the people they respect are those who hold the same religious and political views as they do. The attitudinal and behavioral evidence related to a variety of beliefs and related behaviors suggests that they are not a tolerant generation despite their self-image and public promotion as such. (Forty-three Percent of Millennials Don’t Know, Care, or Believe that God Exists.)

Noting that there is no such as a generic “Christian church” as there is only one Christian church, the Catholic Church and none other, this phenomenon, proximately speaking, is the direct result of the combined anti-Incarnational forces of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, whose lords have made what Joseph Alois “Cardinal” Ratzinger wrote in his misnamed Principles of Catholic Theology their “official reconciliation” with the “new era inaugurated in 1789” (p. 382) and have robbed Catholics of a superabundance of Sanctifying Grace and the world of a superabundance of Actual Grace, which flows out into the world from every true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The liturgically invalid and sacramentally barren rites of conciliarism have robbed Catholics of the means to combat the evils of the world or even to recognize that what they think is the Catholic Church is her counterfeit ape.

Moreover, as it is the nature of man to want to worship something that is above himself, men, who have turned to politics and to political ideologies as possessing “salvific” powers as the influence of Holy Mother Church was eroded by the forces of Modernity and Modernism, will come to believe in such things as “black lives matter” or “QAnon,” which is now more popular than many the combined numbers of Jews, Mohammedans, Buddhists and Hindi in the United States of America:

An estimated 30 million Americans are praying at the altar of Q, according to a new poll by religious interest groups.

That number means QAnon has more followers in America than Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism combined.

Conspiracy theories held by proponents of QAnon — central to which is the notion that powerful people in government are sex-trafficking pedophiles who act on behalf of Satan — have found their way into the mainstream, as lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have publicly espoused the group’s far-flung beliefs. Adherents further suggest that civil unrest and violence are necessary to defend American virtue against such villains.

Experts have said QAnon draws upon decades, even centuries, of “satanic panic,” while proof of the group’s tenets has repeatedly failed to rear its beastly head. Consequential dates and events touted by devotees, such as the day former President Donald Trump was due to retake the “stolen” office — March 4 — have not come to fruition as predicted.

Now, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core confirms QAnon’s political and ideological stranglehold over American society.

“Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants,” PRRI founder Robert P. Jones told the New York Times. “So it lines up there with a major religious group.”

Of the 5,625 respondents to the survey, 15% said they agreed with QAnon’s core premise — that “the government, media and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”

Another 15% agreed with QAnon’s calls for violent revolution, suggesting that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Meanwhile, 20%, or 1 in 5, of respondents agreed that a “storm” — presumably referring to civil war — will soon “sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”

By contract, 40% of participants disagreed with all three of the above statements. Yet 44% — a relative majority — admitted they “mostly disagree” with the statements, but were not willing to reject them wholly.

The difference in responses between Republicans and Democrats was stark: Only about 20% of those who identified as Republican readily rejected QAnon theories, compared to 58% of Democrats.

Close to 1 in 4 Republicans (23%) were likely to be QAnon “believers,” who “completely or mostly agreed” with the statements. As for Democrats and independents, just 7% and 12%, respectively, had joined Q’s cohort.

“It’s one thing to say that most Americans laugh off these outlandish beliefs. But when you take into consideration that these beliefs are linked to a kind of apocalyptic thinking and violence, then it becomes something quite different,” said Jones. (With Thirty Million Followers, QAnon as Popular as Some Religions. For a good analysis of the “psychological operations” program that is the mythical QAnon that was written by a former “believer,” see A Requiem for QAnon.)

Those who do not believe in the true Faith will come to believe in anything so as to provide their lives “meaning” if they do not fall into abject nihilism, which itself is a belief that life has no meaning. Pope Leo XIII warned us in both Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, and Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, that the religiously indifferentist civil state would produce both atheism and nihilism in its train:

The sovereignty of the people, however, and this without any reference to God, is held to reside in the multitude; which is doubtless a doctrine exceedingly well calculated to flatter and to inflame many passions, but which lacks all reasonable proof, and all power of insuring public safety and preserving order. Indeed, from the prevalence of this teaching, things have come to such a pass that may hold as an axiom of civil jurisprudence that seditions may be rightfully fostered. For the opinion prevails that princes are nothing more than delegates chosen to carry out the will of the people; whence it necessarily follows that all things are as changeable as the will of the people, so that risk of public disturbance is ever hanging over our heads.

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)  

Yes, the madness of the universal franchise, as Pope Pius IX termed it in an allocution in 1874, arrogates unto the people what belongs to Christ the King. The "people" come to believe in a governmental system based on false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles that "they" get decide the inherent morality of human actions by means of their legislative bodies and/or by means of direct plebiscites (votes of the "people" on ballot propositions—initiatives and referenda—that become the civil law once approved in a general or special election). This is one of the major consequences of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the triumph, albeit temporary, of the reign of the devil by means of the "reign of man" wrought by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry.

As Pope Leo XIII noted in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, the secular form of public administration can only lead to nihilism and anarchy:

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established (by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,-and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.) 

Anyone who says that public life is not stained with crime is as delusional as those who think that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the “pope,” who mocks the Catholic Faith just as surely as the mad scientists who have developed a wafer resembling a communion host as a means to give the gene therapy vaccines to the people on their tongues rather than an injection in their arms:

May 28, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – A team of researchers from the Universities of Minnesota and Texas have developed a polymer “wafer,” which bears a striking resemblance to the host used at a Catholic Mass, that they predict could become the vaccine of the future and harks back to the warnings of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who pointed to COVID adherence as a new religion.

The six-man development team is composed of three scientists from the University of Minnesota, two from the University of Texas, and one from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The study, published in the peer reviewed medical journal, Journal of Controlled Release, explained that the membrane on the underside of the tongue leant itself to absorbing drugs very effectively. 

While the membrane could easily absorb smaller molecules, the larger molecules used in vaccines and experimental injections, such as Pfizer’s COVID-19 injection, are too large to enter in this manner and hence are delivered via needles in the arm. 

However, the research team believes that the wafer will offer a solution to that, having already proved that the wafer works with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) proteins, and has been designed with a potential future HIV vaccine in mind. 

The team noted, though, that the wafers could be used in the future to deliver COVID-19 vaccines. 

The wafer itself is predominately composed of alginate and carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC). According to reports, the alginate ensures that the proteins do not disintegrate and the CMC works to keep the wafer connected to the membrane in order for the proteins to be imparted.

In a press release from the University of Minnesota, Chun Wang, one of the study’s authors and associate professor in the university’s College of Science and Engineering, expressed hope that the technology could revolutionise the future of vaccines.

“This is just a small step in this long journey,” Wang said. “If we continue this line of work, it can bring us to a point where we will have vaccines — they could be based on DNA, RNA, proteins — that can be stored without refrigeration and easily delivered under the tongue at the sublingual site.”

“They will be quickly disseminated throughout the world because they don’t rely on certain equipment and preservation and all of that stuff. This will be particularly good for low-resource regions of the world, even in America — rural areas that are lacking certain essential facilities and infrastructure.”

Catholics commenting on the wafer have noted the obvious and striking similarity to the host used at every Catholic Mass, which after the words of Consecration becomes the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ. In fact, the wafer developed by the team of researchers appears physically to be almost identical to those used at Mass.

Should it come to be used as a means to deliver COVID-19 vaccines, comparisons would certainly be drawn between what has been described as the “church” of COVID and the Catholic Church’s own sacramental rites. 

Indeed, in January, Archbishop Viganò, former Papal Nuncio to the United States, described the global adherence to the authoritarian COVID measures as being akin to a religious observance. In light of Pope Francis’s reception of the abortion-tainted injections and subsequent dictate that everyone must take the injection, Archbishop Viganò wrote: 

“The bleak Paul VI Audience Hall has been emblematically chosen as the temple in which to celebrate this new sanitary rite, officiated by ministers of the Covid religion in order to assure, certainly not the salvation of souls, but rather the illusory promise of health for the body.”

Indeed, some weeks before, Archbishop Viganò described the COVID-19 measures as being part of a “pseudo-health regime” governed by people both inside and outside of the Church who were “people corrupt in the soul and sold out to Satan.”

“They have thundered at us, using arcane words like 'social distancing' and 'gatherings,' in an endless series of grotesque contradictions, absurd alarms, apocalyptic threats, social precepts and health ceremonies that have replaced religious rites,” he wrote, when summarizing the year 2020. 

The archbishop was supported by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, Vatican whistleblower and the former head of the Vatican bank. Gotti Tedeschi spoke of the manner in which society turned to the COVID vaccines as though to a new form of religion:

“The apparent result seems to be a new form of scientism, reincarnated to solve the COVID problem with vaccines to be accepted fideistically (with blind faith), and perhaps nominating itself as the new moral authority of this age, one that demands an act of faith towards the modern religion, the scientific one.” (Researchers Develop Vaccine Technology to Deliver in Wafer Form Indentical to Communion Hosts.)

As I was saying, if people do not believe in the true Faith, they will believe in anything but the truth, including placing their blind trust in scientists who mock God’s creative powers, deny His Special Creation of the world and of man, scoff at the Incarnation and have gone so far now as to create a veritable liturgical “rite of vaccination” to provide “salvation” to the masses that might very culminate in a complete mockery of Holy Communion, noting that the conciliar revolutionaries have been doing this since November 30, 1969.

We must turn to our true popes for guidance. Pope Leo XIII’s immediate successor, Pope Saint Pius X, amplified Pope Leo XIII’s Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus  in E Supremi, October 4, 1903:

6. Verily no one of sound mind can doubt the issue of this contest between man and the Most High. Man, abusing his liberty, can violate the right and the majesty of the Creator of the Universe; but the victory will ever be with God — nay, defeat is at hand at the moment when man, under the delusion of his triumph, rises up with most audacity. Of this we are assured in the holy books by God Himself. Unmindful, as it were, of His strength and greatness, He “overlooks the sins of men” (Wisd. xi., 24), but swiftly, after these apparent retreats, “awaked like a mighty man that hath been surfeited with wine” (Ps. Ixxvii., 65), “He shall break the heads of his enemies” (Ps. Ixvii., 22), that all may know “that God is the king of all the earth” (Ib. Ixvi., 8), “that the Gentiles may know themselves to be men’ (Ib. ix., 20).

7. All this, Venerable Brethren, We believe and expect with unshakable faith. But this does not prevent us also, according to the measure given to each, from exerting ourselves to hasten the work of God — and not merely by praying assiduously: “Arise, O Lord, let not man be strengthened” (Ib. ix., 19), but, more important still, by affirming both by word and deed and in the light of day, God’s supreme dominion over man and all things, so that His right to command and His authority may be fully realized and respected. This is imposed upon us not only as a natural duty, but by our common interest. For, Venerable Brethren, who can avoid being appalled and afflicted when he beholds, in the midst of a progress in civilization which is justly extolled, the greater part of mankind fighting among themselves so savagely as to make it seem as though strife were universal? The desire for peace is certainly harbored in every breast, and there is no one who does not ardently invoke it. But to want peace without God is an absurdity, seeing that where God is absent thence too justice flies, and when justice is taken away it is vain to cherish the hope of peace. “Peace is the work of justice” (Is. xxii., 17). There are many, We are well aware, who, in their yearning for peace, that is for the tranquillity of order, band themselves into societies and parties, which they style parties of order. Hope and labor lost. For there is but one party of order capable of restoring peace in the midst of all this turmoil, and that is the party of God. It is this party, therefore, that we must advance, and to it attract as many as possible, if we are really urged by the love of peace. (Pope Saint Pius X, E Supremi, October 4, 1903.)

Extensive Comment Number Three:

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., explained the allure of the world’s concept of false liberty in his reflection on the Feast of Pope Saint Eleutherius (commemorated on the Feast of Saint Philip Neri, May 26):

Thy name, O Eleutherius, is the name of every Christian that has risen with Christ. The Pasch has delivered us all, emancipated all, made us all freemen. Pray for us, that we may ever preserve that glorious Liberty of the Children of God, of which the Apostle speaks. By it were we freed from the chains of sin, which consigned us to death; from the slavery of Satan, who would fain have robbed us of our Last End; and from the tyranny of the world, which was deceiving us by its false maxims. The New Life given to us by our Pasch is one that is all of heaven, where our Jesus is awaiting us in glory; to lose it would be to return to slavery. Holy Pontiff! pray for us, that, when the Pasch of next year comes, it may find us in that happy Liberty which the fruit of our having been redeemed by Christ.

There is another kind of Liberty of which the world boasts, and for the acquiring which it sets men at variance with men. It consists in avoiding as a crime all subjection and dependence, and in recognizing no authority except the one appointed by our own elections, which we can remove as soon as we please. Deliver us, O holy Pontiff, from this false Liberty, which is so opposed to the Christian Spirit of obedience, and is simply the triumph of human pride. In its frenzy, it sheds torrents of blood; and with its pompous cant of what it calls the Rights of Man, it substitutes egoism for duty. It acknowledges no such thing as Truth, for it maintains that Error has its sacred rights; it acknowledges no such thing as Good, for it has given up all pretension to preventing Evil. It puts God aside, for it refuses to recognize him in those who govern. It puts upon man the yoke of brute force: it tyrannizes over him by what it calls a “Majority;” and it answers every complaint, that he may make against injustice, by the jargon of “Accomplished Facts.” No—this is not the Liberty into which we are called by Christ, our Deliverer. We are Free, as St. Peter says, and yet make not Liberty a cloak for malice.

O holy Pontiff! show thyself still a Father to the world. During thy peaceful reign, thy throne was near to that of the Cæsars, who governed the Seven Hilled City. They were the Rulers of the world, and yet thy name was revered in every part of their Empire. While the material power held the sword suspended over thy head, the Faithful of various distant lands were flocking to Rome, there to venerate the Tomb of Peter, and pay homage to thee his Successor. When Lucius sent ambassadors from his Island, they turned not their steps to the Emperor’s Palace, but to thine humble dwelling. They came to tell that that a people was called by divine grace, to receive the Good Tidings, and become a portion of the Christian family. The destinies of this people, which thou wast the first to evangelize, were to be great in the Church. The Island of the Britains is a daughter of the Roman Church; and the attempts she is now making to disown her origin are useless. Have pity on her, O thou that wast her first Apostle! Bless the efforts which are being everywhere made to bring her back to unity with the Church. Remember the faith of Lucius and his people; and show thy paternal solicitude for a Country which thou didst lead to the Faith. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Pope Saint Eleutherius, May 26.)

Senator Joseph Machin, for one. would do well to put the party of God, the Catholic Church, over his own political party, which is committed of its wretched nature to the promotion of a form of statist totalitarianism that has at is root the enshrinement in civil war of monstrous crimes against God and against the sanctification and salvation of men and the good order of their societies. God so loved the world that He gave us His Divine Son, Who founded His Holy Church to teach us in all truth and to give us the supernatural means to abide by it. He did not found a political party, and it is thus impossible to think that one is pleasing the Most Holy Trinity by refusing to stand up in defense of moral truth for fear of offending the leaders, including the morally and criminally corrupt Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., of the parties of the devil.

Similarly, those, such as former President Donald John Trump and his Kabbala practicing daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump Kushner and Jared Kushner, would do well to recognize that there will never be any peace in the Middle East until everyone converts to the true Faith, and there will never be peace anywhere in the world as long as men not only persist in their sins unrepentantly but seek to enshrine a nonexistent “right” to sin in civil law and to assure its embedding in every aspect of what passes for “popular culture” today.

As Pope Saint Pius X reminded us that the only way to call men back to the “majesty and empire of God” except “by means of Jesus Christ,” something that so many “conservatives” and Americanist Catholics believe is either imprudent, “divisive” or entirely unnecessary:

But, Venerable Brethren, we shall never, however much we exert ourselves, succeed in calling men back to the majesty and empire of God, except by means of Jesus Christ. "No one," the Apostle admonishes us, "can lay other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ." (I. Cor., iii., II.) It is Christ alone "whom the Father sanctified and sent into this world" (Is. x., 36), "the splendor of the Father and the image of His substance" (Hebr. i., 3), true God and true man: without whom nobody can know God with the knowledge for salvation, "neither doth anyone know the Father but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal Him." (Matth. xi., 27.) Hence it follows that to restore all things in Christ and to lead men back to submission to God is one and the same aim. To this, then, it behoves Us to devote Our care -- to lead back mankind under the dominion of Christ; this done, We shall have brought it back to God. When We say to God We do not mean to that inert being heedless of all things human which the dream of materialists has imagined, but to the true and living God, one in nature, triple in person, Creator of the world, most wise Ordainer of all things, Lawgiver most just, who punishes the wicked and has reward in store for virtue. (Pope Saint Pius X, E Supremi, October 4, 1903.)

Brief Comment Number Four:

Among the materialists who believe God is an “inert being heedless of all things human which the dream of materialists has imagined” are most of those in public life today and most of those in the commentariat class of blathering babblers. It is even true to note that Jorge Mario Bergoglio and each of his brother Jacobin/Bolshevik brand of conciliar revolutionaries are pagans whose concept of “God” is merely a projection that emanates from the phantasms of their own warped imaginations.

Pope Saint Pius X also reminded us that the way to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ can be found only through His true Church, not through some nebulous “Judeo-Christian” values that numerous writers, including Patrick Joseph Buchanan, who knows that the Catholic Church is the true Church but who continues to write in politically ecumenical terms with a respect for Protestantism, which is not a true religion and is the fountainhead of the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity, and everyone who writes for Lifesite News, where great respect is shown for Protestant “pastors” who have no mission and no power from the true God of Divine Revelation to anything to advance the sanctification and salvation of souls. Catholicism is the sole basis of social order, nothing else, and Pope Saint Pius X noted this very clearly:

Now the way to reach Christ is not hard to find: it is the Church. Rightly does Chrysostom inculcate: "The Church is thy hope, the Church is thy salvation, the Church is thy refuge." ("Hom. de capto Euthropio," n. 6.) It was for this that Christ founded it, gaining it at the price of His blood, and made it the depositary of His doctrine and His laws, bestowing upon it at the same time an inexhaustible treasury of graces for the sanctification and salvation of men.

You see, then, Venerable Brethren, the duty that has been imposed alike upon Us and upon you of bringing back to the discipline of the Church human society, now estranged from the wisdom of Christ; the Church will then subject it to Christ, and Christ to God. If We, through the goodness of God Himself, bring this task to a happy issue, We shall be rejoiced to see evil giving place to good, and hear, for our gladness, "a loud voice from heaven saying: Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God and the power of his Christ." (Apoc. xii., 10.) But if our desire to obtain this is to be fulfilled, we must use every means and exert all our energy to bring about the utter disappearance of the enormous and detestable wickedness, so characteristic of our time -- the substitution of man for God; this done, it remains to restore to their ancient place of honor the most holy laws and counsels of the gospel; to proclaim aloud the truths taught by the Church, and her teachings on the sanctity of marriage, on the education and discipline of youth, on the possession and use of property, the duties that men owe to those who rule the State; and lastly to restore equilibrium between the different classes of society according to Christian precept and custom. This is what We, in submitting Ourselves to the manifestations of the Divine will, purpose to aim at during Our Pontificate, and We will use all our industry to attain it. It is for you, Venerable Brethren, to second Our efforts by your holiness, knowledge and experience and above all by your zeal for the glory of God, with no other aim than that Christ may be formed in all. (Pope Saint Pius X, E Supremi, October 4, 1903.)

Final Comment:

In other words, there is no salvation in politics. We are living in a time of profound chastisement with all the forces of the civil state and that of the counterfeit church of conciliarism arrayed against us.

So what?

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, Queen of Heaven and Earth, 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 Angela Merici, pray for us.

Appendix

Material about Talmudism's Influence on the Protestant Revolution Against the Social Reign of Christ the King (extracted from an earlier article)

Alas, it should come as no surprise that many there is a phenomenon as “Christian Zionists” as Talmudists were in the vanguard of undermining the Faith throughout the Middle Ages and played a particularly important role in bringing about Martin Luther’s revolution against the Divine Plan that Our Lord Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His true Church that is responsible, proximately speaking, for the triumph, although only transitory, of Judeo-Masonic naturalism in the world.

William Thomas Walsh’s Characters of the Inquistion summarized the decisive role of Talmudists in bringing about and then propagating the Protestant Revolution to overthrow the Social Reign of Christ the King an eradicate the Holy Name of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ from public view:

During the spectacular and fateful reign of Charles the Fifth, the Spanish Inquisition became so inactive that its enemies began to take its early death for granted. Charles, who was elected German Emperor soon after becoming King of Spain, and while still a youth crowned an extraordinary good fortune by marrying the most beautiful woman in Europe, seemed too powerful a monarch to have to worry about a few heretics here and there; moreover, he was by nature trusting, tolerant and magnanimous to such a degree that Cervantes has been suspected of drawing a sublime caricature of him in Don Quixote. Masters of the new World, whose gold came by galleons to Sevilla, he was always in need of money and dependent upon the favors of usurers. Lover of peace, he was always fighting, now defeating Francis I at Marignano, now performing the prodigies of a paladin in Africa, now warring against traitorous barons in Germany and Austria. Lover of Christ and of the Catholic Faith, he saw through the fallacies of Luther; yet he made fatal compromises (his famous Interim, for example) which permitted Lutheranism to pass from the sectarian to the political plane, and so to destroy the unity of Christian Europe for centuries; and he heard with shame, in 1527, that his armies composed in great measure of German Lutherans and of secret Mohammedans (Moriscoes) from eastern Spain, had sacked Rome, besieged and all but killed the Pope, and filled the capital of Christendom with the horrors of butchery, rape, and desecration even of the Blessed Sacrament. Charles considered himself the great champion of the Church, and was sincerely anxious for the reform of existing abuses against which the Lutherans in the north were clamoring, yet he allowed his aunt, Catherine of Aragon, to be cast aside for a royal concubine by Henry VIII, as a prelude to the crafty destruction of the Catholic Faith in England; and he saw his rivalry with Francis I constantly prevent and finally interrupt, the deliberations of the Council of Trent, which alone could restore health and discipline to the human organization of the Church. A cool and skillful statesman, a keen judge of men and motives, and on the whole, a better man than either Francis or Henry, he was in the main outwitted from first to last by more subtle and unscrupulous individuals. At a time when Europe needed a man of single purpose, a Saint Fernando, a Saint Louis, a Catholic Moses, to insist always that the soul of western civilization was the Christian Faith, on which, in the nature of things no compromise was possible, there were two conflicting men in this Habsburg potentate: an ascetic and a sensualist. During the lifetime of his wife, to whom he was faithful apparently until her death, he promised her that when their son Philip was old enough to rule, they would retire from the world, to a monastery, she to a convent, to meditate and pray. After the death of the Empress Isabel, however, circumstances seemed to demand that he retain his power; and the animal in him, which had always manifested itself in his huge feeding and drinking, gained the ascendance for a time. By one of his mistresses, the blond termagant singer Barbara Blomberg, he begot Don Juan of Austria, about the time when he was advising his legitimate son and heir, Philip, to live chastely, and to beware of politicians who would seek to gain influence over him through the wiles of women. The contrast was characteristic, and it continued to the end. An old man at forty-nine, he handed over the government of Spain to Philip, and retired to the monastery at Yuste to prepare for death, to flagellate himself for his sins, to curse at choristers who sang off key, to gorge himself with meat and wine and then to pay with spasms of the gout, as the dregs of his earthly life seeped miserably away.

Charles seemed unaware, most of his life, that he was surrounded by the agents of an international conspiracy to destroy everything that his heart loved and revered. Most of his councillors were Catholics in name only, or very lax Catholics; many of them, in key positions, were of Jewish descent. Charles saw no danger in this. His favorite chaplain was doctor Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, an eloquent preacher whose voice is said to have had something like the effect of music on his congregations, and whose book on Christian doctrine (dedicated to the Emperor, who read it faithfully) gained him a great reputation as a theologian – though at the very time her was in secret communication with Lutherans in Germany, and had two wives living. The chief minister of Charles, the wily Gattinara, had adopted principles of Erasmian heretics then industriously undermining Catholicism in Spain, while Erasmus himself, alarmed at the turn events were taking, was denouncing Luther. Even Alonso Marique, the Inquisitor General, was said to have Erasmian tendencies. The Emperor intervened to save Juan Gil, who was secretly propagating anti-Catholic doctrines at Alcala, from the Inquisition; and he wanted to make him bishop of Tortosa. Another court preacher in high favor was the secret Protestant, Father Augustin Cazalla. Michael Servetus was secretary to the Emperor's confessor, Juan de Quintana. Propagandists were at work to draw the whole Imperial family away from the Church Catholic. Charles's brother Fernando remained faithful in his rather stupid way; but their sister Mary of Hungary was a Lutheran for a time; and Fernando's son Maximillian (who later became Emperor) was notoriously Protestant in his views and in his friends. Even the children of Charles were in grave danger of perversion. Some one skilfully suggested that young Philip II take as his confessor the great Doctor Constantino; but Philip, warned against the man, chose some one else. Philip's sister Maria (later Empress) was not so wary. Her confessor was Fray Vincente de Rocamoro, who later threw off the mask of Catholicism and joined the Hebrew community at Amsterdam as Isaac of Rocamoro.

The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain had been only a temporary misfortune for that energetic and resourceful race. Already, in various parts of the world, they had built up new political and commercial empires. Even before the Spanish calamity, their control of international trade, and of almost the entire economic life of Europe, had been broken by the organization of the medieval Catholic workmen's guilds: but they had gone a long way toward repairing the misfortune, and scattered from Spain and Portugal, were soon controlling the overland trade between the West and Indies, at Ferrrar, Venice, Ancona, Salonika, Constaninople, Cairo and Suez. A Portuguese Jewish family names Mendes, with relatives in Spain, the Netherlands and England, formed a powerful syndicate which became known as the Spice Trust, whose owners collected toll on goods consumed in every country in Europe, maintained an elaborate intelligence or spy system, indulged in usury on a vast scale, gradually pushed into the background such Catholic bankers as the Fuggers, and threw the huge weight of their wealth and influence on the side of any movement aimed against the Church of Christ. Joseph Mendes, one of the spice magnates, went to Constantinople and there became virtually master of the policy of the Sultan; it was he, for example, who instigated the great threat to Christendom which was stopped by the fleet of Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto. All the powers of international Jewry were allied with, if not actually the motive power of, the vast conspiracy which produced the Protestant revolt. In fact, it was the famous Battle of the Books, a dispute over the Jewish Talmud and Kabbala, which set the stage for Luther. Erasmus's friend Reuchlin, the defender of the Jewish books, assembled around his a party of revolutionaries without whose instant support the Augustinian monk’s voice might have had no more effect than Huss's or Segarelli's. Once the landslide began, the wide-spread wealth and power of Talmudic Jewry was organized behind the new movements in England, Germany, and France, and probably gave them their permanence. International finance gave the Protestant Revolt a world capital at London. Many good things came to an end: medieval hospitals and charities; the unity of Europe; the Catholic guilds of workmen, from which the modern labor movement still has much to learn.

Charles apparently had no insight into the real significance of all this revolution that was going on around him and in his very household. For many years he retained a pathetic belief in the efficacy of physical force and, even more, of political intrigue. As he had compromised with the Lutheran movement in Germany, so he attempted to outflank the Anglican position by compromise and finesse. He arranged for Philip (whose Portuguese wife had died) to marry Mary Tudor, with the hope that they would have a son who would inherit both England and Spain, and thus bring England back into the Catholic fold. This in part was to be Philip's recompense for having lost the Empire. The whole international anti-catholic ring had seen to it that the Imperial succession would pass not to the Spanish prince, whose unyielding devotions to the Catholic Church was well know, but to his cousin Maximillian, whose lukewarm Catholicism was believed to mask a Protestant heart. Philip, however, would still be the most powerful ruler in Christendom: he would have, besides England and Spain, the control of Italy through Milan and Naples; Burgundy, the Low Countries, and the New World. The recovery of England would make the victory over Protestantism decisive.

This beautiful dream dissolved in the light of actuality. Charles and his obedient son made the fatal mistake of not following the advice of the Pope and Cardinal Pole on the restoration of the immense properties of the English Church, stolen by Henry VIII and passed on by him to crafty upstarts who supplanted the ancient nobility. These men, under the skillful and unscrupulous leadership of William Cecil, were resolved at all costs to suppress the Catholic worship in England, for the sake of the loot they held. They were so cowed at the accession of Mary that a bold stoke then might have forced them to restore the monastery lands and other properties to the rightful owners. But Charles and Philip advised Mary not to insist too much on the point; counting, of course, on the birth of a Catholic heir, and the healing effects of time. The heir was not born, however, and time proved unfaithful. When Mary died without issue, Philip felt sure that her bastard sister Elizabeth would keep her oath to be a good Catholic if crowned. It had been within his power to exclude her; he even toyed with the idea, doubtless with encouragement by Elizabeth, that he could marry her if he chose, and thus keep England within his hand. Philip  did not know that William Cecil had secretly arranged matters with Ann Boleyn's daughter, and would control her by his powerful will, and the weapon of fear, for nearly all her life. She had hardly been crowned when she broke her oath, revealed herself a Protestant, and made Cecil her chief minister. Thus Philip, with the best of intentions, and it must be admitted, as victim of his father's opportunist policies, had set up a power which would become the rallying point of the new Protestant world, shield the ancient hatred of the Catholic Church, and plague him to the day of his death. Thanks to his father's political advisers, too, he had been drawn into a costly and foolish war with Pope Paul IV, who on his side was deceived by a scoundrelly nephew; and it was a sorry satisfaction when the Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba, took Rome.

Charles, meanwhile, on returning to Spain to prepare his soul for death, had had more than one rude awakening. With no Ximenes beside him to give wise and disinterested advice, the prematurely old Emperor was shocked especially to learn that while he had been neglecting the Inquisition founded by his ancestors, and making clever compromises with the heretics of Germany and England, Lutheranism had not only appeared, but had made considerable headway, in Spain.

Even after the reforms of Ximenes, there was some danger that an anti-Catholic movement might take hold in Spain. The reforms of the great Cardinal had not yet permeated the secular clergy. Also, among the large population of Catholic Jews there were still some who were waiting for any opportunity to embrace a cause which called itself Christian (without demand the Christian test of sincerity in the confessional) and yet was a solvent of true Christianity. Finally Erasmus had sown the seeds of dissidence. This Voltairian individual, this versatile mediocre man with far more knowledge than wisdom, this sickly misbegotten dispeptic who had an almost irrational hatred of monks because his uncle had forced him to enter an Augustinian monastery, and jeered at Crusaders among whom his puny limbs could never have taken a place, became immensely popular in Spain at the beginning of the siglo de oro. He had done some good works on pagan and Christian antiquities, and in patrology; he was ski;lful in polemics; above all, he attacked clerical abuses at a time when it was fashionable all over Europe to do so. He went even further: he ridiculed rites and ceremonies of the Church, and scoffed at some of her sacred dogmas. He despised such warrior Popes as Julius II (whom Moses would have understood better) and could not find words enough to flatter the Medici Popes, Leo X and Clement VII, under whose pontificates occurred two of the greatest calamities that had befallen the Church: the loss of Germany and the loss of England. His Praise of Folly contained in embryo all of Luther's subsequent attack, and even ridiculed texts of Holy Scripture. Good men were taken in by him, believing him to be a sincere Catholic seeking needed reforms. Saint Ignatius began reading his works on the advice of his confessor: but on noticing his fervor and devotion began to ebb away in proportion, he cast away the book he was reading, and thereafter held all the writings of Erasmus in abhorrence. Juan de Vergaro, thought he had been a secretary to Cardinal Ximenes, was less sensitive to spiritual odors; he obtained a Spanish pension for Erasmus. Neither wholly Catholic or wholly Protestant, this mean-spirited scholar withdrew from the abyss in which Luther had walked, while his disciples became pioneers of the New Religion in England, and even in Spain.

To understand the shock of horror with which the Emperor Charles discovered all this in 1558, just before his death, one must consider circumstances often omitted or overlooked in the modern conspiracy (When I use “conspiracy” in this sense, I do not mean necessarily a plot controlled by one man, or a small group: it suffices to notice that men of the same spiritual affinity tend toward a common end) against truth which has poisoned the records of the English-speaking world, but painfully real to men of the time. England, more than ninety per cent Catholic, was quietly taken in hand by a small rich minority of enemies of the Catholic church, many of them, like Cecil, of very obscure origin. In France, leagued with the English Protestants, another small but rich minority of Calvinists, chiefly nobles and usurers, were beginning the formidable plots which were to lead to the eight bloody Huguenot Wars. These two groups had very intimate connections with the Lutheran princes of Germany, and with William of Orange, who was already laying the groundwork for the Protestant revolt in the Low Countries, and urging the Turks, through Jewish bankers friends who were his heavy creditors, to attack Catholic Spain from the Mediterranean. Not all of this was evident in 1558, but enough of it had come to light to make the last nights of the Emperor very restless indeed. And then to find out that a Lutheran plot was well advanced in Spain – !

Perhaps the Spanish, having fought the battles of Christendom against unbelief so many centuries, had a keener awareness that some of their northern neighbors of the significance of such movements. They had learned that in this world appearances are often deceptive. A Dominican theologian, familiar with the recent activities of the Alumbrados, discovered by the agents of [Cardinal] Ximenes [de Cisernos], and aware of the ideas of the medieval Manichee heretics from which they derived, would not be long in stripping the gospel of Luther of its accidents, which gave it the superficial appearance of something new, and fining in its essentials the same old enemy that the Catholic Church had been fighting so many centuries. Luther professed to be appealing from the Middle Ages to the virgin purity of the first Christian centuries. In reality he was leading the minds of his victims even further back in time, back, in the labyrinth of ideas, to the gospel of despair so elaborately disguised by the bhikkus of India, and so craftily revived by the Beghards, Beguins and other secret societies of the thirteenth century.

“Escape from the evils of life (Karma), from desire and action, into nothingness,” said the Buddhists in effect. “Join us, look within, and sink into pure contemplation. Once desire is dead, you shall be free from sin, rebirth and misery.”

“Life is evil, the work of the devil,” said the medieval Manichees. “Do not listen to Pope or priest, but join our sect of the Pure and the Perfect: then, no matter what you do, you are free from sin, from the torment of conscience, from the evil of living.”

“Be illuminated by a divine feeling from within,” said the Alumbrados. “Obey no one but God, Once you have become perfect and left desire behind, no carnal act you happen to perform can be sinful.”

“No human works are of any avail,” said Luther. “Only faith can save you. If you have faith, it does not matter how much you sin; in fact, the more you sin the more you prove your faith. Therefor be a sinner, sin strongly, sin a thousand times a day.”

Was not Luther's doctrine of salvation by grace alone a restatement, with a somewhat different emphasis, of the old despairing dogma of the Alumbrados, the Manichees, the Gnostics, the Buddhists? Did not he and Melancthon, in the name of reform revive that other heresy of Fraticelli: the detestable error that the state had absolute power over the individual and the Church that the State was the supreme judge and master of human affairs: there was a familiar Manichean smell about all this Lutheran business, and in the nostrils of the Dominicans it was not good.

Spain had a reminder of the implications of Illuminism in 1544, when the Inquisition, in one of its few moments of activity under Charles V, astonished the country by arresting the famous beata, Sister Magdalena de la Cruz, who had been a nun for forty years at the convent of Saint Isabel of the Angels in Cordoba, and had had such a reputation for holiness that even members of the royal family went to solicit her prayers, while the Empress Isabel, wife of Charles V, gave her in gratitude the robe in which her son, Philip II, had been baptized. It was said that the saintly woman performed dreadful penances and vigils, that she lived only on the Host received in Holy Communion, and that she had received the stigmata of Our Lord on hands, feet and side.

Under examination by the Dominican inquisitors, however, Sister Magdalena made some very different revelations. She admitted that she was not a Catholic at all, but one of the sect of the Alumbrados; that when seven years old, she had been persuaded by the devil to pretend sanctity; that at eleven she had made a pact with two demonios incubos, named Balban and Pitonio, who used to have intercourse with her by night, disguised in various ways – now as a Jeronymite friar, now as a Franciscan, now as a black bull, now as a camel. In obedience to them she made wounds on her hands, feet and side so cleverly that even holy persons were deceived; she went into “trances” in which she seemed insensible even to the prick of needles, she imposed even upon princesses and the Empress.

The Inquisition imprisoned this foul impostor for life. Yet her evil mission had a certain measure of success even after her death. Her example made good people afraid of all who manifested any of the phenomenon to which she laid claim; so that when Saint Teresa of Avila experienced real raptures and visions, she was suspected by pious persons of being just one more Magdalena of the Cross, and endured unspeakable persecutions in consequence, even after the Inquisitors declared her free from heresy and deception, and a true mystic.

Whether Magdalena was an impostor, a paranoiac, a lunatic, or one possessed, is beside the point here. It was intolerable that such a person should be allowed to represent the Catholic religion and impose upon the Catholic people. It was one of the functions of the Holy Office to protect the faithful from such deceptions; and although Luther was a very different sort of person from the nun of Cordoba, there was a certain similarity between his doctrine and that of the secret society to which she belonged. They too, used Christian terminology, though with esoteric meanings; they spoke of “contrition for sin,” “the cross of the Christian,” “the warmth of the Holy Ghost” and so on; and all their emphasis was on feeling as opposed to reason, and on private judgment as opposed to the authority of an ordered Church. (William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940 pp. 214-223.)

This describes Jorge Mario Bergoglio just as much as the “Christian Zionists” who are such enthusiastic supporters of President Donald John Trump, especially after his decision to relocate the American embassy in the Zionist State of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem over the course of the next several years.

William Thomas Walsh’s commentary about the work courageous work of Francisco Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, known by contemporaries as Ximens de Cisernos, to root out Jewish infiltration of the Church in Spain to spread the errors of Luther makes it very clear how Jewish saboteurs have long sough to take down Holy Mother Church and thus to discredit and supplant her role in civil society:

The Dominicans, Augustinians and Carmelites did not resist. It was his own community that gave him one of the great battles of his life. After the death of Saint Francis, as we have seen, that order passed through a hectic period, at the end of which when peace had been restored through the efforts of Saint John Capistrano, there still remained two divisions, the Conventuals, who took the easier road for human nature to follow as regarded property and other matters, and the Observatines, who sought to follow the ideal of Saint Francis in all its rigor. Ximenes himself a member by choice of the latter group, put all Franciscans in Spain under the direction of the Commissary General, and then proceeded to reform them. The Conventuals were furious; many of them, in fact, were good men sincerely convinced that their modified rule was better than the original one. The dispute reached such a stage of acrimony that an Italian Franciscan General went to Spain purposely to put an end to the reform, spoke insultingly to Queen Isabel in his anger, and evoked from her a memorable rebuke, while Gonzalo de Cetina, secretary for Aragon, threatened to hang the distinguished visitor with the cord of his habit. Such strong representations were made at the Vatican that Alexander VI, in 1496, ordered the housecleaning suspended, but the following year, being better informed, he allowed it to go on. Ximenes carried on the war to victory. He had the satisfaction of learning that a thousand bad monks had given up the struggle in Castile, and had migrated to Morocco, where they might live as they pleased – some of them taking along women with whom they had given scandal. The Church and Spain were much better, of course, for their departure; and although Ximenes never completed his task with the secular clergy, he had carried the movement so far that when he died the boast was made, with justice, that the Spanish monks were noted beyond all those of Christendom for temperance, chastity, and virtuous living in general. In the course of time, the improved state of the monasteries had its effect upon the secular priesthood. It was probable the reform of Ximenes, therefore that saved Spain from succumbing, after his death, to Protestantism. Unlike his English contemporaries, he proved that monks could be brought back to discipline without cutting off their heard, destroying their works of mercy and handing over their lands to usurers.

Every heretical movement had two important elements: (1) a protest, usually exaggerated but with more or less foundation in fact, against abuses arising from the weaknesses of human nature in the Church; and (2) a conspiracy, often cloaked by some sort of secret society, to pervert the teachings of Christ and the Church, under pretext of reform. Ximenes had forestalled the first of these conditions in Spain. He also did a great deal to expose and prevent the second. It was while he was Inquisitor General, for example, that the sect known as the Alumbrados or Illuminates was first discovered in the Peninsula.

Nothing in history is without cause and without effect. The Alumbrados were a link in the chain of causality connecting the Manichees of the Middle Ages with modern anti-Christian movements; the Inquisition of Toulouse with the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution.

The name Iluminado first appeared in Spain when a report sent to Cardinal Ximenes concerning the activities of one Fray Antonio de Patrana, who had begun to preach a revelation which he said came to him directly from God, called himself Illuminatus, and went about the countryside with certain holy women, on whom he had been instructed, by the inner voice he followed, to beget prophets. The Inquisition clapped him into prison, and scattered his sect.

Obviously, he was a spiritual descendent of those Fourteenth Century imposters Segarelli and Dulcinus. It was no new cure that he dispensed. Nor was Illuminism but a distortion of Christian mysticism, any more than it was a perversion of Judaism. True it made its way into the Christian Church under the guise of various heresies, as it deceived many of the scattered children of Moses under the covers of the Talmud; but in reality it was quite different in origin. The Law of Moses and the Law of Christ came from God, from the source of being, of good, of light, of growth; when free to do so they always produced orderly and beautiful living. And both of them were opposed, from very early times, by a totally different spirit, the spirit than denies, that hates life, that causes confusion and chaos. This dark spirit enthroned itself in the East, even before the Incarnation; and there shielded by a singularly pure and austere code of morality, it evolved systems of thought which took on the appearances of religions, but were in reality elaborate form of atheism. Is not the Nirvana of the Buddhists, the goal of all their strivings thought countless reincarnations, nothing but the death and annihilation of the individual conscience, the extinction of human personality in an All which is but a step from Nothing? Buddhism, the child of pantheistic Brahminism, is atheism in disguise; and granting all that may be said for Buddha's good intentions, the sincere and self-sacrificing lives of many of his followers, and the truth of many of their teachings, the system itself contained the seeds of intellectual and spiritual degeneration. Out of it came a pseudo-mysticism based upon such conceptions as these: life is not worth living, personality is a burden and a curse, marriage is a bed of hot coals leading to the propagation of an evil, all labor and effort are useless, the family and other forms of society therefore become pointless, anarchy thus follows logically, and man can do no better than escape from the penalties of Karma and the chains of human desire into a cold and selfless (but actually selfish) absorption into Nirvana. Pure contemplation, to these mystics, meant that the soul lost its individuality and annihilated itself as it sank into the infinite essence, until at last it arrived at a state of perfection which was soul, there could be no sin.

These ideas underwent many fantastic transmutations as they traveled from the dying East to invade the living West. But the dangerous corollary that to the pure all things are pure, that nothing a perfect soul may do in the ectasy of contemplation can be sinful, persisted in the teachings of several heresies. It was taught by the early Gnostics, by Plotinus, by the Priscillians in Galicia, by the thirteenth century Albigenses of Southern France, by thefourteenth century Beghards of Beguins in Catalonia and Leon. And now the hoary superstition of the Buddhist bkikkus (beggars) which isolated the human soul from human society, from moral good (through braking down the distinction between good and evil) and from God Himself, was reappearing under the mask of “Illuminism.” In exposing and punishing the Alhumbrados, then, Ximenes was merely resuming in Castile the battle that Eymeric had waged, more than a century before, in Aragon and Catalonia.

He was eighty years old when King Fernando died in 1516. Queen Juana was less fit than ever to reign. Her son Charles was in Flanders, where he had been brought up, and was not yet seventeen. All the old intrigues which had divided and weakened Spain in the past began to stir behind the scenes. Nobles were reaching again for power. Catholic Jews of slight orthodoxy saw a fresh opportunity to deal a blow at the Inquisition, which had fallen so heavily upon them or upon their ancestors. They offered Charles V 800,000 ducats if he would make certain “reforms” in the procedure of the Holy Office.

The young king was tempted to accept. What did the Inquisition mean to him? He had been in Spain very little, and was more of a Fleming than a Spaniard, both in looks and in training. Why not do as the Conversos suggested, and allow, among other things publication of the names of witnesses and delators?

Ximenes, who knew that the Holy Office had been the cornerstone of the resurrected Spain, the fulcrum not only of political unity and power, but of spiritual reform, wrote a memorable letter to Charles.

“Most high and mighty Catholic King, most gracious lord: The Catholic sovereigns, as your Majesty is aware, have bestowed so much care upon the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, and examined its laws and institutions with so much prudence, wisdom and consciousness, that modifications of it are not needed, but would rather be harmful than otherwise. At the present moment such changes would fill me the more with sorrow, as they would assuredly tend to increase the defiance shown to the Inquisition by the Catalonians and the Pope. The pecuniary embarrassment of your Majesty is, I confess, very great, but certainly that of Fernando the Catholic, the grandfather of your Majesty, was greater, when the newly converted Christians offered him 600,000 gold ducats to carry on the Navarrese war. He did not accept their proposals, because he preferred the purity of the Christian religion to all the gold in the world. With all the true devotion of a loyal subject, with the zeal which I must have for the office to which your Majesty has raised me, I beseech you to open your eyes and follow the example of your Majesty's grandfather, and consent to no changes in the proceedings of the Inquisition. All the objections raised by its adversaries have before been refuted, under the Catholic kings of glorious memory. The modifications of even the most unimportant law of the Inquisition could not be made without betraying the honor of God and insulting that of your most illustrious ancestors. If this consideration has not sufficient weight with your Majesty, may it please you to recall the deplorable occurrence which has lately taken place at Talavera de la Reina, when a newly-converted Jew, who had learned the name of his accuser, searched for him and stabbed him. The hatred against these informers is indeed so great that, if the publication of their names is not prevented, they will not only be assassinated in private and public, but even at the foot of the altar. No one will be found in future willing to risk his life by similar denunciations; this would be the ruin of the Holy Tribunal, and the cause of God would be left without a defender. I live in confidence that your Majesty, my King, and Lord, will not become unfaithful to the Catholic blood which runs in your veins, but be convinced that the Inquisition is a tribunal of God, and an excellent institution of your Majesty's ancestors.” William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940 pp. 204-207.)

Be not deceived, good readers, that is, if any are still reading this long article!

 

Be not deceived.