Men Remain As Blind Now as They Were When Our Lord Denounced the Blind Jews

Passiontide began with First Vespers last evening, Saturday, April 6, 2019. We have now entered into the final two weeks of our annual Lenten journey of intensified prayers, voluntary sacrifices, mortifications, penances, almsgiving, Scripture reading and the reading of sound reflections upon Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection. This is this most solemn time of year, which is why statues and other images in Catholic churches are shrouded in purple until the Gloria is sung on the morning of Holy Saturday (or the evening of Holy Saturday in those chapels observing the liturgical rites in force at the time of the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958). Holy Mother Church compels us to direct our attention on the events of Our Lord’s Passion, reminding us that the world itself was shrouded in darkness until He, the Light of the World, rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.

Sadly, most people alive today flee from the Light of the World just as much as did the Jews had this Light in their very corporeal presence and yet preferred the darkness of their own unbelief and idolatry. Most people today are so steeped in darkness and have make themselves the willing prisoners of sin and engage in every manner of idolatry imaginable that they are incapable of reading the signs of the times, including the fact that God is sending plagues to punish even believing Catholics for our sins, our sloth, our indifference, our lukewarmness and our worldliness as well as to punish those who promote sin and are openly hostile to the true Faith for their refusal to see Our Lord as the Light of the World and who make open warfare against Him and His true Church.

Godlessness is on the rise around the world, including here in the United States of America, something that is but the logical consequence of the very anti-Incarnational and religiously indifferentist principles upon which Modernity and its secular systems of government are based. As I have noted on so many occasions in the past, atheism is the only logical result that can occur when men and their nations do not profess an open, unswerving belief in Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and acknowledge His Social Reign over them while submitting with humility and docility to the teaching authority of His true Church without any hesitation, qualification or reservation.

Pope Leo XIII made this very clear in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

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

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

Pope Leo XIII’s description of the inherent instability of the Judeo-Masonic civil governments of Modernity requires a bit of commentary as most people alive today refuse to accept the fact that truth exists objectively and is entirely independent upon human acceptance of it. That is, the truths of the Holy Faith have been revealed to us by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself and has entrusted to His Holy Catholic Church for their infallible explication and eternal safekeeping, and the truths of morality inhere in the nature of things and are knowable, albeit imperfectly given man’s fallen human nature, by reason alone unaided by Divine Revelation. No rational, sane human being contends that truth is mutable nor that its existence is entirely subjectively and dependent upon the circumstances of the moment.

Most people alive today, however, are not rational as they do believe that there is no such thing as objective morality and/or immutable doctrines of the Holy Faith, and they believe in this fallacy of relativism absolutely, meaning that they are absolute relativists. Illogic is what must result in a world devoid of a belief in Our Lord as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church and that scoffs of any notion of the need for human beings to have believe in, access to and cooperative with Sanctifying Grace to be virtuous. Indeed, even the concept of virtue itself is unknown to most people today.

What makes this situation so intractable is that the counterfeit church of conciliarism, headed currently by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine Apostate, has so completely eroded the sensus Catholicus from the minds of most, although not all, Catholics who are unfortunate enough to labor under the misapprehension that Bergoglio is “Pope Francis” and that their local parish is part of the Catholic Church and not its counterfeit ape believe that dogmatic and moral truths are as changeable as legislation passed by legislative bodies and as decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States of American and other courts. Bergoglio has been particularly aggressive in this regard, going so far as to say that there nothing about the Holy Faith is every “black or white, this or that.” Here are several examples:

All of us are quite aware of, and deeply worried by, the disturbing social and political situation of the world today.  Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion.  We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism.  This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind.  A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms.  But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.  The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.  We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within.  To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.  That is something which you, as a people, reject. (Bergoglio's Address to U.S. Congress.)

305. For this reason, a pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in “irregular” situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives. This would bespeak the closed heart of one used to hiding behind the Church’s teachings, “sitting on the chair of Moses and judging at times with superiority and superficiality difficult cases and wounded families”.349 Along these same lines, the International Theological Commission has noted that “natural law could not be presented as an already established set of rules that impose themselves a priori on the moral subject; rather, it is a source of objective inspiration for the deeply personal process of making decisions”.350 Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.351 Discernment must help to find possible ways of responding to God and growing in the midst of limits.By thinking that everything is black and white, we sometimes close off the way of grace and of growth, and discourage paths of sanctification which give glory to God. Let us remember that “a small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order, but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties”.352 The practical pastoral care of ministers and of communities must not fail to embrace this reality.  (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Amoris Laetita, March 19, 2016.)

ROME - Pope Francis has fired back at his critics over the document Amoris Laetita, suggesting they suffer from “a certain legalism, which can be ideological.”  The critics now include a group of four cardinals who’ve accused the pontiff of causing grave confusion and disorientation and even floated the prospect of a public correction. 

“Some- think about the responses to Amoris Laetitia- continue to not understand,” Francis said. They think it’s “black and white, even if in the flux of life you must discern.” 

The pope’s comments came in a wide-ranging interview with the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire published on Friday, in response to a question about his Jubilee Year of Mercy and its relation with the 1960s-era Second Vatican Council. 

 “The Church exists only as an instrument to communicate to men God’s merciful design,” he said, adding that during the council, the Church felt the “need to be in the world as a living sign of the Father’s love.” 

The Council, particularly the document Lumen Gentium, according to Francis, moved the axis of the Christian conception “from a certain legalism, which can be ideological,” to God himself, who through the Son became human.

 It’s in this context in which he talked about the responses to Amoris Laetitia by those who continue “not to understand” this point. 

Although he gives no names, it’s not a stretch to imagine the pope was thinking about the dubia or “doubts” about the apostolic exhortation presented to him by four cardinals, including American Raymond Burke. (Argentine Apostate Fires Back At Critics.)

As noted so many times before on this website, the ever-changeable nature of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service, which is replete with endless varieties of celebratory options that can used by even one presbyter at different times as he sees fit, to say nothing of the national and regional variations that are permitted to facilitate what is called the “inculturation of the Gospel, was designed to break down the natural resistance that Catholics have to instability, innovation and change. Today’s younger generations of Catholics who bother to darken the churches held by the conciliar revolutionaries have never known anything else but instability, innovation and change, thus predisposing them to accept doctrinal and moral relativism as a prelude to losing the Faith altogether to fall into the abyss of not only practical atheism but actual atheism as well.

Yes, the unbelief of the perfidious Jews who would not listen to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ when He told them that “Before Abraham was made I AM, is on the rise worldwide as men prefer to live in the darkness rather than walk in the light of the very Light of the World Himself:

The number of Americans who identify as having no religion has risen 266 percent since 1991, to now tie statistically with the number of Catholics and Evangelicals, according to a new survey.

People with no religion – known as 'nones' among statisticians – account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population, while Catholics make up 23 percent and Evangelicals account for 22.5 percent, according to the General Social Survey.

Those three groups now represent the largest the religious groups in America. 

The survey has tracked a broad swath of American trends since 1972, offering comprehensive insight into the evolving face of religion over more than four decades.

Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University who analyzed the data, said that experts have several theories about why the number of 'nones' has risen so dramatically in recent decades.

'One of them is that many people used to lie about what they were,' he told DailyMail.com. 'Many people were (always) atheist or non-religious, but it was previously culturally unacceptable to not have a religion in America.'

Shifting political ideologies about social issues has also played a role, with fewer Americans comfortable with the rhetoric of their religious leaders.

'Another (theory) is that the religious right kind of cleaved moderate Christianity and a lot of moderate Christians who were moderately attached said they didn't want to defend Jerry Falwell … and all the anti-gay and anti- abortion religious rights leaders,' Burge said. 'So they said, 'You know what? I'm out.'

As the 'nones' have ascended, the number of mainline Protestant Christians has fallen 62.5 percent since 1982, to now account for just 10.8 percent of the U.S. population, according to the survey.

The number of Catholics has gone up and down over the decades, cumulatively decreasing more than 4 percentage points from 27.3 percent in 1972.

However, that indicates an overall stability for that religion, despite the decades of sexual abuse scandals that have plagued the Church, Burge said.

'Catholicism is more cultural than religious in a lot of ways,' he said. 'People are less and less likely to disaffiliate from Catholicism than Protestantism, which is less cultural in that people are willing to walk away from it.'

Burge said that America is on a trajectory to become increasingly less religious going forward – following a pattern that has already emerged in Europe's most developed countries, including those in Scandinavia.

'The big questions is what next in terms of what religion is going to look like in America,' he said. 'Secularization theory argues that as countries become more industrialized and prosperous then the throwing off of religion becomes more normalized.'

Burge has seen the overall shifts first hand in his role as a pastor at an American Baptist church.

'My church is on the decline,' he said. 'We had 50 (congregants) in 2005 and now we have 15. We're probably going to have to close (in a few years).'

'Mainline Christianity is dying,' he added. 'It's at least going away. It makes me feel more comfortable that it's not my fault or my church's fault. It's part of a bigger trend that's happening.' (Percentage of Godless Americans Has Risen 266% in Three Decades.)

Modernity leads to unbelief. So does Modernism. Each is an agent of the adversary’s efforts to lead as many people into the abyss as possible before his chosen Antichrist is defeated in the final battle. Men persist in their blindness and are thus incapable of understanding that godlessness is a sign of the rotten nature of heresy and error nor that the sins of men, including the sin of unbelief, must be punished by the just God.

For example, the caste of high priests and priestesses known as “medical professionals,” whose diabolical handiwork with vaccinations was discussed six days ago in               , are blind to the fact that new and more powerful drug-resistant strains of bacterial and fungal infections are spreading across the world in hospitals and other “healthcare” facilities precisely to destroy the demigods of their own medical and scientific omniscience and to serve as modern plagues to chastise the sins of us all:

Last May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious.

Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit. The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe.

Over the last five years, it has hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a prestigious British medical center to shut down its intensive care unit, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa.

Rcently C. auris reached New York , New Jersey and Illinois, leading the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.”

he man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.

“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.

For decades, public health experts have warned that the overuse of antibiotics was reducing the effectiveness of drugs that have lengthened life spans by curing bacterial infections once commonly fatal. But lately, there has been an explosion of resistant fungi as well, adding a new and frightening dimension to a phenomenon that is undermining a pillar of modern medicine.

“It’s an enormous problem,” said Matthew Fisher, a professor of fungal epidemiology at Imperial College London, who was a co-author of a recent scientific review on the rise of resistant fungi. “We depend on being able to treat those patients with antifungals.”

Simply put, fungi, just like bacteria, are evolving defenses to survive modern medicines.

Yet even as world health leaders have pleaded for more restraint in prescribing antimicrobial drugs to combat bacteria and fungi — convening the United Nations General Assembly in 2016 to manage an emerging crisis — gluttonous overuse of them in hospitals, clinics and farming has continued.

Resistant germs are often called “superbugs,” but this is simplistic because they don’t typically kill everyone. Instead, they are most lethal to people with immature or compromised immune systems, including newborns and the elderly, smokers, diabetics and people with autoimmune disorders who take steroids that suppress the body’s defenses.

Scientists say that unless more effective new medicines are developed and unnecessary use of antimicrobial drugs is sharply curbed, risk will spread to healthier populations. A study the British government funded projects that if policies are not put in place to slow the rise of drug resistance, 10 million people could die worldwide of all such infections in 2050, eclipsing the eight million expected to die that year from cancer.

In the United States, two million people contract resistant infections annually, and 23,000 die from them, according to the official C.D.C. estimate. That number was based on 2010 figures; more recent estimates from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine put the death toll at 162,000. Worldwide fatalities from resistant infections are estimated at 700,000.

Antibiotics and antifungals are both essential to combat infections in people, but antibiotics are also used widely to prevent disease in farm animals, and antifungals are also applied to prevent agricultural plants from rotting. Some scientists cite evidence that rampant use of fungicides on crops is contributing to the surge in drug-resistant fungi infecting humans.

Yet as the problem grows, it is little understood by the public — in part because the very existence of resistant infections is often cloaked in secrecy.

With bacteria and fungi alike, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs. Even the C.D.C., under its agreement with states, is not allowed to make public the location or name of hospitals involved in outbreaks. State governments have in many cases declined to publicly share information beyond acknowledging that they have had cases.

All the while, the germs are easily spread — carried on hands and equipment inside hospitals; ferried on meat and manure-fertilized vegetables from farms; transported across borders by travelers and on exports and imports; and transferred by patients from nursing home to hospital and back.

C. auris, which infected the man at Mount Sinai, is one of dozens of dangerous bacteria and fungi that have developed resistance. Yet, like most of them, it is a threat that is virtually unknown to the public.

Other prominent strains of the fungus Candida — one of the most common causes of bloodstream infections in hospitals — have not developed significant resistance to drugs, but more than 90 percent of C. auris infections are resistant to at least one drug, and 30 percent are resistant to two or more drugs, the C.D.C. said.

Dr. Lynn Sosa, Connecticut’s deputy state epidemiologist, said she now saw C. auris as “the top” threat among resistant infections. “It’s pretty much unbeatable and difficult to identity,” she said.

Nearly half of patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days, according to the C.D.C. Yet the world’s experts have not nailed down where it came from in the first place.

“It is a creature from the black lagoon,” said Dr. Tom Chiller, who heads the fungal branch at the C.D.C., which is spearheading a global detective effort to find treatments and stop the spread. “It bubbled up and now it is everywhere.”

‘No need’ to tell the public

In late 2015, Dr. Johanna Rhodes, an infectious disease expert at Imperial College London, got a panicked call from the Royal Brompton Hospital, a British medical center outside London. C. auris had taken root there months earlier, and the hospital couldn’t clear it.

“‘We have no idea where it’s coming from. We’ve never heard of it. It’s just spread like wildfire,’” Dr. Rhodes said she was told. She agreed to help the hospital identify the fungus’s genetic profile and clean it from rooms.

Under her direction, hospital workers used a special device to spray aerosolized hydrogen peroxide around a room used for a patient with C. auris, the theory being that the vapor would scour each nook and cranny. They left the device going for a week. Then they put a “settle plate” in the middle of the room with a gel at the bottom that would serve as a place for any surviving microbes to grow, Dr. Rhodes said.

Only one organism grew back. C. auris.

It was spreading, but word of it was not. The hospital, a specialty lung and heart center that draws wealthy patients from the Middle East and around Europe, alerted the British government and told infected patients, but made no public announcement.

“There was no need to put out a news release during the outbreak,” said Oliver Wilkinson, a spokesman for the hospital.

This hushed panic is playing out in hospitals around the world. Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients — or prospective ones.

Dr. Silke Schelenz, Royal Brompton’s infectious disease specialist, found the lack of urgency from the government and hospital in the early stages of the outbreak “very, very frustrating.”

“They obviously didn’t want to lose reputation,” Dr. Schelenz said. “It hadn’t impacted our surgical outcomes.”

By the end of June 2016, a scientific paper reported “an ongoing outbreak of 50 C. auris cases” at Royal Brompton, and the hospital took an extraordinary step: It shut down its I.C.U. for 11 days, moving intensive care patients to another floor, again with no announcement.

Days later the hospital finally acknowledged to a newspaper that it had a problem. Aheadline in The Daily Telegraph warned, “Intensive Care Unit Closed After Deadly New Superbug Emerges in the U.K.” (Later research said there were eventually 72 total cases, though some patients were only carriers and were not infected by the fungus.)

Yet the issue remained little known internationally, while an even bigger outbreak had begun in Valencia, Spain, at the 992-bed Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe. There, unbeknown to the public or unaffected patients, 372 people were colonized — meaning they had the germ on their body but were not sick with it — and 85 developed bloodstream infections. A paper in the journal Mycoses reported that 41 percent of the infected patients died within 30 days.

A statement from the hospital said it was not necessarily C. auris that killed them. “It is very difficult to discern whether patients die from the pathogen or with it, since they are patients with many underlying diseases and in very serious general condition,” the statement said.

As with Royal Brompton, the hospital in Spain did not make any public announcement. It still has not.

One author of the article in Mycoses, a doctor at the hospital, said in an email that the hospital did not want him to speak to journalists because it “is concerned about the public image of the hospital.”

The secrecy infuriates patient advocates, who say people have a right to know if there is an outbreak so they can decide whether to go to a hospital, particularly when dealing with a nonurgent matter, like elective surgery.

“Why the heck are we reading about an outbreak almost a year and a half later — and not have it front-page news the day after it happens?” said Dr. Kevin Kavanagh, a physician in Kentucky and board chairman of Health Watch USA , a nonprofit patient advocacy group. “You wouldn’t tolerate this at a restaurant with a food poisoning outbreak.”

Health officials say that disclosing outbreaks frightens patients about a situation they can do nothing about, particularly when the risks are unclear.

“It’s hard enough with these organisms for health care providers to wrap their heads around it,” said Dr. Anna Yaffee, a former C.D.C. outbreak investigator who dealt with resistant infection outbreaks in Kentucky in which the hospitals were not publicly disclosed. “It’s really impossible to message to the public.”

Officials in London did alert the C.D.C. to the Royal Brompton outbreak while it was occurring. And the C.D.C. realized it needed to get the word to American hospitals. On June 24, 2016, the C.D.C. blasted a nationwide warning to hospitals and medical groups and set up an email address, candidaauris@cdc.gov, to field queries. Dr. Snigdha Vallabhaneni, a key member of the fungal team, expected to get a trickle — “maybe a message every month.”

Instead, within weeks, her inbox exploded.

Coming to America

In the United States, 587 cases of people having contracted C. auris have been reported, concentrated with 309 in New York, 104 in New Jersey and 144 in Illinois, according to the C.D.C.

The symptoms — fever, aches and fatigue — are seemingly ordinary, but when a person gets infected, particularly someone already unhealthy, such commonplace symptoms can be fatal.

The earliest known case in the United States involved a woman who arrived at a New York hospital on May 6, 2013, seeking care for respiratory failure. She was 61 and from the United Arab Emirates, and she died a week later, after testing positive for the fungus. At the time, the hospital hadn’t thought much of it, but three years later, it sent the case to the C.D.C. after reading the agency’s June 2016 advisory.

This woman probably was not America’s first C. auris patient. She carried a strain different from the South Asian one most common here. It killed a 56-year-old American woman who had traveled to India in March 2017 for elective abdominal surgery, contracted C. auris and was airlifted back to a hospital in Connecticut that officials will not identify. She was later transferred to a Texas hospital, where she died.

The germ has spread into long-term care facilities. In Chicago, 50 percent of the residents at some nursing homes have tested positive for it, the C.D.C. has reported. The fungus can grow on intravenous lines and ventilators.

Workers who care for patients infected with C. auris worry for their own safety. Dr. Matthew McCarthy, who has treated several C. auris patients at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, described experiencing an unusual fear when treating a 30-year-old man.

“I found myself not wanting to touch the guy,” he said. “I didn’t want to take it from the guy and bring it to someone else.” He did his job and thoroughly examined the patient, but said, “There was an overwhelming feeling of being terrified of accidentally picking it up on a sock or tie or gown.”

The role of pesticides?

As the C.D.C. works to limit the spread of drug-resistant C. auris, its investigators have been trying to answer the vexing question: Where in the world did it come from?

The first time doctors encountered C. auris was in the ear of a woman in Japan in 2009 (auris is Latin for ear). It seemed innocuous at the time, a cousin of common, easily treated fungal infections.

Three years later, it appeared in an unusual test result in the lab of Dr. Jacques Meis , a microbiologist in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was analyzing a bloodstream infection in 18 patients from four hospitals in India. Soon, new clusters of C. auris seemed to emerge with each passing month in different parts of the world.

The C.D.C. investigators theorized that C. auris started in Asia and spread across the globe. But when the agency compared the entire genome of auris samples from India and Pakistan, Venezuela, South Africa and Japan, it found that its origin was not a single place, and there was not a single auris strain.

The genome sequencing showed that there were four distinctive versions of the fungus, with differences so profound that they suggested that these strains had diverged thousands of years ago and emerged as resistant pathogens from harmless environmental strains in four different places at the same time.

“Somehow, it made a jump almost seemingly simultaneously, and seemed to spread and it is drug resistant, which is really mind-boggling,” Dr. Vallabhaneni said.

There are different theories as to what happened with C. auris. Dr. Meis, the Dutch researcher, said he believed that drug-resistant fungi were developing thanks to heavy use of fungicides on crops.

Dr. Meis became intrigued by resistant fungi when he heard about the case of a 63-year-old patient in the Netherlands who died in 2005 from a fungus called Aspergillus. It proved resistant to a front-line antifungal treatment called itraconazole. That drug is a virtual copy of the azole pesticides that are used to dust crops the world over and account for more than one-third of all fungicide sales .

A 2013 paper in Plos Pathogens said that it appeared to be no coincidence that drug-resistant Aspergillus was showing up in the environment where the azole fungicides were used. The fungus appeared in 12 percent of Dutch soil samples, for example, but also in “flower beds, compost, leaves, plant seeds, soil samples of tea gardens, paddy fields, hospital surroundings, and aerial samples of hospitals.”

Dr. Meis visited the C.D.C. last summer to share research and theorize that the same thing is happening with C. auris, which is also found in the soil: Azoles have created an environment so hostile that the fungi are evolving, with resistant strains surviving.

This is similar to concerns that resistant bacteria are growing because of excessive use of antibiotics in livestock for health and growth promotion. As with antibiotics in farm animals, azoles are used widely on crops.

“On everything — potatoes, beans, wheat, anything you can think of, tomatoes, onions,” said Dr. Rhodes, the infectious disease specialist who worked on the London outbreak. “We are driving this with the use of antifungicides on crops.”

Dr. Chiller theorizes that C. auris may have benefited from the heavy use of fungicides. His idea is that C. auris actually has existed for thousands of years, hidden in the world’s crevices, a not particularly aggressive bug. But as azoles began destroying more prevalent fungi, an opportunity arrived for C. auris to enter the breach, a germ that had the ability to readily resist fungicides now suitable for a world in which fungi less able to resist are under attack.

The mystery of C. auris’s emergence remains unsolved, and its origin seems, for the moment, to be less important than stopping its spread.

Resistance and denial

For now, the uncertainty around C. auris has led to a climate of fear, and sometimes denial.

Last spring, Jasmine Cutler, 29, went to visit her 72-year-old father at a hospital in New York City, where he had been admitted because of complications from a surgery the previous month.

When she arrived at his room, she discovered that he had been sitting for at least an hour in a recliner, in his own feces, because no one had come when he had called for help to use the bathroom. Ms. Cutler said it became clear to her that the staff was afraid to touch him because a test had shown that he was carrying C. auris.

“I saw doctors and nurses looking in the window of his room,” she said. “My father’s not a guinea pig. You’re not going to treat him like a freak at a show.”

He was eventually discharged and told he no longer carried the fungus. But he declined to be named, saying he feared being associated with the frightening infection.  (Mysterious Infection Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy.)

There is no fear of God, only fear of a bad “public image.”

The very same people who believe themselves, their medicines, their support of the destruction of the innocent preborn in their mothers’ wombs and of everyone else thereafter under the guises of the manufactured, profit-making myth of “brain death” to facilitate the vivisection of living human beings for their vital bodily organs or by “palliative care” care more for their “public image” than they do for the welfare of the patients and the general public even on the natural level. These high priests and priestesses of the medical profession, such as it is, will never accept the fact that these drug-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi are plagues send by the true God of Divine Revelation to bring them, who have long mocked Him, His very existence and His immutable moral laws, to chastise them for their role in killing off the innocent in the name of “medical care.”

Moreover, these “omniscient” high priests and priestesses of the medical industry admit to being “baffled” about their inability to “get their head around” the reality of a chastisement when it is right before their very eyes. They are fools.

None of these clowns and jugglers in the medical industry quoted above has the compassion, purity and apostolic courage of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, who exposed himself to the contagion of the plague in the service of those who were hospitalized with it and then died as he spent himself selflessly in their behalf. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga had the compassion of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and he saw in the sick the suffering Christ and ministered to them as he would have done to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself.

None of these clowns and jugglers in the medical industry quoted above knows anything about the selfless care given to the sick by Saint John of God, who founded the Hospitallers to follow after his holy example, or Saint Camillus de Lellis or our own Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini. People who do not see the image of the suffering Christ in those who are sick with contagious diseases will flee from their charges like the hireling who refuses to protect his flock from the wolf.

Indeed, these clowns and jugglers lie regularly, and they go so far as to attempt to destroy the documentation of their lies, including those that have been told to assure of the “safety” of vaccines (for additional information to supplement what was published six days ago, please see:  Vaccine Safety White Paper and Aluminum Adjuvant in Vaccines and Autism.)

The truth is there to be found. However, those who prefer the darkness continue to spread their lies as they peddle their poisons in the name of “public health.” The death of a mere two people from a cholera outbreak in Mozambique recently gave these liars all the excuse they needed to vaccinate 900,000 people with the “cholera vaccine” (see Cholera Vacccine Launched in Mozambique After Cyclone).

God is not mocked:

[1] Brethren, and if a man be overtaken in any fault, you, who are spiritual, instruct such a one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. [2] Bear ye one another's burdens; and so you shall fulfill the law of Christ. [3] For if any man think himself to be some thing, whereas he is nothing, he deceiveth himself. [4] But let every one prove his own work, and so he shall have glory in himself only, and not in another. [5] For every one shall bear his own burden.

[6] And let him that is instructed in the word, communicate to him that instructeth him, in all good things. [7] Be not deceived, God is not mocked.[8] For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in his flesh, of the flesh also shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting. [9] And in doing good, let us not fail. For in due time we shall reap, not failing. [10] Therefore, whilst we have time, let us work good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the faith. (Galatians 6: 1-10.)

The onset of Passiontide should prompt us to examine our consciences very thoroughly in order to prepare them to make a good, integral confession of our sins to a true priest as our own sins have mocked God, His Omnipotence, His Omniscience, His Justice and even His Mercy, which have too frequently presumed so casually, so that Our Lord will not speak to us at the Particular Judgment as He speak to the Jews in the passage from the Holy Gospel according to Saint John that is read at Holy Mass today:

At that time, Jesus said to the crowds of the Jews: Which of you can convict Me of sin? If I speak the truth, why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear is that you are not of God. The Jews therefore in answer said to Him, Are we not right in saying that You are a Samaritan, and have a devil? Jesus answered, I have not a devil, but I honor My Father, and you dishonor Me. Yet, I do not seek My own glory; there is One Who seeks and Who judges. Amen, amen, I say to you, if anyone keep My word, he will never see death. The Jews therefore said, Now we know that You have a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets, and You say, ‘If anyone keep My word he will never taste death.’ Are You greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? And the prophets are dead. Whom do You make Yourself? Jesus answered, If I glorify Myself, My glory is nothing. It is My Father Who glorifies Me, of Whom you say that He is your God. And you do not know Him, but I know Him. And if I say that I do not know Him, I shall be like you, a liar. But I know Him, and I keep His word. Abraham your father rejoiced that he was to see My day. He saw it and was glad. The Jews therefore said to Him, You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am. They therefore took up stones to cast at Him; but Jesus hid Himself, and went out from the temple. (John 8: 46-49.)

Our Lord clearly proclaimed Himself to be God to the Jews in this discourse, and they did not believe Him. Well, it is perhaps more accurate to say that they did not want to believe Him as they, mere mortals, knew that believing in Him would mean an end their pretentiously cruel use of the Mosaic laws to lord it over others without regard for the spirit of those laws, which is why that they had to accuse Him of blasphemy. The leaders of the Jews refused to bend their knees before their very God, Whom they knew full well had said the following to Moses when charging him with the responsibility to liberate the Hebrew people from their captivity to the Egyptians:

[11] And Moses said to God: Who am I that I should go to Pharao, and should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? [12] And he said to him: I will be with thee: and this thou shalt have for a sign, that I have sent thee: When thou shalt have brought my people out of Egypt, thou shalt offer sacrifice to God upon this mountain. [13] Moses said to God: Lo, I shall go to the children of Israel, and say to them: The God of your fathers hath sent me to you. If they should say to me: What is his name? what shall I say to them? [14] God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM. He said: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, hath sent me to you. [15] And God said again to Moses: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me to you: This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. (Exodus 3: 1-15.)

The Jews knew that Our Lord was proclaiming Himself to be God. They knew also that He had performed miracles and had taught more authoritatively than anyone before Him. Blinded by their pride and their obstinacy, they, presaging the high priests and priestesses of the Judeo-Masonic world of Modernity, were constitutionally incapable of bowing down to acknowledge their very God when He appeared and spoke to them in the very Flesh.

Father Maurice Meschler explained the encounter as follows:

In proportion as He reveals Himself more fully, the Jews grow more bitter in their rage and hatred. We see their increasing irritation in their more and more frequent and excited contradiction; in the scorn and derision which now marks their retorts and with which they respond to our Lord’s prediction with regard to His decease (John viii. 22), here with far more malevolence than on the Feast of the Tabernacles (John vii. 35); lastly, in the open affront and curse which they hurl in His face before all the people, calling Him a Samaritan and a demoniac (John viii. 48, 52, vii. 20), Our Lord a more severe in His language, and upbraids them with very bitter truths, predicting their impatient death and temporal and eternal ruin (John vii. 34; viii. 44). The severe and humiliating defeat in connection with the adulterers must already have excited and exasperated these perverse hearts to the very utmost, and now that our Lord so unsparingly castigates their national and personal pride, their hatred and fury breaks out into a wild act of violence, and they wish to stone Him in the Temple. Our Saviour’s divine power alone frustrates their attempt. It is as though we see the combat between light and darkness actually before our eyes, and as if the word of St. John: “The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (i. 5) were here enacted in a living scene (Keppler). The Jews are not only the real adulterers, by their violation of the covenant with their God, but also His persecutors and murderers; they wish to stone their Messias in the midst of His Temple, and thus to extinguish the Light of the World with their own hands. How marvelouslly beautiful and majestic the figure of our Saviour appears against this dark background, in His calmness and self-possession, His childlike fidelity and love to His Father; in His pure zeal for the honour and mandate of His Heavenly Father; and lastly, in the courage He displays in the midst of the infuriated people, and in His divine power, since He does not flee or bend down to avoid the stones cast at Him, but simply withdraws from them like the light, which cannot be seized and stoned! The Godhead was His shield and refuge. But the situation had become so strained by the preceding events that a crisis was unavoidable. (Father Maurice Meschler, S.J., The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, The Son of God, in Meditations, Volume I, Freiburg Im Breisgau, 1928 Herder & Co., Publishers to the Holy Apostolic See, pp. 599-600.)

Yes, the confrontation has begun. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has proclaimed Himself to be what He is, God in the very Flesh, and they did not want to believe Him. Instead, of course, much like the Talmudists, Kabbalists, Zionists and other naturalists and rationalists of our day, the Jews who were denounced by Our Lord used epithets to try to distract the people from the fact that Truth Himself was announcing to them all that the time of the Old Covenant was coming to an end. The Jews preferred the blindness. So do most people, including most Catholics today, which is why career politicians, civil servant apparatchiks, lawyers, educators, talking heads and the other blathering, babbling naturalists of the commentariat class, scientists, medical “professionals,” leaders of multinational corporations and other businesses, bankers and others who become wealthy from charging usurious rates of interest to keep the peons who must purchase automobiles and other major expenses on credit in states of perpetual slave bondage and poverty can never see the truth about anything, especially on matters of life and death. Merchants of lies can never see the Divine impress in others, and they can never admit that there are truths that exist in the nature of things that do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force and validity and that bind the consciences of all people at a times in all circumstances and in all places.

Our situation is so bad that the United States Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo, an apostate Catholic who practices the heresy of Presbyterianism and looks forward to the mythical “rapture,” told Talmudists that he believed that it is possible that God has raised up Donald John Trump to save the Jewish people from the “Iranian menace.” I kid you not:

(JTA) — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that President Donald Trump may have been sent by God to protect Israel.

Asked in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network whether he thought “President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace” — a reference to the story behind the Purim holiday, and to the present-day relationship between Iran and Israel — Pompeo said: “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible.”

He added that with “the work that our administration’s done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains,” that he is “confident that the Lord is at work here.”

Pompeo was in Jerusalem, where he accompanied Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Western Wall.

The secretary also said that the Trump administration’s peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians doesn’t sacrifice “core principles” of any religion.

“I’ve seen the details of the plan as it stands now,” Pompeo said. Asked if it includes dividing Jerusalem, he said it “doesn’t sacrifice any of these core principles, frankly, of any of the faiths.”

Israel has opposed relinquishing control of the Western Wall and other sites holy to Judaism to the Palestinians. (Michael Richard Pompeo Says it is possible that God Raised Up Trump to Save the Jewish People from the "Iranian Menance".)

The Zionist State of Israel is a preparation for the coming of Antichrist. While the country of Israel exists as a matter of fact and it has the natural law of self-defense from legitimate, not perceived, threats against the safety of its citizens, Talmudists believe that the Messias will manifest himself thunderously out of a mountainside to “redeem” them from their political enemies and thus restore Israel to what they believe is its “rightful” place as the undisputed leader of the world. This is the same thing that the Biblical Jews of Our Lord’s time who called him a Samaritan and a devil believed, and it is really a variation of what even some Catholics, deluded by the exigencies of the present moment, believe is a correlative, complementary destiny of sorts for the United States of America in support of Israel under the leadership of the man who they think is “saving” America, Donald John Trump. There is no such thing as a secular salvation of any kind. Pompeo is as much as a fool as those quoted earlier in this commentary.

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., explained that Our Lord came to redeem us from our sins, not to restore Israel as He told the Jews to their face that their time was coming to an end:

The fury of the Jews is evidently at its height, and Jesus is obliged to hide Himself from them. But He is to fall into their hands before many days are over; then will they triumph and put Him to death. They triumph, and Jesus is their victim; but how different is to be His lot from theirs! In obedience to the decree of His heavenly Father, and out of love for men. He will deliver Himself into the hands of His enemies, and they will put Him to death; but He will rise victorious from the tomb, He will ascend into heaven. He will enthroned on the right hand of His Father. His enemies, on the contrary, after venting all their rage, will live on without remorse, until the terrible day come for their chastisement. That day is not far off, for observe the severity wherewith our Lord speaks to them: ‘You hear not the words of God, because you are not of God.’ Yet there was a time when they were of God, for the Lord gives His grace to all men; but they have rendered this grace useless; they are now in darkness, and the light they have rejected will not return.

You say that my Father is your God, and you have not known Him; but I know Him. Their obstinacy in refusing to acknowledge Jesus as the Messias, has led them to ignore that very God, whom they boast of honouring; for if they knew the Father, they would not reject His Son. Moses, and the Psalms, and the Prophets, are a dead letter to them; these sacred Books are soon to pass into the hands of the Gentiles, who will both read and understand them. If, continues Jesus, I should say that I know Him not, I should be like you, a liar. This strong language is that of the angry Judge who is come down, at the last day, to destroy sinners. Jerusalem has not known the time of her visitation: the Son of God has visited her, He is with her, and she dares to say to Him: Thou hast a devil! She says to the eternal Word, who proves Himself to be God by the most astonishing hat miracles, that Abraham and prophets are greater than He! Strange blindness, that comes from pride and hardness of heart! The feast of the Pasch is at hand; these men are going to eat, and with much parade of religion, the flesh of the figurative lamb; they know full well that this lamb is a symbol, or a figure, which is to have its fulfillment. The true Lamb is to be sacrificed by their hands, and they will not know Him. He will shed His Blood for them, and it will not save them. How this reminds us of those sinners, for whom this Easter promises to be as fruitless as those of the past years! Let us redouble our prayers for them, and beseech our Lord to soften their hearts, lest trampling the Blood of Jesus under their feet, they should have it to cry vengeance against them before the throne of the heavenly Father. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B, The Liturgical Year: Volume 6—Passiontide, pp. 114-115.)

Judaism belongs to the kingdom of satan, which is why is it completely diabolical for anyone to contend that it has any authority from God to occupy the very places where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour sanctified with His own Most Precious Blood as He suffered and died at the hands of the unbelieving Jews, motivated in large part by our sins having transcended time, who even refused the thirty-seven year period mercy that the Divine Victim had extended to them to respond to the preaching of the Apostles. Alas, they refused to listen to the Apostles, and they persecuted them just as they had to Our Lord, Who had prophesied their persecution—and those of all anti-Catholics until the end of time—as follows:

[16] You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. [17] These things I command you, that you love one another. [18] If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you. [19] If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. [20] Remember my word that I said to you: The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also.

[21] But all these things they will do to you for my name's sake: because they know not him who sent me. [22] If I had not come, and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. [23] He that hateth me, hateth my Father also. [24] If I had not done among them the works that no other man hath done, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. [25] But that the word may be fulfilled which is written in their law: They hated me without cause. (John 15: 16-24.)

There is no middle ground. All must be darkness when the Light of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not penetrate deep into the souls of the baptized and when the unbaptized, whose souls are captive to the devil by means of Original Sin, persist in their unbelief and, to be sure, their hatred all truth, supernatural and natural, starting with the very Holy Name of Jesus and all that He has entrusted to Holy Mother Church, including His teaching and the sacraments He instituted for our sanctification and salvation to apply the fruits of His Redemptive Act to men until the end of time.

One of the readings for Matins in today’s Divine Office contains Pope Saint Gregory the Great’s reflections on the events recorded in the Gospel passage read at Holy Mass today:

Dearly beloved brethren, consider the gentleness of God. He came to take away sins, and He saith Which of you convinceth Me of sin? He Who, through the might of His Godhead, was able to justify sinners, was contented to show by argument that He was not Himself a sinner. But exceeding dread is that which followeth. He that is of God heareth God's words; ye, therefore, hear them not, because ye are not of God. If, then, whosoever is of God heareth God's words, and whosoever is not of Him cannot hear His words, let each one ask himself if he, in the ear of his heart, heareth God's words, and understandeth Whose words they are? The Truth commandeth us to long for a Fatherland in heaven, to bridle the lusts of the flesh, to turn away from the glory of the world, to seek no man's goods, and to give away our own.

Let each of you, therefore, think within himself if this voice of God is heard in the ear of his heart, and if he knoweth already if he is of God. For some there be, whom it pleaseth not to hear the commandments of God even with their bodily ears. And some there be, who receive the same with their bodily ears, but whose heart is far from them. And some also there be, who hear the words of God with joy, so that they are moved thereby even to tears; but when their fit of weeping is past they turn again to iniquity. They hear not the words of God, who despise to do them. Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, call up your own life before your mind's eye, and then ponder with trembling those awful words which the mouth of the Truth spoke. Ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.

The Truth speaketh these words concerning the reprobate; but the reprobate make manifest the same thing concerning themselves, by their evil works. Thus immediately followeth: Then answered the Jews, and said unto Him: Say we not well that Thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil? But let us hear what the Lord said to this insult. I have not a devil, but I honour My Father, and ye do dishonour Me. The Lord said: I have not a devil, but He did not say: I am not a Samaritan, for in a sense a Samaritan He was indeed, since the word Samaritan, in the Hebrew tongue, signifieth, being interpreted, a Watcher, and the Lord is that Watcher, of Whom the Psalmist saith cxxviii. 2 that unless He keep the city, other watchman waketh but in vain. He also is that Watchman unto Whom crieth Isaiah xxi. 11: Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? Therefore the Lord said: I have not a devil, but not I am not a Samaritan. Of the two things brought against Him He denied one; but by His silence, admitted the other. (Pope Saint Gregory the Great, as found in Matins, The Divine Office, Passion Sunday.)

We have to make sure that we are not reprobated and that we are not blind to the truth about ourselves. It is good to see the truth about the blindness of those who control the levers. However, it is far better for us to see the ugly truth about ourselves and the necessity of our relying upon the ineffable graces won for us by the High Priest Whose work of sanctification was described by Saint Paul the Apostle in the lesson appointed for Holy Mass today that Dom Prosper Gueranger reflected upon as follows:

It is by blood alone that man is to be redeemed.  He has offended God. This God cannot be appeased by anything short of the extermination of His rebellious creatures, who, by shedding his blood, will give an earnest of his repentance and his entire submission to the Creator, against whom he dared to rebel. Otherwise, the justice of God must be satisfied by the sinner’s suffering eternal punishment. This truth was understood by all the peoples of the ancient world, and all confessed it by shedding the blood of victims, as in the sacrifice of Abel at the very commencement of the world., in the hecatombs of Greece, in the countless immolations whereby Solomon dedicated his temple. And yet God thus speaks to His people: ‘Hear, O My people, and I will speak: O Israel, and I will testify to thee: I am God thy God. I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices, and they burnt-offerings are always in my sight. I will not take calves out of thy house, nor he-goats out of thy flocks. I need them not: for all the beasts of the world are Mine. If I should be hungry I would not tell thee; for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof. Shall I eat the flesh of bullocks? or shall I drink the blood of goats?’ Thus, God commands the blood of victims to be offered to Him, and, at the same time, declare that neither it nor they are precious in His sight. Is this a contradiction? No: God would hereby have man understand that it is only by blood that he can be redeemed, but that the blood of brute animals cannot effect this redemption. Can the blood of man himself bring him his own redemption, and appease God’s justice? No, not even man’s blood, for it is defiled; and even were it undefiled, it is powerless for o compensate for the outrage to God by sin. For this there was needed the Blood of a God; such was the Blood of Jesus, and He has come that he may shed it for our redemption.

In Him is fulfilled the most sacred of the figures of the old Law. Once each year, the high-priest entered into the Holy of holies, there to make intercession for the people. He went within the veil, even to the Ark of the Covenant; but he was not allowed to enjoy this great privilege, unless he entered the holy place carrying the blood of a newly-offered victim. The Son of God, the true High-Priest, is now about to enter heaven, and we are to follow Him thither; but unto this, He must have an offering of blood, and that Blood can be none other than His own. We are going to assist at His compliance with the divine ordinance. Let us open our hears, that this precious Blood may, as the apostle says in to-day’s Epistle, cleanse our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B, The Liturgical Year: Volume 6—Passiontide, pp. 110-111.)

Passiontide beckons us to remember that the liturgies that will be celebrated during Holy Week, starting with First Vespers on Palm Sunday and reaching their zenith during the Paschal Triduum of Our Lord’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, would not be possible without the full consent and cooperation of Our Lady, she who enfleshed the Word in her Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation, who was with her Divine Son throughout the last days before His Crucifixion and Death, at which she, the Co-Redemptrix of the world, became for us Our Queen of Martyrs.

Now is the time to pray the Sorrowful Mysteries of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary first before the Glorious and the Joyful Mysteries each day until Holy Saturday as it is these mysteries that unite us so entirely to sufferings that her Divine Son endured out of love and obedience to His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal God the Father and out of the most compassionate love of His Most Sacred Heart for us recidivist sinners for whose redemption He poured out every single drop of His Most Precious Blood.

Pope Leo XIII explained the importance of the Sorrowful Mysteries as follows in Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893:

7. A second evil, one which is specially pernicious, and one which, owing to the increasing mischief which it works among souls, we can never sufficiently deplore, is to be found in repugnance to suffering and eagerness to escape whatever is hard or painful to endure. The greater number are thus robbed of that peace and freedom of mind which remains the reward of those who do what is right undismayed by the perils or troubles to be met with in doing so. Rather do they dream of a chimeric civilization in which all that is unpleasant shall be removed, and all that is pleasant shall be supplied. By this passionate and unbridled desire of living a life of pleasure, the minds of men are weakened, and if they do not entirely succumb, they become demoralized and miserably cower and sink under the hardships of the battle of life.

8. In such a contest example is everything, and a powerful means of renewing our courage will undoubtedly be found in the Holy Rosary, if from our earliest years our minds have been trained to dwell upon the sorrowful mysteries of Our Lord’s life, and to drink in their meaning by sweet and silent meditation. In them we shall learn how Christ, “the Author and Finisher of Our faith,” began “to do and teach,” in order that we might see written in His example all the lessons that He Himself had taught us for the bearing of our burden of labor — and sorrow, and mark how the sufferings which were hardest to bear were those which He embraced with the greatest measure of generosity and good will. We behold Him overwhelmed with sadness, so that drops of blood ooze like sweat from His veins. We see Him bound like a malefactor, subjected to the judgment of the unrighteous, laden with insults, covered with shame, assailed with false accusations, torn with scourges, crowned with thorns, nailed to the cross, accounted unworthy to live, and condemned by the voice of the multitude as deserving of death. Here, too, we contemplate the grief of the most Holy Mother, whose soul was not merely wounded but “pierced” by the sword of sorrow, so that she might be named and become in truth “the Mother of Sorrows.” Witnessing these examples of fortitude, not with sight but by faith, who is there who will not feel his heart grow warm with the desire of imitating them?

9. Then, be it that the “earth is accursed” and brings forth “thistles and thorns,” — be it that the soul is saddened with grief and the body with sickness; even so, there will be no evil which the envy of man or the rage of devils can invent, nor calamity which can fall upon the individual or the community, over which we shall not triumph by the patience of suffering. For this reason it has been truly said that “it belongs to the Christian to do and to endure great things,” for he who deserves to be called a Christian must not shrink from following in the footsteps of Christ. But by this patience, We do not mean that empty stoicism in the enduring of pain which was the ideal of some of the philosophers of old, but rather do We mean that patience which is learned from the example of Him, who “having joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. xvi., 2). It is the patience which is obtained by the help of His grace; which shirks not a trial because it is painful, but which accepts it and esteems it as a gain, however hard it may be to undergo. The Catholic Church has always had, and happily still has, multitudes of men and women, in every rank and condition of life, who are glorious disciples of this teaching, and who, following faithfully in the path of Christ, suffer injury and hardship for the cause of virtue and religion. They reecho, not with their lips, but with their life, the words of St. Thomas: “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John xi., 16).

10. May such types of admirable constancy be more and more splendidly multiplied in our midst to the weal of society and to the glory and edification of the Church of God!

11. The third evil for which a remedy is needed is one which is chiefly characteristic of the times in which we live. Men in former ages, although they loved the world, and loved it far too well, did not usually aggravate their sinful attachment to the things of earth by a contempt of the things of heaven. Even the right-thinking portion of the pagan world recognized that this life was not a home but a dwelling-place, not our destination, but a stage in the journey. But men of our day, albeit they have had the advantages of Christian instruction, pursue the false goods of this world in such wise that the thought of their true Fatherland of enduring happiness is not only set aside, but, to their shame be it said, banished and entirely erased from their memory, notwithstanding the warning of St. Paul, “We have not here a lasting city, but we seek one which is to come” (Heb. xiii., 4).

12. When We seek out the causes of this forgetfulness, We are met in the first place by the fact that many allow themselves to believe that the thought of a future life goes in some way to sap the love of our country, and thus militates against the prosperity of the commonwealth. No illusion could be more foolish or hateful. Our future hope is not of a kind which so monopolizes the minds of men as to withdraw their attention from the interests of this life. Christ commands us, it is true, to seek the Kingdom of God, and in the first place, but not in such a manner as to neglect all things else. For, the use of the goods of the present life, and the righteous enjoyment which they furnish, may serve both to strengthen virtue and to reward it. The splendor and beauty of our earthly habitation, by which human society is ennobled, may mirror the splendor and beauty of our dwelling which is above. Therein we see nothing that is not worthy of the reason of man and of the wisdom of God. For the same God who is the Author of Nature is the Author of Grace, and He willed not that one should collide or conflict with the other, but that they should act in friendly alliance, so that under the leadership of both we may the more easily arrive at that immortal happiness for which we mortal men were created.

13. But men of carnal mind, who love nothing but themselves, allow their thoughts to grovel upon things of earth until they are unable to lift them to that which is higher. For, far from using the goods of time as a help towards securing those which are eternal, they lose sight altogether of the world which is to come, and sink to the lowest depths of degradation. We may doubt if God could inflict upon man a more terrible punishment than to allow him to waste his whole life in the pursuit of earthly pleasures, and in forgetfulness of the happiness which alone lasts for ever. (Pope Leo XIII, Laetitiae Sanctae, December 8, 1893.)

Heaven awaits those who keep close to Our Lady and compassionate her for how our sins caused her Divine Son to suffer and die for us on the wood of the Holy Cross and that keep us steeped in blindness about the unvarnished truth about the state of our own souls. Our sins caused Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart to be pierced with swords of sorrow, which is why we must resolve to amend our lives and seek to sin no more. The praying of her Dolors, in addition to the praying of the Holy Rosary, is just one way that we can unite ourselves with her so that she can be brings to stand by the foot of her Divine Son’s Most Holy Cross every day of our lives, and from there to bring us to an unending Easter Sunday in Heaven in the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, Triumph soon!

Our Lady of the 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.