Nearly Seventy Years of Priesthood Spent Making What Is Clear Seem Obscure, part one

Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who has once again reiterated that he did indeed resign from the antipapal seat effective on Thursday, February 28, 2013 (see Mister Asteroid Is Looking Pretty Good Right About Now, Living In Fantasyland To The Very End, part one, Living In Fantasyland To The Very End, part two, Living In Fantasyland To The Very End, part three, Living In Fantasyland To The Very End, part four, Whittling Away At The Last Catholic Bastion, Victim Of His Own Obliviousness, Coming Soon: The Two-Headed "Pope" Monster, and It's Two O'Clock: Do Your Know Where Your "Pope" Is?), although I suppose that this will do nothing to put an end to the delusional beliefs of the resignationists, has been the entirety of his nearly seventy years of priesthood in a mental fog caused by his unique capacity to make what is clear obscure and hard to understand. His entire apostate understanding of the Catholic Faith is in rooted in the “new theology’s” rejection of certainty in favor of ambiguity and obscurity.

Pope Pius XII explained the “new theology’s” rejection of certainty as follows in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950:

22. To return, however, to the new opinions mentioned above, a number of things are proposed or suggested by some even against the divine authorship of Sacred Scripture. For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the Vatican Council's definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a human sense of the Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they say is the only infallible meaning, lies hidden. In interpreting Scripture, they will take no account of the analogy of faith and the Tradition of the Church. Thus they judge the doctrine of the Fathers and of the Teaching Church by the norm of Holy Scripture, interpreted by the purely human reason of exegetes, instead of explaining Holy Scripture according to the mind of the Church which Christ Our Lord has appointed guardian and interpreter of the whole deposit of divinely revealed truth.

23. Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church's vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.

24. Everyone sees how foreign all this is to the principles and norms of interpretation rightly fixed by our predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII in his Encyclical "Providentissimus," and Benedict XV in the Encyclical "Spiritus Paraclitus," as also by Ourselves in the Encyclical "Divino Affflante Spiritu."

25. It is not surprising that novelties of this kind have already borne their deadly fruit in almost all branches of theology. It is now doubted that human reason, without divine revelation and the help of divine grace, can, by arguments drawn from the created universe, prove the existence of a personal God; it is denied that the world had a beginning; it is argued that the creation of the world is necessary, since it proceeds from the necessary liberality of divine love; it is denied that God has eternal and infallible foreknowedge of the free actions of men -- all this in contradiction to the decrees of the Vatican Council[5] (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

Readers of this site know that the text of Humani Generis applies directly to the entirety of the thought and pastoral praxis of Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger from the time of seminaries days in Regensburg, Germany, to the time of his ordination on June 29, 1951, the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, to his life as a university professor, “bishop” of Munich and Freising, to his twenty-four years as “prefect” of the so-called Congregation for the Doctrine of the Holy Faith, to his false “pontificate” and to the present days of his “antipope emeritus” status. Ratzinger has been the same throughout his life, which is why he is singularly incapable of seeing anything about the world clearly. Everything must be nuanced, and nothing can be as obvious as it is, and perish the thought that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church explicated the text of Sacred Scripture with perfection.

The whole notion of any kind of truth, whether supernatural or nature, is foreign to the minds of “new theologians” such as Joseph Alois Ratzinger. Obscurity must replace truth, ambiguity must replace clarity, doubt must replace certainty, rationalism must replace supernatural faith on any point of doctrine, including the miracles of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus as recorded in Holy Writ and that have been approved as such by Holy Mother Church in the process of elevating worthy candidates to the altars by means of the infallible act of canonization.

As Pope Pius XI noted in Humani Generis, the “new theologians” prefer the vagueness of the schismatic and heretical orthodox to the exactitude of Holy Mother Church’s dogmatic pronouncements, which Ratzinger, in particular, has claimed repeatedly throughout the past seventy years suffer from the alleged inadequacies of human language to express all the “aspects” of a particular point and are thus subject to the vicissitudes of the historical circumstances in which they, dogmatic pronouncements, have been made. This, as I have noted in hundreds upon hundreds of commentaries on this website, is nothing other warfare against the immutability of God and thus upon God Himself, and it is also blasphemy against the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, Who has guided our true popes and the fathers of Holy Mother Church’s true general councils to express Catholic doctrine with exactitude that was removed from subjectivism and rationalism.

Pope Pius XI also noted that the “new theologians,” rejecting Scholasticism in general and Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor in particular, make of Sacred Scripture whatever it is they want:

Moreover they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries.

It is evident from what We have already said, that such tentatives not only lead to what they call dogmatic relativism, but that they actually contain it. The contempt of doctrine commonly taught and of the terms in which it is expressed strongly favor it. Everyone is aware that the terminology employed in the schools and even that used by the Teaching Authority of the Church itself is capable of being perfected and polished; and we know also that the Church itself has not always used the same terms in the same way. It is also manifest that the Church cannot be bound to every system of philosophy that has existed for a short space of time. Nevertheless, the things that have been composed through common effort by Catholic teachers over the course of the centuries to bring about some understanding of dogma are certainly not based on any such weak foundation. These things are based on principles and notions deduced from a true knowledge of created things. In the process of deducing, this knowledge, like a star, gave enlightenment to the human mind through the Church. Hence it is not astonishing that some of these notions have not only been used by the Oecumenical Councils, but even sanctioned by them, so that it is wrong to depart from them.

Hence to neglect, or to reject, or to devalue so many and such great resources which have been conceived, expressed and perfected so often by the age-old work of men endowed with no common talent and holiness, working under the vigilant supervision of the holy magisterium and with the light and leadership of the Holy Ghost in order to state the truths of the faith ever more accurately, to do this so that these things may be replaced by conjectural notions and by some formless and unstable tenets of a new philosophy, tenets which, like the flowers of the field, are in existence today and die tomorrow; this is supreme imprudence and something that would make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind. The contempt for terms and notions habitually used by scholastic theologians leads of itself to the weakening of what they call speculative theology, a discipline which these men consider devoid of true certitude because it is based on theological reasoning. (Pope Pius XI, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

There is no better way to describe the mind of Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Antipope Emeritus Benedict XVI as “formless and unstable,” a mind that cannot accept anything with certitude, which Pope Pius XII noted in Humani Generis is anathema to the nouvelle theologie:

34. It is not surprising that these new opinions endanger the two philosophical sciences which by their very nature are closely connected with the doctrine of faith, that is, theodicy and ethics; they hold that the function of these two sciences is not to prove with certitude anything about God or any other transcendental being, but rather to show that the truths which faith teaches about a personal God and about His precepts, are perfectly consistent with the necessities of life and are therefore to be accepted by all, in order to avoid despair and to attain eternal salvation. All these opinions and affirmations are openly contrary to the documents of Our Predecessors Leo XIII and Pius X, and cannot be reconciled with the decrees of the Vatican Council. It would indeed be unnecessary to deplore these aberrations from the truth, if all, even in the field of philosophy, directed their attention with the proper reverence to the Teaching Authority of the Church, which by divine institution has the mission not only to guard and interpret the deposit of divinely revealed truth, but also to keep watch over the philosophical sciences themselves, in order that Catholic dogmas may suffer no harm because of erroneous opinions. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.

For the likes of men such as the conciliar revolutionaries to be correct, the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity not only hid the true meaning of doctrines for over nineteen hundred years, He permitted true popes and the Fathers of Holy Mother Church's twenty true general councils to condemn propositions that have, we are supposed to believe, only recently been "discovered" as having been true. Blasphemous and heretical.

It should as no surprise that man who once described himself a “rationalist” has stated that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who is the nominal President of United States of America (or President In Name Only—PINO, who has lots of RINO friends, of course), is “tending” in the direction of the Democratic Party’s support for abortion.

Tending?

Tending?

Tending?

Is Joseph Alois Ratzinger sane?

To call to mind a phrase by someone within the conciliar structures I know many years ago, is Joseph Alois Ratzinger living on “Planet Mongo”?

Tending?

Tending?

Well, here is a report about what he said in his successor’s favorite form of communication: an interview:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, better known as emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, expressed misgivings in a Monday interview about President Biden for falling in line with the Democratic Party’s political platform.

Cardinal Ratzinger, who became the first pope in more than 600 years to retire when he stepped down in 2013, had “some reservations on a religious level” with Mr. Biden, according to the Italian publication Corriere della Sera.

“It’s true, he’s Catholic and observant. And personally he is against abortion,” Cardinal Ratzinger told the newspaper. “But as president, he tends to present himself in continuity with the line of the Democratic Party. … And on gender politics we have not yet understood what his position is.” (Ratzinger is "Uneasy" with President in Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden's adherence to the Democratic Party pro-abortion agenda.)

The nonagenarian apologist for the Girondist/Menshevik delusion that there the “Second” Vatican Council and its aftermath was not a rupture with the Catholic “past” has been living in such a fog of uncertainty, nuance, ambiguity, obscurantism, and opaqueness that he is unable to see anything with clarity, including the fact that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., has been fully supportive of the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn ever since the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on January 22, 1973. It has been to the utter shame of the American bishops (most of them were true bishops forty-eight years ago) at the time and to those “bishops” who have succeeded them that they have lacked the moral courage to excommunicate Biden and every other Catholic in public life who has made a false, self-serving “dichotomy” between their supposed “personal” opposition to the slaughter of innocent babies and their “public duty” to “support” a Supreme Court decision that was manufactured out of a whole cloth in the same manner that Court invented a nonexistent “right to marital privacy” in Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965. It is philosophically impossible to say that one “personally” opposes that which defies the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment and the Natural Law while militantly promoting what one “opposes” with flaming rhetoric and public policies that consign innocent human beings to their executions at the hands of money-grubbing medical butchers and even forces taxpayers to fund the carnage.

Let me bring clarity to bear on what is obscure” to the Bavarian New Theologian who is so blinded by nuance and ambiguity as to refuse to take any personal responsibility for how he enabled the cognitively challenged, corrupt, basement dwelling lowlife from Delaware when he, Ratzinger,” was “Pope Benedict XVI” and did nothing to penalize Biden or anyone else, including Biden’s co-religionist, the octogenarian named Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi or anyone else, including the late Mario Matthew Pilate/Pontius Cuomo and his son, Andrew Mark Cuomo, who seems to be much in the news these days, doesn’t he?

Here is the clarity: the belief that one can be a Catholic in “good standing” while giving public support to that which is says he knows is evil was condemned by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Insofar as PINO Biden’s longstanding support for abortion, Father Ratzinger has to be living far beyond the fictional Planet Mongo to be unaware of how he, as Senator Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Chairman of the United States Committee on the Judiciary, orchestrated the character assassination of Judge Robert Bork of the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia when he was nominated by President Ronald Wilson Reagan for a vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States of America following the retirement of Associate Justice Lewis Powell in 1987, and how he, Biden, questioned Judge Anthony MacLeod Kennedy very carefully about his Catholic Faith and abortion after Regan nominated Kennedy following Biden’s orchestrated defeat of Bork and the withdrawal of Reagan’s second nominee, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, after the latter admitted to breaking a just civil law and smoked marijuana in his youth:

The CHAIRMAN. And this may save some time, because I had a whole round of questions on this. Let me put it to you very bluntly. Do you think Griswold was reasoned properly? 

Judge KENNEDY. I really think I would like to draw the line and not talk about the Griswold case so far as its reasoning or its result. I would say that if you were going to propose a statute or a hypothetical that infringed upon the core values of privacy that the Constitution protects, you would be hard put to find a stronger case than Griswold.   

The CHAIRMAN. That doesn't answer the question. Is there a marital right to privacy protected by the Constitution?   

Judge KENNEDY. Yes—pardon, is there a   

The CHAIRMAN. Marital right to privacy. 

Judge KENNEDY. Marital right to privacy; that is what I thought you said. Yes, sir.   

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. (Questioning of Judge Anthony Kennedy by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., December 15, 1987)  

The then Judge Anthony Kennedy had been asked by Senator Biden the day before about a conversation he had had with United States Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina, now deceased), who drew the inference that Kennedy's calling himself a "practicing Catholic" and that he, Kennedy, "admired" Helm's pro-life position was an indication that Kennedy would use his religious beliefs as a foundation of judicial decision-making. This concerned the pro-abortion Catholic, Biden, who had just helped to torpedo the nomination of another "strict constructionist" positivist, Judge Robert Bork:

Judge KENNEDY: Now it would be highly improper for a judge to allow his, or her, own personal or religious views to enter into a decision respecting a constitutional matter. There are many books that I will not read, that I do not let, or these days do not recommend, my children read. That does not prohibit me from enforcing the first amendment because those books are protected by the first amendment. A man's, or a woman's, relation to his, or her, God, and the fact that he, or she, may think they are held accountable to a higher power, may be important evidence of a person's character and temperament. It is irrelevant to his, or her, judicial authority. When we decide cases we put such matters aside, and as—I think it was—Daniel Webster said, "Submit to the judgment of the nation as a whole." 

The CHAIRMAN. SO Judge, when you said—if it is correct—to Senator Helms: "Indeed I do, and I admire it, I am a practicing Catholic," you were not taking, at that point a position on the constitutional question that has been and continues to be before the Court?  

Judge KENNEDY. TO begin with, that was not the statement.   

The CHAIRMAN. Will you tell us what   

Judge KENNEDY. We had a wide-ranging discussion and those two matters were not linked.  

The CHAIRMAN. Those two matters were not linked. So the article is incorrect? 

Judge KENNEDY. In my view, yes.

The CHAIRMAN. That is fine. I thank you. My time is up. (Questioning of Judge Anthony Kennedy by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.)  

Well, there’s bipartisanship for you, bipartisan Americanism, that is!

Associate Justice Anthony MacLeod Kennedy went on to “distinguish” himself as a firm support of the chemical and surgical assassination of innocent preborn babies and was a judicial pioneer in promoting the nonexistent “constitutional” right for those of the same gender to “marry” under cover of the civil law, which Biden himself championed even before his then boss, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, was “ready” to announce his own support for “marriage equality” at the Democratic National Convention in 2012:

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I-- I-- look, I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction-- beyond that.

DAVID GREGORY:  In a second term, will this administration come out behind same-sex marriage, the institution of marriage?

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, I-- I-- I can't speak to that. I-- I-- I-- I don't know the answer to that. But I can tell you--

DAVID GREGORY:  It sounds like you'd like to see it happen. If that's what the president would get--

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, the president continues to fight, whether it's Don't Ask, Don't Tell or whether it is making sure, across the board, that you cannot discriminate. Look-- look the the executive orders he's put in place. Any hospital that gets federal funding, which is almost all of them, they can't deny a partner from being able to have access to their-- their-- their partner who's ill or making the call on whether or not they-- you know-- it's just-- this is evolving.

And by the way, my measure, David, and I take a look at when things really begin to change, is when the social culture changes. I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody's ever done so far. And I think-- people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning to understand. They're beginning to understand that this as a base--

I-- I was with-- speaking to a group of gay leaders in-- in Los Angeles-- la-- two, two weeks ago. And one gentleman looked at me in the question period and said, "Let me ask you, how do you feel about us?" And I had just walked into the back door of this gay couple and they're with their two adopted children. And I turned to the man who owned the house. I said, "What did I do when I walked in?" He said, "You walked right to my children. They were seven and five, giving you flowers." And I said, "I wish every American could see the look of love those kids had in their eyes for you guys. And they wouldn't have any doubt about what this is about."  (Transcript of Meet the Press, National Broadcasting Company, Sunday, May 6, 2012.)

There is no rational foundation for Joseph Alois Ratzinger to “wonder” about PINO Biden’s deep and abiding personal commitment to the “rights” of those engaged in every kind of moral perversity imaginable, including the mutilation of one’s own body by chemical and surgical means to “transition” into the opposite gender, something that is an ontological impossibility, no less a biological travesty.

Indeed, PINO Biden’s nominee to serve as the Assistant Secretary of the United States Health of Human Services, Richard Levine, believes himself to be “Rachel” Levine even though a photograph of him shows that he is clearly a man wearing some kind of wig worthy of a Milton Berle or a Flip Wilson sketch. If confirmed, Mr. Levine will serve under a Catholic, Xavier Becerra, the former Attorney General of California, who picked up the baton given him by his predecessor, President in Real Time (PIRT) Kamala Harris, herself a virulent anti-Catholic, in prosecuting the Centers for Medical Research for its undercover journalism to expose Planned Barrenhood’s practice of selling the body parts of babies butchered at their slaughterhouses. Biden’s abiding commitment to perversity is such that he has declared his support for legislation introduced into the United States House of Representatives to require scholastic athletic teams to permit those who “identify” themselves as belonging to the gender opposite of the one God gave them to compete with those of the opposite gender:

In his first month in office, Mr. Biden revoked the Mexico City policy banning foreign aid for abortions abroad; cheered the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and named pro-choice crusader California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Mr. Biden has also thrown his support behind the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation — and exempt itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — with implications for faith-based employers, medical providers and women’s sports. (Ratzinger is "Uneasy" with President in Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden's adherence to the Democratic Party pro-abortion agenda.)

This is mentally ill. It is insane.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is an apostate. Then again, so is the nonagenarian New Theologian from Bavaria, a man who is as incapable of recognizing apostasy in others as he is in himself and those he has taught and cultivated throughout the past seventy years.

Well, time does not permit me to add to this laundry list.

Suffice it for the moment to note yet again that it is impossible to realize justice and concord in temporal affairs when one supports that which is repugnant to the peace and happiness of eternity as the state of nations depends, quite simply, on the state of souls:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, as quoted by Pope Pius XI inDivini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

God the Holy Ghost saw fit to instruct us in Sacred Scripture, including in the passage from the Book of Proverbs:

[34] Justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable. (Proverbs 14: 34.)

Christ the King will not be mocked. He will suffer the sins of men so that they and their nations might be brought to repentance. He is not, however, indifferent that which Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross, sin, and that wounds the Church Militant on earth and impedes the pursuit of the true common temporal good of men and their nations.

As Pope Pius XI noted in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1929:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 30, 1930.)

Clarity is not something you will find from the pen or the mouth of Joseph Alois Ratzinger, but the work of Christ or Chaos, now in its twenty-fifth year as a printed journal (1996-2004) and online publication (2004-present) has tried to provide readers.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is not an observant Catholic and neither is Joseph Alois Ratzinger.

On the Feast of Saint Casimir

Today, Thursday, March 4, 2021, is the semi-double feast of Saint Casimir, a Prince of Poland who cared not for the luxuries of regal life but preferred to life his short life in the odor of sanctity characterized by austere penances and mortifications that are unknown to anyone, including Catholics, in public life today no matter whether they belong to the organized crime family of the naturalist “left” or of the naturalist “right.” Saint Casimir sought to please God, not men, and he considered himself a great sinner even though all around him knew that he was ever scaling the heights of personal sanctity.

Dom Prosper Gueranger described our Saint as follows:

It is from a Court that we are to be taught today the most heroic virtues. Casimir is a Prince; he is surrounded by all the allurements of youth and luxury; and yet he passes through the snares of the world with as much safety and prudence as though he were an Angel in human form. His example shows us what we may do. The world has not smiled on us as it did on Casimir; but how much we have loved it! If we have gone so far as to make it our idol, we must now break what we have adored, and give our service to the Sovereign Lord, who alone has a right to it. When we read the Lives of the Saints, and find that persons who were in the ordinary walk of life, practiced extraordinary virtues, we are inclined to think that they were not exposed to great temptations, or that the misfortunes they met in the world made them give themselves up unreservedly to God’s service. Such interpretations of the actions of the Saints are shallow and false, for they ignore this great fact—that there is no condition or state, however humble, in which man has not to combat against the evil inclinations of his heart, and that corrupt nature alone is strong enough to lead him to sin. But in such a Saint as Casimir, we have no difficulty in recognizing that all his Christian energy was from God, and not from any natural source; and we rightly conclude that we, who have the same good God, may well hope that this Season of spiritual regeneration will change and better us. Casimir preferred death to sin.

But is not every Christian bound to be thus minded every hour of the day? And yet such is the infatuation produced by the pleasures or advantages of this present life that we, every day, see men plunging themselves into sin, which is the death of the soul; and this, not for the sake of saving the life of the body, but for a vile and transient gratification, which is oftentimes contrary to their temporal interests. What stronger proof could there be than this, of the sad effects produced in us by Original Sin? The examples of the Saints are given us as a light to lead us in the right path: let us follow it, and we shall be saved. Besides, we have a powerful aid in their merits and intercession: let us take courage at the thought that these Friends of God have a most affectionate compassion for us their Brethren, who are surrounded by so many and great dangers.

The Church, in her Liturgy, thus describes to us the virtues of our young Prince:

Casimir was the son of Casimir, king of Poland, and of Elizabeth of Austria. He was put, when quite a boy, under the care of the best masters, who trained him to piety and learning. He brought his body into subjection by wearing a hair-shirt, and by frequent fasting. He could not endure the soft bed which is given to kings, but lay on the hard floor, and during the night, he used privately to steal from his room, and go to the Church, where, prostrate before the door, he besought God to have mercy on him. The Passion of Christ was his favorite subject of meditation; and when he assisted at Mass, his mind was so fixed on God that he seemed to be in one long ecstasy.

Great was his zeal for the propagation of the Catholic faith, and the suppression of the Russian schism. Her persuaded the king, his father, to pass a law, forbidding the schismatics to build new churches, or to repair those which had fallen to ruin. Such was his charity for the poor and all sufferers, that he went under the name of the Father and Defender of the Poor. During his last illness, he nobly evinced his love of purity, which virtue he had maintained unsullied during his whole life. He was suffering a cruel malady; but he courageously preferred to die, rather than suffer the loss, whereby his physicians advised him to purchase his cure—the loss of his priceless treasure.

Being made perfect in a short space of time, and rich in virtue and merit, after having foretold the day of his death, he breathed forth his soul into the hands of his God, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, surrounded by Priests and Religious. His body was taken to Vilna, and was honored by many miracles. A young girl was raised to life at his shrine; the blind recovered their sight, the lame the use of their limbs, and the sick their health. He appeared to a small army of Lithuanians, who were unexpectedly attacked by a large force, and gave them the victory over the enemy. Leo the Tenth was induced by all these miracles to insert his name among the Saints. (Matins, The Feast of Saint Casimir, as founded in The Liturgical Year.)

Enjoy thy well-earned rest in heaven, O Casimir! Neither the world with all its riches, nor the court with all its pleasures, could distract thy heart from the eternal joys it alone coveted and loved. Thy life was short, but full of merit. The remembrance of heaven made thee forget the earth. God yielded to the impatience of thy desire to be with him, and took thee speedily from among men. Thy life, though most innocent, was one of penance, for knowing the evil tendencies of corrupt nature, thou hadst a dread of a life of comfort. When shall we be made to understand that penance is a debt we owe to God—a debt of expiation for the sins we have committed against him? Thou didst prefer death to sin; get us a fear of sin, that greatest of all the evils that can befall us, because it is an evil which strikes at God himself. Pray for us during this holy Season, which is granted us that we may do penance. The Christian world is honoring thee today; repay its homage by thy blessing. Poland, thy fatherland, is in mourning; comfort her. She was once the bulwark of the Church, and kept back the invasion of schism, heresy, and infidelity; and now she is crushed by tyrants who seek to rob her of her faith—pray for her that she may be freed from her oppressors and, by regaining her ancient zeal for the faith, be preserved from the apostasy into which her enemies are seeking to drive her. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year.)

We hath not the likes of Saint Casimir today. However, we can pray to our Saint for the day in which a true pope will be restored to the Throne of Saint Peter and thus fulfill Our Lady’s Fatima Message for the proper, collegial consecration of Russia, whose conversion was very important to Saint Casimir, back to the true Church, to her Immaculate Heart and thus for the cessation of the spread of the errors that have helped to produce the twin nightmares of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, of which Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Joseph Alois Ratzinger, respectively, exemplars par excellence.

May every Rosary we pray, especially during this holy season of Lent, help us to die to self so that we, vivified by the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour’s Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, may conquer the infernal enemy of our own salvation and thus be an instrument, no matter how insignificant in human terms, of restoring a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter and restoring the Social Reign of Christ the King and Our Lady, she who is Our Immaculate Queen.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Casimir, pray for us.

Pope Saint Lucius I, pray for us.