Persecution in the Beginning, Persecution Now

Although the persecution of Catholics since Pentecost Sunday has been discussed many times on this site, including most recently in Believing Catholics Pose No Threat to a Just Social Order, it is useful to discuss, if ever so briefly, the fact that the current reign of terror against Catholics within the so-called “civilized West” that has been unleashed by the combined forces of deep state apparatchiks and fascists of various types (educational, medical, pharmaceutical, corporate, financial, insurance, legal, judicial, political, “entertainment,” Big Media, Big Tech, nongovernmental actors—World Economic Forum, Soros Foundation, etc.) is nothing other than a complete ape of that which began with the Jewish persecution of Catholics soon after Pentecost Sunday and by the authorities of the Roman Empire in episodes of various ferocity between Nero’s persecutions in 67 A.D. and the time of the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D.

It is interesting to note that some Jews in the Diaspora, eager to curry favor with Roman authorities, became cooperators in the Roman persecution of Catholics in the first three centuries of the Church even though they themselves had been driven out of the Holy Land by the Romans in 70 A.D. after Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had granted them a thirty-seven year period of mercy so that they might respond to the preaching of the Apostles and their successors, and it has ever been such since then, including the open persecution of Christians by Jews in the Zionist State of Israel at this very time which has not aroused the ire of any so-called “conservative” in public life here in the United States of America:

JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land has warned in an interview that the rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has made life worse for Christians in the birthplace of Christianity.

The influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, told The Associated Press that the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community has come under increasing attack, with the most right-wing government in Israel’s history emboldening extremists who have harassed clergy and vandalized religious property at a quickening pace.

The uptick in anti-Christian incidents comes as the Israeli settler movement, galvanized by its allies in government, appears to have seized the moment to expand its enterprise in the contested capital.

“The frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new,” Pizzaballa said during Easter week from his office, tucked in the limestone passageways of the Old City’s Christian Quarter. “These people feel they are protected … that the cultural and political atmosphere now can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.”

Pizzaballa’s concerns appear to undercut Israel’s stated commitment to freedom of worship, enshrined in the declaration that marked its founding 75 years ago. The Israeli government stressed it prioritizes religious freedom and relations with the churches, which have powerful links abroad.

“Israel’s commitment to freedom of religion has been important to us forever,” said Tania Berg-Rafaeli, the director of the world religions department at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “It’s the case for all religions and all minorities that have free access to holy sites.”

But Christians say they feel authorities don’t protect their sites from targeted attacks. And tensions have surged after an Israeli police raid on the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque compound set off outrage among Muslims, and a regional confrontation last week.

For Christians, Jerusalem is where Jesus was crucified and resurrected. For Jews, it’s the ancient capital, home to two biblical Jewish temples. For Muslims, it’s where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

The scorn heaped upon minority Christians is nothing new in the teeming Old City, a crucible of tension that the Israeli government annexed in 1967. Many Christians feel squeezed between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians.

But now Netanyahu’s far-right government includes settler leaders in key roles — such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who holds criminal convictions from 2007 for incitement of anti-Arab racism and support for a Jewish militant group.

Their influence has empowered Israeli settlers seeking to entrench Jewish control of the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, alarming church leaders who see such efforts — including government plans to create a national park on the Mount of Olives — as a threat to the Christian presence in the holy city. Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state.

“The right-wing elements are out to Judaize the Old City and the other lands, and we feel nothing is holding them back now,” said Father Don Binder, a pastor at St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem. “Churches have been the major stumbling block.”

The roughly 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today, the majority of them Palestinians, were once 27,000 — before hardships that followed the 1967 Mideast war spurred many in the traditionally prosperous group to emigrate.

Now, 2023 is shaping up to be the worst year for Christians in a decade, according to Yusef Daher from the Inter-Church Center, a group that coordinates between the denominations.

Physical assaults and harassment of clergy often go unreported, the center said. It has documented at least seven serious cases of vandalism of church properties from January to mid-March — a sharp increase from six anti-Christian cases recorded in all of 2022. Church leaders blame Israeli extremists for most of the incidents, and say they fear an even greater surge.

“This escalation will bring more and more violence,” Pizzaballa said. “It will create a situation that will be very difficult to correct.”

In March, a pair of Israelis burst into the basilica beside the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Virgin Mary is said to have been buried. They pounced on a priest with a metal rod before being arrested.

In February, a religious American Jew yanked a 10-foot rendering of Christ from its pedestal and smashed it onto the floor, striking its face with a hammer a dozen times at the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, along which it’s believed Jesus hauled his cross toward his crucifixion. “No idols in the holy city of Jerusalem!” he yelled.

Armenians found hateful graffiti on the walls of their convent. Priests of all denominations say they’ve been stalked, spat on and beaten during their walks to church. In January, religious Jews knocked over and vandalized 30 graves marked with stone crosses at a historic Christian cemetery in the city. Two teenagers were arrested and charged with causing damage and insulting religion.

But Christians allege that Israeli police haven’t taken most attacks seriously. In one case, 25-year-old George Kahkejian said he was the one beaten, arrested and detained for 17 hours after a mob of Jewish settlers scaled his Armenian Christian convent to tear down its flag earlier this year. The police had no immediate comment.

“We see that most incidents in our quarter have gone unpunished,” complained Father Aghan Gogchian, chancellor of the Armenian Patriarchate. He expressed disappointment with how authorities frequently insist cases of desecration and harassment hinge not on religious hatred but on mental illness.

The Israeli police said they have “thoroughly investigated (incidents) regardless of background or religion” and made “speedy arrests.” The Jerusalem municipality is boosting security at upcoming Orthodox Easter processions and creating a new police department to handle religiously motivated threats, said Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.

Most top Israeli officials have stayed quiet on the vandalism, while government moves — including the introduction of a law criminalizing Christian proselytizing and the promotion of plans to turn the Mount of Olives into a national park — have stoked outrage in the Holy Land and beyond.

Netanyahu vowed to block the bill from moving forward, following pressure from outraged evangelical Christians in the United States. Among the strongest backers of Israel, evangelicals view a Jewish state as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.

Meanwhile Jerusalem officials confirmed that they’re pressing on with the contentious zoning plan for the Mount of Olives — a holy pilgrimage site with some dozen historic churches. Christian leaders fear the park could stem their growth and encroach on their lands. Jewish settlements home to over 200,000 Israelis already encircle the Old City.

The Israeli National Parks Authority promised buy-in from churches and said it hopes the park will “preserve valuable areas as open areas.”

Pizzaballa pushed back. “It’s a kind of confiscation,” he said.

Simmering tensions in the community came to a head over Orthodox Easter rituals as Israeli police announced strict quotas on the thousands of pilgrims seeking to attend the rite of the “Holy Fire” at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Citing safety concerns over lit torches being thrust through massive crowds in the church, authorities capped Saturday’s ceremony at 1,800 people. Priests who saw police open gates wide for Jews celebrating Passover, which coincided this year with Easter, alleged religious discrimination on Wednesday.

These days, Bishop Sani Ibrahim Azar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jerusalem said he struggles for answers when his congregants ask why they should even bear the bitter price of living in the Holy Land.

“There are things that make us worry about our very existence,” he said. “But without hope, more and more of us will leave.”  (Holy Land Christians say attacks rising in far-right Israel.)

Ah, yes, “things” have changed because of the “Second” Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate, October 28, 1965, right?

Wrong.

It is the same now as it was in the beginning of Holy Mother Church, and the situation in Israel has parallels right here in the “free” and “tolerant” United States of America:  

The adversary’s minions are many within the annals of governmental and nongovernmental power today, and they are getting so bold as to be more and more open about their plans to place “assets” within what is believed to be the structures of the Catholic Church, which was indeed infiltrated by Communist and Judeo-Masonic assets throughout the Twentieth Century, an infiltration that paved the way for the “Second” Vatican Council, to ferret out “extremists” (white nationalists, white supremacists, Latin Mass extremists, anti-abortion and anti-lavender “zealots):

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) allegedly used an undercover agent to target the clergy and leadership of the Catholic Church, according to GOP Representative Jim Jordan.
• Jordan issued a subpoena to FBI Director Christopher Wray related to his committee's investigation into the FBI's alleged targeting of Catholic parishioners.
• The Republican said that enlisting clergy to monitor their parishes prevents Americans who attend church from being able to exercise their First Amendment rights.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) allegedly used an undercover agent to target the clergy and leadership of the Catholic Church, according to GOP Representative Jim Jordan.

On Monday, Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray alerting Wray that he was being subpoenaed for an investigation into the agency's handling of a domestic extremism analysis that proposed developing sources among church leaders to look for signs of radicalization among Catholic parishioners.

The subpoena is the latest development in Jordan's probe into the FBI's alleged misuse of domestic violent extremism resources. House Republicans first accused Wray of exploiting those resources for "political purposes" after an eight-paged internal memo was leaked by a former special agent.

The FBI told Newsweek in a statement that the agency received the subpoena and that it "remains fully committed to cooperating with Congress's oversight requests consistent with its constitutional and statutory responsibilities."

"The FBI is actively working to respond to congressional requests for information –including voluntary production of documents," the agency said on Monday.

Back in February, former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin leaked a memo that revealed plans to spy on a Catholic denomination in Richmond, Virginia, as part of an effort to protect people from the threat of white supremacy—a threat that the FBI believed to have "found a home within Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass."

The FBI issued a statement last month and has said the memo "does not meet the exacting standards" of the agency and that headquarters have removed it from the system upon learning of the document. The matter is currently undergoing internal review.

In his March 8 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wray described being "aghast" by the memo and said his agency does not "conduct investigations based on religious affiliation or practices, full stop."

Christopher Dunham, the acting assistant director of Congressional Affairs, also said in a March 23 statement, "The FBI is not anti-Catholic in any way, shape, or form, and does not target people of any faith because of their religious beliefs."

Attorneys general from 19 Republican-led states have also penned a letter to Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland condemning the memo and asking for additional information.

In Monday's letter, Jordan said that "based on the limited information produced by the FBI to the Committee," documents from the agency show that Catholic houses of worship were enlisted as sources to help monitor and report on parishioners.

Jordan said that engaging in such outreach prevents Americans who attend church from being able to exercise their First Amendment rights "without worrying that the FBI may have planted so-called 'tripwire' sources or other informants in the house of worship."

"The FBI purported to categorize Catholic Americans based on theological distinctions and relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center to suggest that certain kinds of Catholic Americans may be domestic terrorists," Jordan said.

"This shocking information reinforces our need for all responsible documents, and the Committee is issuing a subpoena to you to compel your full cooperation," the Republican wrote to the agency's director. (FBI Used Undercover Agent to Target Catholic Church.)

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has issued a subpoena to FBI Director Christopher Wray for records as part of a probe into the bureau's handling of an FBI field analysis that proposed further developing sources within a group of traditionalist Catholic chapels in Richmond, Va., to look for signs of radicalization and burgeoning domestic violent extremism.

The committee's chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan, of Ohio, accused the FBI of undertaking "domestic violent extremism investigations against Catholic Americans," according to a letter reviewed by CBS News.

Jordan said of information provided to the committee previously regarding the the Jan. 23 analysis that it showed the FBI had "relied on at least one undercover agent to produce its analysis" and that the bureau proposed "that its agents engage in outreach to Catholic parishes to develop sources among the clergy and church leadership to inform on Americans practicing their faith."

Jordan writes that "based on the limited information produced by the FBI to the committee, we now know that the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to produce its analysis, and that the FBI proposed that its agents engage in outreach to Catholic parishes to develop sources among the clergy and church leadership to inform on Americans practicing their faith."

When the bureau was contacted about the FBI assessment earlier this year, Christopher Dunham, Acting Assistant Director of Congressional Affairs responded on March 23 that the "Domain Perspective (report) did not meet the FBI's exacting standards and was withdrawn," adding, "Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters removed it from our internal system.  The FBI also initiated a review — which is now ongoing."

Dunham also stressed that "the FBI is not anti-Catholic in any way, shape, or form, and does not target people of any faith because of their religious beliefs." And he told Jordan that the FBI "does not categorize investigations as domestic terrorism based on the religious beliefs—to include Catholicism—of the subject involved."

According to heavily redacted records reviewed by CBS News, the FBI report was initially approved by multiple FBI supervisors, including a top lawyer at the Richmond field office. The report cited information gathered from an "FBI UCE '' which is an acronym for an undercover employee. In another section labeled "Opportunities," the report advised using "Requests for Collection to leverage existing sources and/or initiate Type 5 Assessments to develop new sources."

The GOP-led committee said the FBI report reinforced the committee's need for "all FBI material responsive to our request" and the FBI director's cooperation by April 28. Jordan wrote, "Although the FBI claims to have 'numerous' and 'rigorous' policies to protect First Amendment rights, the FBI's Richmond document plainly undercuts these assertions. "

CBS News contacted The Society for Saint Pius X for comment, but there was no immediate response.

The FBI has received the committee's subpoena and said it is fully committed to cooperating with "congressional oversight requests consistent with its constitutional and statutory responsibilities." 

A spokesperson for the bureau also pointed out that when Wray was asked about the field report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in early March, he said he was "aghast." He told the committee that the bureau had "immediately" withdrawn it and said of the analysis that "it does not reflect FBI standards."

"We do not and will not target people for religious beliefs, and we do not and will not monitor people's religious practices," Wray told the panel on March 8. "That's not acceptable." (House Judiciary Committee subpoenas FBI Director Christopher Wray over Catholic churches field report.)

Although not the focus  of this commentary, I had wondered about the removal of that he Society of Saint Pius X from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) infamous “hate group” for some time now even before the revelation two months ago that the Richmond, Virginia, field office of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had circulated a memorandum using the SPLC “hate group” list, which, of course, includes this website, as a basis for infiltrating Catholic churches and chapels. There is much about the Society of Saint Pius X that is mystifying over and above its false Gallican ecclesiology, but it sure does appear that the contention made by many over the decades that it has been a “controlled opposition” to conciliarism may indeed have more merit that those who hear Holy Mass in their chapels may want to recognize or admit.

To the point of this commentary, though, the plain fact of the matter that the rank totalitarianism that is upon is the direct result of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the subsequent rise of Judeo-Masonry upon Protestantism’s ruins, something that William Thomas Walsh pointed out in Characters of the Inquisition:

(1) The isolation of the human soul from God. The indifference and godlessness of our day are directly traceable to the triumph of Manicheanism under the guise of Sixteenth Century Protestantism. Many thoughtful Protestants are now beginning to see that the Revolt inflicted a ghastly wound upon Christianity without adding anything to it. Such positive Christian elements as the Reformers taught were already in Catholicism. As for the aberrations – Luther's doctrine of grace, Calvin's predestination – how many who call themselves Protestants today believe in the divinity of Christ; a Methodist will say he believes in the existence of some vague Life Force, not a personal God. With each generation the descendants of the men and women who were led from the Catholic fold by plausible reformers promising them primitive Christianity, become less and less concerned with any religion, and more the prey of Communism, Fascism or some other panacea with new false hopes of creating something permanently good on the frail structure of human nature alone. These will not even listen to the ancient wisdom of the Catholic Church; as Mr. Chesterton wrote somewhere, “They are tired of hearing what they have never heard.”

(2) Moral confusion and nihilism. There is and can be no objective and eternal standard of conduct, except that of Christ, as interpreted by His Church. All the old sins and follies that the Church began to drive into exterior darkness two thousand years ago, have come back to destroy the peace of individuals and the harmony of society. Divorce is destroying the family, murder the individual. The free love of the Beghards and the Alumbrados is corrupting the young. What is the prevalent craze for self-destruction but a manifestation of the old Manichean despair of life? And what is the fatal race-suicide known euphemistically as “birth control” but the old nastiness of the Manichees, born of cowardice, sensuality, distrust of life itself and the Author of life? Usury, which the medieval schoolmen called theft, and capitalism, which in its reprehensible form they identified as one of the seven deadly sins (greed), are defended by dull college professors in the name of economic law; while the enslaved masses everywhere pay tribute to the modern Mammon.

(3) Intellectual confusion. The Catholic Church speaks with authority in our world in defense of the human reason against a thousand sophistries having their origin in obscure feelings or prejudices. It has become the fashion in certain academic circles to speak disdainfully of logic itself, and of the law of cause and effect, as if these were relics of medieval barbarism. It was not merely a coincidence that a Manichean thought, or rather feeling has appeared extensively in our literature, and in some of the best of it, wherever the Protestant Revolt has prepared for the return of darkness and slavery. Consider the Manichean attitudes in some of Thomas Hardy's work – especially in Jude the Obscure, in The Return of the Native, and in that frightful sneer at the end of Tess; in Ibsen's Master Builder and Hedda Gabler; in Shelley's Defense of Poetry; in the Autobiography of Mark Twain; in such plays as the Piper of Josephine Preston Peabody, The Scarecrow of Percy Mackaye, and a great deal of O'Neill's work; even in that calm Victorian, Tennyson, who puts into the mouth of a Catholic King a sentiment that would have set Bernard Gui on the trail of any Albigensian:

“For why is all around us here,

As if some lesser god has made the world,

but had not force to make it as he would,

Until the High God enter from beyond . . .?”

Not to press the point too far – for some liberty must be allowed the facies of poets! – this and much more that could be mentioned is clearly symptomatic of the sickness which afflicts a world which will not turn to Christ.

(4) Totalitarianism. Is not the present evolution of government a retrogression toward heresies that the medieval Inquisitors combatted with all their might? Communism, first propagated by the Freemasons on the ruins of Protestantism, finally set up in Russia the absolute state which the Fraticelli had invoked (in so far as the state of science and communications would permit them to envisage it): it was a perversion also of their concept of primitive Christianity, without private property. The Nazi State, set up partly in imitation of Mussolini's Fascism, as a natural reaction to Communism, had also another parentage. The ideal of the omnipotent absolute state, for whose sake the individual exists, was expressed in very similar terms on behalf of Kaiserism by Bernhardi, in 1911; and Bernhadi's teacher was Treitchke, who in turn acknowledged his indebtedness to Martin Luther. (I have developed this idea further in an article published in The Sign, with quotations from Luther and others, in February, 1940.) Thus in two different directions we trace the origins of the Totalitarian State, toward which, by imitation or reaction, the governments of the whole world are tending, to breaches made by medieval heretics in the walls of the City of God, in despite of the watchdogs of the Inquisition.

The list could be extended. All the evils that the Inquisition sought to repress, and did in great measure repress, have returned to the modern world, grown great and ravening, to feed upon our children. What then of the evils incidental to the Inquisition itself – torture, loss of liberty and even life, occasional deceit and hypocracy? Are we better in those regards? Can anyone think of the torture cells maintained by the Reds in Spain in 1936-7 to drive their victims mad, (the cells constructed by the “Loyalist” Reds “were described as hollow cement blocks four feet height and containing a cement chair and bed, built in a slanting position so that it was impossible for a prisoner to sit or lie down for more than a minute at a time. Raised cement blocks were arranged in a crazy-quilt fashion on the floor to prevent prisoners from standing up. The prosecutor (in the Cik trial) charged that the Loyalists placed rings in the eyelids of prisoners to keep them open in the glare of powerful lights.  Some of the witnesses testified that the prisoners were denied food and water and were flogged, sometimes while suspended head down from the ceiling or while cold water was showered upon them. Witnesses said the cells were pained with hundreds of yellow spots, broad black lines and scores of black and white cubes.” –  Associated Press, dispatch from Barcelona, June 13, 1939, published in the New York Sun and other newspapers, Torquemada would have shrunk from the very idea of such diabolical ingenuity.) of the unspeakable butcheries of civilians and priests by both Germans and Russians in Poland in 1939, of the unrestrained villainy of modern warfare, of all our nightmare of hypocrisy, abortion, child-suicide, unpunished murder, and what is worse even that all these monstrosities, disdain for the Deity Himself, without wondering whether we have really progressed to a point where we can look patronizingly upon the memory of a Torquemada?

All the worst miseries which men everywhere endure today, while they begin “withering away for fear and expectations of what shall come? – famine and pestilence and civil wars whose shadows may already be discerned on the dim walls of the futre – all these have been foretold by the Popes of modern tomes, on after another pointing out the causes that must lead to such effects, and pleading with mankind to turn away from them to the only possible remedy, held forth by Christ in the Catholic Church. Against all the progressive steps in the disintegration of the European Order, from the Manichees to the Communists and other state worshippers, The Vicars of Christ have uttered solemn and deliberate warnings, based upon ample information. Very soon after the reorganization of the Freemasonry by the Grand Lodge of England, in Spain, the situation was clearly seen at Rome; and in 1738, Pope Clement XII uttered the first formal denunciation of this particular heresy, this oriental dissolvent in modern guise. “If they were not doing evil, they would not fear the light,” he said of all societies, without any exception, of the Masonic type or affiliation. He forbade Catholics to join them, favor, support, shelter, or defend them in any way, or even to receive the members into their homes. Any Catholic so doing was excommunicated by the very fact, and the ban could be removed only by the Pope himself, save in the danger of death. This, as we have seen, did not deter vain, ambitious or stupid Catholics, even among the clergy here and there, from being drawn into an organization which pretended to be social and philanthropic, and masked its real aims and nature from all its neophytes, from all except a few initiates. The Popes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries continued to raise their voices against the stealthy advances of this mystery of iniquity. Pius XII accused the Freemasons of being the chief causes of the revolutionary upheavals (antichristian in their direction) of Europe. Gregory XVI said they were guilty of sacrilege, infamy and blasphemy, and promoted heresy and revolution. Pius IX applied to them the words that Christ addressed to the scribes and pharisees who sought His destruction, “You are of your father the devil, and the works of your father you will do.” He called them the wolves in sheep's clothing against whom Our Lord and the Apostles had warned the first Christians. In another letter he referred to them as “the Synagogue of Satan . . . whose object is to blot out the Church of  Christ, were it possible from the face of the Universe.” Renewing the condemnations of his predecessors, he explicitly included Freemasons in America “and in whatever part of the world they may be.”

Pope Leo XIII warned the world that Freemasonry was the real source and center of Communist and Atheist propaganda. “In this insane and wicked endeavor,” he wrote, “we may almost see the implacable hatred and spirit of revenge with which Satan himself is inflamed against Jesus Christ.” In that same magnificent encyclical he cried out to all Catholics, laymen as well as priests, to “tear the mask off the face? Of the hidden menace. If not, he said, “the ruin and overthrow of all things must necessarily follow.: (Encyclical, Humanum genus, 1884.)

This tremendous prophecy, deliberately uttered by the Vicar of Christ, and now being fulfilled with terrible literalness as the flimsy structure built of the sands of the great apostacy of the Sixteenth Century comes crashing down about us, has of course been generally disregarded by the world, as the prophecies of Christ were disregarded. Other profound observations from Leo and his successors have met the same characteristically Christian fate; nevertheless they remain as truth.

It was Pius XI who pointed out the close spiritual affinity of Liberalism and Socialism, even when they waged a sham battle across the arena of the world. “Let us bear in mind,” he wrote in Quadragesimo Anno, “that the parent of this cultural Socialism was Liberalism, and that its offspring will be Bolshevism.” He had no more regard for one of these antichristian aberrations than for the other. Liberalism, he said, had shown as early as 1891 “its utter impotence to find a right solution of the social question,” while Socialism “would have exposed human society to still graver dangers by offering a remedy much more disastrous than the evil it designed to cure.” (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931)

This great Pope remarked that since the time of Leo XIII the “capitalistic economic regime” had “penetrated everywhere”; and that:

“It is patent that in our days not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few, and that those few are frequently not the owners, but only the trustees and directors of invested funds, who administer them at their good pleasure. This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercises by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will. This accumulation of power, the characteristic note of the modern economic order, is a natural result of limitless free competition which permits the survival of those only who are the strongest, which often means those who fight most relentlessly, who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience. This concentration of power has led to a threefold struggle for domination. First, there is the struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere itself; then, the fierce battle to acquire control of the state, so that its resources and authority may be abused in the economic struggles. Finally, the clash between states themselves. . .  The state, which should be the supreme arbiter, ruling in kingly fashion far above all party contention, intent only upon justice and the common good, has become instead a slave, bound over to the service of human passion and greed.” (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931)

Elsewhere, of course, Pius condemned the totalitarian theory which, reacting against the evil here described, rushed to the opposite extreme, and erroneously hald that the individual existed for the benefit of the state. None of these panaceas could reach the center of the disorder; they were all, inf fact, so many forms of Socialism, one fighting the other, but all tending toward a common end. With characteristic acuteness, Pius noticed that since the time of Leo XIII Socialism had broken up into various forms, of which he condemned even the most moderate.

“The question arises, or is unwarrantably proposed in certain quarters, whether the principles of Christian truth also could not be somewhat moderated and attenuated, so as to meet Socialism, as it were, halfway upon a common ground. Some are engaged by the empty hope of gaining Socialists in this way to our cause. But such hope are vain. Those who wish to be apostles among the Socialists should preach the Christian truth whole and entire, openly and sincerely, without any connivance with error. If they wish in truth to be heralds of the Gospel, let them convince Socialists that their demands, in so far as they are just, are defended much more cogently by the principles of Christian faith, and are promoted much more efficaciously by the power of Christian charity . . . Whether Socialism be considered as a doctrine or as an historical fact, or as a movement, if it really remain socialism, it cannot be brought into harmony with the dogmas of the Catholic Church, even after it has yielded to truth and justice in the points. We have mentioned; the reason being that it conceives human society in a way utterly alien to Christian truth.

“According to Christian doctrine, Man, endowed with a social nature, is place here on earth in order that he may spend his life in society, and under authority ordained by God, that he may develop and evolve to the full all his faculties to the praise and glory of his Creator; and that, by fulfilling faithfully the duties of his station, he may attain to temporal and eternal happiness. Socialism, on the contrary, entirely ignorant of or unconcerned about his sublime end both of individuals and of society, affirms that living in community was instituted merely for the sake of advantages which it brings to mankind. Goods are produced more efficiently by a suitable distribution of labor than by the scattered efforts of individuals. Hence the Socialist argue that economic production, of which they see only the material side, must necessarily be carried on collectively, and that because of this necessity men must surrender and submit themselves wholly to society with a view to the production of wealth. Indeed, the possession of the greatest possible amount of temporal goods is esteemed so highly, that man's higher goods, not excepting liberty must, they claim, be subordinated and even sacrificed to the exigencies of efficient production. They affirm that the loss of human dignity, which result from these socialized methods of production, will be easily compensated for by the abundance of good produced in common and accring to the individual who can turn them at his will to the comforts and culture of life. Society, therefore, as the Socialist conceives it, is, on the one hand, impossible and unthinkable without the use of compulsion of the most excessive kind: on the other it fosters a false liberty, since in such a scheme no place if found for true social authority, which is not based on temporal and material advantages, but descends from God alone, the Creator and Last End of all things. If, like all errors, Socialism, contains a certain element of truth (and this founded upon a doctrine of human society peculiarly its own, which is opposed to true Christianity . . . No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist." (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931)

Since Pius XI wrote those words in 1931, the nations of the world generally have taken long steps toward various forms of Socialism which, however different they appeared on first view, are more and more revealing themselves as essentially the same. Communism, the most radical and patently godless form was not too remote ideologically from its pretended rival Nazi-Socialism, to lie down beside it in the same foul nest, when it suited both to beget a second great war. Other nations, loving freedom, have been conquered and drawn into the two Socialist orbits. Still others have imitated Socialist regimes by reaction, or by military necessity. Few have been able to maintain fully the sacredness of human personality. The tiny nations of Portugal and Ireland, both thoroughly Catholic, are glorious exceptions. Of Spain, I have high hopes; may the Catholic spirit of General Franco prevail, and not certain others, very different and very crafty, which still exist in the country and even in high places, hungry for power. England, while fighting Hitler, has kept a friendly hand mysteriously outstretched toward his partner, Stalin; and whatever the outcome of the present war, is likely to emerge from it shackled to some form of Socialism.

Here in the United States Socialism has made more cautious but not the less evident gains. It is rather amusing, and at the same time depressing, to see that likable Socialist Mr. Norman Thomas denouncing both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilkie as champions of peace-time conscription, which he says (and I think rightly) must lead toward dictatorship, and to realize at the same time that both these gentlemen are fundamentally (that is to say spiritually) as Socialistic as he is. If we judge not by what a man says he is or even believes he is, but by the antithesis set up by Pope Pius XI as a test of spirits, this conclusion becomes inescapable. Mr. Roosevelt has tried to save the country by curtailing production. Mr. Wilkie proposes to do it by speeding up curtailing production,  Yet both these Liberals, as they proudly call themselves, are interested primarily in production; in the material, in the things of this world. It is difficult, of course, to see how a politician could wholly free himself from such concerns, and I am not criticising either, or discussing any issues, political or economic, between them – whoever is elected will be entitled to our obedience, under the Constitution, and no doubt, will do his best according to his lights. I would only suggest that neither has the lights necessary to solve the social problem. (It is true that both have spoken reverently in public of Divine Providence; but so, for that matter has Hitler; so have the politicians of every country, except godless Russia.) Not too much must be expected from these well-meaning statesmen. They are children of a Liberalism evolving rapidly into Socialism. Both are high in the ranks of a secret society proscribed and abhorred by the Catholic Church and denounced by Pope Leo XIII as the true source of Socialism and Communism, and the general corruption of European and world society. They are servants of the same invisible masters, to whose obedience they are bound by oaths – masters who may not even be in America, but in Europe or Asia; masters of whose exact identity they may themselves be ignorant. When they speak of “Democracy,” one must remember this background, and the fact that the elastic word has been used by many Liberals to include even the tyranny of Soviet Russia. Can Democracy be anything but a farce among men, when some of them, including the most influential, belong to a secret society whose real aims and principles have been repeatedly disclosed as political and anti-Christian? The French Catholics, in the sad clarifying light of catastrophe, have recently found the answer to this question. As Our Holy Father Pope Pius XII said in welcoming the French Ambassador after the tragedy of last summer, “Like lightening which flashes through heavy clouds, the devastating lights of war . . . have torn from the eyes of all careful and sincere observers that veil of prejudices which for half a century the voice of the Church, and especially the reiterated warnings of the last Popes, Our venerated predecessors, did not succeed in penetrating . . . May the lessons of this bitter period in acts which permit us to hope in the future for a revival of Christian spirit, particularly in the education of youth . . .” and  “the creation of a new Christian order . . . When will this desired hour arrive? God preserves the secret of it; but We beseech Him to hasten its advent.”

All this is part of a universal conflict between the church of Christ and the Prince of This World.  All other conflicts are either subsidiary to this or camouflages for it. Just now there seems to be a deadly strife between international capitalism, intrenched in the United States and gradually leading this country toward a State Socialism or (what amounts to the same thing) toward a State Capitalism, and on the other side, the seemingly more godless and godless forms of Socialism beyond the seas. Yet if Nazi-Socialism and Bolshevism, after so violent a sham battle, could so speedily come to terms, for a purpose convenient to both, what is to prevent this American Socialism, now in the making and already accepted and propagated by the dominant educational forces of this county, from arriving at mutually agreeable arrangements with both the Soviet and the Nazi forms of Socialism, whenever it may suit the real leaders on both sides to do so? Within a generation we have seen our Liberal politicians denounce the Soviet, cultivate friendly relations with it, and denounce it again – this time more coyly. As the world grows smaller in time, may not all the forms of Socialism be gathered together by skilful hands into a World Sate, such as many Masonic writers have advocated, and the League of Nations sought to achieve? It is not only conceivable, but probable; for all forms of Socialism (even if some still call themselves Democracies) will be animated by a single obscure but powerful principle: the worship of the material, which is and always must be the negation of Christianity. Here, then, by a masterly antithesis, Pius XI has cast a strong light upon the shapes of things to come. It is all the more revealing when it shows us only the recurrence upon a larger stage of a deathless drama that happened long ago. Christ still lives in His Mystical Body, the Church, as truly as in the human body he took from Our Lady; and when the time comes for Him to be crucified again in His Church, depend upon it, Pilate and Herod that day will find a way to patch up their differences, some Caiaphas will cry, “Crucify Him! We have no king but Caesar!” and there will always be found some Judas to give the kiss of death.

Admittedly (perhaps my wish is father to this thought) we may by some miracle escape that fate, here in America. Perhaps despite their affiliations, Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Wilkie, as political Catholic admirers of each will tell us, will be led in the right direction by a divine hand. Again, perhaps not. Only the future can reveal this. Meanwhile this much is certain: the United States, in a very few years, will be either a Catholic country (and therefore a free country) or a Socialist country, (and therefore a slave country). “He who is not with Me is against Me.” History demonstrates the unfailing truth of this dilemma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, the United States of America has become a slave state controlled by the same set of forces that the Inquisition sought to eliminate from within Holy Mother Church. This is because the United States of America was founded on false principles, including those of “religious liberty” and “religious indifferentism” that contributed to the rise of counterfeit church of conciliarism, whose very false spirit was being pioneered by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America Frank Murphy and the others, including that nameless priest who taught at the Catholic University of America, described by Mr. Walsh above.

Indeed, William Thomas Walsh explained how the Jews of the Sixteenth Century both instigated Martin Luther’s revolution and then served as its enthusiastic propagandists:

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.)

There is one passage from the selection from Characters of the Inquisition quoted just above that I want to emphasize as it describes precisely what the conciliar revolutionaries have believed and have put into practice as they reconciled themselves to the “world” while disparaging the Social Reign of Christ the King:

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. (William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition.)

This is what the Talmudists believed five centuries ago, and it is what they and their successors, especially those who do not observe any version of contemporary Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Liberal), believe today, which is why the whole of Modernity has been about the eradication of the Holy Name of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and those who dare to profess It openly in public discourse, which is one of the reasons Talmudists believed that the government of the United States of America represented a “new science of politics” based on an absolute indifference to religious matters, thus enabling them to rule the roost, even if from behind closed doors at first, and to call the shots.

Religious indifferentism (the belief that one religion is as good as another and/or that no religion is as good as any religion) was unheard of in any country prior to the founding of the United States of America on religiously principles that are of the essence of Judeo-Masonry regardless of which founders were or were not members of the sect. As Pope Leo XIII pointed out in Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884, one does not have to be a card-carrying member of a Masonic lodge to adhere to Masonic principles, and religious indifferentism is of the essence of Judeo-Masonry.

The Judeo-Masonic spirit insists that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb and His Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross are matters of complete indifference to personal and social order, that men can organize themselves, both individually and collectively in the institutions of civil governance, without any reference to the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord entrusted exclusively to His true Church and without any reliance at all upon Sanctifying Grace to root out personal sins and to grow in holiness. This Judeo-Masonic spirit is not of God. It is of the devil himself as the devil seeks to make belief in Our Lord's Incarnation and Redemptive Act a matter of complete indifference so that men will come to the false and thoroughly Pelagian conclusion that they themselves are more or less self-redemptive, that they can remake the world on their own without the teaching and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church. (This is the foundation of John Locke’s liberalism.)

It is this Judeo-Masonic spirit that has been shared by each of the forty-five men who have served as president of the United States of America, yes, including the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy and, of course, the pro-abort reprobate named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

Although some presidents have been formally enrolled members in Masonic lodges, each has believed in the Judeo-Masonic spirit, each has believed in the lie that the civil state does not need to recognize the true religion and that Holy Mother Church possesses the right, exercised judiciously and only as a last resort following the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to interpose herself with its officials at times when the good of souls demands her motherly intervention. The influence of the Judeo-Masonic spirit in the United States of America thus has been very insidious, convincing even most believing Catholics that it is neither prudent or necessary to even pray for the conversion of our country, which the Natural Law enjoins us to love with a fervent love of filial piety, to the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

The Judeo-Masonic spirit has been insidious in that most people, including most Catholics, are unaware of its influence upon them. This has led some Americanist Catholics, including those who are sedevacantists and those who are in the "resist and recognize" camp, to state that American Masonry is “different” from European Masonry, which attacked the Faith with violence. This is true, but not in the sense that Americanist Catholics would like to believe.

European Masonry had to attack the Faith with violence in once proudly Catholic Europe as the Cross of the Divine Redeemer was implanted so firmly there. This is the same reason that Masonry in Latin America, aided by the funds of Masonic lodges in the nascent United States of America, had to attack the Faith with such violence there in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

There was, however, no need for Masons in the United States of America to attack the Church head on, although there were indeed times when Masons did so, to be sure. Members of Masonic lodges in the United States of America in the late-Eighteenth and then the Nineteenth Centuries knew that many Catholics would be so grateful merely for the opportunity to practice their religion openly here without the overt persecution that had taken place in England and Ireland following the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century that they would come to terms with religious indifferentism and religious liberty and cultural pluralism, the net effect being the neutralization of their Catholicism in the public arena.

To “liberate” men and their nations from sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls after the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching, preaching, and admonition is to enslave them to the devil, who is the ultimate persecutor of faithful Catholics and the quintessential totalitarian who inspires men to ape his hared of the true Faith and to seek its eradication by totalitarian means even in supposedly “free” countries that have always been enslaved to him in one degree or another as a logical consequence of their leaders’ abject rejection of the necessity of pursing the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End and thus to foster those conditions wherein men can better sanctify and save their immortal souls.

Father Edward Cahill pointed this out in his book Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement:

We have already referred to Rationalism and Hermeticism (including Theosophy, Christian Scientism, Spiritism, etc.) as characteristic of the Masonic religion and philosophy, These, which are put forward as a substitute for real religion, are fast becoming more and more widespread in England and throughout the English-speaking world. They are the most powerful dissolvents of whatever elements of true Christianity are being attempted. This element is perhaps the most deadly and dangerous aspect of the whole Masonic movement; for it cuts deeper than anything into Christian life, whose very foundation it attacks.

The immediate aim of the practical policy of Freemasonry is to make its naturalistic principles effective in the lives of the people; and first of all to enforce them in every detail of public life. Hence its political and social programme includes:

(1) The banishment of religion from all departments of government, and from all public institutions; and as a mark of the triumph of this policy, the removal of the Crucifix and all religious emblems from the legislative assemblies, the courts of justice, the public hospitals, the schools and university colleges, etc. (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, published originally by M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., in Dublin, Ireland, 1930, and republished by Kessinger Legacy Reprints, pp. 156-157.)

It is very telling that the conciliar revolutionaries have applauded these “developments” as most of their own colleges and universities have divested themselves of official control of what is purported to be the Catholic Church and have removed the Crucifix and other religious emblems from most of their classrooms. Formerly Catholic hospitals have done the same. Indeed, many of them, participating fully in the medical industry’s manufactured, money-making myth of “brain death”), have merged with secular corporations. And most Catholics in public life are fully supportive of various evils under cover of the civil law, and none of them is reprobated by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who, quite instead, praises those of them that he meets as “servants of the poor.”

To return to Father Cahill’s enumeration of the Judeo-Masonic program:

(2) The secularization of marriage.

(3) The establishment of a State system of so-called education which, at least in its primary stages, will be obligatory and conducted by the laity.

(4) Complete freedom of worship (at least for all except the true one.) (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, published originally by M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., in Dublin, Ireland, 1930, and republished by Kessinger Legacy Reprints, p. 157.)

To the final two points of the Judeo-Masonic program as outlined by Father Edward Cahill:

(5) Unrestrained liberty of the Press even in the propagation of irreligious doctrines and of principles subversive of morality; similar freedom for the stage, the cinema, and all manner of public activities, even when injurious to the public interest, such as the operation of the betting and gambling agencies, the drink traffic, etc.

(6) The elimination of all distinction between the sexes in education and in all departments of public life and the promotion or encouragement of radical feminism.

The same programme usually includes or favours a (so-called) Democratic or Republican form of government, indiscriminate universal suffrage, and the centralization of political and administrative authority in the hands of a bureaucracy. It is opposed on the other hand to all to the national distinctions which are associated with the Christian virtue of patriotism, to the ideal of strongly organized rural communities settled permanently on the land; and finally to the organization of society in classes bound together by ties of common interest and mutual service. Hence its policy tends towards commercialism, a false internationalism and extreme individualism.

It is clear that in a social system organized according to these Masonic ideals, the masses of the people, while nominally free, and in theory the source of all authority in the State, would inevitably become degraded and enslaved. Demoralized by indulgence, deprived of the guidance and help which Christian principles give, isolated and unorganized, mostly bereft of permanent property, having a smattering of literacy, but without real education, they would have little or no power of resistance against the tyranny of bureaucracies or financial combines controlling the Press and the economic life of the country. The substantial freedom, prosperity, and true civilization which accompany or result from the Christian regime would give way to social conditions akin to those of pre-Christian Rome. (Father Edward Cahill, S.J., Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, published originally by M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., in Dublin, Ireland, 1930, and republished by Kessinger Legacy Reprints, pp. 157-159.)

Nothing that I said in college classrooms between 1974 and 2007 (and for a brief time in the Fall of 2014) or in campaigns for public office or in lectures around the nation or wrote in various publications or have written on this site contains an ounce of originality concerning the state of Western civilization as it spirals into the lowest reaches of the abyss possible, making ancient Rome seem truly tame by way of comparison. We have been given the prescient insights of such giants of Catholic scholarship as Fathers Edward Cahill and Denis Fahey in Ireland and defenders of the immutable Catholic doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King as Louis Edouard “Cardinal” Pie, Monsignor Henri Delassus and Father Theotime de Just in France.

Writing in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record ninety-three years ago now, that is, in 1929, the late Father Edward Cahill, S.J., the great champion of the Social Reign of Christ the King who wrote The Framework of the Christian State and was a contemporary of Father Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., provided a good history of the influence of Talmudic influence in Freemasonry.

Father Cahill’s series of articles in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record were subsequently published as a book under the title of Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement.

On March 28, 1928, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office issued an important decision of the Holy See on ‘the nature and purpose of the Association called Friends of Irsael and on the pamphlet entitled Pax super Israel, edited by the directors of the Association. Although ‘many priests, bishops and even cardinal gave their adhesion to this association,’ the Sacred Congregation condemns and completely suppresses it, by reason of ‘its mode of acting and speaking which is out of harmony with the traditional sense of the Church, the mind of the Fathers and even the Sacred liturgy itself.

The secularist Press, which is mostly controlled by the great Jewish financiers, immediately showed its appreciation for the importance of the decree by striving in the decree by striving to misrepresent it as a gesture of disapproval on the part of the Holy See of Catholic anti-masonic writes, whereas the contrary is the case. The decree is an authoritative reassertion of the traditional attitude of the Church towards the Jewish people. The Church desires sincerely the conversion of the Jews to the true Faith. But she cannot compromise with them any more than she can with the Modernists or even with the so-called Anglo-Catholics. Hence, in the present decree, the Holy See takes measures against the Masonic and Jewish infiltrations into the Church, which were being attempted through the medium of the condemned association and pamphlet. On the other hand she also reprobates as contrary to the Christian spirit and teaching Anti-Semitism, properly so-called, just as she reprobates anti-Germanism or any other similar anti-ism that would imply ‘racial or national hatred.’ But to follow the direction of Leo XIII and ‘tear away the mask from Freemasonry and let it be seen as it really is,’ is not anti-Semitism even when Freemasons in question are Jews; and needless to say, the Holy See does not follow the example of the Masonic sectaries in misapplying the term. (Father E. Cahill, S.J., “Freemasonry: VI: The Jewish Element in Freemasonry, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 1929.)

First, Father Cahill pointed out that the Holy Office had suppressed the “Friends of Israel” association because it had a “mode of acting and speaking which is out of harmony with the traditional sense of the Church, the mind of the Fathers and even the Sacred liturgy itself.” Yet it is that the counterfeit church of conciliarism has adopted this very mode of “acting and speaking” in a manner that is “out of harmony with the traditional sense of the Church, the mind of the Fathers and even the Sacred liturgy.” Father Cahill defended Catholic doctrine. The conciliarists promote that which is anti-Christ, placing them in league with the Talmudists, who have long sought to eradicate all mention of the Holy Name of Jesus from public life.

Second, Father Cahill pointed out that the decree of the Holy Office against the Friends of Israel association defended Catholic doctrine concerning the Jews that has been abandoned by the conciliarists, who have termed it “anti-Semitic” even to speak about any necessity of seeking the conversion of the Jews to the true Faith before they die or to oppose their schemes for the further de-Christianization.

Consider the following words once again:

The decree is an authoritative reassertion of the traditional attitude of the Church towards the Jewish people. The Church desires sincerely the conversion of the Jews to the true Faith. But she cannot compromise with them any more than she can with the Modernists or even with the so-called Anglo-Catholics. Hence, in the present decree, the Holy See takes measures against the Masonic and Jewish infiltrations into the Church, which were being attempted through the medium of the condemned association and pamphlet.  (Father E. Cahill, S.J., “Freemasonry: VI: The Jewish Element in Freemasonry, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 1929.)

Have the conciliar “popes” sought the conversion of the Jews?

Indeed, we have been by the likes of conciliar revolutionaries that the Catholic Church has no “organized mission” to convert the Jews, who somehow get “saved” all on their own. Putative “popes” have gone into Talmudic synagogues content to be treated as inferiors as they have treated this false religion with respect and esteemed its symbols that belong to the devil himself (see Saint Peter and Anti-Peter.)

Moreover, the conciliar “popes” have indeed compromised with Talmudism and Anglicanism as they have promoted one Modernist precept after another, something that Father Cahill notes is impossible for the Catholic Church to do of her very Divine Constitution.

Why is it so difficult for those in the “resist while recognize” movement to understand and accept these truths.

Third, Father Cahill’s reminder that it is not anti-Semitic to seek the conversion of the Jews or to oppose the schemes of some of their number to blot out the Holy Name of our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and spit on His Sacred Deposit Faith and His Holy Church herself is very similar to one provided by Father Denis Fahey in 1949, eight years after his, Father Cahill’s, death:

As I was not able to bring out this book when it was originally written, it has been laid aside for years. In the meantime, the need for setting forth the full doctrine of the Kingship of Christ has been forcibly brought home to me by the confusion created in minds owing to the use of the term “Anti-Semitism.” The Hitlerite naturalistic or anti-supernatural régime in Germany gave to the world the odious spectacle of a display of Anti-Semitism, that is, of hatred of the Jewish Nation. Yet all the propaganda about that display of Anti-Semitism should not have made Catholics forget the existence of age-long Jewish Naturalism or Anti-Supernaturalism. Forgetfulness of the disorder of Jewish Naturalistic opposition to Christ the King is keeping Catholics blind to the danger that is arising from the clever extension of the term “Anti-Semitism,” with all its war-connotation in the minds of the unthinking, to include any form of opposition to the Jewish Nation’s naturalistic aims. For the leaders of the Jewish Nation, to stand for the rights of Christ the King is logically to be “anti-Semitic.”

In March, 1917, Pope Benedict XV wrote to the Archbishop of Tours: “In the midst of the present upheavals, it is important to repeat to men that by her divine institution the Catholic Church is the only ark of salvation for the human race . . . . Accordingly, it is more seasonable than ever to teach . . . that the truth which liberates, not only individuals, but societies, is supernatural truth in all its fulness and in all its purity, without attenuation, diminution or compromise: in a word, exactly as Our Lord Jesus Christ delivered it to the world.” These sublime words of the Vicar of Christ have nerved me to do all in my power to set forth the opposition of every form of Naturalism, including Jewish Naturalism, to the supernatural Reign of Christ the King. In addition, for over twenty years I have been offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass every year, on the Feasts of the Resurrection, Corpus Christi, SS. Peter and Paul and the Assumption of Our Blessed Mother, for the acceptance by the Jewish Nation of the Divine Plan for order. Thus I have been striving to follow the example of our Divine Master. Blessed Pius X insists that “though Jesus was kind to those who had gone astray, and to sinners, He did not respect their erroneous convictions, however sincere they appeared to be.”the need of combining firmness in the proclamation of the integral truth with loving charity towards those in error is insisted on, even more emphatically, by Pope Pius XI: “Comprehending and merciful charity towards the erring,” he writes, “and even towards the contemptuous, does not mean and can not mean that you renounce in any way the proclaiming of, the insisting on, and the courageous defence of the truth and its free and unhindered application to the realities about you. The first and obvious duty the priest owes to the world about him is service to the truth, the whole truth, the unmasking and refutation of error in whatever form or disguise it conceals itself.”

A day will come when the Jewish Nation will cease to oppose order and will turn in sorrow and repentance to Him Whom they rejected before Pilate. That will be a glorious triumph for the Immaculate Heart of Our Blessed Mother. Until that day dawns, however, their naturalistic opposition to the True Supernatural Order of the world must be exposed and combated. (Father Denis Fahey, Foreword, The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation.)

It is not to “hate” anyone to seek their unconditional conversion to the true Faith or to oppose their schemes to undermine It and to persecute those who defend It despite their own sins and failings. Indeed, it is a Spiritual Work of Mercy to seek with urgency the unconditional of non-Catholics to the true Faith (see Believing Catholics Pose No Threat to a Just Social Order ). We simply have to beg Our Lady for perseverance during these times when speaking the truth can land one persecuted by the civil state and a variety of the adversary’s minions within the nooks and crannies of what passes for “popular culture” today.

Rest Secure In Our Lady's Loving Embrace

The true victims of the past two millennia have been those Catholics who have been martyred, frequently by the brute power of the civil state, for their steadfast witness to the truths of the Catholic Faith and to the Social Reign of Christ the King. Saint Alphonsus de Liguori wrote that over thirteen million Catholics were put to death by the authorities of the Roman Empire between the time of Nero in 67 A.D. and the Edict of Milan in the year 313 A.D. Millions upon millions of others have been put to death in the centuries since. These true victims who offered themselves to the Chief Priest and Victim of Calvary, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, did not feel sorry for themselves. They did not castigate their torturers or their executioners, although some exhorted their torturers and executioners to convert to the true Faith.

This is the time for martyrdom. Yes, for heroic martyrdom, certainly white martyrdom, and possibly even actual red martyrdom itself.

The stirring letter, quoted below and  written by a Claretian priest Spain during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939) just before he (and others with him) were martyred, demonstrates the difference between hiding the Faith in public life, whether as a matter of supposedly “clever” calculation or as a matter of habitual reluctance to speak the truth clearly no matter the cost,   and being a victim for Christ the King at all times without any exception or equivocation:

We all die praying to God that the blood from our wounds may not be a vengeful blood, but that it run red and full of life in your veins, to stimulate your growth and development all over the world. Good-bye, dear Congregation! Your sons, the martyrs of Barbastro, salute you from prison and offer you our sorrow and anguish as a holocaust to expiate our faults, our weaknesses, and as a testimony of our faithful, generous and eternal love. The martyrs of tomorrow, the 14th, are mindful of the fact that they die on the eve of the Assumption. What a remembrance that will be! We die for the right to wear the cassock and we die on the very anniversary of the day on which we were clothed in it. (Quoted in Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade, Christendom Press, 1996, p. 110.)

Dr. Carroll went on to quote a member of the civil guard's testimony to the constancy of the Faith of the Claretian martyrs of Barbastro:

These [blasphemous expletive deleted] fools! No one could shut them up! All the way they sang and praised Christ the King. One of them fell dead when he hit him with the butt of a gun, and this is no lie. But the more we hit them, the more they sang and shouted: "Viva Cristo Rey! ("Quoted in Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade, Christendom Press, 1996, p. 110.) 

We must strive to be victims for Christ the King and for Mary our Immaculate Queen as we make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our own sins and those of the whole world.

Yes, we must strive to be victims for Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen as we pray as many Rosaries as our states-in-life permit.

The petty tyrants of today will fade from view soon enough. God is more powerful than any of the fools who think that their grand ideas and schemes can "save" society and make our own lives "easier" and "more comfortable" (sort of like they want to create a huge "national hospice" for us). A country that has killed over sixty million innocent preborn human beings by surgical abortion alone, no less the truly countless number of souls its wars have taken out of the Catholic Church and placed into Protestant "churches" and Masonic lodges, owes God a tremendous debt that might be repaid only by the extinction of its national existence

We must, therefore, embrace the Cross as never before, hoping that our lives of prayer and penance and fasting and mortification and almsgiving and total consecration to Jesus through Mary will help, especially by means of Eucharistic piety and our devotion to Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary, to plant just a few seeds for the day when all men will hail the Chief Victim and Priest, the One Who become Man for us to die on the wood of the Cross so that we might know an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise.

Moreover, we must always remember that we have much reparation to make to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our sins and for those of the whole world. We have so very much reparation to make, especially as we approach the Paschal Triduum of Our Lord’s Passion, Death and Resurrection.

Yes, you see, the truth is this: we, wounded by the vestigial aftereffects of Original Sin and effects of our Actual Sins, some which have been calculated quite deliberately, have at times all too tragically overthrown the Reign of Christ the King in our own souls, thus making it less possible for us to bear witness to His Social Reign over men and nations. We have shown ourselves to be far more dangerous, far more cunning. and far more effective in undermining the cause of Our Lord and His true Church as we have tried to undo the effects of Our Lord's Redemptive Act in our own souls!

Our Lord told Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque that His Most Sacred Heart was more grieved by the faithless of Catholics than It had been by the Jews who were our agents in putting him to death:

Consider that it was no less afflicting and sad for Jesus Christ to see the ingratitude of the majority of the faithful, who would have only coldness and indifference for Him in the Sacrament of His love. He saw the little esteem, nay, even the contempt with which they would treat this greatest proof of His love. He saw that no matter what He might do to be loved by the faithful, even dwelling always amongst them in the Blessed Eucharist, neither this excess of His love, nor His benefits, nor His very presence would be capable of making the greater part of them love Him or would prevent them from forgetting Him. he saw that those churches in which He was to be sacramentally present would be left for most of the time without adorers. He saw what little reverence, nay, what disrespect would be shown in His presence. He saw clearly how the greater part of His followers, who spend long hours in vain amusement and useless visits and complete idleness, would rarely find a quarter of an hour to spend before Him in the Blessed Sacrament. He knew how many others would visit Him only under compulsion and without either devotion or reverence. And finally, He saw the very small number who would eagerly visit Him and devoutly adore Him. He saw clearly that the greater number take no more notice of Him than if He were not really present in the Blessed Sacrament or than if He were a person of no consequence.

The harsh treatment which He received from the Jews, Gentiles and heretics was indeed very painful to Him, but they were His open enemies. But could we ever thought it possible that those who recognize His benefits, that those who make profession of being faithful to Him, that His own children should not only be insensible to His benefits and in no way touched with compassion at the sight of the grief caused by such contempt, but that they should treat Him with contempt by their irreverences and sacrileges? Our Saviour might well say: "If pagans and Turks and infidels had treated Me so, I might have endured it." "for if my enemy had reviled me, I would verily have borne it". (Ps. 54:13), but that Christians, Catholics whom I have not only redeemed, but have fed and nourished with my Body and Blood, should have nothing but contempt for Me, that they should treat Me with ingratitude, is too much. "But thou a man of one mind, my guide and my familiar: who didst take sweetmeats together with me! (Ps. 54: 14-15)

What must be the sentiments of this most generous and tender Heart of Jesus which has so loved men, and which finds in the hearts of those men only coldness and contempt? "I am become a reproach among my enemies." (Ps. 30: 12). If after exposing Myself to the contempt and hatred of My enemies in the midst of the outrages which I suffer, I could at least find a large number of faithful friends who would console Me! But it is quite the contrary: "They that saw me without fled from me." (Ps. 30:12) The greater number, seeing that I have disguised Myself under the feeble appearance of bread in order to have the pleasure of dwelling among men, abandon Me and forget Me as a person who has no place in their hearts, "I am forgotten as one dead from the heart." (Ps. 30:13)  (Father John Croiset, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, republished by TAN Books and Publishers.)

Thus, we should recognize full well that we bear a great share of the guilt and of the responsibility for the state of the world and for the state of the Church Militant on earth as it is at this time.

With Our Lady, as our sure guide and intercessor, may we indeed be ever earnest about making reparation for our own many sins, each of has contributed to the worsening of the state of the Church Militant here on earth and of the world-at-large.

Once again, though, make no mistake about it: our own sins and our ingratitude and our lukewarmness have exacerbated, that is, worsened, the state of the Church Militant on earth. We cannot be content to wallow in spiritual mediocrity. We must accept whatever penances and humiliations that God chooses to send us so that we can give them back to His Most Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother as her consecrated slaves, especially by means of praying as many Rosaries as our states-in-life permit, thus planting seeds for the glorious day of the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart and thus of the restoration of all things in Christ the King.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

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 Benedict Joseph Labre, pray for us.