Scuttling Apostolicae Curae? Nothing is Settled in Jorge's False Church Unless It Is "Settled" According to the Dictates of Modernism

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, having dispensed with what he has long considered to be the nuisance of rigid “counter-revolutionary” traditionalists who are wandering around in a “museum of the past” that “cages” his blasphemously formless “holy spirit” by means of Traditionis Custodes, July 16, 2021, and a follow-up instruction, Responsa ad dubia of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments on some provisions of the Anti-Apostolic Letter issued Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes, that was issued on December 18, 2021, and will be the subject of an upcoming commentary that will reiterate many of the points made in Jorge Mario Bergoglio Bares His Teeth to Do the Work of Baal, is moving with lightning speed at age eighty-five to recognize the schismatic and heretical Orthodox churches and to declare that Pope Leo XIII had it wrong about the invalidity of Anglican orders in Apostolicae Curae, September 15, 1887. This commentary will focus on the latter development, which has been in the works for a long term.

From 1534 to the Present 

The counterfeit church of conciliarism’s efforts to legitimize the heretical and schismatic Anglican sect, which was founded by the drunken, bigamous, adulterous, incestuous, gluttonous King Henry Tudor (VIII), after Pope Urban VII refused to grant him a decree of nullity from his true wife, Queen Katharine of Aragon, so that he could marry his teenaged mistress, who happened to be his own illegitimate daughter, Anne Boleyn (see the appendix for a discussion Anne Boleyn’s parentage), began in earnest under Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI and have “evolved,” shall we say, to the point now where conciliar authorities are openly talking about doing something that is ontologically impossible, namely, to “overturn” Pope Leo  XIII’s Apostolicae Curae, September 15, 1887:

—  A group of Catholic and Anglican theologians has publicly called on the Vatican to review and overturn a papal document from 1896 that declared Anglican ordinations "absolutely null and utterly void."

"Where we once walked apart, we now walk together in friendship and love," wrote members of the Malines Conversations Group after tracing the history of ecumenical agreements between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion and, especially, reviewing examples of collaboration and gestures of recognition.

The judgment made by Pope Leo XIII in his apostolic letter "Apostolicae Curae" in 1896 "does not accord with the reality into which the Spirit has led us now," said members of the group, which is an informal Catholic-Anglican dialogue that began in 2013.

Members of the group, who are not appointed to represent their churches but keep their respective ecumenical offices informed of their studies and discussions, presented their document Dec. 15 at Rome's Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The 27-page document is titled, "Sorores in Spe — Sisters in Hope of the Resurrection: A Fresh Response to the Condemnation of Anglican Orders."

Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said that while his Vatican office does not sponsor the group's dialogue, "we are very happy" that the question of Anglican orders is "being examined in the wholly different ecumenical context of today, when so much has been achieved in Anglican-Catholic relations."

"From the Catholic point of view, it is a question of finding the theological and canonical language that would better reflect what we do in practice, which is to acknowledge a genuine ministry in other churches," he told Catholic News Service. "As the Second Vatican Council teaches, the Holy Spirit does indeed work through them for the salvation of their members."

The context for "Sorores in Spe" is the theological and practical difference in Catholic-Anglican relations over the past 125 years and, especially, since the formal Anglican-Roman Catholic theological dialogue was established in 1967 by St. Paul VI and Anglican Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury.

The theological and canonical motivations for Pope Leo's decision, as explained in the document, were "defects" of both form and intention in the Anglican ordination rites because, in the Vatican's eyes, "it was not made clear that the priest received 'the power of consecrating and of offering the true Body and Blood of the Lord'" and because the Anglican Communion had introduced a rite not approved by the church.

But the official agreed statements of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission since 1970, including statements on the Eucharist and on ministry, "testify to an intimate family likeness between our traditions, which reveals a communion already shared," said "Sorores in Spe."

That likeness is especially underlined by a succession of gifts from the pope to Anglican clerics, said members of the Malines Conversations Group. They cited: St Paul VI's gift of his episcopal ring to Archbishop Ramsey in 1966; the pectoral crosses several popes have given to Anglican bishops over the years; and the stole St. John Paul II gave Anglican Father Henry Chadwick in 1982.

The progress over the past 50 years is such that it is no longer unusual that "our deepest mutual friendships, our spiritual directors, our trusted confidants and prayer partners and theological interlocutors all cross the Anglican-Roman Catholic divide," said the Rev. Sarah Coakley, an Anglican theologian.

In the formal theological dialogue's conversations about ministry and ordination, the issue of the ordination of women as priests and bishops in most churches of the Anglican Communion keeps coming up. The Catholic Church has insisted it has no right to ordain women to the priesthood, since Jesus chose only men as his apostles.

But those who drafted "Sorores in Spe" insisted that the arguments for or against the ordination of women are different from the arguments used by Pope Leo in "Apostolicae Curae" to declare Anglican orders null and void.

"The fact that women can, in most Anglican provinces, now be ordained, does not in itself mean that the pope's condemnation of 1896 must be applied to the present situation," they wrote.

In presenting the document Dec. 15, Sister Gemma Simmonds, a member of the Congregation of Jesus, told the audience one aim of the Catholic Church's synodal process is to overcome "toxic clericalism and misogyny" within its ranks.

But, she said, the ordination of women priests and bishops "has not entirely banished misogyny from within the Anglican Church and illustrates that neither theological discourse nor ecclesial action is sufficient to convert minds and hearts."

Still, Sister Simmonds said, many Catholic women have drawn hope from the Anglican Communion's willingness to "take bold steps" to affirm what is written in the Letter to the Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Since the original Malines Conversations in 1921-27, the group said, "Anglicans and Catholics have learned to pray together and for one another, our shared study of Scripture and tradition has brought renewal, we have engaged in joint projects of dialogue, discipleship and witness, we have experienced growing friendship."

"In a world utterly transformed since the end of the 19th century, facing difficulties and threats on a scale beyond imagining at that time," the group said, "we have learned what it is to share a common hope. We long for our churches to be able to embrace one another as sisters in Christ." (Dialogue group calls for Catholic recognition of Anglican ordinations.)

These "unofficial" recommendations from a group of "theologians" that are not part of any conciliar dicastery do have a strange way of becoming "official" over the course of time even though it does not appear that the Argetine Apostate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is going to make any decision about Apostolicae Curae in the near future as he is far too busy denouncing believing Catholics and eliminating their access to putative offerings of the modernized Mass of Tradition. This having been noted, however, no one should be surprised if these "recommendations" come to fruition sooner rather than later.

Lost in the madness of false ecumenism that has its proximate roots with the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1910, is the fact that the so-called Anglican church has no right from God to exist. It arose solely because a lustful, gluttonous, adulterous, bigamous, incestuous drunkard and power-hungry killer of innocent human beings, King Henry VIII of the House of Tudor, wanted to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, who just happened to be his own illegitimate daughter, even though he was married to his true wife, Katherine of Aragon. Pope Urban VII’s refusal to grant Henry Tudor’s petition to declare that latter’s marriage to Queen Katherine was null prompted the mad king, who desired a male heir to his throne, to have Parliament enact the Supremacy Law in 1534 declaring him to be the “Supreme Head of the Church in England.”

Thus, the "Church of England" was the result of King Henry VIII's having Parliament enact an unjust law naming him as the “supreme head of the church in England,” requiring every Englishman to take an oath in support of it. Saint Thomas More, though he kept his peace about the oath until his trial, resigned his position as the Chancellor of the Realm as he knew that he could not take an oath to support a declaration that was false and had no binding force upon God or man. It was only after the perjured testimony of Richard Rich that Saint Thomas More discharged his mind concerning the injustice of the supremacy law and of his own trial:

In good faith, Master Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than for mine own peril, and you shall understand that neither I nor any man else to my knowledge ever took you to be a man of such credit in any matter of importance I or any other would at any time vouchsafe to communicate with you. And I, as you know, of no small while have been acquainted with you and your conversation, who have known you from your youth hitherto, for we long dwelled together in one parish. Whereas yourself can tell (I am sorry you compel me to say) you were esteemed very light of tongue, a great dicer, and of no commendable fame. And so in your house at the Temple, where hath been your chief bringing up, were you likewise accounted. Can it therefore seem likely to your honorable lordships, that I would, in so weighty a cause, so unadvisedly overshoot myself as to trust Master Rich, a man of me always reputed for one of little truth, as your lordships have heard, so far above my sovereign lord the king, or any of his noble counselors, that I would unto him utter the secrets of my conscience touching the king's supremacy, the special point and only mark at my hands so long sought for?

A thing which I never did, nor ever would, after the statute thereof made, reveal unto the King's Highness himself or to any of his honorable counselors, as it is not unknown to your honors, at sundry and several times, sent from His Grace's own person unto the Tower unto me for none other purpose. Can this in your judgment, my lords, seem likely to be true? And if I had so done, indeed, my lords, as Master Rich hath sworn, seeing it was spoken but in familiar, secret talk, nothing affirming, and only in putting of cases, without other displeasant circumstances, it cannot justly be taken to be spoken maliciously; and where there is no malice there can be no offense. And over this I can never think, my lords, that so many worthy bishops, so many noble personages, and many other worshipful, virtuous, wise, and well-learned men as at the making of the law were in Parliament assembled, ever meant to have any man punished by death in whom there could be found no malice, taking malitia pro malevolentia: for if malitia be generally taken for sin, no man is there that can excuse himself. Quia si dixerimus quod peccatum non habemus, nosmetipsos seducimus, et veritas in nobis non est. [If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.] And only this word, "maliciously" is in the statute material, as this term "forcibly" is in the statute of forcible entries, by which statute if a man enter peaceably, and put not his adversary out "forcibly," it is no offense, but if he put him out "forcibly," then by that statute it is an offense, and so shall be punished by this term, "forcibly."  

Besides this, the manifold goodness of the King's Highness himself, that hath been so many ways my singular good lord and gracious sovereign, and that hath so dearly loved and trusted me, even at my first coming into his noble service, with the dignity of his honorable privy council, vouchsafing to admit me; and finally with the weighty room of His Grace's higher chancellor, the like whereof he never did to temporal man before, next to his own royal person the highest office in this whole realm, so far above my qualities or merits and meet therefor of his own incomparable benignity honored and exalted me, by the space of twenty years or more, showing his continual favors towards me, and (until, at mine own poor suit it pleased His Highness, giving me license with His Majesty's favor to bestow the residue of my life wholly for the provision of my soul in the service of God, and of his special goodness thereof to discharge and unburden me) most benignly heaped honors continually more and more upon me; all this His Highness's goodness, I say, so long thus bountifully extended towards me, were in my mind, my lords, matter sufficient to convince this slanderous surmise by this man so wrongfully imagined against me....  

Forasmuch, my lord, as this indictment is grounded upon an act of Parliament directly oppugnant to the laws of God and his holy church, the supreme government of which, or of any part thereof, may no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual preeminence by the mouth of our Savior himself, personally present upon the earth, to Saint Peter and his successors, bishops of the same see, by special prerogative granted; it is therefore in law amongst Christian men, insufficient to charge any Christian man....  

More have I not to say, my lords, but that like as the blessed apostle Saint Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of Saint Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now twain holy saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends forever: so I verily trust and shall therefore right heartily pray, that though your lordships have now in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation. (See Saint Thomas More's Speech in Defense of Himself, at his Trial.)

The conciliar "popes" do not believe that the Church of England is based on laws repugnant to God and man. They celebrate what the English and Irish Martyrs died to oppose. Their view of history is to erase whatever stands in the way of false reconciliations with religious entities created by mere men and that defect in one or more ways from the truths contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has revealed exclusively to His Catholic Church for their infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.

In the case of Anglicanism, of course, the aforementioned King Henry VIII engaged in a wanton persecution of his subjects who remained faithful to the See of Saint Peter. This persecution included the execution of over 72,000 Catholics in England alone between 1534 and the time of the martyr’s death in 1547, over 3.2% of the English population alive at that time. Catholic churches, schools, monasteries, convents, and shrines were seized and turned over to the false
“Church of England” or given to Henry’s political allies. England was divided between those who were loyal to the lecherous, murderous king and the recusant Catholics who loved God more than their king and would not render unto him an authority he did not possess.

Indeed, the kind of state-sponsored social engineering that has created the culture of entitlement in England and elsewhere in Europe has its antecedent roots in Henry's revolt against the Social Reign of Christ the King and His Catholic Church in the Sixteenth Century.

Henry had Parliament enact various laws to force the poor who had lived for a nominal annual fee on the monastery and convent lands (as they produced the food to sustain themselves, giving some to the monastery or convent) off of those lands, where their families had lived for generations, in order to redistribute the Church properties  that he had stolen to those who supported his break from Rome. Henry quite cleverly created a class of people who were dependent upon him for the property upon which they lived and the wealth they were able to derive therefrom, making them utterly supportive of his decision to declare himself Supreme Head of the Church in England. Those of the poorer classes who had been thrown off of the monastery and convent lands were either thrown into prison (for being poor, mind you) or forced to migrate to the cities, where many of them lost the true Faith and sold themselves into various vices just to survive. The effects of this exercise of state-sponsored engineering are reverberating in the world today, both politically and economically.

Indeed, many of the conditions bred by the disparity in wealth created by Henry's land grab in the Sixteenth Century would fester and help to create the world of unbridled capitalism and slave wage that so impressed a German emigre in London by the name of Karl Marx. Unable to recognize the historical antecedents of the real injustices he saw during the Victorian Era, Marx set about devising his own manifestly unjust system, premised on atheism and anti-Theism, to rectify social injustice once and for all. In a very real way, Henry Tudor led the way to Lenin of Russia and to the European Union as the sterile substitute for the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Father Edward Cahill provided a very good summary of the effects of King Henry VIII’s revolution in The Framework of A Christian State:

Results of the Plunder of the Church.—Not only is the Protestant Revolt mainly responsible for the unsocial character of Britain’s economic system but it was the immediate cause of much of the degrading pauperism that has disfigured British civilisation for the past four centuries. We have already alluded to the plunder of the Church and the alienation of the revenues devoted to charitable and educational purposes, which took place as a result of the religious revolt. This led directly to dreadful hardship in the case of the poor, to whose benefit most of the ecclesiastical revenue had previously been applied. The confiscated wealth, which according to the law under which the confiscations were carried out should have been to the service of the State, was in very large measure appropriated by lawyers, court favourites and other greedy and avaricious adventurers. These henceforth formed a new class of wealthy and unscrupulous plutocrats who in the following centuries dominated the political and social life of their several countries. Nowhere did these robbery of Church goods produce such disastrous results as in Ireland and Britain. In both these countries the Protestant Reformation laid the foundations secure and deep, of extreme individualistic capitalism, with its hideous counterpart of pauperism and oppression of the poor, which forms one of the chief characteristics of their social history during the following centuries. On this aspect of the question, Cardinal Gasquet writes:

“Viewed in its social aspect the English Reformation was in reality an uprising of the rich against the poor. . . . Those in place and power were enabled to grow greater in wealth and position, while those who had before but a small share of the good things of this world came in the process to have less. . . . The supposed purification . . . of doctrine and practice was brought about . . .  at the cost of driving a wedge well into the heart of the nation, which . . . established the distinction which still exists and the masses.” (Preface to Cobbett’s History of the Reformation, p. 6.)

The history of this lamentable revolution in England, by which the whole face of a great Catholic nation became permanently disfigured, the great majority of her once happy children plunged in ever-increasing degradation and misery, and her ideals and principles conformed to a non-Christian instead of a Christian standard, is graphically told by the Protestant writer Cobbett, in his History of the Protestant Reformation. “Never,” he writes, “since the world began was there so rich a harvest of plunder.” He tells how gold and silver, books and manuscripts, ornaments, paintings and statuary of priceless value equally with church, monastery and convent fell a prey to the satellites of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell:

“The whole country was thus disfigured: it had the appearance of a land recently invaded by the most brutal barbarians: and this appearance it has . . . even to the present day. Nothing has ever come to supply the place of what has been destroyed.” (Cobbett—History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, edited by Cardinal Casquet (Art and Book Co., London, 1899), chap. vii, no. 182.)

Explaining the social effects of the plunder of the Church, Cobbett writes:

“The Catholic Church included in itself a great deal more than the business of teaching religion . . . and administering the Sacraments. It had a great deal to do with the temporal concerns of the people. It provided  . . . for all the wants of the poor and distressed. . . .  It contained a great body of land proprietors, whose revenues were distributed in various ways amongst the people upon terms always singularly favourable to the latter. It was a great and powerful estate, and naturally siding with the people. . . . By its charity and its benevolence towards its tenants it mitigated the rigour of proprietorship, and held society together by the ties of religion rather than by the trammels and terrors of the Law. (Cobbett, History of the Protestant Reformation, chap. vii, no. 206.)

Dissolution of the Monasteries.—The dissolution of the monasteries, with the resulting confiscation of their property, immediately produced overwhelming distress amongst the multitudes who had been maintained by the resources that the religious bodies had administered. It proved disastrous also to the tenants on the monastic lands, which were probably more than 2,000,000 statute acres in extent. The tenants who had been accustomed to an easy and sympathetic mode of treatment at the hands of the monks, now passed under the power of harsh and exacting landlords. Rack-rents were too often exacted and the numerous exemptions and privileges to which the tenants had been accustomed were withdrawn.

Enclosures and Confiscations.—Again, the common lands, in which the poor of the neighbourhood had from time immemorial possessed common rights, were seized and enclosed in the lords’ demenses; and numberless other hardships, hitherto unknown, now began to press upon the people.

The wanton confiscation of the property of the guilds, hospitals and almshouses, unjust and indefensible even form the Protestant standpoint, was also disastrous to the interests of the poor. The destruction of the religious schools and colleges, in which so many children were educated free of cost, was still another blow. Even the introduction of married clergy, which diverted into another channel the energies and resources that would otherwise be expended on charity, aggravated further the lot of the poor.

Vagabondage in England.—Hence it was that the destruction of Catholicism in England gave rise to the sordid pauperism which has since disfigured English civilisation. Cobbett describes in his own eloquent and vigorous style how England, “once happy and hospitable, became a den of famishing robbers and slaves.” As a result of the plunder of the Church and the destruction of the institutions which had grown up under its influence, the country quickly became filled with the destitute. Immense numbers of these were drive to live as professional robbers. “There were,” writes Hume, “at least 300 or 400 able-bodied vagabonds in every country who lived by theft and rapine, and who sometimes met in troops to the number of sixty and committed spoil on the inhabitants.” As many as five hundred of this expropriated class were sometimes executed in a single year during the reign of Elizabeth.

English Poor Laws.—This state of affairs—a direct result of the Protestant revolt—gave rise to the celebrated Elizabethan leglsation on pauperism, “as novel as it was harsh,” which for the first time standardized pauperism as distinct from poverty. The former was henceforth the status of those who, being destitute of the prime necessities of life, are maintained at the public expense in the parish poorhouses. They are no longer “God’s poor,” to whom as the special representatives of Him Who became poor for men’s sake, special sympathy and even reverence are due. They are now despised outcasts, the pariahs of society. They usually live, or are supposed to live, in the poorhouses, segregated form their wives and children, under a harsh discipline, deprived of the franchise and compelled to wear a special uniform.

The following extracts from Pelgrave will convey a general idea of the spirit which animated the English post-Reformation legislation on mendicancy and poverty:

“It was only towards the middle and end of the 16^th century that measures against it [viz., mendicancy] were enforced, possibly in part owing to the sounder (sic) teachings of the Reformers on the subject. Then we find Southampton ordering that beggars should have their hair cut, and Parliament decreeing punishments on a progressive scale of severity. Whipping, branding, cutting off the gristle of the ear, even death, were the penalties assigned (!) . . . A Consolidating Act of 1713 lays it down that any person wandering about the country, on any one of a long list of pretences, is to be summarily arrested and removed to his settlement, or, if he have one, to be dealt with by the poor law authorities of the parish in which he is apprehened; but previously he may be flogged or set to hard labour, or committed for seven years to the custody of any person who will undertake to set him to work in Great Britain or the Colonies. By the Act of 1744 even women are to flogged for vagrancy and late as 1824 flogging is retained as punishment  for “incorrigible rogues.” (Palgrave—Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. iii. Art “Poor Law” p. 154; also art. “Pauperism,” p. 81.)

Such was the spirit introduced by Protestantism into the legislative system of a country that was once the “Dowry of Mary.” (Cahill, pp. 97-101.)

Consider this for a moment.

Henry VIII threw the poor off the lands on which their ancestors had lived for centuries, and that his wretched, murderous daughter, Elizabeth, by his partner in adultery and bigamy, Anne Boleyn, made sure when she acceded to the throne in 1558 that the penal laws which he had enacted against the poor were enforced with vigor that can only be described as diabolically conceived.

Anglicanism is founded on a rejection of Papal Primacy and that the Catholic Church is the one and only true Christian church in the whole world.

Anglicanism teaches that, contrary to the words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself, divorce and remarriage while one’s true spouse is still living is morally acceptable.

It is important to remember in this regard that the warfare waged by King Henry VIII against the sanctity and indissolubility of Holy Matrimony made inevitable his false religious sect’s warfare against the fecundity of marriage at its Lambeth Conference in 1930:

Resolution 15

The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex

Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles. The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience. (Resolution 15 - The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage.)

This decision opened the floodgates of Protestant acceptance of contraception, which, of course, had been promoted for the previous fifteen years in the United States of America by the nymphomaniac revolutionary anti-Theist named Margaret Sanger. An organization known as the Federal Council of Churches in America (which merged in 1950 with other such organizations to form the “National Council of Churches”) endorsed contraception in 1931, prompting the following editorial to appear, amazingly enough, in The Washington Post:

The Federal Council of Churches in America some time ago appointed a committee on "marriage and the home," which has now submitted a report favoring a "careful and restrained" use of contraceptive devices to regulate the size of families. The committee seems to have a serious struggle with itself in adhering to Christian doctrine while at the same time indulging in amateurish excursions in the field of economics, legislation, medicine, and sociology. The resulting report is a mixture of religious obscurantism and modernistic materialism which departs from the ancient standards of religion and yet fails to blaze a path toward something better.   

The mischief that would result from an attempt to place the stamp of church approval upon any scheme for "regulating the size of families" is evidently quite beyond the comprehension of this pseudo-scientific committee. It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would lead to the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous. If the churches are to become organizations for political and 'scientific' propaganda they should be honest and reject the Bible, scoff at Christ as an obsolete and unscientific teacher, and strike out boldly as champions of politics and science as substitutes for the old-time religion. ("Forgetting Religion," Editorial, The Washington Post, March 22, 1932.)

The Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 15, which prompted Pope Pius XI to issue Casti Connubii on December 31, 1930, accustomed the British people to “planned” pregnancies and opened the way to the public acceptance of one degrading practice after another over the course of time, up to and including the legalization of surgical baby-killing by means of the Abortion Law of 1967 that was passed Parliament at the behest of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Here is a brief history of surgical baby-killing in the United Kingdom as found on the website of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn in England:

In 1938, a London gynaecologist, Aleck Bourne, tested the laws by performing an abortion on a 14-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted by five off-duty British soldiers. Dr Bourne was a supporter of the Abortion Law Reform Association.

He was charged with an illegal abortion, and pleaded not guilty on the basis that the girl's mental health would have been adversely affected by giving birth. Dr Bourne was acquitted after the judge, Mr Justice Macnaughten, invited the jury to decide whether in acting to preserve the girl's mental health, as he saw it, the doctor's action had amounted to saving her life. The judge evidently condoned the abortion, and the jury acquitted the doctor.

The effect of the Bourne case was to give legal sanction for abortions to prevent damage to a woman's physical or mental health, a test which became interpreted more and more liberally, and which was incorporated into the Abortion Act. This marked a watershed and although medical grounds are still formally required, doctors can practice abortion virtually on request provided they claim mental health is at risk. Aleck Bourne eventually became appalled at the results of his case and became an early member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.

Steel's 1967 Abortion Act

The Abortion Act was introduced by the liberal MP David Steel with the tacit support of the Labour government under Harold Wilson. Steel introduced the bill as a Private Member's Bill after drawing third place in the ballot on 12th May 1966. The bill would not have reached the statute book but for the support of the government which provided the parliamentary time needed to get the bill through. The government was sympathetic to the measure but did not want to include it in its own legislative programme. The bill was eventually given a third reading by the House of Commons on 14th July 1967, and came into force on 27th April 1968.

The operation of the Act proved controversial from the outset, and a committee of inquiry was set up under Mrs Justice Lane in 1971 to review the working of the Act. Obstetricians and gynaecologists who refused to provide abortions, were put under pressure, and although those in senior posts were protected by the 'conscience clause' in the Act others were forced out of the specialism, or out of the country, as pro-abortion officials in the Department of Health demanded that NHS hospitals should provide wide access to abortion services.

Pro-life reform attempts

Pro-life MPs sought to amend the Act, first introducing amendment bills as early as 1969. But despite numerous attempts through the 1970s and 1980s, they all failed to achieve any reform of the Act, as government ministers of various parties and Department of Health officials studiously defended the legislation and its abuse.

In 1990 the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher introduced a bill (the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act) to legislate for in-vitro fertilisation, and agreed to allow amendments to the Abortion Act to be attached to the bill, thereby overcoming the major obstacle to getting abortion amendments onto the statute book. This proved a miscalculation on the part of pro-life MPs, as it later became clear that the government's agenda was not to introduce any significant restriction, but to widen the abortion law to accommodate new abortion techniques and to extend abortion for disabled babies up to birth (previously it had been restricted to the point at which the baby could be born alive).

Recent efforts

Further attempts to amend the law by pro-abortion MPs were attached to a later embryology bill in 2008. These also failed for reasons that are not apparent.

Recent efforts have focused on unlawful abuses of the abortion law, such as the practice of sex-selection abortion, and the discriminatory nature of abortion for disabled babies.  The policy of the Department of Health to allow "unwanted" pregnancy to be deemed a threat to mental health is another way in which the law is being treated with contempt. (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.)

British authorities admitted in 2013 that over eight million children had been killed since 1967 (Over eight million abortions since 1967), although a chart found here provides statistics that date as far back as the very year of the infamous 1930 Lambeth Conference. The British Isles have been a killing field since 1534, and it is thus only logical that it has been the scene of so much carnage in recent decades. Only seventeen percent of the British people believe that the killing of preborn children by surgical means is wrong in all instances (Ipsos Mori Research Publicationsttps), a figure that is very similar to that here in the United States of America, where nineteen percent of the public believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances (Gallup Poll.)

How can the conciliar authorities speak seriously of any kind of “union” with the Anglicans when the latter endorse all manner of moral perversity and have become such a laughingstock of globalist absurdities that only twelve percent of the English even identify themselves as Anglicans and, of that number, only two percent of professed “Anglicans” bother to show up at this infamous sect’s invalid liturgical services. Sterility is always the result of apostasy. This is true of Anglicanism and all other Protestant sects. It is also true of conciliarism. Sterility is always the result of apostasy.

England was Catholic for nearly a thousand years from the time that Pope Saint Gregory the Great sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury to re-evangelize the English people. England’s Catholic history is rich, beginning with the English devotion to Our Lady of Walshingham, which has undergo a revival in recent decades following the efforts of the English Protestant revolutionaries in the Sixteenth Century to wipe out all memory of this devotion, which dates back to the year 1061 A.D.

As I noted in a recent commentary, revolutionaries hate the past. They also must ignore the past as it contains well-documented contradictions of their own schemes to create a synthetic reality that is based upon the conjuring of their own pagan and thus sterile imaginations.

However, it is important to list, if only briefly, the chief heresies taught by the Anglican sect whose existence was but the will of a lustful man, not that of God Himself.

1) Unlike the Orthodox, who have sacramental rites that developed under the inspiration of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, when the Eastern churches were united to the Catholic Church, the “traditions” of Anglicanism are man-made and were meant to be a publicly manifest rejection of Catholicism, which is why so many scores of thousands of Catholics were willing to suffer the most cruel tortures and inhumane executions to bear their own visible, tangible rejection of those man-made “traditions.”

2) The passage of time does not confer legitimacy on that which has its very origins from the devil in a rejection of the Catholic Faith and the authority of the Catholic Church.

Alas, one of the chief contentions of heterodox theologians such as the late Father Walter Burghardt, S.J., centers around the false belief that that the mere existence of Protestant sects is a proof of their enjoying the Divine favor. Such an existential view of life ignores the distinction between the fact that God permits men to use their free will contrary to His Laws and/or contrary to His Divine Plan to effect man’s return to Him through His Catholic Church. God permits men evil without condoning the evil they do, and the passage of time never confers any kind of legitimacy on that which is evil in the objective order of things.

Has the passage of time conferred legitimacy on the “Anglican Book of Common Prayer”?

If not, then why should it receive “protection” in the counterfeit church of conciliarism that presents itself to the world as the Catholic Church?

3) Pope Saint Pius V declared the books of Anglican liturgy to be heretical:

Prohibiting with a strong hand the use of the true religion, which after its earlier overthrow by Henry VIII (a deserter therefrom) Mary, the lawful queen of famous memory, had with the help of this See restored, she has followed and embraced the errors of the heretics. She has removed the royal Council, composed of the nobility of England, and has filled it with obscure men, being heretics; oppressed the followers of the Catholic faith; instituted false preachers and ministers of impiety; abolished the sacrifice of the mass, prayers, fasts, choice of meats, celibacy, and Catholic ceremonies; and has ordered that books of manifestly heretical content be propounded to the whole realm and that impious rites and institutions after the rule of Calvin, entertained and observed by herself, be also observed by her subjects. She has dared to eject bishops, rectors of churches and other Catholic priests from their churches and benefices, to bestow these and other things ecclesiastical upon heretics, and to determine spiritual causes; has forbidden the prelates, clergy and people to acknowledge the Church of Rome or obey its precepts and canonical sanctions; has forced most of them to come to terms with her wicked laws, to abjure the authority and obedience of the pope of Rome, and to accept her, on oath, as their only lady in matters temporal and spiritual; has imposed penalties and punishments on those who would not agree to this and has exacted then of those who persevered in the unity of the faith and the aforesaid obedience; has thrown the Catholic prelates and parsons into prison where many, worn out by long languishing and sorrow, have miserably ended their lives. All these matter and manifest and notorious among all the nations; they are so well proven by the weighty witness of many men that there remains no place for excuse, defense or evasion. (Regnans in Excelsis, the decree issued by Pope Saint Pius V on March 5, 1570, excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I.) 

How has the passage of time corrected the heretical content of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (which is a replacement for the four parts of the liturgy used in the Catholic Church: The Breviary, the Missal, the Pontifical, and the Ritual)?

4) The Anglican liturgy (referred to as the Anglican "use" "Mass" in the conciliar structures, a "rite" whose theological deficiencies were assessed quite critically in an article in The Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture in the 2000s) was a precursor and progenitor of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo service itself.

Although Regnans in Excelsis seems to have been forgotten quite deliberately by the conciliar revolutionaries and by the Anglicans, it is impossible for anyone to simply “forget” about Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae, September 15, 1887. Pope Leo XIII, of course, definitively declared that Anglican orders were null and void. This simple declaration has been an obstacle that the conciliar and Anglican ecumaniacs have long sought to overcome by one Modernist sleight of hand after another.

The following passages from Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae determined the invalidity of Anglican orders once and for all, noting that for the conciliar revolutionaries, much like their comrades in the political and social order of things, nothing is ever considered” unless it is “settled” on their terms, which, ipso facto, makes their reversal of theological and/moral truth “irreversible”:

24. In the examination of any rite for the effecting and administering of Sacraments, distinction is rightly made between the part which is ceremonial and that which is essential, the latter being usually called the “matter and form”. All know that the Sacraments of the New Law, as sensible and efficient signs of invisible grace, ought both to signify the grace which they effect, and effect the grace which they signify. Although the signification ought to be found in the whole essential rite, that is to say, in the “matter and form”, it still pertains chiefly to the “form”; since the “matter” is the part which is not determined by itself, but which is determined by the “form”. And this appears still more clearly in the Sacrament of Order, the “matter” of which, in so far as we have to consider it in this case, is the imposition of hands, which, indeed, by itself signifies nothing definite, and is equally used for several Orders and for Confiirmation.

25. But the words which until recently were commonly held by Anglicans to constitute the proper form of priestly ordination namely, “Receive the Holy Ghost,” certainly do not in the least definitely express the sacred Ordel of Priesthood (sacerdotium) or its grace and power, which is chiefly the power “of consecrating and of offering the true Body and Blood of the Lord” (Council of Trent, Sess. XXIII, de Sacr. Ord. , Canon 1) in that sacrifice which is no “bare commemoration of the sacrifice offered on the Cross” (Ibid, Sess XXII., de Sacrif. Missae, Canon 3).

26. This form had, indeed, afterwards added to it the words “for the office and work of a priest,” etc.; but this rather shows that the Anglicans themselves perceived that the first form was defective and inadequate. But even if this addition could give to the form its due signification, it was introduced too late, as a century had already elapsed since the adoption of the Edwardine Ordinal, for, as the Hierarchy had become extinct, there remained no power of ordaining.

27. In vain has help been recently sought for the plea of the validity of Anglican Orders from the other prayers of the same Ordinal. For, to put aside other reasons when show this to be insufficient for the purpose in the Anglican life, let this argument suffice for all. From them has been deliberately removed whatever sets forth the dignity and office of the priesthood in the Catholic rite. That “form” consequently cannot be considered apt or sufficient for the Sacrament which omits what it ought essentially to signify.

28. The same holds good of episcopal consecration. For to the formula, “Receive the Holy Ghost”, not only were the words “for the office and work of a bishop”, etc. added at a later period, but even these, as we shall presently state, must be understood in a sense different to that which they bear in the Catholic rite. Nor is anything gained by quoting the prayer of the preface, “Almighty God”, since it, in like manner, has been stripped of the words which denote the summum sacerdotium.

29. It is not relevant to examine here whether the episcopate be a completion of the priesthood, or an order distinct from it; or whether, when bestowed, as they say per saltum, on one who is not a priest, it has or has not its effect. But the episcopate undoubtedly, by the institution of Christ, most truly belongs to the Sacrament of Order and constitutes the sacerdotium in the highest degree, namely, that which by the teaching of the Holy Fathers and our liturgical customs is called the Summum sacerdotium sacri ministerii summa . So it comes to pass that, as the Sacrament of Order and the true sacerdotium of Christ were utterly eliminated from the Anglican rite, and hence the sacerdotium is in no wise conferred truly and validly in the episcopal consecration of the same rite, for the like reason, therefore, the episcopate can in no wise be truly and validly conferred by it, and this the more so because among the first duties of the episcopate is that of ordaining ministers for the Holy Eucharist and sacrifice.

30. For the full and accurate understanding of the Anglican Ordinal, besides what we have noted as to some of its parts, there is nothing more pertinent than to consider carefully the circumstances under which it was composed and publicly authorized. It would be tedious to enter into details, nor is it necessary to do so, as the history of that time is sufficiently eloquent as to the animus of the authors of the Ordinal against the Catholic Church; as to the abettors whom they associated with themselves from the heterodox sects; and as to the end they had in view. Being fully cognizant of the necessary connection between faith and worship, between “the law of believing and the law of praying”, under a pretext of returning to the primitive form, they corrupted the Liturgical Order in many ways to suit the errors of the reformers. For this reason, in the whole Ordinal not only is there no clear mention of the sacrifice, of consecration, of the priesthood (sacerdotium), and of the power of consecrating and offering sacrifice but, as we have just stated, every trace of these things which had been in such prayers of the Catholic rite as they had not entirely rejected, was deliberately removed and struck out.

31. In this way, the native character or spirit as it is called of the Ordinal clearly manifests itself. Hence, if, vitiated in its origin, it was wholly insufficient to confer Orders, it was impossible that, in the course of time, it would become sufficient, since no change had taken place. In vain those who, from the time of Charles I, have attempted to hold some kind of sacrifice or of priesthood, have made additions to the Ordinal. In vain also has been the contention of that small section of the Anglican body formed in recent times that the said Ordinal can be understood and interpreted in a sound and orthodox sense. Such efforts, we affirm, have been, and are, made in vain, and for this reason, that any words in the Anglican Ordinal, as it now is, which lend themselves to ambiguity, cannot be taken in the same sense as they possess in the Catholic rite. For once a new rite has been initiated in which, as we have seen, the Sacrament of Order is adulterated or denied, and from which all idea of consecration and sacrifice has been rejected, the formula, “Receive the Holy Ghost”, no longer holds good, because the Spirit is infused into the soul with the grace of the Sacrament, and so the words “for the office and work of a priest or bishop”, and the like no longer hold good, but remain as words without the reality which Christ instituted.

32. Many of the more shrewd Anglican interpreters of the Ordinal have perceived the force of this argument, and they openly urge it against those who take the Ordinal in a new sense, and vainly attach to the Orders conferred thereby a value and efficacy which they do not possess. By this same argument is refuted the contention of those who think that the prayer, “Almighty God, giver of all good Things”, which is found at the beginning of the ritual action, might suffice as a legitimate “form” of Orders, even in the hypothesis that it might be held to be sufficient in a Catholic rite approved by the Church.

33. With this inherent defect of “form” is joined the defect of “intention” which is equally essential to the Sacrament. The Church does not judge about the mind and intention, in so far as it is something by its nature internal; but in so far as it is manifested externally she is bound to judge concerning it. A person who has correctly and seriously used the requisite matter and form to effect and confer a sacrament is presumed for that very reason to have intended to do (intendisse) what the Church does. On this principle rests the doctrine that a Sacrament is truly conferred by the ministry of one who is a heretic or unbaptized, provided the Catholic rite be employed. On the other hand, if the rite be changed, with the manifest intention of introducing another rite not approved by the Church and of rejecting what the Church does, and what, by the institution of Christ, belongs to the nature of the Sacrament, then it is clear that not only is the necessary intention wanting to the Sacrament, but that the intention is adverse to and destructive of the Sacrament.

34. All these matters have been long and carefully considered by ourselves and by our venerable brethren, the Judges of the Supreme Council, of whom it has pleased Us to call a special meeting upon the 16th day of July last, the solemnity of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. They with one accord agreed that the question laid before them had been already adjudicated upon with full knowledge of the Apostolic See, and that this renewed discussion and examination of the issues had only served to bring out more clearly the wisdom and accuracy with which that decision had been made. Nevertheless, we deemed it well to postpone a decision in order to afford time both to consider whether it would be fitting or expedient that we should make a fresh authoritative declaration upon the matter, and to humbly pray for a fuller measure of divine guidance.

35. Then, considering that this matter, although already decided, had been by certain persons for whatever reason recalled into discussion, and that thence it might follow that a pernicious error would be fostered in the minds of many who might suppose that they possessed the Sacrament and effects of Orders, where these are nowise to be found, it seemed good to Us in the Lord to pronounce our judgment.

36. Wherefore, strictly adhering, in this matter, to the decrees of the pontiffs, our predecessors, and confirming them most fully, and, as it were, renewing them by our authority, of our own initiative and certain knowledge, we pronounce and declare that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void. (Pope Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae, September 15, 1887.) 

One of the chief ironies of the present moment, although one I came to recognize only fifteen and one-half years ago, sadly, is that the text of Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae condemns not only the rites of “episcopal” consecration and presbyteral “ordination” in the false Anglican sect but also those within the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Father Louis J. Campbell, who was ordained to the Holy Priesthood on September 3, 1961, for the Order of Saint Augustine and has been the pastor of Saint Jude Shrine in Stafford, Texas, since 2001, explained what is defective in the Anglican “rites” of “episcopal” consecration and “presbyteral” ordination are also present in the conciliar “rites as well, relying upon Pope Pius XII’s Sacramentum Ordinis, November 30, 1947, to illustrate this fact:

“Let no one lead you astray with empty words,” warns St. Paul in today’s Epistle (Eph.5:6). We must keep the faith, the faith of our fathers, handed on to us from the Apostles by saints and martyrs, the fathers and doctors of the Church, and holy popes and bishops. Now it is our turn to teach the faith, handing it on to the younger generation unchanged and untainted by heresy, lest the Church become the desolate kingdom spoken of by Our Lord in the Gospel. 

Many, “with empty words,” have tried to destroy the Catholic faith – Arius, Luther, Calvin and Cranmer, to name a few. Then came the Modernists, condemned by Pope St. Pius X, whose heresies lived on to be re-hatched at Vatican II by the liberal theologians, and canonized by the conciliar popes.

If one were to set out to destroy the Catholic faith, a good place to begin would be to tamper with the Sacraments, the Sacrament of Baptism, for instance. But every well instructed Catholic knows that the essential rite of Baptism requires the pouring of water upon the head of the person (or immersing the person in the water) while saying the words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (or Holy Spirit).  

If the priest baptizing were to say, “I pour upon you the life-giving waters of salvation, that you may share the life of the Holy Trinity,” we would know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Sacrament was invalid, and that the person would have to be re-baptized using the form that is required for validity. We would not have to wait for the theologians to debate the matter, or for the Holy See to issue a decree of nullity. Any Catholic in his right mind would know that the attempted Baptism was invalid. Any attempt by the “liturgical experts” to change the essentials of the Sacrament would not have been tolerated by the Catholic faithful.   

But consider some of the other sacraments. Most of us knew little of what was required, for instance, for the valid consecration of a bishop. In a ceremony rarely witnessed by most of the faithful, the Sacrament was administered in Latin amid mysterious and lengthy rites. Change the form of this Sacrament, and who would notice? Then what better way to destroy the Catholic Church than to render invalid the Sacrament of Holy Orders, since true bishops are absolutely necessary if the Church is to survive?    

The essential matter and form for the valid consecration of a bishop was determined by Pope Pius XII on November 30, 1947, in the Apostolic Constitution Sacramentum Ordinis (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 40, 1948, 5-7), a document which appears to have all the essential characteristics of infallibility. Even if it does not, it is certainly an authoritative document, which Pope Pius expected to be taken most seriously. With the laying on of hands, the consecrating bishop was to say the words of the Preface, “of which,” says the pope, “the following are essential and therefore necessary for validity: ‘Fill up in Thy priest the perfection of Thy ministry and sanctify him with the dew of Thy heavenly ointment, this thy servant decked out with the ornaments of all beauty’” (Comple in sacerdote tuo ministerii tui summum, et ornamentis totius glorificationis instructum coelestis unguenti rore sanctifica). 

At the end of the document Pope Pius XII states: “We teach, declare, and determine this, all persons not withstanding, no matter what special dignity they may have, and consequently we wish and order such in the Roman Pontifical... No one therefore is allowed to infringe upon this Constitution given by us, nor should anyone dare to have the audacity to contradict it...”

Pope Pius XII’s body had hardly begun “a-mouldering in the grave” when the agents of change began working in earnest to destroy the Catholic faith. Paul VI, once the confidant and trusted friend of Pope Pius XII, had that “audacity to contradict” when he published his own decree in 1968. In vain did Pope Pius XII “teach, declare, and determine” what was required for the validity of the Sacrament of Orders. Paul VI would introduce entirely new words, requiring them for validity, words which were never used for the consecration of a bishop in the Roman Rite: “So now pour out upon this chosen one that power which is from you, the governing Spirit whom you gave to your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, the Spirit given by him to the holy apostles, who founded the Church in every place to be your temple for the unceasing glory and praise of your name” (Pontificalis Romani, June 18, 1968).

As to why Paul VI found it necessary to discard the essential words of the traditional form of consecration and replace them with entirely different words, he says “…it was judged appropriate to take from ancient sources the consecratory prayer that is found in the document called the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome, written at the beginning of the third century.”

Judged appropriate? By whom? None other than Archbishop Annibale Bugnini and his associates of the “Consilium,” who invented the Novus Ordo Mass. And who on earth was Hippolytus of Rome? He was an anti-pope of the third century who separated from Rome because of doctrinal differences and established a schismatic church, although he later returned to the Catholic Church and died a martyr. Who knows but that his “Apostolic Tradition” was drawn up for his schismatic sect? 

And whatever became of Pope Pius XII’s Apostolic Constitution, Sacramentum Ordinis?  The name Sacramentum Ordinis was even given to another document by John Paul II, probably as a red herring to throw us off the track.  

What conclusion does one draw? The Catechism of the Council of Trent states: “In our Sacraments… the form is so definite that any, even a casual deviation from it renders the Sacrament null.” We would never tolerate a change in the form of the Sacrament of Baptism. Never! Can we blithely accept a total deviation in the form of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, a change which omits the part of the traditional form declared essential for validity by Pope Pius XII? I think not! Pope Pius XII changed nothing of the traditional form, but merely designated which part of the form was essential for validity. Paul VI omitted that essential part of the form and replaced it with something entirely new. Not even popes (certainly not would-be popes) can change the form of a Sacrament. Whom do we trust, Pope Pius XII who carefully guarded the traditional sacramental form handed down from ages past, or Paul VI? Paul VI, who on the flimsiest of pretexts changed the essential form of a Sacrament, thus rendering it invalid. The result is that we are left with a whole generation of pseudo-bishops attempting to govern the Church without the grace of office. A miter and a bishop’s ring do not a bishop make. And the Kingdom is brought to desolation (Lk.11:17).  

But even among traditionalists many refuse to consider the possibility of invalid sacramental rites. It’s more convenient to think that if the pope says so it’s got to be OK. But Paul VI told us the Novus Ordo Mass was OK, and look where that has brought us. The day must come when all awaken to the fact that the Church has been brought low by an apostasy more monstrous than we have been willing to admit. Only then will the true bishops emerge, a true pope will restore the hierarchy, and the Church will rise more glorious than ever. “And all mankind shall see the salvation of God” (Lk.3:6).  (Father Louis J. Campbell, "A Kingdom Brought to Desolation (Lk.11:17)," Third Sunday of Lent, March 27, 2011, Saint Jude Shrine, Stafford, Texas.)

It is thus very ironic that the conciliar revolutionaries have long sought to overlook Apostolicae Curae to provide their “official” (but utterly worthless) endorsement of Anglican orders as their own rites of “episcopal” consecration” and “priestly” ordination stand thereby condemned as well.

5) Although conciliar officials claim that Protestant sects are in "partial communion" with the Catholic Church and thus have "elements of truth and sanctification," there is no such thing as "partial communion" with the Catholic Church. One is either a member of the Catholic Church or he is not. Pope Leo XIII, writing with the Orthodox in mind in the following passage from Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae, June 20, 1894, made this very clear. So did Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943:

Weigh carefully in your minds and before God the nature of Our request.  It is not for any human motive, but impelled by Divine Charity and a desire for the salvation of all, that We advise the reconciliation and union with the Church of Rome; and We mean a perfect and complete union, such as could not subsist in any way if nothing else was brought about but a certain kind of agreement in the Tenets of Belief and an intercourse of Fraternal love.  The True Union between Christians is that which Jesus Christ, the Author of the Church, instituted and desired, and which consists in a Unity of Faith and Unity of Government. (Pope Leo XIII, Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae, June 29, 1894.)

Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. "For in one spirit" says the Apostle, "were we all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free." As therefore in the true Christian community there is only one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one Baptism, so there can be only one faith. And therefore, if a man refuse to hear the Church, let him be considered - so the Lord commands - as a heathen and a publican. It follows that those who are divided in faith or government cannot be living in the unity of such a Body, nor can they be living the life of its one Divine Spirit. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)

Sixth, adherents of any false religion must be converted unconditionally to the Catholic Church as they publicly abjure their errors and make a profession in everything contained in the Deposit of Faith without any reservation or qualification whatsoever.

The conciliar revolutionaries circumvent this by making short work of the very nature of true. Remember, Modernists believe that the facts of history are in dispute as those who were involved in various, including the true general councils of Holy Mother Church that were guided infallibly by God the Holy Ghost, were the time-bound prisoners of their own "biased" preconceptions. This is how the former President of the "Pontifical" Council for Promoting Chrisitan Unity, Walter Kasper, could heap hot coals upon his own head for giving remarks such as those that he gave in England on May 24, 2003, that placed the infallibly binding nature of Apostolicae Curae into question:

As I see the problem and its possible solution, it is not a question of apostolic succession in the sense of an historical chain of laying on of hands running back through the centuries to one of the apostles; this would be a very mechanical and individualistic vision, which by the way historically could hardly be proved and ascertained. The Catholic view is different from such an individualistic and mechanical approach. Its starting point is the collegium of the apostles as a whole; together they received the promise that Jesus Christ will be with them till the end of the world (Matt 28, 20). So after the death of the historical apostles they had to co-opt others who took over some of their apostolic functions. In this sense the whole of the episcopate stands in succession to the whole of the collegium of the apostles.

To stand in the apostolic succession is not a matter of an individual historical chain but of collegial membership in a collegium, which as a whole goes back to the apostles by sharing the same apostolic faith and the same apostolic mission. The laying on of hands is under this aspect a sign of co-optation in a collegium.

This has far reaching consequences for the acknowledgement of the validity of the episcopal ordination of another Church. Such acknowledgement is not a question of an uninterrupted chain but of the uninterrupted sharing of faith and mission, and as such is a question of communion in the same faith and in the same mission.

It is beyond the scope of our present context to discuss what this means for a re-evaluation of Apostolicae Curae (1896) of Pope Leo XIII, who declared Anglican orders null and void, a decision which still stands between our Churches. Without doubt this decision, as Cardinal Willebrands had already affirmed, must be understood in our new ecumenical context in which our communion in faith and mission has considerably grown. A final solution can only be found in the larger context of full communion in faith, sacramental life, and shared apostolic mission.

Before venturing further on this decisive point for the ecumenical vision, that is a renewed communio ecclesiology, I should speak first on another stumbling block or, better, the stumbling block of ecumenism: the primacy of the bishop of Rome, or as we say today, the Petrine ministry. This question was the sticking point of the separation between Canterbury and Rome in the 16th century and it is still the object of emotional controversies.

Significant progress has been achieved on this delicate issue in our Anglican/Roman Catholic dialogues, especially in the last ARCIC document The Gift of Authority (1998). The problem, however, is that what pleased Catholics in this document did not always please all Anglicans, and points which were important for Anglican self-understanding were not always repaid by Catholic affection. So we still have a reception problem and a challenge for further theological work.

It was Pope John Paul II who opened the door to future discussion on this subject. In his encyclical Ut Unum Sint (1995) he extended an invitation to a fraternal dialogue on how to exercise the Petrine ministry in a way that is more acceptable to non-Catholic Christians. It was a source of pleasure for us that among others the Anglican community officially responded to this invitation. The Pontifical Council for Christian Unity gathered the many responses, analyzed the data, and sent its conclusions to the churches that had responded. We hope in this way to have initiated a second phase of a dialogue that will be decisive for the future of the ecumenical approach.

Nobody could reasonably expect that we could from the outset reach a phase of consensus; but what we have reached is not negligible. It has become evident that a new atmosphere and a new climate exist. In our globalized world situation the biblical testimonies on Peter and the Petrine tradition of Rome are read with new eyes because in this new context the question of a ministry of universal unity, a common reference point and a common voice of the universal church, becomes urgent. Old polemical formulas stand at odds with this urgency; fraternal relations have become the norm. Extensive research has been undertaken that has highlighted the different traditions between East and West already in the first millennium, and has traced the development in understanding and in practice of the Petrine ministry throughout the centuries. As well, the historical conditionality of the dogma of the First Vatican Council (1869-70), which must be distinguished from its remaining obligatory content, has become clear. This historical development did not come to an end with the two Vatican Councils, but goes on, and so also in the future the Petrine ministry has to be exercised in line with the changing needs of the Church.

These insights have led to a re-interpretation of the dogma of the Roman primacy. This does not at all mean that there are still not enormous problems in terms of what such a ministry of unity should look like, how it should be administered, whether and to what degree it should have jurisdiction and whether under certain circumstances it could make infallible statements in order to guarantee the unity of the Church and at the same time the legitimate plurality of local churches. But there is at least a wide consensus about the common central problem, which all churches have to solve: how the three dimensions, highlighted already by the Lima documents on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982), namely unity through primacy, collegiality through synodality, and communality of all the faithful and their spiritual gifts, can be brought into a convincing synthesis. (A Vision of Christian Unity for the Next Generation.) 

This is simply apostasy of the highest order. Apostolic succession is not "an historical chain of laying on of hands running back through the centuries to one of the apostles"? The perpetually binding nature of Apostolicae Cenae needs to be re-evaluated? No member of the Catholic Church is free to assert such things and remain a Catholic in good standing (see Number 9, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

The dogmatic decrees of the [First] Vatican Council are historically conditioned?

Walter Kasper is a manifest believer of dogmatic evolutionism, which was condemned by the Fathers of the [First] Vatican Council, by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907, Praestantiae Scripturae, November 18, 1907, and The Oath Against Modernism, September 1, 1910, and by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.

Alas, Walter Kasper’s dogmatic evolutionism is the same as that Wojtyla/John Paul II’s “living tradition” and of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI “hermeneutic of continuity.”  These manifest heretics believe that past dogmatic decrees and/or papal encyclical letters are conditioned by the time and historical circumstances in which they were declared, thus blaspheming the Third Person of the o Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, Who protected those who made these declarations at the time they were made. Dogmatic truth is immutable because God Himself is immutable.

Ah, but this is why, you see, Walter Kasper does not believe that there is any need to seek with urgency the unconditional conversion of Anglicans to the Catholic Church, who he clearly believes have true bishops and true priests. It is simply up to the Lambeth Committee to chart its own "direction," to determine, in Kasper's words, whether Anglicans belongs more “to the churches of the first millennium -Catholic and Orthodox,” which leads to the second major error in Kasper's recent remarks: that the patriarchies of the East constituted a separate “church” prior to the Greek Schism of 1054. No such “church” existed.

Lost in all of this willingness to subject immutable truths to the “historical-critical” method of Hegelian analysis is the fact that one is either a Catholic who assents to all of the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith, or he is not. How absurd is it to ask Protestants to determine whether they belong to the Protestantism in which their sects had their origins?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio might make advertence to the supposedly “time-conditioned” nature of Apostolicae Curae when he overturns it sooner or later. However, it should be remembered that the Argentine Apostate hates Catholic doctrine as much as Matin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, John Wesley, Oliver Cromwell, or Richard Cromwell, and he has long viewed the Anglican sect as perfectly legitimate, which is why he criticized Joseph Alois Ratzinger’s Anglicanorum Coetibus, November 9, 2009, and the subsequent erection of the Personal “Ordinariate” of  Our Lady of Walsingham to provide Anglican ministers who desired to convert to what they thought was the Catholic Church with the opportunity to be “ordained” in the conciliar rites, which are invalid for much of the same reasons as are the Anglican order and to continue the invalid Anglican liturgy as “Catholics.” Bergoglio made it clear that what he thinks is the Catholic Church “needs” the Anglican “church.”

Here is a news report that appeared in March of 2013 shortly after Jorge Mario “Cardinal” Bergoglio was chosen by his fellow apostates as “Pope Francis.” My own contemporaneous commentary will follow immediately below the news report, which is double-indented as follows:

The new Pope has reportedly said the Church universal needs Anglicans and that the Ordinariate is "quite unnecessary".

In a note released after the election of the first ever pontiff from Latin America, the Anglican Bishop of Argentina and former Primate of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone, the Rt Revd Greg Venables said Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was "an inspired choice".

"Many are asking me what is really like. He is much more of a Christian, Christ centered and Spirit filled, than a mere churchman. He believes the Bible as it is written.

"I have been with him on many occasions and he always makes me sit next to him and invariably makes me take part and often do what he as Cardinal should have done. He is consistently humble and wise, outstandingly gifted yet a common man. He is no fool and speaks out very quietly yet clearly when necessary."

Bp Venables added that in a conversation with Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, the latter made it clear that he values the place of Anglicans in the Church universal.

"He called me to have breakfast with him one morning and told me very clearly that the Ordinariate was quite unnecessary and that the Church needs us as Anglicans.

The former Primate of the Anglican Communion's Iglesia Anglicana del Cono Sur de America added, "I consider this to be an inspired appointment not because he is a close and personal friend, but because of who he is In Christ. Pray for him." (Anglican Communion News Service: "The Church universal needs Anglicans"-- Francis the Head Citizen of the One World Ecumenical Church.)

Yes, indeedy, boys and girls out there in cyberspace, most of whom like to access articles without giving any thought to, say, providing even five or ten dollars to support its continuation, Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis has expressed himself very clearly about “relations” with the schismatic and heretical Anglican sect, sending a message to the new layman posing as the Anglican “archbishop” of Canterbury, Justin Welby, upon his installation yesterday, March 21, 2013, the Feast of Saint Benedict, as the latest fake, phony, fraud to pose as a successor of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. Remember, of course, that the Canterbury Cathedral was stolen from the true Church by the murderous, lecherous King Henry VIII in 1534 after he had Parliament declare himself to be "supreme head of the Church in England. 

It is no accident that the date of March 21 was chosen by the Anglican sect as is on that date in 1556 that hideous named Thomas Cranmer, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and the first Anglican to claim that position, was burned to death upon the orders of Queen Mary. This heretic, who had the blood of thousands upon thousands of Catholic martyrs in England and Ireland on his dirty hands, is considered to be a martyr by the Anglican sect. Sickening. Truly revolting.

Here is Bergoglio/Francis's first message to his spanking new partner in “ecumenical dialogue,” Justin Welby (not to be confused with Marcus Welby, M.D., of course), who is a fellow socialist and believer in the One World Ecumenical Church: 

To the Most Reverend and Right Honourable
Justin Welby
Archbishop of Canterbury

"May grace and peace be multiplied to you" (1 Pet 1:2b)

I thank you for the kind words contained in your message to me at my election, and I wish in turn to offer my greetings and best wishes on the occasion of your Enthronement at Canterbury Cathedral.

The pastoral ministry is a call to walk in fidelity to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Please be assured of my prayers as you take up your new responsibilities, and I ask you to pray for me as I respond to the new call that the Lord has addressed to me.

I look forward to meeting you in the near future, and to continuing the warm fraternal relations that our predecessors enjoyed. (Message of The Head Apostate in Rome to the Head Apostate in England.)

“Enthronement at Canterbury Cathedral”?

What “enthronement”?

Justin Welby and his schismatic, heretical Anglican sect have no right to that glorious Catholic cathedral. No right whatsoever. Canterbury Cathedral is stolen property. It belongs to the Catholic Church.

Then again, of course, the church buildings, including the Basilica of Saint Peter, and the schools, hospitals, monasteries and convents and other institutions and property that belong to the Catholic Church have been seized by spiritual robber barons, each of whom does not possess the Catholic Faith in her Holy Integrity while saying and doing things that are proscribed by the Catholic Church. Most of these spiritual robber barons are neither priests nor bishops. They are laymen just as surely as Justin Welby,

“Pastoral fidelity”?

“A call to work in fidelity to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ”?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis, simply aping the party line taken by Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II and Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, believes that heretics and schismatics some kind of “ministry” to discharge in the “Church of Christ” while supporting many grave evils (contraception, the surgical and chemical assassination of innocent preborn children under cover of the civil law as the exercise of a “duly informed conscience,” perversity as an expression love “love” and a "commitment" in stable relationships, installation of women as Anglican presbyters and bishops, installation of men and women engaged in unrepentant acts of perversity) under cover of the civil and, of course, using liturgical books condemned as heretical by Pope Saint Pius V in Regnans in Excelsis, March 5, 1870, and declared to be utterly null and void of any sacramental validity by Pope Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae, September 18, 1896, using a translation of Sacred Writ that is heretical and promoting one heresy after another.

Some ministry, huh? (End of 2013 Commentary, taken from: Jorge Mario Bergoglio And His Friend, Justin Welby.)

Perhaps even to the point is the fact that Jorge Mario Bergoglio stated without equivocation that there is an entity called the “universal church” that is not co-identical with the Catholic Church, removing all the studied ambiguity that Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger, aided by a Lutheran “theologian,” structured into the text of Lumen Gentium, November 21, 1964. There is only one “universal church,” the Catholic Church. None other.

Pope Pius XII explained this clearly in Mystici Corporis Christi, June 29, 1943:

13. If we would define and describe this true Church of Jesus Christ — which is the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church — we shall find nothing more noble, morre sublime, or more divine than the expression “the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ” – an expression which springs from and is, as it were, the fair flowering of the repeated teaching of the Sacred Scriptures and the holy Fathers.

14. That the Church is a body is frequently asserted in the Sacred Scriptures. “Christ,” says the Apostle, “is the Head of the Body of the Church.” If the Church is a body, it must be an unbroken unity, according to those words of Paul: “Though many we are one body in Christ.”  But it is not enough that the body of the Church should be an unbroken unity; it must also be something definite and perceptible to the senses as Our predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Satis Cognitum asserts: “the Church is visible because she is a body.”  Hence they err in a matter of divine truth, who imagine the Church to be invisible, intangible, a something merely “pneumatological” as they say, by which many Christian communities, though they differ from each other in their profession of faith, are united by an invisible bond. . . .

Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. "For in one spirit" says the Apostle, "were we all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free." As therefore in the true Christian community there is only one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one Baptism, so there can be only one faith. And therefore, if a man refuse to hear the Church, let him be considered - so the Lord commands - as a heathen and a publican. It follows that those who are divided in faith or government cannot be living in the unity of such a Body, nor can they be living the life of its one Divine Spirit. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)

Writing in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, Pope Pius XII condemned the belief of the “new theologians,” among whose number at that time was seminarian Joseph Alois Ratzinger, that the Church of Christ is not co-extensive with the Catholic Church:

Some say they are not bound by the doctrine, explained in Our Encyclical Letter of a few years ago, and based on the Sources of Revelation, which teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing.[6] Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation. Others finally belittle the reasonable character of the credibility of Christian faith. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

Yet it is that Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes that everyone is part of the “universal” church, which is true if one is referring to the church of the adversary, who is the driving force behind his relentless effort to strip away the last bastions of anything remotely recognizable as part of Catholic Faith, Worship, and Morals. He hates Catholic doctrine with a diabolical fervor, and he is unashamed in condemning those who hold to its holy integrity.

As noted earlier in this commentary, the Anglican “church” has no right from God to exist. It is a false religion. Its adherents are in need to be converted unconditionally to the Catholic Church.

Walter Kasper and his three chief enablers in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio have been and, in Bergoglio’s case, continue to be pretty blatant in their disregard for the Apostolicae Curae as they have engaged in publicly notorious acts that give the impression of conferring an acceptance?

Are not the First and Second Commandments the foundation-stones of the law of God?

How can one violate these Commandments openly and repeatedly without being guilty of both heresy and apostasy?

Each of the conciliar antipopes have defected from the Holy Faith on numerous points. Five of the six, Albino Luciani/John Paul I, who was a heretic in his own right, being excepted as his antipapal tenure lasted thirty-four days in 1978, have embraced the leaders of false religions, starting with Angelo Roncalli/“Saint” John XXIII, who greeted the archlayman, Geoffrey Fischer, of the Anglican sect on December 2, 1960, and explained how he, a putative successor of Pope Saint Gregory the Great, was “delighted” to meet with the false successor of Saint Augustine of Canterbury (see John XXIII and the Anglican Archlayman for a glowing report on this meeting), and continuing with Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI’s meetings with Fischer's successor, Michael Ramsey, and the patriarchs of the Greek Orthodox schismatics and heretics, Athenagoras and Dimitrios, before whom the antipope spontaneously genuflected when they met in the Sistine Chapel in 1972 (see Montini and Dimitrios for a reference to this act of apostasy). Antipopes Karol Josef Wojtyla/“Saint” John Paul II and Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict opened the floodgates of “interreligious” prayer as they entered into places of false worship and heaped endless words of praise about the “virtues” of false religions. It was a short step from there to the apologies that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has issued to leaders of false religions for the efforts of Catholics in the past to convert their adherents.

Although I have used the following quotation several times in the past, it is worth using yet again as readers forget and as the apostasies of conciliarism tend to make Catholics as a whole forget the the passage of time can never erase the validity of the witness given by the English martyrs, Catholics who refused to make any compromises or concessions to Anglicanism in the slightest:

A lady was lately told that she should be let out of prison if she would just once allow herself to be seen walking through an Anglican church. She refused. She had come into prison with a sound conscience and would depart with it, or die. In Henry's day [King Henry VIII], the whole kingdom, with all its bishops and learned men, abjured its faith at one word of the tyrant. But now, in his daughter's days [the daughter was Queen Elizabeth], boys and women boldly profess their faith before the judges and refuse to make the slightest concession even at the threat of death.

"The adversaries are very mad that by no cruelty can they move a single Catholic from his resolution, no, not even a little girl. A young lady of sixteen was questioned by the sham bishop of London about the Pope, and answered him with courage, and even made fun of him in public, and so was ordered to be carried to the public prison . . . On the way she cried out that she was being carried to that place for her religion." (Letter of Blessed Edmond Campion, S.J., to his Jesuit superiors in Rome, quoted in Father Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., Edmund Campion, Hero of God's Underground, Vision Books: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957.)

It is a very sad commentary on the extent of the state of apostasy that is upon us that so few Catholics see any disparity between the steadfast resolve of Catholics in Elizabethan England to make any compromises with Anglicanism and the ready willingness of conciliar officials to make such compromises as a matter of routine, including treating Anglican clergy in a de facto manner as legitimate ministers of God as one conciliar a “pope” after another has imparted "joint blessings" with the laymen posing as the “archbishop of Canterbury.”

Very few, if any, “resist while recognize” Catholics, grateful to their “pope” for the now abrogated Summorum Pontificum, July 7, 2007, cared that their beloved Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI gave a “joint blessing” with the then layman posing as the "archbishop" of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on September 17, 2010:

This photograph is simply one of many that demonstrate the de facto legitimacy extended to Protestant sects and their invalid orders by the conciliar “popes” and “bishops.”

Unlike the conciliar “popes” and their “bishops,” Pope Pius IX understood that he had a personal obligation before Christ the King as His Vicar on earth to seek with urgency the unconditional conversion of all non-Catholics to the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order:

It is therefore by force of the right of Our supreme Apostolic ministry, entrusted to us by the same Christ the Lord, which, having to carry out with [supreme] participation all the duties of the good Shepherd and to follow and embrace with paternal love all the men of the world, we send this Letter of Ours to all the Christians from whom We are separated, with which we exhort them warmly and beseech them with insistence to hasten to return to the one fold of Christ; we desire in fact from the depths of the heart their salvation in Christ Jesus, and we fear having to render an account one day to Him, Our Judge, if, through some possibility, we have not pointed out and prepared the way for them to attain eternal salvation. In all Our prayers and supplications, with thankfulness, day and night we never omit to ask for them, with humble insistence, from the eternal Shepherd of souls the abundance of goods and heavenly graces. And since, if also, we fulfill in the earth the office of vicar, with all our heart we await with open arms the return of the wayward sons to the Catholic Church, in order to receive them with infinite fondness into the house of the Heavenly Father and to enrich them with its inexhaustible treasures. By our greatest wish for the return to the truth and the communion with the Catholic Church, upon which depends not only the salvation of all of them, but above all also of the whole Christian society: the entire world in fact cannot enjoy true peace if it is not of one fold and one shepherd. (Pope Pius IX, Iam Vos Omnes, September 13, 1868.) 

Has a conciliar “pope” spoke in such a way? 

Indeed not. 

Just the opposite is true. Such is one of the many distinct differences between Catholicism and conciliarism.

One must believe in everything that is taught by the Catholic Church or he is not a Catholic.

One cannot believe in the “new ecclesiology” and be a member of the Catholic Church.

One cannot believe in “episcopal collegiality” and be a member of the Catholic Church.

One cannot believe in “false ecumenism” and be a member of the Catholic Church.

One cannot participate in “interreligious dialogue” and “inter-religious prayer services” and be “blessed” by Protestant "ministers and enter into the temples of Protestants or the Orthodox or Mohammedans and be a member of the Catholic Church.

One cannot believe in and promote "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" and be a member of the Catholic Church.

One cannot engage in liturgical ceremonies that would have made even the Arians white with rage and be a member of the Catholic Church.

One cannot refer to the clergy of Protestant sects or the Orthodox confessions as being "pastors" in the "Church of Christ.

Bergoglio has done this by reaffirming Anglicans in their Anglicanism and by being "blessed" by Protestant “ministers” in 2006 when he was the conciliar “archbishop” of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

No heretic/schismatic has any “pastoral ministry” to fulfill in the “Church of Christ” as the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church and none other.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio has no such “pastoral ministry” in the Catholic Church as he is an apostate who has separated himself from the bosom of Holy Mother Church.

Yes, one must believe in everything taught by Holy Mother Church as it has been defined and understood from time immemorial or he is simply not a Catholic.

Who says so?

Well, let's take a little look:

With reference to its object, faith cannot be greater for some truths than for others. Nor can it be less with regard to the number of truths to be believed. For we must all believe the very same thing, both as to the object of faith as well as to the number of truths. All are equal in this because everyone must believe all the truths of faith--both those which God Himself has directly revealed, as well as those he has revealed through His Church. Thus, I must believe as much as you and you as much as I, and all other Christians similarly. He who does not believe all these mysteries is not Catholic and therefore will never enter Paradise. (Saint Francis de Sales, The Sermons of Saint Francis de Sales for Lent Given in 1622, republished by TAN Books and Publishers for the Visitation Monastery of Frederick, Maryland, in 1987, pp. 34-37.)

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

There is no wiggle room here at all.

If one even "privately" dissents from one article contained in the Catholic Faith while holding, however tenuously, to others, he has expelled himself from the bosom of Holy Mother Church by virtue of violating the Divine Positive Law. 

So much for the utterly absurd claim that there are an “irreducible minima” of truths by which anyone, no less one of the conciliar “popes,” can hold and thus remain a member of the Catholic Church even though he denies or puts into question many others. It does not get much clearer, does it?

Ah, but a true pope cannot teach anything that is heretical or otherwise contrary to the Catholic Faith.

This leads to Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, November 26, 2013, that contains contains rank heresy, which means that “Pope Francis” is not “Pope Francis” but merely a man of Argentinian birth who does not hold to the Catholic Faith in all of its holy integrity.

Here is the proof:

247. We hold the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked, for “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). The Church, which shares with Jews an important part of the sacred Scriptures, looks upon the people of the covenant and their faith as one of the sacred roots of her own Christian identity (cf. Rom 11:16-18). As Christians, we cannot consider Judaism as a foreign religion; nor do we include the Jews among those called to turn from idols and to serve the true God (cf. 1 Thes 1:9). With them, we believe in the one God who acts in history, and with them we accept his revealed word.

248. Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus’ disciples. The friendship which has grown between us makes us bitterly and sincerely regret the terrible persecutions which they have endured, and continue to endure, especially those that have involved Christians.

249. God continues to work among the people of the Old Covenant and to bring forth treasures of wisdom which flow from their encounter with his word. For this reason, the Church also is enriched when she receives the values of Judaism. While it is true that certain Christian beliefs are unacceptable to Judaism, and that the Church cannot refrain from proclaiming Jesus as Lord and Messiah, there exists as well a rich complementarity which allows us to read the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures together and to help one another to mine the riches of God’s word. We can also share many ethical convictions and a common concern for justice and the development of peoples. (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Evangelii Gaudium, November 26, 2013.)

"Pope Francis" chose to have this "apostolic exhortation" published in the December, 2013, edition of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis.

Here are the three passages as found in the Italian language (not Latin, by the way!) in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis as it is published in its conciliar captivity:

247. Uno sguardo molto speciale si rivolge al popolo ebreo, la cui Alleanza con Dio non è mai stata revocata, perché “i doni e la chiamata di Dio sono irrevocabili” (Rm 11, 29). La Chiesa, che condivide con l’Ebraismo una parte importante delle Sacre Scritture, considera il popolo dell’Alleanza e la sua fede come una radice sacra della propria identità cristiana (cfr Rm 11, 16-18). Come cristiani non possiamo considerare l’Ebraismo come una religione estranea, né includiamo gliebrei tra quanti sono chiamati ad abbandonare gli idoli per convertirsi al vero Dio (cfr 1 Ts 1, 9). Crediamo insieme con loro nell’unico Dio che agisce nella storia, e accogliamo con loro la comune Parola rivelata.

248. Il dialogo e l’amicizia con i figli d’Israele sono parte della vita dei discepoli di Gesù. L’affetto che si è sviluppato ci porta sinceramene ed amaramente a dispiacerci per le terribili persecuzioni di cui furono e sono oggetto, particolarmente per quelle che coinvolgono o hanno coinvolto cristiani.

249. Dio continua ad operare nel popolo dell’Antica Alleanza e fa nascere tesori di saggezza che scaturiscono dal suo incontro con la Parola divina. Per questo anche la Chiesa si arricchisce quando raccoglie i valori dell’Ebraismo. Sebbene alcune convinzioni cristiane siano inaccettabili per l’Ebraismo, e la Chiesa non possa rinunciare ad annunciare Gesù come Signore e Messia, esiste una ricca complementarietà che ci permette di leggere insieme i testi della Bibbia ebraica e aiutarci vicendevolmente a scerare le ricchezze della Parola, come pure di condividere molte convinzioni etiche e la comune preoccupazione per la giustizia e lo sviluppo dei popoli. (Data presso San Pietro, alla chiusura dell’Anno della fede, il 24 novembre, Solennità i i. S. Gesù Cristo Re dell’Universo, dell’anno 2013, primo del mio Pontificato. Acta Apostolicae Sedis, December, 2013.)

If one professes belief that a particular claimant to the Throne of Saint Peter is legitimate and is indeed the Vicar of Christ on earth, a matter about which no Catholic is free to err or to profess indifference, then one must accept as binding upon his conscience and beyond all criticism even Evangelii Gaudium as part of the Universal Ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church without complaint, reservation or qulification of any kind.

Well, is the Mosaic Covenant still valid?

Has it never been revoked?

Catholics who think that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the pope agree with their "pope's" statement as they must "obey" the man they think is a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter. 

Alas, Jorge Mario Bergoglio's "teaching" on the Jews is heretical, and it is in this and in so many other ways that he shows himself to be a perfect disciple of the falsehoods promulgated by the authority of his predecessors since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958. Jorge Mario Bergolio lacks the Catholic Faith, He has openly denied Catholic doctrine on this subject with great boldness. Although he style is more vulgar, visceral profane that those who have preceded him, he is, of course, merely following those before him who have denied, whether implicitly or explicitly, the Catholic truth about the Old Covenant that was summarized so clearly by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943:

28.That He completed His work on the gibbet of the Cross is the unanimous teaching of the holy Fathers who assert that the Church was born from the side of our Savior on the Cross like a new Eve, mother of all the living. [28] "And it is now," says the great St. Ambrose, speaking of the pierced side of Christ, "that it is built, it is now that it is formed, it is now that is .... molded, it is now that it is created . . . Now it is that arises a spiritual house, a holy priesthood." [29] One who reverently examines this venerable teaching will easily discover the reasons on which it is based.

29.And first of all, by the death of our Redeemer, the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished; then the Law of Christ together with its mysteries, enactments, institutions, and sacred rites was ratified for the whole world in the blood of Jesus Christ. For, while our Divine Savior was preaching in a restricted area -- He was not sent but to the sheep that were lost of the house of Israel [30] -the Law and the Gospel were together in force; [31] but on the gibbet of his death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees, [32] fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, [33] establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race. [34] "To such an extent, then," says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, "was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom." [35]

30. On the Cross then the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death, [36] in order to give way to the New Testament of which Christ had chosen the Apostles as qualified ministers; [37] and although He had been constituted the Head of the whole human family in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, it is by the power of the Cross that our Savior exercises fully the office itself of Head in His Church. "For it was through His triumph on the Cross," according to the teaching of the Angelic and Common Doctor, "that He won power and dominion over the gentiles"; [38] by that same victory He increased the immense treasure of graces, which, as He reigns in glory in heaven, He lavishes continually on His mortal members it was by His blood shed on the Cross that God's anger was averted and that all the heavenly gifts, especially the spiritual graces of the New and Eternal Testament, could then flow from the fountains of our Savior for the salvation of men, of the faithful above all; it was on the tree of the Cross, finally, that He entered into possession of His Church, that is, of all the members of His Mystical Body; for they would not have been united to this Mystical Body. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)

Pope Pius XII's Mystici Corporis was inserted into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis in 1943. Although it was nothing new whatsoever, Pope Pius XII reaffirmed an irreformable teaching that is part of the Sacred Deposit of Faith. The fact that Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose to insert a contrary teaching into the Acta Apostlicae Sedis shows that he is not in perfect communion of mind and heart with his predecessors and is thus a heretic who is outside of the bosom of the Catholic Church, an imposter on the Throne of Saint Peter. Such a man is never to be obeyed as to do so is to obey the adversary himself.

Dom Prosper Gueranger’s reflection on the parable read at Holy Mass on Septuagesima Sunday (which will occur on Sunday, February 13, 2022, during this current liturgical year) concerning those called at the eleventh hour contains a reiteration of the consistent teaching of the Church Fathers that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is referring to the fact that the Old Covenant is about to give way to the New Covenant He would institute on Holy Thursday and then ratify by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross:

It is of importance that we should well understand this parable of the Gospel, and why the Church inserts this parable in to-day’s liturgy. Firstly, then, let us recall to mind on what occasion our Saviour spoke this parable, and what instruction He intended to convey by it to the Jews. He wishes to warn them of the fast approach of the day when their Law is to be give way to the Christian law; and He would prepare their minds against the jealousy and prejudice which might arise in them, at the thought that God was about to form a covenant with the Gentiles. The vineyard is the Church in several periods, from the beginning of the world to the time when God Himself dwelt among men, and former all true believers into one visible and permanent society. The morning is the time from Adam to Noah; the third hour begins with Noah and ends with Abraham; the sixth hour includes the period which elapsed between Abraham and Moses; and lastly, the ninth hour opens with the age of the prophets, and closes with the birth of the Saviour. The Messias came at the eleventh hour when the world seemed to be at the decline of its day. Mercies unprecedented were reserved for this last period, during which salvation was to be given to the Gentiles by the preaching of the apostles. It is by this mystery of mercy that our Saviour rebukes the Jewish pride. By the selfish murmurings made against the master of the house by the early labourers, our Lord signifies the indignation which the scribes and pharisees would show at the Gentiles being adopted as God’s children. Then He shows them how their jealousy would be chastised; Israel, that had laboured before us, shall be rejected for their obduracy of heart, and we Gentiles, the last comers, shall be made first, for we shall made members of that Catholic Church which is the bride of the Son of God.  (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year: Volume IV: Septuagesima, pp. 125-126.)

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., accepted what Jorge Mario Bergoglio rejected: the Catholic Faith in its entirety. How many “conservative” “bishops” within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism believe that the Old Covenant has been abrogated? Perhaps a few. Maybe. However, none has spoken out in defense of the truth, and none has dared to called upon Jews to convert to the Holy Faith as they know that this goes about the teaching of their “popes,” something that should be a pretty clear indication that the religious sect in which they find themselves is the counterfeit ape of the Catholic Church, a counterfeit ape whose leaders feel free to override immutable truths arbitrarily without any qualm of conscience whatsoever about doing so.

Obviously like examples on every matter of doctrine on which the conciliar revolutionaries defect from the Catholic Faith could be given ad infinitum, ad nauseam. However, I have neither the time nor the desire to rewrite Antichrist Has Shown Us His Calling Card, which was published in 2019.

No Catholic is free to dissent from anything that a true pope causes to be inserted into his Acta Apostolicae Sedis, something that was explained sixty-two years ago by the eminent theological, Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton in the American Ecclesiastical Review, a journal whose editor he was between 1943 and 1963:

Six years ago, then, Pope Pius XII was faced with a situation in which some of the men who were privileged and obligated to teach the truths of sacred theology had perverted their position and their influence and had deliberately flouted the teachings of the Holy See about the nature and the constitution of the Catholic Church.  And, when he declared that it is wrong to debate a point already decided by the Holy Father after that decision has been published in his "Acta," he was taking cognizance of and condemning an existent practice.  There actually were individuals who were contradicting papal teachings.  They were so numerous and influential that they rendered the composition of the Humani generis necessary to counteract their activities.  These individuals were continuing to propose teachings repudiated by the Sovereign Pontiff in previous pronouncements.  The Holy Father, then, was compelled by these circumstances to call for the cessation of debate among theologians on subjects which had already been decided by pontifical decisions published in the "Acta."

The kind of theological teaching and writing against which the encyclical Humani generis was directed was definitely not remarkable for its scientific excellence.  It was, as a matter of fact, exceptionally poor from the scientific point of view.  The men who were responsible for it showed very clearly that they did not understand the basic nature and purpose of sacred theology.  For the true theologian the magisterium of the Church remains, as the Humani generis says, the immediate and universal norm of truth.  And the teaching set forth by Pope Pius IX in his Tuas libenter is as true today as it always has been.

But when we treat of that subjection by which all Catholic students of speculative sciences are obligated in conscience so that they bring new aids to the Church by their writings, the men of this assembly ought to realize that it is not enough for Catholic scholars to receive and venerate the above-mentioned dogmas of the Church, but [they ought also to realize] that they must submit to the doctrinal decisions issued by the Pontifical Congregations and also to those points of doctrine which are held by the common and constant agreement of Catholics as theological truths and conclusions which are so certain that, even though the opinions opposed to them cannot be called heretical, they still deserve some other theological censure.[12]

It is definitely the business of the writer in the field of sacred theology to benefit the Church by what he writes.  It is likewise the duty of the teacher of this science to help the Church by his teaching.  The man who uses the shoddy tricks of minimism to oppose or to ignore the doctrinal decisions made by the Sovereign Pontiff and set down in his "Acta" is, in the last analysis, stultifying his position as a theologian. (The doctrinal Authority of Papal allocutions.)

Are there any further questions about the binding nature of what a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter places in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis?

Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton denounced "the shoddy tricks of minimism to ignore the doctrinal decisions made by the Sovereign Pontiff and set down his his 'Acta'."

The same shoddy tricks of minimism that were being used by the likes of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., and the "new theologians," including Father Joseph Ratzinger, in the 1950s that prompted Pope Pius XII to issue Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, have been employed for the past fifty years or more by those seeking to claim the absolutely nonexistent ability to ignore and/or refute the teaching of men they have recognized to be a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter. I know. I contributed to that literature for a while. I was wrong. So are those who persist in their willful, stubborn rejection of the binding nature of all that is contained in the Universal Ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church even though if not declared infallible in a solemn manner.

As noted just above in this commentary, the “resist while recognize” movement has done e incalculable harm to Catholic teaching on the nature of the papacy and the authority of papal teaching. A true pope must be obeyed, to be sure, and a true pope can never teach error, no less outright heresy.

Indeed, the conciliar “popes” have been responsible for attacking the nature of the papacy and for needlessly dividing believing Catholics, thus causing enmities aplenty, including estrangements among families, relatives, friends and former colleagues and acquaintances. Catholicism unites. Error divides.

Catholics must be of one mind about the Holy Faith:

Agreement and union of minds is the necessary foundation of this perfect concord amongst men, from which concurrence of wills and similarity of action are the natural results. Wherefore, in His divine wisdom, He ordained in His Church Unity of Faith; a virtue which is the first of those bonds which unite man to God, and whence we receive the name of the faithful - "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Eph. iv., 5). That is, as there is one Lord and one baptism, so should all Christians, without exception, have but one faith. And so the Apostle St. Paul not merely begs, but entreats and implores Christians to be all of the same mind, and to avoid difference of opinions: "I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms amongst you, and that you be perfect in the same mind and in the same judgment" (I Cor. i., 10). Such passages certainly need no interpreter; they speak clearly enough for themselves. Besides, all who profess Christianity allow that there can be but one faith. It is of the greatest importance and indeed of absolute necessity, as to which many are deceived, that the nature and character of this unity should be recognized. And, as We have already stated, this is not to be ascertained by conjecture, but by the certain knowledge of what was done; that is by seeking for and ascertaining what kind of unity in faith has been commanded by Jesus Christ. (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

The ethos of the “Second” Vatican Council and the magisteria of the postconcilar “popes” have destroyed Catholic unity, making open dissent from “papal” teaching and disrespect for the person of one considered to be a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter an institutionalized feature of the false religious sect that is Catholicism’s counterfeit ape, conciliarism. No, dissent from any teaching that a pope decides to insert into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis is not permitted. Those who believe otherwise have to reckon with the considered theological conclusions that had been reached by the Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton sixty-four years ago.

The rotten fruit of false ecumenism is plain for all who have the eyes to see. There is no reconciling the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church concerning false religions and that of the counterfeit church conciliarism, a statement that is readily verifiable by examining the following passage from Pope Pius XI’s Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928, which was issued in part as a reaction to the unofficial “Anglo-Catholic” discussions that had taken place between 1921 and 1927 that were referenced in the news story cited at the beginning of this commentary:

Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity? Who would dare to say that he loved Christ, unless he worked with all his might to carry out the desires of Him, Who asked His Father that His disciples might be "one." And did not the same Christ will that His disciples should be marked out and distinguished from others by this characteristic, namely that they loved one another: "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another"? All Christians, they add, should be as "one": for then they would be much more powerful in driving out the pest of irreligion, which like a serpent daily creeps further and becomes more widely spread, and prepares to rob the Gospel of its strength. These things and others that class of men who are known as pan-Christians continually repeat and amplify; and these men, so far from being quite few and scattered, have increased to the dimensions of an entire class, and have grouped themselves into widely spread societies, most of which are directed by non-Catholics, although they are imbued with varying doctrines concerning the things of faith. This undertaking is so actively promoted as in many places to win for itself the adhesion of a number of citizens, and it even takes possession of the minds of very many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed.

Admonished, therefore, by the consciousness of Our Apostolic office that We should not permit the flock of the Lord to be cheated by dangerous fallacies, We invoke, Venerable Brethren, your zeal in avoiding this evil; for We are confident that by the writings and words of each one of you the people will more easily get to know and understand those principles and arguments which We are about to set forth, and from which Catholics will learn how they are to think and act when there is question of those undertakings which have for their end the union in one body, whatsoever be the manner, of all who call themselves Christians. . . 

And here it seems opportune to expound and to refute a certain false opinion, on which this whole question, as well as that complex movement by which non-Catholics seek to bring about the union of the Christian churches depends. For authors who favor this view are accustomed, times almost without number, to bring forward these words of Christ: "That they all may be one.... And there shall be one fold and one shepherd," with this signification however: that Christ Jesus merely expressed a desire and prayer, which still lacks its fulfillment. For they are of the opinion that the unity of faith and government, which is a note of the one true Church of Christ, has hardly up to the present time existed, and does not to-day exist. They consider that this unity may indeed be desired and that it may even be one day attained through the instrumentality of wills directed to a common end, but that meanwhile it can only be regarded as mere ideal. They add that the Church in itself, or of its nature, is divided into sections; that is to say, that it is made up of several churches or distinct communities, which still remain separate, and although having certain articles of doctrine in common, nevertheless disagree concerning the remainder; that these all enjoy the same rights; and that the Church was one and unique from, at the most, the apostolic age until the first Ecumenical Councils. Controversies therefore, they say, and longstanding differences of opinion which keep asunder till the present day the members of the Christian family, must be entirely put aside, and from the remaining doctrines a common form of faith drawn up and proposed for belief, and in the profession of which all may not only know but feel that they are brothers. The manifold churches or communities, if united in some kind of universal federation, would then be in a position to oppose strongly and with success the progress of irreligion. (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.) 

It should be eminently clear that Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s praise of various Protestant sects and his references to Protestant “bishops” such as the late Tony Palmer as “my brother bishop” are part of his goal to create a One World Ecumenical Church in fact if not in name, a One World Ecumenical Church that was a goal of The Sillon over a century ago and condemned as follows by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

And now, overwhelmed with the deepest sadness, We ask Ourselves, Venerable Brethren, what has become of the Catholicism of the Sillon? Alas! this organization which formerly afforded such promising expectations, this limpid and impetuous stream, has been harnessed in its course by the modern enemies of the Church, and is now no more than a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world (if such a Church could overcome) the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Everything about the counterfeit church of conciliarism is untrue, starting with its claim to be the Catholic Church when it is, of course, her counterfeit ape, a home of veritable figures of Antichrist, men who fear not to blaspheme God, reaffirm adherents of false religions in their falsehoods to the point of their very deaths, stage sacrilegious liturgical events that would have shocked even the pagans of yore, and propagate every manner of false doctrine that has been condemned solemnly by the authority of Holy Mother Church.

This is important to emphasize as so many commentators in the Gallicanist resist while recognize universe are making appeals to “fight” against the man they consider to be a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter. Some of these commentators have termed the man they say is their pope as a heretic, although a believing Catholic understands that a heretic has never served on the Throne of Saint Peter. The incalculable harm done by this recrudescence of Gallicanism is such that anyone who points out the simple truth that anyone who defects knowingly from a single tenet of the Catholic Faith is outside the pale of Holy Mother Church must be condemned, ridiculed, and scorned as an object of derision.

Pope Saint Pius X explained the reverence that we must have for a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter:

Distracted with so many occupations, it is easy to forget the things that lead to perfection in priestly life; it is easy [for the priest] to delude himself and to believe that, by busying himself with the salvation of the souls of others, he consequently works for his own sanctification. Alas, let not this delusion lead you to error, because nemo dat quod nemo habet [no one gives what he does not have]; and, in order to sanctify others, it is necessary not to neglect any of the ways proposed for the sanctification of our own selves….

The Pope is the guardian of dogma and of morals; he is the custodian of the principles that make families sound, nations great, souls holy; he is the counsellor of princes and of peoples; he is the head under whom no one feels tyrannized because he represents God Himself; he is the supreme father who unites in himself all that may exist that is loving, tender, divine.

It seems incredible, and is even painful, that there be priests to whom this recommendation must be made, but we are regrettably in our age in this hard, unhappy, situation of having to tell priests: love the Pope!

And how must the Pope be loved? Non verbo neque lingua, sed opere et veritate. [Not in word, nor in tongue, but in deed, and in truth - 1 Jn iii, 18] When one loves a person, one tries to adhere in everything to his thoughts, to fulfill his will, to perform his wishes. And if Our Lord Jesus Christ said of Himself, “si quis diligit me, sermonem meum servabit,” [if any one love me, he will keep my word - Jn xiv, 23] therefore, in order to demonstrate our love for the Pope, it is necessary to obey him.

Therefore, when we love the Pope, there are no discussions regarding what he orders or demands, or up to what point obedience must go, and in what things he is to be obeyed; when we love the Pope, we do not say that he has not spoken clearly enough, almost as if he were forced to repeat to the ear of each one the will clearly expressed so many times not only in person, but with letters and other public documents; we do not place his orders in doubt, adding the facile pretext of those unwilling to obey – that it is not the Pope who commands, but those who surround him; we do not limit the field in which he might and must exercise his authority; we do not set above the authority of the Pope that of other persons, however learned, who dissent from the Pope, who, even though learned, are not holy, because whoever is holy cannot dissent from the Pope.

This is the cry of a heart filled with pain, that with deep sadness I express, not for your sake, dear brothers, but to deplore, with you, the conduct of so many priests, who not only allow themselves to debate and criticize the wishes of the Pope, but are not embarrassed to reach shameless and blatant disobedience, with so much scandal for the good and with so great damage to souls. (Pope Saint Pius X, Allocution Vi ringrazio to priests on the 50th anniversary of the Apostolic Union, November 18, 1912, as found at: RORATE CÆLI: “Love the Pope!” – no ifs, and no buts: For Bishops, priests, and faithful, Saint Pius X explains what loving the Pope really entails.)

Yes, one must obey the pope, who, guided infallibly by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, is the guarantor of orthodoxy and the Principle of Unity. 

Our Lady Will Come  to the Rescue of her Dowry, England

Despite the fact that the Anglican sect has existed for nearly five centuries and that the conciliar sect has been about the work of deceiving Catholics for over six decades now, there are still pockets of Catholics here and there who know what is true and who, like many of slackers before them, are trying to make sense of the state of apostasy and betrayal that exists at this time.

Indeed, there are Anglicans in England who have converted to what they think is the Catholic Church without realizing that they have only moved from one deck of the SS One World Ecumenical Church to another. These souls are motivated by a desire to belong to the Catholic Church and most of them want nothing to do with the so-called “Anglican Use” liturgy of the “Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham” as they want to belong to the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church and to worship God in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition that their English forefathers rejected with a ready abandon following Henry VIII’s break from the Catholic Church in 1534. We must pray for these good people to come to a recognition of the fact that the Catholic Church is the spotless, inerrant, virginal mystical bride of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head, and Mystical Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and thus cannot ever err nor make accommodations with those steeped in error.

This having been noted, however, the longing for union with the true Church and their beloved England’s return thereto was also near and dear to the heart of the very same pope who had declared Anglican orders to be null and void, Pope Leo XIII, who addressed an Apostolic Letter to England in 1895 begging for the English to fly unto the patronage of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Possessing a true pastoral heart, Pope Leo XIII wanted to free the English from their enslavement to the sorts of theological errors that have emptied the pews of Anglican church buildings and led many among the ranks of the Anglican clergy to reject the Ten Commandments and even to go so far as deny the Sacred Divinity of Our Lord Himself. Like Pope Pius IX immediately before him, Pope Leo XIII exhorted non-Catholics to convert to the true Church, and this fact alone should help to convince the unconvinced that those who have laid claim to the papacy since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958, have been and continue to be antipopes who have preached doctrines antithetical to that which is contained within the Sacred Deposit of Faith and thus inimical to the good of souls upon which the entirety of a just social order must be premised.

Pope Leo XIII started his Apostolic Letter, which was written in 1895, by reminding the English of his own pastoral concern for them and of their own rich history of Catholicism, which produced numerous saints and respected centers of learning:

The love and care of the Roman Pontiffs for England has been traditional from the days of our holy pre­decessor Gregory the Great. Religion and humanity generally, and especially the English nation, owe him a deep debt of gratitude. Although prevented, by the Divine call to yet higher duty, from himself undertaking the apostolic labour “of converting the Anglo-Saxons, as he had proposed to do whilst still a monk, his mind remained intent upon this great and salutary design” (Joann. Diac. in vita ejus, c. ii. 33), nor did he rest until it was accomplished. For from that monastic family which he had formed in learning and holiness of life in his own house he sent a chosen band under the leadership of Augustine to be the messengers of grace, wisdom, and civilization to those who were still buried in paganism. And relying as he did on Divine help his hope grew stronger under difficulty, until at length he saw his work crowned with success. He himself writes of this in tones of triumphant joy in reply to St. Augustine, who had sent him the news of the happy result: “Glory be to God on high and on earth peace to men of good will. To Christ be the glory in whose death we live; by whose weakness we are strong, in the love of whom we seek in Britain those brethren whom we knew not; by whose mercy we have found those whom knowing not we sought. Who can tell what gladness filled the hearts of all here to know that the English race, by the workings of the grace of God Almighty, and by your labours, my brother, has been illuminated by the light of our holy Faith, which expels the darkness of error, and has with free mind trodden underfoot those idols to which aforetime they were subject in ‘foolish fear” (Epist. c. xi., 28, al c. xi., 58). And congratulating Ethelbert, King of Kent, and Bertha his Queen, in a letter full of affection, in that they imitated St. Helen, of illustrious memory, and Constantine, the devout Emperor” (ib. c. xi., 66, al. c. xi., 60, c. xi., 29, al c. ix., 59), he strengthens them and their people with salutary admonitions. Nor did he cease for the rest of his life to foster and develop their faith in instructions dictated by holy prudence. Thus Christianity, which the Church had conveyed to Britain, and spread and defended there against rising heresy;” after having been blotted out by the invasion of heathen races, was now by the care of Gregory happily restored. 

Having resolved to address this letter to the English people, we recall at once these great and glorious events in the annals of the Church, which must surely be re­membered by them in gratitude. Moreover, it is note­worthy that this love and solicitude of Gregory was inherited by the Pontiffs who succeeded him. This is shown by their constant interposition in providing worthy and capable teachers in learning, both human and divine, by their helpful counsels, and by their affording in abundant measure whatever was necessary for establishing and developing that rising Church. And very soon was such care rewarded, for in no other case, perhaps. did the Faith take root so quickly, nor was so keen and intense a love manifested towards the See of Peter. That the English race was in those days devoted to this centre of Christian unity divinely constituted in the Roman Bishops, and that in the course of ages men of all ranks were bound to them by ties of loyalty, are facts too abundantly and plainly testified by the pages of history to admit of doubt or question. 

The Holy League for England’s return to union

But, in the storms which devastated Catholicity throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. England, too, received a grievous wound; for it was first unhap­pily wrenched from communication with the Apostolic See, and then was bereft of that holy Faith in which for long centuries it had rejoiced and found liberty. It was a sad defection; and our predecessors, while lamenting it in their earnest love, made every prudent effort to put an end to it, and to mitigate the many evils consequent upon it. It would take long, and it is not necessary, to detail the sedulous and increasing care taken by our predecessors in those circumstances. But by far the most valuable and effective assistance they afforded lies in their having so repeatedly urged on the faithful the practice of special prayer to God that He would look with compassion on England. In the number of those who devoted themselves to this special work of charity there were some venerable and saintly men, especially Saint Charles Borromeo and Saint Philip Neri, and, in the last century. Paul, the founder of the Society of the Passion of Christ, who, not without a certain Divine impulse, it is said, was instant in supplication “at the throne of Divine Grace:” and this all the more earnestly that the times seemed less favourable to the realization of his hopes. We, indeed, long before being raised to the Supreme Pontificate, were deeply sensible also of the importance of holy prayer offered for this cause, and heartily ap­proved of it. For, as we gladly recall, at the time when we were Nuncio in Belgium, becoming acquainted with an Englishman, Ignatius Spencer, himself a devout son of the same St. Paul of the Cross, he laid before us the project he had already initiated for extending a society of pious people to pray for the return of the English nation to the Church.

We can hardly say how cordially we entered into this design, wholly inspired by faith and charity, and how we helped forward this cause, anticipating that the Eng­lish Church would obtain abundant assistance thereby. Although the fruits of Divine Grace obtained by prayer had previously manifested themselves, yet as that holy League spread they became notorious. Very many were led to follow the Divine call, and among them not a few men of distinguished eminence, and many, too, who in doing so had to make personal and heroic sacrifices. Moreover, there was a wonderful drawing of hearts and minds towards Catholic Faith and practice, which rose in public respect and esteem, and many a long-cherished prejudice yielded to the force of truth.

Looking at all this, we do not doubt that the united and humble supplications of so many to God are hasten­ing the time of further manifestations of His merciful designs towards the English people when “the Word of the Lord may run and be glorified” (Thess. iii. I)”. Our confidence is strengthened by observing the legislative and other measures which, if they do not, perhaps, directly, still do indirectly help forward the end, have in view by ameliorating the condition of the people at large, and by giving effect to the laws of justice and charity. (Pope Leo XIII to the English People, April 14, 1895.)

Please noted that Pope Leo XIII called to mind the work of the great Benedictine, Saint Augustine of Canterbury, who was sent by his fellow Benedictine, Pope Saint Gregory the Great, to re-evangelize the British at the beginning of the Seventh Century. Although the heretical Anglicans have tried to coopt Saint Augustine of Canterbury as their own, Pope Leo XIII was reminding the English that the first Archbishop of Canterbury was a Catholic who had been sent to England by the Vicar of Christ, thus reminding all Englishmen of good will that the papacy was central to the conversion of England and to the sustaining of the Holy Faith there until the break caused by King Henry VIII in 1534.

Saint Augustine of Canterbury was, as noted just above, the Apostle to England, and he was sent there by his fellow Benedictine, Pope Saint Gregory the Great, to evangelize a land whose Catholic Faith, which had been established in Britain by Pope Saint Eleutherius in the Second Century A.D., had been decimated by the invasions of the Angles and the Saxons. The hagiography found in Matins for the Divine Office on the Feast of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, May 28, provides the account:

Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Apostle of the English, was sent into England by blessed Gregory, and came thither in the year 597. At that time there was in Kent a most mighty king named Ethelbert, whose power reached even to the Humber. When this King had heard wherefore the holy man was come, he received him kindly, and bade him and his companions, who were all monks, to come to his own capital city of Canterbury being struck with astonishment at the perfect blamelessness of their lives, and the power of the heavenly doctrine which they preached, and which God confirmed with signs following. 

They drew nigh to the city in solemn procession, singing the Litany, and bearing before them for their standard a silver cross and a picture of the Lord our Saviour painted on a panel. Hard by the city, upon the east side, there was a Church builded of old time in honour of St. Martin, and wherein the Queen, who was a Christian, was used to pray. There they first began to meet together, to sing, to pray, to celebrate Masses, to preach, and to baptize, until the King was turned to the faith, and the most part of his people were led by his example, (but not his authority,) to take the name of Christian, for he had learnt from his teachers and his own soul's physicians, that men are to be drawn, and not driven to heaven. And now Augustine, being ordained Archbishop of the English and of Britain, lest he should leave untravailed any part of the Lord's vineyard, asked from the Apostolic See a new band of labourers, Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus, and Rufinian.

Having arranged the affairs of his church, Augustine held a synod with the bishops and doctors of the ancient Britons, who had long been at variance with the Roman Church in the celebration of Easter and other rites. But since he could not move them, either by the authority of the apostolic see or by miracles, to put an end to these variations, in a prophetic spirit he foretold their ruin. At length, after having endured many difficulties for Christ, and having become noted for miracles, when he had placed Mellitus in charge of the church of London, Justus of that of Rochester, and Laurence in charge of his own church, he passed to heaven on the 26th day of May, in the reign of Ethelbert, and was buried in the monastery of St. Peter, which thereafter became the burying-place of the bishops of Canterbury and of some kings. The English people honoured his memory with fervent zeal; and the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII extended his Office and Mass to the universal Church. (Matins, Divine Office, Feast of Saint Augustine of Canterbury.)

Writing before Pope Leo XIII extended the Feast of Saint Augustine of Canterbury to the universal Church and moved it from a concelebration with Saint Philip Neri and Pope Saint Eleutherius, Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., connected Saint Augustine of Canterbury’s reconquering of England for Christ the King and His true Church with rejection of the Holy Faith by the English people after the revolution inaugurated by the lecherous, murderous lout named King Henry VIII and then institutionalized by his daughter by the nefarious Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I:

Four hundred years had scarcely elapsed since the glorious death of Eleutherius, when a second Apostle of Britain ascended from this world, and on this same day, to the abode of eternal bliss. We cannot but be struck by the fact that the names of our two Apostles appear on the Calendar together: it shows us that God has his own special reasons in fixing the day for the death of each one among us. We have more than once noticed these providential coincidences, which form one of the chief characteristics of the liturgical cycle. What a beautiful sight is brought before us to-day, of the first Archbishop of Canterbury, who, after honouring on this day the saintly memory of the holy Pontiff from whom England first received the Gospel, himself ascended into heaven, and shared with Eleutherius the eternity of heaven’s joy! Who would not acknowledge in this, a pledge of he predilection wherewith heaven has favoured this country, which, after centuries of fidelity to the truth, has now for more than three hundred years been an enemy to her own truest glory?

The work begun by Eleutherius had been almost entirely destroyed by the invasion of the Saxons and Angles; so that a new mission, a preaching of the Gospel, had become a necessity. It was Rome that again supplied the want. St. Gregory the Great was the originator of the great design. Had it been permitted hm, he would have taken upon himself the fatigues of the apostolate to our country. He was deeply impressed with the idea that he was to be the spiritual Father of these poor islanders, some of whom he had seen exposed in the market-place of Rome, that they might be sold as slaves. Not being allowed to undertake the work himself, he looked around him for men whom he might send as Apostles to our island. He found them in the Benedictine monastery where he himself had spent several years of his life. There started from Rome forty monks, with Augustine at their head, and they entered England under the standard of the Cross.

Thus the new race that then peopled the island received the faith, as the Britons had previously done, from the hands of a Pope; and monks were their teachers in the science of salvation. The word of Augustine and his companions fructified in this privileged soil. It was some time of course before he could provide the whole nations with instruction; but neither Rome nor the Benedictines abandoned the work thus begun. The few remnants that were still left of the ancient British Christianity joined the new converts; and England merited to be call, for long ages, the ‘Island of Saints.’

The history of St. Augustine’s apostolate in England is of thrilling interest. The landing of the Roman missioners and their marching through the country, to the chant of the Litany; the willing and almost kind welcome given them by king Ethelbert; the influence exercised by his queen Bertha, who was a French-woman and a Catholic, in the establishment of the faith among the Saxons; the baptism of ten thousand neophytes, on Christmas day, and in the bed of a river; the foundation of the metropolitan see of Canterbury, one of the most illustrious Churches of Christendom on account of the holiness and noble doings of its Archbishops; all these admirable episodes of England’s conversion are eloquent proofs of God’s predilection of our dear land. Augustine’s peaceful and gentle character, together with his love of contemplation amidst his arduous missionary labours, gives an additional charm in this magnificent page of the Church’s history. But who can help feeling sad at the thought that a country, favoured as ours has been with such graces should have apostatized from the faith; have repaid with hatred that Rome which made her Christian; and have persecuted with unheard-of-cruelties the Benedictine Order to which she owed so much of her glory? (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year: Volume 8—Paschal Time, Book II, pp. 604-606.)

The legacy of Saint Augustine of Canterbury has been rejected by the people of England, Wales, Scotland ,and Northern Ireland. While it is true enough that many of those who apostatized did so out of fear of incurring Henry VIII and his bought-and-paid-for minions, the Protestant Revolution took hold in a short space of time, and it was within that short space of time that the once proudly Catholics of England came to “burn what they once adored.” A furious, passionate hatred for the Catholic Church became, in turn, a “tradition” of its own.

The conciliar “popes” have even spoken of the heretical and schismatic Anglican sect as one of three parts of “the Christian Faith, which some, including Jorge Mario Bergoglio, believe consists of the “Roman Christianity,” “the Reformed Ecclesiastical Communities,” “the Anglican Tradition” and “Orthodoxy.”  Martyrs died to defend the true Faith from the apostasies of the Greeks, the “reformers” (Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al.) and the Anglicans. Their martyrdom is held to be of no account even to the conciliar “popes” who have either “beatified” or “canonized” them.

This is what Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI said to Archlayman Michael Ramsey on March 24, 1966, the Feast of Saint Gabriel the Archangel, when the two first met:

In this city of Rome, from which St. Augustine was sent by St. Gregory to England and there founded the cathedral see of Canterbury, towards which the eyes of all Anglicans now turn as the centre of their Christian Communion, His Holiness Pope Paul VI and His Grace Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, representing the Anglican Communion, have met to exchange fraternal greetings.

At the conclusion of their meeting they give thanks to Almighty God who by the action of the Holy Spirit has in these latter years created a new atmosphere of Christian fellowship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Churches of the Anglican Communion.

This encounter of the 23rd March 1966 marks a new stage in the development of fraternal relations, based upon Christian charity, and of sincere efforts to remove the causes of conflict and to re-establish unity.

In willing obedience to the command of Christ who bade his disciples love one another, they declare that, with His help, they wish to leave in the hands of the God of mercy all that in the past has been opposed to this precept of charity, and that they make their own the mind of the Apostle which he expressed in these words: "Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3, 13-14).

They affirm their desire that all those Christians who belong to these two Communions may be animated by these same sentiments of respect, esteem and fraternal love, and in order to help these develop to the full, they intend to inaugurate between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion a serious dialogue which, founded on the Gospels and on the ancient common traditions, may lead to that unity in truth, for which Christ prayed.

The dialogue should include not only theological matters such as Scripture, Tradition and Liturgy, but also matters of practical difficulty felt on either side. His Holiness the Pope and His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury are, indeed, aware that serious obstacles stand in the way of a restoration of complete communion of faith and sacramental life; nevertheless, they are of one mind in their determination to promote responsible contacts between their Communions in all those spheres of Church life where collaboration is likely to lead to a greater understanding and a deeper charity, and to strive in common to find solutions for all the great problems that face those who believe in Christ in the world of today.

Through such collaboration, by the grace of God the Father and in the light of the Holy Spirit, may the prayer of Our Lord Jesus Christ for unity among His disciples be brought nearer to fulfilment, and with progress towards unity may there be a strengthening of peace in the world, the peace that only He can grant who gives "the peace that passeth all understanding", together with the blessing of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that it may abide with all men for ever. (Common Declaration of Paul the Sick and Layman Arthur Michael Ramsey.)

The cause of the "conflict" between the Anglican sect and the Catholic Church was the declaration that was passed by the English Parliament at the command of King Henry VIII stating that he was the supreme head of the Church in England, thereby permitting him to marry his mistress, the plotting, scheming Anne Boleyn. The Anglican sect started as a result of the carnal lust of a debauched man, Henry Tudor, who was egged on by disciples of the heretic Martin Luther such as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

Pope Leo XIII, moved with the love of a true pastor’s heart that was modeled after that of the Most Sacred Heart of the Good Shepherd Himself, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, understood that men can forget history, which is why he gently reminded the English to call to their minds what had been attacked with a violent fanaticism three hundred sixty-one years earlier. His Holiness also strove to point out that the movement of many prominent Anglican “ministers” and men esteemed in the fields of arts and letters to the Catholic Church that was as yet ongoing when he wrote his Apostolic Letter was a hopeful sign that England might reclaim the Holy Faith. Indeed, the conversions of esteemed scholars such as Father Frederick William Faber, John Henry Cardinal Newman, Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, Monsignor Ronald Knox, and Father Gerard Manley Hopkins to the Catholic Faith brought out the conversions of many others.

Leaving nothing to change, however, Pope Leo XIII exhorted the English to return home to Rome, to abandon the errors that had been institutionalized and had produced most of the wretched social conditions that Anglicans and Catholics alike had sought to ameliorate in decades preceding his Apostolic Letter:

And here no thought is more welcome to our soul than that happy unity of Faith and will for which our Redeemer and Divine Master prayed in that earnest supplication a unity which, if useful at all times even for temporal interests, both at home and abroad, is shown by the very divisions and confusions of these days to be more than ever needful. We on our part, watching the signs of the times, exhorting and taking thought for the future, urged thereto by the example of Christ and the duty of our Apostolic office, have not ceased to pray, and still humbly pray, for the return of Christian nations, now divided from us, to the unity of former days. We have more than once of late years given expression to this object of our desires, and have devoted sedulous care to its realization. The time cannot be far distant when we must appear to render an account of our stewardship to the Prince of Pastors, and how happy, holy blessed should we be if we could bring to Him some fruit-some realization of these our wishes which He has inspired and sustained. In these days our thoughts turn with love and hope to the English people, observing as we do the frequent and manifest works of Divine Grace in their midst; how to some, it is plain, the confusion of religious dissensions which divide them is a cause of deep concern, how others see clearly the need of some sure defence against the inroad of modern errors which only too readily humour the wishes of fallen nature and depraved reason; how the number of religious and discreet men, who sincerely labour much for reunion with the Catholic Church, is increasing. We can hardly say how strongly these and other signs quicken the charity of Christ in us, and redoubling our prayers from our inmost soul we call down a fuller measure of Divine Grace, which, poured out on minds so well disposed, may issue in the ardently desired fruit, the fruit, namely, that we may all meet into the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son God (Eph, iv, 13), careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, one body and one Spirit, as you are called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism (ib, 3-5).

With loving heart, then, we turn to you all in Eng­land to whatever community or institution you may belong, desiring to recall you to this holy unity. We beseech you, as you value your eternal salvation, to offer up humble and continuous prayer to God, the Heavenly Father, the Giver of all Light, who with gentle power impels us to the good and the right, and without ceasing to implore light to know the truth in all its fullness and to embrace the designs of His mercy with single and entire faithfulness, calling upon the glorious name and merits of Jesus Christ, who is “author and finisher of our faith” (Heb. xii. 2), who loved the Church and delivered Himself for it that He might sanctify it and might present it to Himself a glorious Church (Eph. v. 25-27.) Difficulties may be for us to face, but they are not of a nature which should delay our apostolic zeal or stay your energy Ah, no doubt the many changes that have come about, and time itself, have caused the existing divisions to take deeper root. But is that a reason to give up all hope of remedy, reconciliation, and peace? By no means if God is with us. For we must not judge of such great issues from a human standpoint only, but rather must we look to the power and mercy of God. In great and arduous enterprises, provided they are under­taken with an earnest and right intent, God stands by man’s side, and it is precisely in these difficulties that the action of His Providence shines forth with greatest splendour. The time is not far distant when thirteen cen­turies will have been completed since the English race welcomed those apostolic men sent, as we have said, from this very city of Rome, and, casting aside the pagan deities, dedicated the first fruits of its faith to Christ our Lord and God. This encourages our hope. It is, indeed, an event worthy to be remembered with public thanksgiving; would that this occasion might bring to all reflecting minds the memory of the faith then preached to your ancestors, the same which is now preached – Jesus Christ yesterday, today and the same for ever, as the Apostle says (Heb. xiii. 8), who also most opportunely exhorts you; as he does all, to remem­ber those first preachers “who have spoken the word of God” to you, whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation (ib. 7). (Pope Leo XIII to the English People, April 14, 1895.)

A true pope seeks the conversion of non-Catholics to the true Faith.

Antipopes denounce those who seek such conversion.

As we know, especially from the statistics recounted earlier in this commentary, most of the people in England have returned to pagan deities while many others are simply pagans who worship themselves.

In the midst of what appear to be insuperable problems, Our Lady, who has conquered all heresies, stands ready to win back her Dowry, England, which is why there are so many pilgrimages taking place to the site of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham that was attacked after Henry Tudor began his revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself had established in England to effect man’s return to him through His Catholic Church.

Although the information below comes from a “resist while recognize” site, I am presenting it  to those who read this article as a means of providing encouragement in the middle of events that seem to be out of control even though all that is occurring is within the Providence of God,
Who has given His Most Blessed Mother preeminence of place in the return of England to the Catholic Faith:

WALSINGHAM IS ENGLAND'S NAZARETH

"When England returns to Walsingham, Our Lady will return to England".

Before the reformation Walsingham was one of the three main pilgrimage sites in the world along with Jersusalem and St. James' Way (Santiago de Compostella).

Since these times it as always been understood that every English Catholic will go on pilgrimage to Walsingham and...

...Walk the Holy Mile.

WALSINGHAM, THE PRAYER FOR ENGLAND & DEVOTION TO OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM ARE ALL LINKED TO THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND (TO CATHOLICISM) WHICH WILL LEAD EVERYONE IN THIS COUNTRY TO CHRIST.

1. TO PRAY FOR THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND.

2. TO THANK GOD FOR THE GOOD THAT HAS HAPPENED IN YOUR LIFE.

3.  TO ASK FOR THE INTERCESSION OF OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM FOR HEALING (CATHOLICS DO NOT HAVE TO TRAVEL TO LOURDES FOR HEALING BECAUSE CATHOLICS HAVE BEEN HEALED BY GOING ON PILGRIMAGE TO WALSINGHAM IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY).

4. TO ASK FOR THE INTERCESSION OF OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM FOR HELP IN YOUR LIFE.

5. TO SPEND TIME CLOSE TO GOD. WALSINGHAM IS WHAT IS REFERRED TO AS A 'THIN PLACE' WHERE HEAVEN COMES CLOSE TO EARTH. THIS IS DUE TO THE INTENSITY OF HUNDREDS OF YEARS OF PRAYER AND DEVOTION.

MOST IMPORTANTLY CATHOLIC PILGRIMAGE IS A PERSONAL SACRIFICE TO GOD. (ORA PRO NOBIS: THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND.)

England’s departure from the Holy Faith was foreseen as early as the year 1061 by Saint Edward the Confessor, who also saw her return in a manner similar to though seen in a mystical experience of Saint Dominic Savio:

EDWARD THE CONFESSOR & THE VISION OF THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND

"During the month of January, 1066, the holy King of England St. Edward the Confessor was confined to his bed by his last illness in his royal Westminster Palace. St. Ælred, Abbott of Rievaulx, in Yorkshire, relates that a short time before his happy death, this holy king was wrapt in ecstasy, when two pious Benedictine monks of Normandy, whom he had known in his youth, during his exile in that country, appeared to him, and revealed to him what was to happen to England in future centuries, and the cause of the terrible punishment.

They said: 'The extreme corruption and wickedness of the English nation has provoked the just anger of God. When malice shall have reached the fullness of its measure, God will, in His wrath, send to the English people wicked spirits, who will punish and afflict them with great severity, by separating the green tree from its parent stem the length of three furlongs. But at last this same tree, through the compassionate mercy of God, and without any national (governmental) assistance, shall return to its original root, reflourish and bear abundant fruit.' (Saint Edward the Confessor.)

After having heard these prophetic words, the saintly King Edward opened his eyes, returned to his senses, and the vision vanished. He immediately related all he had seen and heard to hisvirgin spouse, Edgitha, to Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, and to Harold, his successor to the throne, who were in his chamber praying around his bed." (See "Vita beati Edwardi regis et confessoris", from manuscript Selden 55 in Bodleian Library.) (ORA PRO NOBIS: THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND.)

The Dream of Saint Dominic Savio about the Return of England to the Catholic Faith

 'One morning, while I was doing my thanksgiving after Holy Communion, I was taken by a strong distraction. It seemed that I was on a very vast flat land surface, full of people surrounded by thick darkness. They were walking, but did so as though they had lost their way and could not see where they set their feet. Someone beside me said, "This region is England."

'Then I saw the Supreme Pontiff, Pius IX. He was dressed in a majestic fashion, carrying in his hands a splendorous light, and advancing amidst the multitude of people. As He advanced, the darkness gradually disappeared and the people were bathed with so much light that it seemed noon time.  

'The friend said, "This light is the Catholic Religion, which must illuminate England." (ORA PRO NOBIS: THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND.)

The return of England to the true Faith from which she departed nearly half a millennium ago will be the work of Our Lady, and it is because that this is so that Pope Leo XIII composed a prayer to the Mother of God to win back her Dowry, England, to her Divine Son’s one and only true Church, the Catholic Church:

O Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and our most gentle Queen and Mother, look down in mercy upon England “thy Dowry” and upon us all who greatly hope and trust in thee. By thee it was that Jesus, our Saviour and our hope, was given unto the world; and He has given thee to us that we might hope still more. Plead for us thy children, whom thou didst receive and accept at the foot of the Cross, O sorrowful Mother. Intercede for our separated brethren, that with us in the one true fold they may be united to the Supreme Shep­herd, the Vicar of thy Son. Pray for us all, dear Mother, that by faith fruitful in good works we may all deserve to see and praise God, together with thee, in our heavenly home. Amen. (Pope Leo XIII to the English People, April 14, 1895.)

That prayer, composed one hundred twenty-six years ago, is really all the proof one needs to have about the difference between the conciliar antipopes and our true popes, who knew that it was their duty before the One Whose Vicar they were during their respective papacies to seek with urgency the conversion of all non-Catholics to the true Church, the Catholic Church.

Let the conciliar revolutionaries “overturn” Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae. No such “overturning” can ever make Anglican orders valid, and no amount of willing it so can ever make the conciliar rites, which are very similar to those of the Anglicans, a valid means of sanctification and salvation.

The final victory belongs to Our Lady, who was given to Saint John the Evangelist, whose feast we celebrate today, Monday, December 27, 2021, by her Divine to be his Mother and hence ours. The conciliar revolutionaries and their partners in ecumaniacal crimes will have their celebrations as the number of people who show up on a weekly basis in the formerly Catholic churches that they have either stolen outright or coopeted surreptitiously continues to dwindle with each passing year. We know Our Lady and her Divine Son’s Holy Church will emerge victorious, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary.

Thus, praying our Rosaries as we beseech Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful, to protect us in these times of great peril, may we fly unto his Most Chaste Spouse, to surrender to everything, including our liberty if this is to be taken away from us, to serve Christ the King as soldiers in His holy army in our battle with the forces of the adversary in our lives and in the world-at-large.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Appendix A

William Cobbett on the Plunder of the Catholic Church and the Rise of Pauperism in England under King Henry VIII

183. If I look at the county of Surrey, in which I myself was born, and behold the devastation of that county, I am filled with indignation against the ruffian devastators. Surrey has very little of natural wealth in it. A very considerable part of it is mere heath-land. Yet this county was, from one end of it to the other, ornamented and benefited by the establishments which grew out of the Catholic Church. At Bermondsey there was an abbey; at St. Mary Overy there was a priory, and this convent founded that very St. Thomas’s Hospital which now exists in Southwark. This hospital also was seized by the ruffians, but the building was afterwards given to the City of London. At Newington there was a hospital, and after its revenues were seized the master obtained a licence to beg! At Merton there was a priory. Then, going across to the Sussex side, there was another priory at Reigate. Coming again near the Thames, and more to the west, there was a priory at Shene. Still more to the west there was an abbey at Chertsey. At Tandridge there was a priory. Near Guildford, at Sende, there was a priory; and at the lower end of the county, at Waverley, in the parish of Farnham, was an abbey. To these belonged cells and chapels at a distance from the convents themselves; so that it would have been a work of some difficulty for a man so to place himself, even in this poor heathy county, at six miles distance from a place where the door of hospitality was always open to the poor, to the aged, the orphan, the widow and the stranger. Can any man now place himself, in that whole county, within any number of miles of any such door? No, nor in any other county. All is wholly changed, and all is changed for the worse. There is now no hospitality in England. Words have changed their meaning. We now give entertainment to those who entertain us in return. We entertain people because we like them personally, and very seldom because they stand in need of entertainment. A hospital, in those days, meant a place of free entertainment, and not a place merely for the lame, the sick, and the blind; and the very sound of the words "Old English Hospitality" ought to raise a blush on every Protestant cheek. But besides this hospitality exercised invariably in the monasteries, the weight of their example was great with all the opulent classes of the community, and thus to be generous and kind was the character of the nation at large; a niggardly, a base, a money-loving disposition could not be in fashion, when those institutions to which all men looked with reverence set an example which condemned such a disposition.

184. And if I am asked why the thirteen monks of Waverley, for instance, should have had And I may go on and ask why anybody should have any property at all? Aye, but they never worked; they did nothing to increase the nation's store. Let us see how this is. They possessed the lands of Waverley, — a few hundred acres of very poor land, with a mill, and perhaps about twenty acres of very indifferent meadow land, on one part of which, sheltered by a semicircle of sand-hills, their abbey stood, the river Wey (about twenty feet wide) running close by the outer wall of the convent.

Besides this they possessed the impropriated tithes of the parish of Farnham, and a pond or two on the commons adjoining. This estate in land belongs to a Mr. Thompson, who lives on the spot, and the estate in tithes to a Mr. Halsey, who lives at a distance from the parish. Now, without any disparagement to these gentlemen, did not the monks work as much as they do? Did not their revenue go to augment the nation's store as much as the rents of Mr. Thompson or the tithes of Mr. Halsey? Aye, and which is of vast importance, the poor of the parish of Farnham, having this monastery to apply to and having for their neighbour a bishop of Winchester who did not sell small beer out of his palace, stood in no need of poor rates, and had never heard the horrid word pauper pronounced. Come, my townsmen of Farnham; you who as well as 1 have, when we were boys, climbed the ivy-covered ruins of this venerable abbey (the first of its order in England; you who as well as I have, when looking at those walls which have outlived the memory of the devastators, bat not the malice of those who still taste the sweets of the devastation; you who, as well as I, have many times wondered what an abbey was, and how and why this one came to be devastated; you shall be the judge in this matter. You know what poor-rates are, and you know what church-rates are. Very well then, there were no poor-rates and no church-rates as long as Waverley Abbey existed and as long as bishops had no wives. This is a fact wholly undeniable. There was no need of either. The Church shared its property with the poor and the stranger, and left the people at large to possess their own earnings; and as to matters of faith and worship, look at that immense heap of earth round the church where your parents and my parents and where our progenitors for twelve hundred years lie buried; then bear in mind that for nine hundred years out of the twelve they were all of the faith and worship of the monks of Waverley, and with that thought in your mind find, if you can, the heart to say that the monks of Waverley, by whose hospitality your fathers and my fathers were for so many ages preserved from bearing the hateful name of pauper, taught an idolatrous and damnable religion.

185. That which took place in Surrey took place in every other county, only to a greater extent in proportion to the greater wealth and resources of the spot. Defacing followed closely upon the heels of confiscation and plunder. If buildings could have been murdered, the tyrant and his plunderers would have made short work of it. As it was they did all they could; they knocked down, they blew up, they annihilated as far as they could. Nothing, indeed, short of diabolical malice was to be expected from such men; but there were two abbeys in England which one might have hoped that even these monsters would have spared, — that which contained the tomb of St. Austin, and that which had been founded by and contained the remains of Alfred. We have seen how they rifled the tomb of St. Austin at Canterbury. They tore down the church and the abbey, and with the materials built a menagerie for wild beasts and a palace for the tyrant himself. The tomb of Alfred was in an abbey at Winchester, founded by that king himself. The abbey and its estates were given by the tyrant to Wriothesley, who was afterwards made Earl of Southampton, and who got a pretty good share of the confiscations in Hampshire. One almost sickens at the thought of a man capable of a deed like the destruction of this abbey. Where is there one amongst us who has read any thing at all who has not read of the fame of Alfred? What book can we open, even for our boyish days, that does not sound his praise? Poets, moralists, divines, historians, philosophers, lawyers, legislators, not only of our own country but of all Europe, have cited him, and still cite him, as a model of virtue, piety, wisdom, valour and patriotism, as possessing every excellence without a single fault. He, in spite of difficulties such as no other human being on record ever encountered, cleared his harassed and half-barbarized country of horde after horde of cruel invaders, who at one time had wholly subdued it and compelled him, in order to escape destruction, to resort to the habit and the life of a herdsman. From this state of depression he, during a not long life, raised himself and his people to the highest point of happiness and of fame. He fought, with his armies and fleets, more than fifty battles against the enemies of England. He taught his people by his example as well as by his precepts, to be sober, industrious, brave and just. He promoted learning in all the sciences; he planted the University of Oxford; to him, and not to a late Scotch lawyer, belongs " Trial by Jury." Blackstone calls him the founder of the Common Law; the counties, the hundreds, the tithings, the courts of justice, were the work of Alfred. He, in fact, was the founder of all those rights, liberties and laws which made England to be what England has been, which gave her a character above that of other nations, which made her rich and great and happy beyond all her neighbours, and which still give her whatever she possesses of that pre-eminence. If there be a name under heaven to which Englishmen ought to bow with reverence approaching towards adoration it is the name of Alfred. And we are not unjust and ungrateful in this respect at any rate, for, whether Catholics or Protestants, where is there an Englishman to be found who would not gladly make a pilgrimage of a thousand miles to take off his hat at the tomb of this maker of the English name ? Alas! that tomb is nowhere to be found. The barbarians spared not even that. It was in the abbey before mentioned, called Hyde Abbey, which had been founded by Alfred himself and intended as the place of his burial. Besides the remains of Alfred this abbey contained those of St. Grimbald, the Benedictine monk, whom Alfred brought into England to begin the teaching at Oxford. But what cared the plunderers for remains of public benefactors? The abbey was knocked down or blown up, the tombs were demolished, the very lead of the coffins was sold," and, which fills one with more indignation than all the rest, the estates were so disposed of as to make the loan-makers, the Barings, at this day the successors of Alfred the Great!

186. Wriothesley got the manors of Micheldever and Stratton, which by marriage came into the hands of the family of Russell ; and from that family, about thirty years ago, they were bought by the Barings, and are now in possession of Sir Thomas Baring. It is curious to observe how this Protestant "Reformation" has worked. If it had not been there would have been no paupers at Micheldever and Stratton, but then the Russells would not have had the estates, and they could not have sold them to the Barings: aye, but then there would have been, too, no national debt as well as no paupers, and there would have been no loan-makers to buy the estates of the Russells. Besides this there would have been no bridewell erected upon the precise spot where the abbey church stood; no tread-mill, perhaps over the very place where the ashes of Alfred lay; and, what is more, there would have been no need of bridewell or tread-mill. It is related of Alfred that he made his people so honest that he could hang bracelets up by the way side without danger of their being touched. Alas! that the descendants of that same people should need a tread-mill! Aye, but in the days of Alfred there were no paupers, no miserable creatures compelled to labour from month's end to month's end without seeing meat, no thousands upon thousands made thieves by that hunger which acknowledges no law, human or divine.

187. Thus then was the country devastated, sacked and defaced; and I should now proceed to give an account of the commencement of that poverty and degradation which were, as I have pledged myself to show, the consequences of this devastation, and which I shall show, not by bare assertion, nor from what are called " Histories of England," but from Acts of Parliament, and from other sources which every one can refer to, and the correctness of which is beyond all dispute. But before we come to this important matter we must see the end of the ruffian "Vice-gerent," and also the end of the tyrant himself, who was, during the events that we have been speaking of, going on marrying and divorcing or killing his wives, but whose career was, after all, not very long.

188. After the death of Jane. Seymour, who was the mother of Edward VI., and who was the only one of all the tyrant's wives who had the good luck to die a queen and to die in her bed ; — after her death, which took place in 1537, he was nearly two years hunting up another wife. None certainly but some very gross and unfeeling woman could be expected to have voluntarily anything to do with a man whose hands were continually steeped in blood. In 1539 he found, however, a mate in Anne, the sister of the Duke of Cleves. When she arrived in England he expressed his dislike of her person ; but he found it prudent to marry her. In 1540, about six or seven months after the marriage, he was divorced from her, not daring in this case to set his myrmidons to work to bring her to the block. There was no lawful pretence for the divorce. The husband did not like his wife; that was all, and this was alleged, too, as the ground of the divorce." Cranmer, who had divorced him from two wives before, put his irons into the fire again for this occasion, and produced in a little time as neat a piece of work as ever had come from the shop of the famous "Reformation." Thus the King and Queen were single people again; but the former had another young and handsome wife in his eye. This lady's name was Catherine Howard, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk. This Duke, as well as most of the old nobility, hated Cromwell, and now was an opportunity of inflicting vengeance on him. Cromwell had been the chief cause of the King's marriage with Anne of Cleves; but the fact is his plundering talent was no longer wanted, and it was convenient to the tyrant to get rid of him.

189. Cromwell had obtained enormous wealth from his several offices, as well as from the plunder of the Church and the poor. He had got about thirty of the estates belonging to the monasteries ; his house, or rather palace, was gorged with the fruits of the sacking; he had been made Earl of Essex; he had precedence over every one but the King; and lie, in fact, represented the King in the Parliament, where he introduced and defended all his confiscating and murdering laws. He had been barbarous beyond all description towards the unfortunate and unoffending monks and nuns ; without such an instrument the plunder never could have been effecte : but he was no longer wanted; the ruffian had already lived too long; the very walls of the devastated convents seemed to call for public vengeance on his head. On the morning of the 10th of June, 1540, he was all-powerful; in the evening of the same day he was in prison as a traitor. He lay in prison only a few days before he had to experience the benefit of his own way of administering justice. He had, as we have seen in the last chapter, invented a way of bringing people to the block or the gallows without giving them any form of trial, without giving them even a hearing, but merely by passing a law to put them to death. This was what he had brought about in the case of the Countess of Salisbury; and this was what was now to fall on his own head. He lived only about forty-eight days after his arrest; not half long enough to enable him to expiate, barely to enumerate, the robberies and murders committed under his orders. His time seems, however, to have been spent, not in praying God to forgive him for these robberies and murders, but in praying to the tyrant to spare his life. Perhaps of all the mean and dastardly wretches that ever died, this was the most mean and dastardly. He who had been the most insolent and cruel of ruffians when he had power, was now the most disgustingly slavish and base. He had, in fact, committed no crime against the King ; though charged with heresy and treason, he was no more a heretic than the King was, and as to the charge of treason there was not a shadow of foundation for it. But he was just as guilty of treason as the abbots of Reading, Colchester and Glastonbury, all of whom and many more he had been the chief instrument in putting to death. He put them to death in order to get possession of their property; and I dare say to get at his property, to get the plunder back from him, was one of the motives for bringing him to the block. This very ruffian had superintended the digging up of the ashes of Thomas a Becket and scattering them in the air; and now the people who had witnessed that had to witness the letting of the blood out of his dirty body, to run upon the pavement to be licked up by hogs or dogs. The cowardly creature seems to have had, from the moment of his arrest, no thought about anything but saving his life. He wrote repeatedly to the King in the hope of getting pardoned, but all to no purpose: he had done what was wanted of him, the work of plunder was nearly over, he had, too, got a large share of the plunder which it was not convenient to leave in his hands; and therefore, upon true "Reformation" principles, it was time to take away his life. He in his letters to the King most vehemently protested his innocence. Aye, no doubt of that; but he was not more innocent than were the butchered abbots and monks, he was not more innocent than any one out of those thousands upon thousands whom he had quartered, hanged, burned, or plundered; and amongst all those thousands upon thousands there never was seen one, female or male, so complete a dastard as himself. In these letters to the tyrant he fawned on him in the most disgusting manner; compared his smiles and frowns to those of God; besought him to suffer him to kiss his balmy hand once more that the fragrance thereof might make him fit for heaven! "The base creature deserved his death, if it had only been for writing these letters. Fox, the "martyr" man, calls this Cromwell the “valiant soldier of the Reformation." Yes, there have been few soldiers to understand sacking better; he was full of valour on foraging parties, and when he had to rifle monks and nuns and to rob altars; a brave fellow when he had to stretch monks and nuns on the rack to make them confess treasonable words or thought ; but when death began to stare him in the face he was, assuredly, the most cowardly caitiff that ever died. It is hardly necessary to say that this man is a great favourite of Hume, who deeply laments Cromwell's fate, though he has not a word of compassion to bestow upon all the thousands that had been murdered or ruined by him. He, as well as other historians, quotes from the conclusion of one of Cromwell's letters to the King these abject expressions: " I, a most woful prisoner, am ready to submit to death when it shall please God and your Majesty; and yet the frail flesh incites me to call to your grace for mercy and pardon of mine offences. — Written at the Tower with the heavy heart and trembling hand of your Highness's most miserable prisoner and poor slave, Thomas Cromwell. Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy" That is the language of Fox's "valiant soldier." Fox meant valiant, not in the field or on the scaffold, but in the convent, pulling the rings from women's fingers and tearing the gold clasps from books: that was the Protestant valour of the “Reformation." Hume says that Cromwell " deserved a better fate." Never was fate more just or more appropriate. He had been the willing, the officious, the zealous, the eager agent in the execution of all the tyrannical, sacrilegious, and bloody deeds of his master, and had amongst other things been the very man who first suggested the condemning of people to death without trial. What could be more just than that he should die in the same way? Not a tear was shed at his death, which produced on the spectators an effect such as is produced when the foulest of murderers expiate their crimes on the gallows.

190. During the seven years that the tyrant himself survived this his cruel and dastardly vice-gerent, he was beset with disappointments, vexations, and torments of all sorts. He discovered at the end of a few months that his new queen had been, and still was, much such another as Anne Boleyn. He with very little ceremony sent her to the block, together with a whole posse of her relations, lovers, and cronies. He raged and foamed like a wild beast, passed laws most bloody to protect himself against lewdness and infidelity in his future wives, and got for his pains the ridicule of the nation and of all Europe. He for the last time took another wife; but this time none would face his laws but a widow, and she very narrowly escaped the fate of the rest. He for some years before he died became, from his gluttony and debaucheries, an unwieldy and disgusting mass of flesh, moved about by means of mechanical inventions. But still he retained all the ferocity and bloody-mindedness of his former days. The principal business of his life was the ordering of accusations, executions, and confiscations. When on his death-bed every one was afraid to intimate his danger to him, lest death to the intimator should be the consequence; and he died before he was well aware of his condition, leaving more than one death-warrant unsigned for want of time.

191. Thus expired, in the year 1547, in the fifty-sixth year of his age and the thirty-eighth year of his reign, the most unjust, hard-hearted, meanest "and most sanguinary tyrant that the world had ever beheld, whether Christian or heathen. That England which he found in peace, unity, plenty and happiness, he left torn by factions and schisms, her people wandering about in beggary and misery. He laid the foundations of immorality, dishonesty and pauperism, all which produced an abundant harvest in the reigns of his unhappy, barren, mischievous and miserable children, with whom, at the end of a few years, his house and his name were extinguished for ever. How he disposed of the plunder of the Church and the poor; how his successors completed that work of confiscation which he had carried on so long ; how the nation sunk in point of character and of wealth ; how pauperism first arose in England ; and how were sown the seeds of that system of which we now behold the effects in the impoverishment and degradation of the main body of the people of England and Ireland ; all these will be shown in the next chapter, and shown, I trust, in a manner which will leave in the mind of every man of sense no doubt that, of all the scourges that ever afflicted this country, none is to be put in comparison with the Protestant Reformation.

CHAPTER VII.

192. Having shown that the thing impudently called the “Reformation” was begun in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood, I intended to show in the present chapter how the main body of the people were by these doings impoverished and degraded up to this time; that is to say, I intended to trace the impoverishment and degradation down to the end of the reign of the tyrant, Henry VIII. But upon reviewing my matter I think it best first to go through the whole of my account of the plunderings, persecutings and murderings of the "Reformation" peopl ; and when we have seen all the robberies and barbarities that they committed under the hypocritical pretence of religious zeal, or rather, when we have seen such of those robberies and barbarities as we can find room for, then I shall conclude with showing how enormously the nation lost by the change, and how that change made the main part of the people poor and wretched and degraded. By pursuing this plan I shall in one concluding chapter give, or at least endeavour to give, a clear and satisfactory history of this impoverishment. I shall take the present Protestant labourer and show him how his Catholic forefathers lived  and if cold potatoes and water, if this poorer than pig-diet, have not quite taken away all the natural qualities of English blood, I shall make him execrate the plunderers and hypocrites by whom was produced that change which has finally led to his present misery and to nine-tenths of that mass of corruption and crime, public and private, which now threatens to uproot society itself.

193. In pursuance of this plan, and in conformity with my promise to conclude my little work in ten chapters, I shall distribute my matter thus: — in chapter VII. (the present) the deeds and events of the reign of Edward VI. In chapter VIII., those of the reign of Queen Mary. In chapter IX., those of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and in chapter X., the facts and arguments to establish my main point, namely, that the thing impudently called the “Reformation” impoverished and degraded the main body of the people. In the course of the first three of these chapters I shall not touch, except incidentally, upon the impoverishing and degrading effects of the change, but shall reserve these for the last chapters, when, having witnessed the horrid means, we will take an undivided view of the consequences, tracing those consequences down to the present day.

194. One of Henry's last acts was a will by which he made his infant son his immediate successor, with remainder, in case he died without issue, to his daughter Mary first, and then in default of issue again, to his daughter Elizabeth, though, observe, both the daughters had been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament, and though the latter was born of Anne Boleyn while the king's first wife, the mother of Mary, was alive. Parliament had given the king the right to determine the succession by will.

195. To carry this will into execution, and to govern the kingdom until Edward, who was then ten years of age, should be eighteen years of age, there were sixteen executors appointed, amongst whom was Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and the "honest Cranmer." These sixteen worthies began by taking, in the most solemn manner, an oath to stand to and maintain the last will of their master. Their second act was to break that oath by making Hertford, who was a brother of Jane Seymour, the King's mother, "protector," though the will gave equal powers to all the executors. Their next step was to give new peerages to some of themselves. The fourth, to award to the new peers grants of the public money. The fifth was to lay aside at the coronation the ancient English custom of asking the people if they were willing to have and obey the King. The sixth was "to attend at a solemn high mass.” And the seventh was to begin a series of acts for the total subversion of all that remained of the Catholic religion in England, and for the effecting of all that Old Harry had left uneffected in the way of plunder.

196. The monasteries were gone; the cream had been taken off; but there remained the skimmed milk of church altars, chantries and guilds. Old Harry would doubtless, if he had lived much longer, have plundered these; but he had not done it, and he could not do it without openly becoming Protestant, which, for the reasons stated in paragraph 101, he would not do. But Hertford and his fifteen brother worthies had in their way no such obstacle as the ruffian king had had. The church altars, the chantries and the guilds contained something valuable, and they longed to be at it. The power of the Pope was gotten rid of, the country had been sacked, the poor had been despoiled; but still there were some pickings left. The piety of ages had made every church, however small, contain some gold and silver appertaining to the altar. The altars in the parish churches, and generally in the cathedrals, had been left as yet untouched; for though the wife-killer had abjured the Pope, whose power he had taken to himself, he still professed to be of the Catholic faith, and he maintained the mass and the sacraments and creeds with fire and faggot. Therefore he had left the church altars unplundered. But they contained gold, silver, and other valuables, and the worthies saw these with longing eyes and itching fingers.

197. To seize them, however, there required a pretext, and what pretext could there be short of declaring at once that the Catholic religion was false and wicked, and, of course, that there ought to be no altars, and, of course, no gold and silver things appertaining to them! The sixteen worthies, with Hertford at their head and with Cranmer amongst them, had had the King crowned as a Catholic, he as well as they had taken the oaths as Catholics, they had sworn to uphold that religion, they had taken him to a high mass after his coronation:' but the altars had good things about them  there was plunder remaining, and to get at this remaining plunder the Catholic religion must be wholly put down. There were doubtless some fanatics, some who imagined that the religion of nine hundred years' standing ought not to be changed, some who had not plunder and plunder only in view; but it is impossible for any man of common sense, of unperverted mind, to look at the history of this transaction, at this open avowal of Protestantism, at this change from the religion of England to that of a part of Germany, without being convinced that the principal authors of it had plunder and plunder only in view.

198. The old tyrant died in 1547, and by the end of 1549 Cranmer, who had tied so many Protestants to the stake for not being Catholics, had pretty nearly completed a system of Protestant worship. He first prepared a book of homilies and a catechism, in order to pave the way. Next came a law to allow the clergy to have wives, and then, when all things had been prepared, came the Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments .Gardiner, who was Bishop of Winchester, reproached Cranmer with his duplicity, reminded him of the zeal with which he had upheld the Catholic worship under the late king, and would have made him hang himself or cut his throat if he had had the slightest remains of shame in him.

199. This new system did not, however, go far enough for the fanatics, and there instantly appeared arrayed against it whole tribes of new lights on the Continent; so that Cranmer, cunning as he was, soon found that he had undertaken no easy matter. The proclamations put forth upon this occasion were disgustingly ridiculous, coming as they did in the name of a king only ten years of age, and expressed in words so solemnly pompous and full of arrogance. However, the chief object was the plunder, and to get at this nothing was spared. There were other things to attract the grasp, but it will be unnecessary to dwell very particularly on anything but the altars and the churches. This was the real " reformation reign," for it was a reign of robbery and hypocrisy without anything to be compared with them, — anything in any country or in any age. Religion, conscience, was always the pretext; but in one way or another robbery, plunder, was always the end. The people, once so united and so happy, became divided into innumerable sects, no man knowing hardly what to believe, and, indeed, no one knowing what it was lawful for him to say, for it soon became impossible for the common people to know what was heresy and what was not heresy.

200. That prince of hypocrites, Cranmer, who, during the reign of Henry had condemned people to the flames for not believing in transubstantiation, was now ready to condemn them for believing in it. We have seen that Luther was the beginner of the work of "reformation," but he was soon followed by further reformers on the Continent. These had made many attempts to propagate their doctrines in England, but old Henry had kept them down. Now, however, when the churches were to be robbed of what remained in them, and when, to have pretext for that robbery, it was necessary to make a complete change in the form of worship, these sectarians all flocked to England, which became one great scene of religious disputation. Some were for the Common Prayer-Book, others proposed alterations in it, others were for abolishing it altogether; and there now began that division, that multiplicity of hostile opinions, which has continued to the present day. Cranmer employed a part of the resources of the country to feed and fatten those of these religious, or rather impious, adventurers who sided with him and who chose the best market for their doctrines. England was overrun by these foreign traders in religion, and this nation, so jealous of foreign influence, was now compelled to bend its haughty neck, not only to foreigners but to foreigners of the most base and infamous character and description. Cranmer could not find Englishmen sufficiently supple to be his tools in executing the work that he had in hand. The Protector, Hertford, whom we must now call Somerset (the child-king having made him Duke of Somerset), was the greatest of all “reformers” that had yet appeared in the world, and, as we shall soon see, the greatest and most audacious of all the plunderers that this infamous reformation has produced, save and except Henry himself. The total abolition of the Catholic worship was necessary to his projects of plunder, and therefore he was a great encourager of these greedy and villainous foreigners.

201. The consequences to the morals of the people were such as were naturally to be expected. All historians agree that vice of all sorts and crimes of every kind were never so great and so numerous before. This was confessed by the teachers themselves, and yet the Protestants have extolled this reign as the reign of conscience and religion! It was so manifest that the change was a bad one, that men could not have proceeded in it from error. Its mischiefs were all manifest before the death of the tyrant; that death afforded an opportunity for returning into the right path, but there was plunder remaining, and the plunderers went on. The  “Reformation” was not the work of virtue, of fanaticism, of error, of ambition, but of a love of plunder. This was its great animating principle; in this it began, and in this it proceeded till there was nothing left for it to work on.

202. Henry had, in certain cases, enabled his minions to rob the bishoprics, but now there was a grand sweep at them. The Protector took the lead, and his example was followed by others. They took so much from one, so much from another, and some they wholly suppressed, as that of Westminster, and took their estates to themselves. There were many chantries (private property to all intents and purposes), free chapels (also private property), almshouses, hospitals, guilds or fraternities, the property of which was as much private property as the funds of any plunder. And yet there are men who pretend that what is now possessed by the Established Church is of so sacred

a nature as not to be touched by Act of Parliament! This was the reign in which this our present Established Church was founded, for though the fabric was overset by Mary it was raised again by Elizabeth. Now it was that it was made. It was made, and the new worship along with it, by Acts of Parliament. It had its very birth in division, disunion, discord, and its life has been worthy of its birth. The property it possesses was taken nominally from the Catholic Church, but in reality from that Church, and also from the widow, the orphan, the indigent and the stranger. The pretext for making it was that it would cause a union of sentiment amongst the people, that it would compose all dissensions. The truth, the obvious truth, that there could be but one true religion, was acknowledged and loudly proclaimed, and it was not to be denied that there were already twenty, the teachers of every one of which declared that all the others were false, and, of course, that they were, at the very least, no better than no religion at all. Indeed, this is the language of common sense, though it is now so fashionable to disclaim the doctrine of exclusive salvation.

I ask the Unitarian parson or prater, for instance, why he takes upon him that office; why he does not go and follow some trade, or why he does not work in the fields. His answer is that he is more usefully employed in teaching. If I ask of what use his teaching is, he tells me, he must tell me, that his teaching is necessary to the salvation of souls. Well, say I, but why not leave that business to the Established Church, to which the people all pay tithes? Oh no, says he, I cannot do that, because the Church does not teach the true religion. Well, say I, but true or false, if it serve for salvation, what signifies it? Here I have him penned up in a corner. He is compelled to confess that he is a fellow wanting to lead an easy life by pandering to the passions or whims of conceited persons, or to insist that his sort of belief and teaching are absolutely necessary to salvation; as he will not confess the former he is obliged to insist on the latter, and here, after all his railing against the intolerance of the Catholics, he maintains the doctrine of exclusive salvation.

203. Two true religions, two true creeds, differing from each other, contradicting each other, present us with an impossibility; what then are we to think of twenty or forty creeds, each differing from all the rest? If deism or atheism be something not only wicked in itself, but so mischievous in its effects as to call — in case of the public profession of it — for imprisonment for years and years, if this be the case, what are we to think of laws, the same laws too which inflict that cruel punishment, tolerating and encouraging a multiplicity of creeds, all but one of which must be false? A code of laws acknowledging and tolerating but one religion is consistent in punishing the deist and the atheist, but if it acknowledge or tolerate more than one it acknowledges or tolerates one false one, and let divines say whether a false religion is not as bad as deism or atheism? Besides, is it just to punish the deist or the atheist for not believing in the Christian religion at all, when he sees the law tolerate so many religions, all but one of which must be false? What is the natural effect of men seeing constantly before their eyes a score or two of different sects, all calling themselves Christians, all tolerated by the law, and each openly declaring that all the rest are false? The natural, the necessary effect is, that many men will believe that none of them have truth on their side, and of course that the thing is false altogether, and invented solely for the benefit of those who teach it and who dispute about it.

204. The law should acknowledge and tolerate but one religion, or it should know nothing at all about the matter. The Catholic code was consistent. It said that there was but one true religion, and it punished as offenders those who dared openly to profess any opinion contrary to that religion. Whether that were the true religion or not we have not now to inquire; but while its long continuance —and in so many nations too — was a strong presumptive proof of its good moral effects upon the people, the disagreement amongst the Protestants was and is a presumptive proof not less strong of its truth. If, as I observed upon a former occasion, there be forty persons who — and whose fathers for countless generations — have up to this day entertained a certain belief, and if thirty-nine of these say at last that this belief is erroneous, we may naturally enough suppose, or at least we may think it possible, that the truth so long hidden is, though late, come to light. But if the thirty-nine begin, aye, and instantly begin, to entertain, instead of the one old belief, thirty-nine new beliefs, each differing from all the other thirty-eight, must we not in common justice decide that the old belief must have been the true one? What! shall we hear these thirty-nine protestors against the ancient faith each protesting against all the other thirty-eight, and still believe that their joint protest was just? Thirty-eight of them must now be in error; this must be: and are we still to believe in the correctness of their former decision, and that, too, relating to the same identical matter? If in a trial relating to the dimensions of a piece of land, which had been proved to have always been, time without mind, taken for twenty acres, there were one surveyor to swear that it contained twenty acres, and each of thirty-nine other surveyors to swear each of the other number of acres between one and forty, what judge and jury would hesitate a moment in crediting him who swore to the twenty, and in wholly rejecting the testimony of all the rest?

205. Thus the argument would stand on the supposition that thirty-nine parts out of forty of all Christendom had protest; but there were not, and there are not even unto this day, two parts out of fifty. So that here we have thirty-nine persons breaking off from about two thousand, protesting against the faith which the whole, and their fathers, have held; we have each of these thirty-nine instantly protesting that all the other thirty-eight have protested upon false grounds; and yet we are to believe that their joint protest against the faith of the two thousand, who are backed by all antiquity, was wise and just ! Is this the way in which we decide in other cases? Did honest men, and men not blinded by passion or by some base motive, ever decide thus before? Besides, if the Catholic faith were so false as it is by some pretended to be, how comes it not to have been extirpated before now? When, indeed, the Pope had very great power, when even kings were compelled to bend to him, it might be said, and pretty fairly said, that no one dared use the weapons of reason against the Catholic faith. But we have seen the Pope is prisoner in a foreign land; we have seen him without scarcely food and raiment; and we have seen the press of more than half the world at liberty to treat him and his faith as it pleased to treat them. But have we not seen the Protestant sects at work for three hundred years to destroy the Catholic faith? Do we not see, at the end of those three hundred years, that that faith is still the reigning faith of Christendom? Nay, do we not see that it is gaining ground at this very moment, even in this kingdom itself, where a Protestant hierarchy receives eight millions sterling a year, and where Catholics were rigidly excluded from all honour and power and, in some cases, from all political and civil rights under a constitution founded by their Catholic ancestors? Can it be then that this faith is false? Can it be that this worship is idolatrous? Can it be that it was necessary to abolish them in England as far as law could do it? Can it be that it was for our good, our honour, to sack our country, to violate all the rights of property, to deluge the country with blood, in order to change our religion?

206. But in returning now to the works of the plunderers, we ought to remark that, in discussions of this sort, it is a common but a very great error to keep our eyes so exclusively fixed on mere matters of religion. The Catholic Church included in it a great deal more than the business of teaching religion and of practising worship and administering sacraments. It had a great deal to do with the temporal concerns of the people. It provided, and amply provided, for all the wants of the poor and distressed. It received back, in many instances, what the miser and extortioner had taken unfairly, and applied it to works of beneficence. It contained a great body of land proprietors whose revenues were distributed in various ways amongst the people at large, upon terms always singularly advantageous to the latter. It was a great and powerful estate, independent both of the aristocracy and the crown, and naturally siding with the people. But above all things, it was a provider for the poor and a keeper of hospitality. By its charity and by its benevolence towards its tenants and dependents, it mitigated the rigour of proprietorship, and held society together by the ties of religion rather than by the trammels and terrors of the law. It was the great cause of that description of tenants called life-holders, who formed a most important link in the chain of society, coming after the proprietors in fee and before the tenant at will, participating, in some degree, of the proprietorship of the estate, and yet, not wholly without dependence on the proprietor." This race of persons, formerly so numerous in England, has by degrees become almost wholly extinct, their place having been supplied by a comparatively few rack-renters and by swarms of miserable paupers. The Catholic Church held the lending of money for interest, or gain, to be directly in the face of the Gospel. It considered all such gain as usurious and, of course, criminal. It taught the making of loans without interest; and thus it prevented the greedy-minded from amassing wealth in that way in which wealth is most easily amassed. Usury amongst Christians was wholly unknown, until the wife-killing tyrant had laid his hands on the property of the Church and the poor. The principles of the Catholic Church all partook of generosity; it was their great characteristic, as selfishness is the characteristic of that Church which was established in its stead.

207. The plunder which remained after the seizure of the monasteries was comparatively small; but still, the very leavings of the old tyranny, the mere gleanings of the harvest of plunder, were something; and these were not suffered to remain. The plunder of the churches, parochial as well as collegiate, was preceded by all sorts of antics played in those churches. Calvin had got an influence opposed to that of Cranmer; so that there was almost open war amongst these Protestants, which party should have the teaching of the people. After due preparation in this way, the robbery was set about in due form. Every church altar had, as I have before observed, more or less of gold and silver. A part consisted of images, a part of censers, candlesticks, and other things used in the celebration of the mass. The mass was, therefore, abolished, and there was no longer to be an altar, but a table in its stead. The fanatical part of the reformers amused themselves with quarrelling about the part of the church where the table was to stand, about the shape of it, and whether the head of it was to be placed to the north, the east, the west, or the south, and whether the people were to stand, kneel, or sit at it! The plunderers, however, thought about other things: they thought about the value of the images, censers, and the like.

208. To reconcile the people to these innovations the plunderers had a Bible contrived for the purpose, which Bible was a perversion of the original text wherever it was found to be necessary. Of all the acts of this hypocritical and plundering reign this was, perhaps, the basest. In it we see the true character of the heroes of the " Protestant Reformation"; and the poor and miserable labourers of England, who now live upon potatoes and water, feel the consequences of the deeds of the infamous times of which I am speaking. Every preparation being made the robbery began, and a general plunder of churches took place by royal and parliamentary authority! The robbers took away everything valuable, even down to the vestments of the priests. Such mean rapacity never was heard of before, and for the honour of human nature let us hope that it will never be heard of again. It seems that England was really become a den of thieves, and of thieves, too, of the lowest and most despicable character.

209. The Protector, Somerset, did not forget himself. Having plundered four or five of the bishoprics he needed a palace in London. For the purpose of building this palace, which was erected in the Strand, London, and which was called Somerset House," as the place is called to this day, he took from three bishops their town houses. He pulled these down, together with a parish church, in order to get a suitable spot for the erection. The materials of these demolished buildings being insufficient for his purpose, he pulled down a part of the buildings appertaining to the then cathedral of Saint Paul; the church of Saint John, near Smithfield; Barking chapel, near the Tower; the college church of Saint Martin-le-Grand; St. Ewen's church, Newgate; and the parish church of Saint Nicholas. He, besides these, ordered the pulling down of the parish church of Saint Margaret, Westminster; but, says Dr. Heylyn, “the workmen had no sooner advanced their scaffolds when the parishioners gathered together in great multitudes with bows and arrows and staves and clubs, which so terrified the workmen that they ran away in great amazement, and never could be brought again upon that employment." Thus arose Somerset House, the present grand seat of the power of fiscal grasping. It was first erected literally with the ruins of churches, and it now serves, under its old name, as the place from which issue the mandates to us to give up the fruit of our earnings to pay the interest of a debt which is one of the evident and great consequences of the " Protestant Reformation," without which that debt never could have existed.

210. I am, in the last chapter, to give an account of the impoverishment and degradation that these and former Protestant proceedings produced amongst the people at large; but I must here notice that the people heartily detested these Protestant tyrants and their acts. General discontent prevailed, and this, in some cases, broke out into open insurrection. It is curious enough to observe the excuses that Hume, in giving an account of these times, attempts to make for the plunderers and their "reformation." It was his constant aim to blacken the Catholic institutions, and particularly the character and conduct of the Catholic clergy. Yet he could not pass over these discontents and risings of the people; and, as there must have been a cause for these, he is under the necessity of ascribing them to the badness of the change, or to find out some other cause. He therefore goes to work in a very elaborate manner to make his readers believe that the people were in error as to the tendency of the change. He says that " scarce any institution can be imagined less favourable, in the main, to the interests of mankind," than that of the Catholic; yet, says he, "as it was followed by many good effects, which had ceased with the suppression of the monasteries, that suppression was very much regretted  by the people." He then proceeds to describe the many benefits of the monastic institutions; says that the monks, always residing on their estates, caused a diffusion of good constantly around them; that, "not having equal motives to avarice with other men, they were the best and most indulgent landlords"; that, when the church lands became private property, the rents were raised, the money spent at a distance from the estates, and the tenants exposed to the rapacity of stewards; that whole estates were laid waste; that the tenants were expelled, and that even the cottagers were deprived of the commons on which they formerly fed their cattle; that a great decay of the people, as well as a diminution of former plenty, was remarked in the kingdom; that at the same time the coin had been debased by Henry, and was now further debased; that the good coin was hoarded or exported; that the common people were thus robbed of part of their wages; that "complaints were heard in every part of the kingdom." (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, written between 1824 and 1827 and published by Benziger Brothers, pp. 137-167.)

Appendix B

William Cobbett On the Just Punishment of Heretics by Queen Mary

247. As a preliminary to the punishment of heretics, there was an Act of Parliament passed in December, 1554 (a year and a half after the Queen came to the throne), to restore the ancient statutes relative to heresy. These statutes were first passed against the Lollards in the reigns of Richard II. and Henry IV., and they provided that heretics who were obstinate should be burnt. These statutes were altered in the reign of Henry VIII. in order that he might get the property of heretics, and in that of Edward they were repealed; not out of mercy, however, but because heresy was, according to those statutes, to promulgate opinions contrary to the Catholic faith, and this did, of course, not suit the state of things under the new Church "as by law established." Therefore it was then held that heresy was punishable by common law, and that, in case of obstinacy, heretics might be burnt; and accordingly many were punished and some burnt in that reign by process at common law; and these were, too, Protestants dissenting from Cranmer’s Church, who himself condemned them to the flames. Now, however, the Catholic religion being again the religion of the country, it was thought necessary to return to ancient statutes, which accordingly were re-enacted. That which had been the law during seven reigns, comprising nearly two centuries, and some of which reigns had been amongst the most glorious and most happy that England had ever known, one of the kings having won the title of King of France, and another of them having actually been crowned at Paris; that which had been the law for so long a period was now the law again, so that here was nothing new at any rate. And observe, though these statutes were again repealed when Elizabeth's policy induced her to be a Protestant, she enacted others to supply their place, and that both she and her successor, Tames I., burnt heretics; though they had, as we shall see, a much more expeditious and less noisy way of putting out of the world those who still had the constancy to adhere to the religion of their fathers.

248. The laws being passed were not likely to remain a dead letter. They were put in execution chiefly in consequence of condemnations in the spiritual court by Bonner, Bishop of London. The punishment was inflicted in the usual manner, dragging to the place of execution and then burning to death, the sufferer being tied to a stake in the midst of a pile of faggots, which, when set on fire, consumed him. Bishop Gardiner, the Chancellor, has been by Protestant writers charged with being the adviser of this measure. I can find no ground for this charge, while all agree that Pole, who was now become Archbishop of Canterbury in the place of Cranmer, disapproved of it. It is also undeniable that a Spanish friar, the confessor of Philip, preaching before the Queen, expressed his disapprobation of it. Now, as the Queen was much more likely to be influenced, if at all, by Pole, and especially by Philip, than by Gardiner, the fair presumption is that it was her own measure. And as to Bonner, on whom so much blame has been thrown on this account, he had indeed been most cruelly used by Cranmer and his Protestants, but there was the council continually accusing all the bishops (and he more than any of the rest) of being too slow in the performance of this part of their duty.  Indeed, it is manifest that in this respect the council spoke the almost then universal sentiment; for though the French ceased not to hatch rebellions against the Queen, none of the grounds of the rebels ever were that she punished heretics. Their complaints related almost solely to the connection with Spain, and never to the "flames of Smithfield," though we of later times have been made to believe that nothing else was thought of; but the fact is, the persons put to death were chiefly of very infamous character, many of them foreigners, almost the whole of them residing in London and called in derision by the people at large the "London Gospellers." Doubtless, out of two hundred and seventy-seven persons (the number stated by Hume on authority of Fox) who were thus punished, some may have been real martyrs to their opinions, and have been sincere and virtuous persons, but in this number of two hundred and seventy-seven many were convicted felons, some clearly traitors, as Ridley and Cranmer. These must be taken from the number ; and we may surely take such as were alive when Fox first published his book, and who expressly begged to decline the honour of being enrolled amongst its " Martyrs." As a proof of Fox's total disregard of truth, there was in the next reign a Protestant parson, as Anthony Wood (a Protestant) tells us, who in a sermon related, on authority of Fox, that a Catholic of the name of Grimwood had been, as Fox said, a great enemy of the Gospellers, had been " punished by a judgment of God," and that "his bowels fell out of his body." Grimwood was not only alive at the time when the sermon was preached, but happened to be present in the church to hear it, and he brought an action of defamation against the preacher! Another instance of Fox's falseness relates to the death of Bishop Gardiner. Fox and Burnet, and other vile calumniators of the acts and actors in Queen Mary's reign, say that Gardiner, on the day of the execution of Latimer and Ridley, kept dinner waiting till the news of their suffering should arrive, and that the Duke of Norfolk, who was to dine with him, expressed great chagrin at the delay; that when the news came, "transported with joy" they sat down to table, where Gardiner was suddenly seized with the disury, and died in horrible torments in a fortnight afterwards. Now Latimer and Ridley were put to death on the 16th of October, and Collier, in his Ecclesiastical History, p. 386, states that Gardiner opened the Parliament on the 21st of October, that he attended in Parliament twice afterwards, that he died on the 12th of November of the gout, and not of disury, and that as to the Duke of Norfolk, he had been dead a year when this event took place! What a hypocrite, then, must that man be who pretends to believe in this Fox! Yet this infamous book has, by the arts of the plunderers and their descendants, been circulated to a boundless extent amongst the people of England, who have been taught to look upon all the thieves, felons and traitors whom Fox calls " Martyrs," as sufferers resembling St. Stephen, St. Peter and St. Paul!

249. The real truth about these  Martyrs" is that they were generally a set of most wicked wretches, who sought to destroy the Queen and her government, and, under the pretence of conscience and superior piety, to obtain the means of again preying upon the people. No mild means could reclaim them; those means had been tried: the Queen had to employ vigorous means, or to suffer her people to continue to be torn by the religious factions, created not by her but by her two immediate predecessors, who had been aided and abetted by many of those who now were punished, and who were worthy of ten thousand deaths each if ten thousand deaths could have been endured. They were, without a single exception, apostates, perjurers, or plunderers ; and the greater part of them had also been guilty of flagrant high treason against Mary herself, who had spared their lives, but whose lenity they had requited by every effort within their power to overset her authority and her government. To make particular mention of all the ruffians that perished upon this occasion would be a task as irksome as it would be useless; but there were amongst them three of Cramer's bishops and himself! For now justice at last overtook this most mischievous of all villains, who had justly to go to the same stake that he had unjustly caused so many others to be tied to; the three others were Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, each of whom was, indeed, inferior in villainy to Cranmer, but to few other men that have ever existed.

250. Hooper was a monk; he broke his vow of celibacy and married a Flandrican; he, being the ready tool of the Protector Somerset, whom he greatly aided in his plunder of the churches, got two bishoprics, though he himself had written against pluralities. He was a co-operator in all the monstrous cruelties inflicted on the people during the reign of Edward, and was particularly active in recommending the use of German troops to bend the necks of the English to the Protestant yoke. Latimer began his career, not only as a Catholic priest, but as a most furious assailant of the Reformation religion. By this he obtained from Henry VIII. the bishopric of Worcester. He next changed his opinions, but he did not give up his Catholic bishopric! Being suspected, he made abjuration of Protestantism; he thus kept his bishopric for twenty years while he inwardly reprobated the principles of the Church, and which bishopric he held in virtue of an oath to oppose to the utmost of his power all dissenters from the Catholic Church. In the reigns of Henry and Edward he sent to the stake Catholics and Protestants for holding opinions which he himself had before held openly, or that he held secretly at the time of his so sending them. Lastly, he was a chief tool in the hands of the tyrannical Protector Somerset in that black and unnatural act of bringing his brother, Lord Thomas Somerset, to the block. Ridley had been a Catholic bishop in the reign of Henry VIII., when he sent to the stake Catholics who denied the king's supremacy and Protestants who denied transubstantiation. In Edward's reign he was a Protestant bishop, and denied transubstantiation himself. He in Edward's reign got the bishopric of London by a most roguish agreement to transfer the greater part of its possessions to the rapacious ministers and courtiers of that day. Lastly, he was guilty of high treason against the Queen, in openly (as we have seen in paragraph 220) and from the pulpit exhorting the people to stand by the usurper, Lady Jane, and thus endeavouring to produce civil war and the death of his sovereign, in order that he might by treason be enabled to keep that bishopric which he had obtained by simony including perjury.

251. A pretty trio of Protestant "saints;" quite worthy, however, of Martin Luther, who says in his own works that it was by the arguments of the devil (who, he says, frequently ate, drank and slept with him) that he was induced to turn Protestant; three worthy followers of that Luther who is by his disciple Melancthon called "a brutal man, void of piety and humanity, one more a Jew than a Christian; “three followers altogether worthy of this great founder of that Protestantism which has split the world into contending sects: but black as these are, they bleach the moment Cranmer appears in his true colours. But alas where is the pen or tongue to give us those colours? Of the sixty-five years that he lived, and of the thirty-five years of his manhood, twenty-nine years were spent in the commission of a series of acts which, for wickedness in their nature and for mischief in their consequences, are absolutely without anything approaching to a parallel in the annals of human infamy. Being a fellow of a college at Cambridge, and having, of course, made an engagement (as the fellows do to this day) not to marry while he was a fellow, he married secretly and still enjoyed his fellowship. While a married man he became a priest and took the oath of celibacy, and going to Germany he married another wife, the daughter of a Protestant "saint," though his oath bound him to have no wife at all. He, as archbishop, enforced the law of celibacy, while he himself secretly kept his German wife in the palace at Canterbury having, as we have seen in paragraph 104, imported her in a chest. He, as ecclesiastical judge, divorced Henry VIII. from three wives, the grounds of his decision in two of the cases being directly the contrary of those which he himself had laid down when he declared the marriages to be valid; and in the case of Anne Boleyn he, as ecclesiastical judge, pronounced that Anne had never been the king's wife; while as a member of the House of Peers he voted for her death, as having been an adulteress and thereby guilty of treason to her husband. As archbishop under Henry (which office he entered upon with a premeditated false oath on his lips) he sent men and women to the stake because they were not Catholics, and he sent Catholics to the stake because they would not acknowledge the king's supremacy and thereby perjure themselves as he had so often done. Become openly a Protestant in Edward's reign, and openly professing those very principles for the professing of which he had burnt others, he now punished his fellow Protestants because their grounds for protesting were different from his. As executor of the will of his old master, Henry, which gave the crown (after Edward) to his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, he conspired with others to rob those two daughters of their right, and to give the crown to Lady Jane, that queen of nine days, whom he with others ordered to be proclaimed. Confined, notwithstanding his many monstrous crimes, merely to the palace at Lambeth, he, in requital of the Queen's lenity, plotted with traitors in the pay of France to overset her government. Brought at last to trial and to condemnation as a heretic, he professed himself ready to recant. He was respited for six weeks, during which time he signed six different forms of recantation, each more ample than the former. He declared that the Protestant religion was false ; that the Catholic religion was the only true one; that he now believed in all the doctrines of the Catholic Church; that he had been a horrid blasphemer against the Sacrament; that he was unworthy of forgiveness; that he prayed the people, the Queen and the Pope to have pity on and to pray for his wretched soul; and that he had made and signed this declaration without fear and without hope of favour, and for the discharge of his conscience, and as a warning to others. It was a question in the Queen's Council whether he should be pardoned, as other recanters had been; but it was resolved that his crimes were so enormous that it would be unjust to let him escape. Brought, therefore, to the public reading of his recantation on his way to the stake, seeing the pile ready, now finding that he must die, and carrying in his breast all his malignity undiminished, he recanted his recantation, thrust into the fire the hand that had signed it, and thus expired, protesting against that very religion in which, only nine hours before, he had called God to witness that he firmly believed."

 

252. And Mary is to be called the "Bloody" because she put to death monsters of iniquity like this! It is surely time to do justice to the memory of this calumniated queen; and not to do it by halves, I must, contrary to my intention, employ part of the next chapter in giving the remainder of her history. (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, written between 1824 and 1827 and published by Benziger Brothers, pp. 203-211.)