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Take Your Pick: Plutarco Elias Bergoglio/Jorge Mario Calles
Although it is very hard to believe, For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada, was released eight years, four months ago. Its release prompted much commentary before, as happens with motion pictures, becoming obscured by other events, including the lack of publicity given to it and the agitation engendered by thoroughly predictable naturalistic “conflict” between Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and the hapless, flip-flopping and ever-sanctimonious Mormon named Willard Mitt Romney.
For Greater Glory did prompt a great deal of interest about the Cristeros War on the part of some Catholics, and I wrote a series of commentaries (Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part one, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part two, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part three, Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part four and Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part five) about it that will be published in an anthology at some point next year or the year after if God continues to grant me the gift of life and the ability to continue my work, that is. Central to the story of the very dramatized account of the Masonic/Communist government’s attack on Holy Mother Church and believing Catholics—and central to the actual facts of what happened between in Mexico between 1926 and 1929—was the role played by Plutarco Elias Calles. Indeed, Calles continue to be the power behind the throne until at least as late as 1934 even after he had left the presidency in 1928 and was succeeded by his puppet, Emilio Portes Gil.
Calles was an anticlerical Masonic revolutionary with Communist leanings. The law passed by the Mexican Congress at his behest in 1926 to enforce the anticlerical provisions of the 1917 Mexican Constitution was a direct assault upon the rights of Catholics to assist at Holy Mass and to receive the Holy Sacraments. Indeed, it was an effort to destroy the life of the Faith in the hearts of Catholics in Mexico who have always been so devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Calles hated the Mass and he hated the devotional lives of Mexican Catholics as obstacles in the promotion of the “the immortal principles of “La Revolucion.” His relentless attacks on bishops, priests, consecrated religious and ordinary lay Catholics led to the Cristeros War, which was undertaken by faithful Catholics only after all peaceful means to redress Calles Law of 1926 had been rebuffed with brutality.
I will provide readers a more thorough summary of what happened after the peace agreement that was brokered by the American Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, and Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the Holy See’s Secretary of State under Pope Pius XI below to demonstrate how grieved Pope Pius XI upon learning of the peace treaty by Plutarco Elias Calles’s puppet, Emilio Portes Gil, and to contrast this grief with the full, active, and conscious participation of Plutarco Elias Bergoglio and his own revolutionary stooges in Mexico in the Mexican government’s renewed attacks upon Catholic churches and the Catholic Faith in Our Lady’s beloved country.
As readers can see in the report below, the Mexican military invaded the cathedral recently, something that drew the lament of the cathedral’s rector, who founded himself contracted the conciliar “archbishop” of Mexico City, who is a Bergoglian acolyte:
Being a proud Mexican-American Catholic born of Catholic Mexican parents who immigrated to the USA, and whose great grandfather was a Military general in the State of Michoacan who secretly defended clergy and religious from the tyrannical and bloody persecution of the Turkish-Mexican dictator-in-chief, Plutarco Elias Calles, during the Cristero War of the 1930’s, and because of which he suffered tremendous consequences for: I am uniquely outraged about the following underreported news.
Today, Mexico’s “president”, rather, masonic dictator-in-chief, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (who likes to go by AMLO), commanded the national guard to abruptly and without notice, enter the Metropolitan Cathedral, like some kind of gestapo, to arrest all priests, canons, and personnel, and lock them out of the facility like dogs, preventing them and the faithful, from public or private use of the facility until further notice. What is most sad is that almost no major news network has reported this, and no video footage has been published. Besides a few statements that the Archdiocese has published and what I first heard from a Youtube video, I could only find two brief articles from local independent news sources on the matter.
The Archdiocese of Mexico City published the following statement on their Twitter account (my translation) shortly after the event occurred:
“It is with great sorrow that we inform the faithful that today and, probably, those close to Independence Day will not be able to enter this Cathedral to participate in the religious services since its surroundings have been taken over by members of the Army. As we were unfortunately not informed and still do not know how many and what days this situation will remain, we offer an apology and ask for patience as long as we can reopen.”
The corrupt, marxist-socialist, and pro-sodomy, Cardinal Aguiar Retes (whom according to a very prominent priest in the Archdiocese, was appointed by Bergoglio to completely destroy the Archdiocese in every way including priestly vocations), denies that there was ever a “takeover” but said in his tweets which were also published in the Archdiocese’s twitter account:
“I would like to clarify that there has been no takeover of the Metropolitan Cathedral by the federal authorities, however there was a lack of proper communication with them to implement the protocols prior to the acts of the Patriotic Festivities.”
And also:
“I express my desire that there be constant and cordial communication with the authorities so that each of the parties can develop in the best way the activities that correspond to them.”
The cardinal is clearly playing the political game of the masonic dictator. As you can see, Mexican Catholics are stuck between their own religious tyrannical authority (the Cardinal), and a tyrannical state and dictator.
Anyway, I’ve also read that the Mexican dictator has shut down access to any underground subway train stations near the area and will soon be barricading the entire surroundings of the plaza. His excuse, according to sources, is that the Patriotic Festivities i.e. Mexican Independence Day, which is typically celebrated on Sept. 15th, usually with a big gathering at the Plaza, has been cancelled due to covid-19 this year, but, it seems that there is yet another reason why the dictator has suddenly decided to shut down the Cathedral and Plaza. And that is, to prevent a major “occupy” protest that is scheduled to take place only a few days after Independence Day, on Sept. 19th.
The protest was organized by the group FRENA which is a group of outraged Mexican citizens who seeks the immediate removal of the president as he has clearly demonstrated his desires to establish a Venezuelan-style dictatorship. Protestors will be occupying the historic Plaza which, surprise! surprise!, is located right between the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace where the dictator currently resides. Protestors plan to occupy the plaza indefinitely until the dictator resigns and vacates National Palace. The main organizer, Gilberto Lozano, has said in past recordings that they are demanding the resignation in such a manner according to Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution which says: “National sovereignty resides essentially and originally in the people. All public power emanates from the people and is instituted for their benefit. The people have at all times the inalienable right to alter or modify the form of their government.”
Our Lady of Guadalupe, have pity on the Mexican People, and rescue them from the scourge of the dragon! (Mexican President Seizes Control of Cathedral in Mexico City.)
Although the man who wrote this is undoubtedly well-meaning, he fails to see that the Catholic Church in Mexico and elsewhere throughout the entire world has been seized by and has been since the "Second" Vatican Council in the grip of heretics and apostates who have not only made their official “reconciliation” with the Jacobin principles of 1789 but with the Bolshevik principles of 1917.
Plutarco Elias Bergoglio has been busy at work appointed Communist and Communist-sympathizing men in the conciliar “hierarchy,” such as it is, all throughout the world, most especially in Latin America. Bergoglio has given various winks and nods to the surgical execution of innocent preborn children by praising such abortion advocates as Emma Bonino (see Jorge Always Indemnifies Today's Herods) and by giving his own Bolshevik acolytes full permission to send signals to Catholics in the United States that he is rooting for the pro-Marxist, pro-abortion, pro-sodomite Black Lives Matter movement in the United States of America to prevail with the election of former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., up to and including a computerized projection of a the Sacred Body of Our Divine Redeemer as a black man being held by Our Lady in Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Basilica of Saint Peter (see Introducing: The ‘Pontifical Academy for Black Lives Matter’.) Bergoglio has given winks and nods to practicing sodomites directly and by encouraging his “bishops” and priests/presbyters to baptize the children, conceived via the immoral practice of in vitro fertilization, of course, of practicing lesbians and of making it appear that there is nothing wrong to have one’s bodily surgically and chemically mutilated into becoming what is ontologically impossible: a member of the opposite gender.
The well-meaning writer of Mexican ancestry does not realize that the man he thinks is the “pope” does not want Catholics to oppose actions by “enlightened” civil leaders that result in the closure of Catholic churches and shrines, something that he has demonstrated consistently throughout the course of the current Plandemic, which Plutarco Elias Bergoglio has aided and abetted even though some of his “bishops” in Italy have pleaded with him to let Catholics in the conciliar structures go to back to what they think, erroneously, is Holy Mass but is actually an abomination in the sight of the Most Holy Trinity and has no more power to sanctify souls than a Anglican “high liturgy” staged in the Latin language.
As is amply demonstrated in a post on Novus Ordo Watch about what the bloggers term rightly an “ecclesiological train wreck” of a commentary by Father Carlo Maria Vigano about what constitutes the conciliar church even though he recognizes the legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s claim to the papacy, the Catholic Church is opposed to all errors, including the godless falsehood that is Communism in any of its wretched forms, especially that of Marxism-Leninism. The counterfeit church of conciliarism is such a patently false creation that its officials have been admitting very openly that a new church was created at the “Second” Vatican Council and that they have thrown all efforts to disguise its dogmatic evolutionism by such euphemisms as “living tradition” or “the hermeneutic of continuity” into the trash bin with various bold proclamations, among them are the following:
“He [“Archbishop” Oscar Romero] was killed at the altar,” Archbishop Paglia said, instead of when he was an easier target at home or on the street. “Through him, they wanted to strike the Church that flowed from the Second Vatican Council." (Romero To Be "Beatified" Soon.)
Whether or not he realized it, “Archbishop” Vincenzo Paglia, who was featured on this site most recently in Naturally Absurd, part three, made quite a statement in 2015 by stating that his church is one that flowed from the “Second” Vatican Council and not the the one that flowed from Wounded Side of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as Blood and Water flowed forth out from the His Most Sacred Heart. As a conciliar presbyter noted to me in an e-mail in 2004, the “Second” Vatican Council represented what he termed was an “ecclesiogensis,” that is, the springing forth of a new church that had little to do with the one that preceded it.
This is indeed quite correct. What has flowed forth from the “Second” Vatican Council and the “magisterium” of the conciliar “popes” has been nothing other than a polluted stream of apostasy that originated from the poisoned wells of Modernity and Modernism. Countless hundreds of millions of people have been poisoned by it enough to have had their minds poisoned against any mention of the “old faith,” especially as expressed and protected in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.
Over fifty years of the conciliar revolution’s endless assaults upon the sensus Catholicus of ordinary Catholics have produced a counter-revolution amongst some “conservative” or traditional-leaning Catholics to try to “fight from within” against those they believe have been true popes, bishops and priests for the “restoration” of the Holy Faith. Mind you, this is not a condemnation. Far from it as I was part in that unhappy state for a long time before coming to admit what was gnawing at my Catholic conscience for some years, namely, that it is impossible for anything impure, unholy, heretical, sacrilegious or that wreaked of apostasy to emanate from Holy Mother Church. It is impossible for any true pope or true ecumenical council convened by him to teach error in the name of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
What most Catholics attached to the conciliar structures do not realize is that the triumph of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism in one form or another throughout the world, including here in the United States of America, is the direct result of the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s embrace of the anti-Incarnational foundation of the modern civil state, an entity that can only wind up producing a “new ruling class” that controls the expression of thought in speech or in print at the behest of the Red Chinese and other Communists worldwide (see The Rising Danger of the Big Tech Thought Police and America's China Class Launches a New War Against Trump for two very prescient articles from naturalistic standpoints on this phenomenon), controls the movements of its citizens with or without a plandemic and acts against “heterodox” beliefs with either state-sponsored or state-encouraged violence, including actual attacks upon individual Catholics who try to remain faithful to the Holy Faith in spite of their own sins and failings and upon their churches. This reality is upon us at present here in the United States of America, but it has been upon the Mexican people in a particularly harsh, sometimes brutally violent way for over a century now, making the current actions of the Mexican government against the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City with the blessing of an “archbishop” acting as a rubber stamp for the policies of atheists who desire to stamp out Catholicism from the very life of Our Lady’s country, Mexico.
What is happening now bears some similarities with the situation in Mexico a century ago. However, there is one essential difference, namely, that while Pope Pius XI was advised that Plutarco Elias Calles would keep to the terms on the peace treaty signed in 1929 but, unlike Plutarco Elias Bergoglio, who has respondence with diffidence in the face of continued Red Chinese persecution against underground Catholics following his sellout of them two years ago (see Bergoglio the Red Surrenders Faithful Catholics to Their Persecutors, Neville Bergoglio's Appeasement of the Chicom Monsters, and Doubly Betrayed by Jorge and His False Church), Pope Pius XI wept—yes, he wept—when he learned of the of Calles’s and Gil’s continuation of their persecutions.
Even though Vatican diplomacy failed the Cristeros and thus the cause of Cristo Rey and La Virgen de Guadalupe, Pope Pius XI cannot be faulted for being ill-informed about the extent of the persecution. He was very well informed of the facts of the situation in 1926. Indeed, it is said that he wept when learning of the results of the "agreement" that had resulted in the "cease" fire on June 21, 1929, learning that the Calles persecution had continued under his stooge Emilio Portes Gil even after most of the Cristeros had laid down their weapons.
Pietro Cardinal Gasparri just wanted there to be a "deal" so that the Sacraments could be offered once again to the Mexican people. Alas, that "deal" was based on the "word" of a professed atheist, a Freemason and a Socialist, Plutarco Elias Calles, who had shown himself to be a ruthless murderer of innocent human beings in his blind zeal to eradicate the "superstition" of Catholicism, which he called nothing other than a "political movement," off the face of Mexico once and for all. Calles believed that the people would forget about the Faith once they did not have the Sacraments (go tell that to the Catholics in Japan who were without the sacraments for two hundred fifty years), seeming not to know anything about history as English Catholics hid priests, sometimes from their own closest friends so as not to betray the priest, in their own homes, after King Henry Tudor's Protestant Revolution began. And, quite indeed, many Mexican Catholics did exactly the same thing during the Cristeros War as they hid priests and kept to themselves in order to have the sacraments, just as faithful Catholics had done when refusing any association with the so-called "Constitutional Church" during the years of the French Revolution. Those steeped in a blind hatred for God and His Holy Church always think that they can wipe out that which is immortal: the Catholic Faith.
Mary Ball Martinez explained in The Undermining of the Catholic Church how Cardinal Gasparri sought to control the mind of Pope Pius XI, whose heart was clearly with the cause of the suffering Catholics in Mexico:
From the very beginning of the Mexican troubles two contrasting signals were coming from the Vatican. There was the sympathetic emotional reaction of Pius XI. After listening in private audience to the tragic accounts of the Bishops of Durango, Leon and Tamaulipas he sat down to write the encyclical Iniquis Afflictisque. Clearly overcome by what he had heard of the deaths by firing squad he wrote, "With rosary in hand and the cry 'Viva Cristo Rey!' on their lips these young students are going voluntarily to their deaths. What a spectacle of holiness for the whole world!"
Feeling was considerably more restrained at the office of the Vatican Secretary of State. After a lengthy exposition of events in Mexico Msgr. Gonzalez Valencia of Durango, one of the few Mexican bishops who stood up publicly for the Cristeros was astounded to hear Cardinal Gasparri express scepticism about the seriousness of the rebel movement. The Mexicans could only retort, "Eminence, some people are refusing to give us aid because they doubt the seriousness of our cause and others say our movement is not serious because we get no aid. This is a vicious circle and it must be broken." He pleaded in vain.
The French Charge d'Affaires in Mexico City wrote confidentially to Foreign Minister Briand at the Quai D'Orsay, "Gasparri is exhausted by a stream of Mexican prelates with their strident orthodoxy and their fulminating anathemas. He continuously urges them to come to some agreement with President Calles."
Indeed, pitting Italian subtlety against Spanish intransigence, Cardinal Gasparri worked assiduously to dampen the Cristero fire. He advised members of the Mexican hierarchy to refuse encouragement to the fighters. He alerted the bishops of the United States to refuse all appeals for economic aid. The student leader, Rene Capistran Garza, has left a pathetic account of his attempt to raise funds among Catholics of the United States. (Mary Ball Martinez, The Undermining of the Catholic Church, 1991, pp. 53-54.)
There were two American bishops who did stand fast on behalf of the persecuted Catholics of Mexico, Archbishop Michael Joseph Curley of Baltimore, Maryland, and Bishop Francis Kelley of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. These two bishops, however, were the only ones in the United States of America willing to take a firm stands in defense of the suffering, bleeding Catholic Church in Mexico, especially in the six years between the "agreements" of ninety-one years ago today and the coming to power of President Lazaro Cardenas in 1934, who, as will be noted below, repealed the Calles Law in 1935.
And the Pope Wept
The six years between the time that the agreements were signed and the Calles Law repealed were ones of continued persecution against the Catholic Church on part of Plutarco Elias Calles and his stooges, Emilio Portes Gil (1928-1930), Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930-1932) and Abelardo Rodriguez (1932-1934). They were summarized as follows by Father Brian Van Bove, S.J.:
The first things (sic) Calles did after peace had been made was to shoot down 500 Cristero leaders. The six years of the entente Cordiale between Calles and the Church have been the six bloodiest years in the history of Mexico.
Actually, Elizonde puts the figure at 400, but perhaps the exact number will never be known. Calles was responsible for the killing. Plutarco Elías Calles, President of Mexico from 1924 to 1928, was depicted in the "BCR" the way Nicolai Ceausescu was in the popular press of 1989. When Calles left office in 1928 he controlled the government from behind the scenes, and he dominated the life of the country until 1934 when his rival Lázaro Cárdenas won out. How did Calles control the whole country for so long? Very simple _ by owning the army. Cárdenas prevented him from making a final comeback in 1936. No one has ever been able to explain adequately Calles' extreme and irrational hatred for the Church. Perhaps it was a combination of greed and Jacobin ideology. In any case, Cárdenas also hated the Church, but his fanaticism was more pragmatic and times had changed by the mid-30s.
The "BCR" described the 1929 revenge upon the Catholic "freedom fighters" more fully by setting the figure at 500 leaders and 5,000 ordinary men who were shot, often in their homes in front of their families. Their property was then seized, leaving the survivors destitute. Elizonde clearly says that the obedience of the Mexican Catholics to the request of the Holy See was a disaster for the Church, and ended only in betrayal. The American Jesuit Wilfred Parsons, on the other hand, claims Archbishop Pascual Díaz, SJ, of Mexico City, disagreed with those of Elizonde's persuasion, and thought the decision to seek a military solution was mistaken in the first place (Father Brian Van Hove, S.J, Blood-Drenched Altars.)
Father Von Hove pointed out that Archbishop Diaz, who had given his "quasi-blessing" to the Cristeros although he forbade priests to take up arms, actually told Father John Burke of the National Catholic Welfare Conference during his exile in the United States of America that he did not want to the conference to provide aid to the Cristeros, something that Archbishop Curley and Bishop Kelley believed was most mistaken. Archbishop Diaz's opposition to the rebellion, at least in principle, provided Father Burke, given a carte blanche by Cardinal Gasparri through the papal delegate to negotiate terms of peace with Calles through the offices of Dwight Morrow, those "terms of peace" were arrived at without anyone from the Cristeros being represented. An empty "peace" was the result, one that caused the Church in Mexico even more suffering after the church bells began to ring again in Our Lady's country ninety-one years ago.
Mary Ball Martinez described the feeling of betrayal that many Mexicans felt that they had suffered as a result of the machinations of the Holy See:
Finally, on October 11, 1929, papers were signed which amounted to nothing less than the unconditional surrender of a victorious army. In the words of the Bishop of Huehuetla to the faculty of Louvain University a month later, "The Mexican people, preserving the pure, integral faith of their fathers look on the Pope as the Vicar of Christ on earth. Knowing this fact the enemies of Christ were very astute to betake themselves to Rome in order to break the unmovable wall of armed resistance. Very soon they had the satisfaction of seeing the people surrender their arms at the first signal from the Pope. Those in the government who consented to a settlement offered all kinds of promises verbally but afterward never removed a single comma from the monstrous laws that have wounded Holy Church in Mexico and strangled the most sacred rights of men and of society."
Churches, it is true, were reopened to a great thunder of clanging bells and general rejoicing. However, it was not the government that had closed the churches in the first place. Ostensibly, nothing was changed. There was still no religious education in the schools and monasteries, convents and seminaries were to remain closed. Foreign priests continued to be forbidden to exercise ministries within the country and no priest might wear clerical garb or enjoy ordinary civil status including the right to vote. Exiled for life were the two or three other bishops who had championed the Cristeros and the blanket amnesty promised to rebel fighters was to result in a systematic liquidation by assassins' bullets of leaders of the movement during the coming years.
Paralleling its canonical sanctions against members of L'Action Francaise, the Gasparri Vatican threatened with suspension any priest who administered sacraments to a Catholic who was still bent on resistance. "As a consequence," in the words of Msgr. [Archbishop of Durango Jose Maria] Gonzalez Valencia, "the traditional esteem of Mexican for his bishop has been completely destroyed as the faithful see the inexplicable indulgence given by the bishops to the persecutors and their no less inexplicable severity, even cruelty, to the sincere defenders of the faith. And I warn you, Eminence, he was addressing the new Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli [the future Pope Pius XII], "these charges against the bishops have now begun to touch on the Holy See!"
The role of Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, in the Mexican tragedy was apparently much like his role in the French affair. Msgr. [Bishop of Huejulta Jose de Jesus] Manriquez, the new Bishop of Durango, attempted to explain it, "What we Mexicans must remember about His Holiness is that the reason he acted mistakenly is because of enormous pressure put on him by individuals determined to get their way. In the end those intriguers persuaded him that these "arreglos," which we all know resolved absolutely nothing, were the only way to obtain freedom for the Mexican Church."
To this day the treaty has never been given a more dignified name than "los arreglos," the arrangements. There is a report from Cardinal Baggiano to the effect that on finally learning what the arrangements actually amounted to, Pope Pius wept. (Mary Ball Martinez, The Undermining of the Catholic Church, 1991, pp. 53-54.)
Confronted with the facts of how Calles broke his worthless word, Pope Pius XI issued a mea culpa in Acerba Animi, September 29, 1932, explaining once again his support for the suffering Catholics of Mexico and his regret that the persecution had continued after the truce:
6. In the face of the firm and generous resistance of the oppressed, the Government now began to give indications in various ways that it would not be averse to coming to an agreement, if only to put an end to a condition of affairs which it could not turn to its own advantage. Whereupon, though taught by painful experiences to put scant trust in such promises, We felt obliged to ask Ourselves whether it was for the good of souls to prolong the suspension of public worship. That suspension had indeed been an effective protest against the arbitrary interference of the Government; nevertheless, its continuation might have seriously prejudiced civil and religious order. Of even greater weight was the consideration that this suspension, according to grave reports which We received from various and unexceptionable sources, was productive of serious harm to the faithful. As these were bereft of spiritual helps necessary for the Christian life, and not infrequently were obliged to omit their religious duties, they ran the risk of first remaining apart from and then of being entirely separated from the priesthood, and in consequence from the very sources of supernatural life. To this must be added the fact that the prolonged absence of almost all the Bishops from their dioceses could not fail to bring about a relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline, especially in times of such great tribulation for the Mexican Church, when clergy and people had particular need of the guidance of those "whom the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Church of God."
7. When, therefore, in 1929 the Supreme Magistrate of Mexico publicly declared that the Government, by applying the laws in question, had no intention of destroying the "identity of the Church" or of ignoring the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, We thought it best, having no other intention but the good of souls, to profit by the occasion, which seemed to offer a possibility of having the rights of the Hierarchy duly recognized. Seeing, therefore, some hope of remedying greater evils, and judging that the principal motives that had induced the Episcopate to suspend public worship no longer existed, We asked Ourselves whether it were not advisable to order its resumption. In this there was certainly no intention of accepting the Mexican regulations of worship, nor of withdrawing Our protests against these regulations, much less of ceasing to combat them. It was merely a question of abandoning, in view of the Government's new declarations, one of the methods of resistance, before it could bring harm to the faithful, and of having recourse instead to others deemed more opportune.
8. Unfortunately, as all know, Our wishes and desires were not followed by the peace and favourable settlement for which We had hoped. On the contrary, to Bishops, priests, and faithful Catholics continued to be penalized and imprisoned, contrary to the spirit in which the modus vivendi had been established. To Our great distress We saw that not merely were all the Bishops not recalled from exile, but that others were expelled without even the semblance of legality. In several dioceses neither churches nor seminaries, Bishops' residences, nor other sacred edifices, were restored; notwithstanding explicit promises, priests and laymen who had steadfastly defended the faith were abandoned to the cruel vengeance of their adversaries. Furthermore, as soon as the suspension of public worship had been revoked, increased violence was noticed in the campaign of the press against the clergy, the Church, and God Himself; and it is well known that the Holy See had to condemn one of these publications, which in its sacrilegious immorality and acknowledged purpose of anti-religious and slanderous propaganda had exceeded all bounds.
9. Add to this that not only is religious instruction forbidden in the primary schools, but not infrequently attempts are made to induce those whose duty it is to educate the future generations, to become purveyors of irreligious and immoral teachings, thus obliging the parents to make heavy sacrifices in order to safeguard the innocence of their children. We bless with all Our heart these Christian parents and all the good teachers who help them, and We urge upon you, Venerable Brethren, upon the clergy secular and regular, and upon all the faithful, the necessity of giving their utmost attention to the question of education and the formation of the young, especially among the poorer classes, since they are more exposed to atheist, masonic, and communistic propaganda, persuading yourselves that your country will be such as you build it up in the children.
10. An effort has been made to strike the Church in a still more vital spot; namely, in the existence of the clergy and the Catholic hierarchy, by trying to eliminate it gradually from the Republic. Thus the Mexican Constitution, as We have several times deplored, while proclaiming liberty of thought and conscience, prescribes with the most evident contradiction that each State of the Federal Republic must determine the number of priests to whom the exercise of the sacred ministry is allowed, not only in public churches, but even within private dwellings. This enormity is further aggravated by the way in which the law is applied. The Constitution lays down that the number of priests must be determined, but ordains that this determination must correspond to the religious needs of the faithful and of the locality. It does not prescribe that the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is to be ignored in this matter, and this point was explicitly recognized in the declarations of the modus vivendi. Now in the State of Michoacan one priest was assigned for every 33,000 of the faithful, in the State of Chiapas one for every 60,000, while in the State of Vera Cruz only one priest was assigned to exercise the sacred ministry for every 100,000 of the inhabitants. Everyone can see whether it is possible with such restrictions to administer the Sacraments to so many people, scattered for the most part over a vast territory. Indeed, the persecutors, as though sorry for having been too liberal and indulgent, have imposed further limitations. Some Governors closed seminaries, confiscated canonries, and determined the sacred buildings and the territory to which the ministry of the approved priest would be restricted.
11. The clearest manifestation of the will to destroy the Catholic Church itself is, however, the explicit declaration, published in some States, that the civil Authority, in granting the licence for priestly ministry, recognizes no Hierarchy; on the contrary, it positively excludes from the possibility of exercising the sacred ministry all of hierarchic rank namely, all Bishops and even those who have held the office of Apostolic Delegates.
12. We wished briefly to rehearse the salient points in the grievous condition of the Church in Mexico, so that all lovers of order and peace among nations, on seeing that such an unheard-of persecution differs but little, especially in certain States, from the one raging within the unhappy borders of Russia, may from this iniquitous similarity of purpose conceive fresh ardour to stem the torrent which is subverting all social order. At the same time it is Our intention to give a new proof to you, Venerable Brethren, and to all Our beloved sons of Mexico, of the paternal solicitude with which We follow you in your tribulation: the same solicitude that inspired the instructions which We gave you last January through Our Beloved Son the Cardinal Secretary of State, and which was communicated to you by Our Apostolic Delegate. In matters strictly connected with religion, it is undoubtedly Our duty and Our right to establish the reasons and norms that all who glory in the name of Catholics are under the obligation of obeying. In this connection We are anxious to recall to mind that when We issued these instructions We gave due consideration to all the reports and advices that came to Us either from the Hierarchy or the faithful. We say all, even those that appeared to counsel a return to a severer line of conduct, with the total suspension of public worship throughout the Republic, as in 1926. (Pope Pius XI, Acerba Animi, September 29, 1932.)
The Calles Law was not reversed until 1935. The persecution continued up to that time.
President Lazaro Cardenas hated the Catholic Church just as much as Plutarco Elias Calles. However, he was a more clever and subtle politician than Calles, from whose shackles he desired to break once and for all.
There is an old maxim that goes something along the lines of: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Cardenas knew that the repeal of the Calles Law would make Catholics grateful to him, gratitude that became even greater in 1936 when he exiled Calles to the United States of America in the belief that the former president turned political "Godfather" pulling the strings of one president after another was about to overthrow him.
Far from being a friend of the Catholic Church, Lazaro Cardenas was permitting her persecution up to the time he repealed the Calles Law, something that Dr. Michael Kenny documented in No God Next Door when detailing the terrible consequences of the "arreglos:"
No peace resulted. Within a week President Portes Gil declared at a Masonic banquet that he would see to it that the Constitution and laws were entirely and strictly enforced; and that as a Mason and as President he had yielded nothing. This was in fact true of the substance of the compact; but now he had publicly repudiated in word the good will he had expressed in it; and he and his fellows began at once to repudiate in deeds the amnesty he had definitely pledged.
Within a month five hundred surrendered Cristeros were shot, or murdered in their homes, their property seized, and their persecuted families left destitute; and altogether five thousand Cristeros and hundreds of priests shared the same fate. This, with the expulsion of the Episcopate and clergy and all sisterhoods, leaving but some two hundred registered priests--most of them fingerprinted like criminals--for over fifteen million people, and the stamping of the Moscow brand of atheizing communism on every school and office in the land, are now blazoning to the world the cost of compromise with irresponsible tyranny; and therewith the lesson, that no compact of liberty is possible unless tyranny first be uprooted.
Bishop Diaz' statement that no compromise with Mexico's tyranny is possible and the only way to mend it is to end it, prove true in the very year of the one-sided concordat, which precluded the Church's legal personality and permitted the state to prescribe the number of her ministers.
As the Pope's encyclical [Acerba Animi] stated, it had nothing but its promise of "good will" to recommend it; and this good will was at once disavowed by Congress and the Party and the President who pledged it, and by the vigorous renewal of countess acts of varied and universal persecution.
The armistice was broken by the slaughter of every Cristero fighter or suspect that could be reached; and the assaults that followed on priests, sisters, churches, schools, and Christian people were worse and more numerous than McCullogh's "Red Mexico" records for the previous decade. The country became more and more reddened with murdered blood as the Calles procedure took on the fullness of Moscow Red. I have a list of hundreds of outrages on churches and clergy and people, without a single instance of punishment for the perpetrators. These are news items culled from the daily papers, with date and place; and though they are but a fraction of the atrocities recorded, they cover some fifty pages.
Churches and shrines seized, desecrated, burned, or bombed; priests assaulted even during church services, injured, murdered, or expelled; states limiting the number of priests to one for fifty thousand or one hundred thousand people, or totally excluding them as in Tabasco since 1925 and in fifteen states at this writing [1935]; the accompanying sacrileges and outrages on person and property with the ever-increasing prevalence of de-religionizing and demoralization teachings in the schools after the Canabal fashion in Tabasco, and the expulsion of the protesting Apostolic Delegate and nearly all the Episcopate, prove the pledge of "good will" was but a trick.
Removing all armed opposition, this treacherous treaty left the Calles forces free to accomplish unrestricted the determined communist purpose to tear out religion, root and branch, from the hearts and homes as well and the schools and temples of Mexico.
This purpose, authoritatively stated within a week of the good will compact and many times since, is well expressed in the letter of Convocation to the Masonic Anti-Clerical Convention at Guadalajara, July 20, 1933, at which the present President Cardenas presided: "God is a myth, religion is a fable; the clergy are bureaucrats of the theological farce"; and on this basis they would operate "for the Emancipation of Human Thought."
Their most perfect emancipator, then and now, was the recent dominating member of the cabinet, Garrido Canabal, whose naked exemplifications of emancipating minds form morality were extended to all schools by Secretary of Education Bassols, also recent cabinet minister, and are now constitutionally authorized.
Canabal had other emancipating methods which were also copied widely. Their officials, like themselves, practice with immunity in the immoralities the preach, and brothers are an official industry. Such sources swell in the millionaire wealth of ex-President Rodriguez in Lower California and of Canabal in Tabasco, and they up hold their agents in like emancipatory methods.
Canabal had 85 villagers of Paraiso hanged in a body because some of them had lynched a municipal agent who had ravished and mortally wounded a girl of fourteen; and he sent his Red Shirts to executed some hundred others who were fleeing to another state for Christian security.
It is significant that two hundred of his Red Shirts proceeded recently on a similar mission to Jalisco; but none of them returned. Countless such instances of incredible barbarity illustrate the emancipating or "defanaticizing" methods which followed the 1929 covenant, and to which the recent government had given its highest sanction by raising the chief Exemplifiers, Canabal, Rodolfo Calles and Bassols, to cabinet rank.
The Apostolic Delegate and Archbishop Diaz have recently reaffirmed the conditions and accompaniments of persecution are immeasurably worse than in 1926, which is also evidenced in the atrocities recorded in the Mexican dailies, though these are heavily hampered by government censorship. The murderous assaults on worshippers at Coyoacan and Tacuabya and Santa Catalina, and the seizure and imprisonment of priests in the Federal District happen to reach us because witnessed by foreign reporters at the capital. But the government has taken measures to prevent such mistakes in the future, and hundreds of infamies throughout the nation wrought by Canabal's now official Red Shirts and other federal agents have not been permitted to leak out. Many of these are connected with the atheizing and sex teaching educational program, which has resulted in the almost universal boycotting of the state schools.
Police and soldiers have been sent out to seek the children on the streets and in the homes and force them into empty classrooms. The consequent outrages on resisting mothers and weeping children are numerously documented under "Leva de Ninos" (seizure of children) in the Mexican dailies; also such items as the savage beatings of children at Naco, Sonora, who objected to atheistic teachings, and, bidden to repeat: "No hay Dios" (There is no God) cried out, "Hay, Dios, hay Dios." (Dr. Michael Kenny, No God Next Door: Red Rule in Mexico and Our Responsibility, William J. Hirten Company, Inc., New York, 1935, republished by CSG and Associates Publishers, pp. 143-147.)
Astute readers can see quite readily that that are some parallels between Red Mexico in 1935 and Red America in 2020, and they can see just as readily that unlike Pope Pius XI, who regretted his having been convinced to give his agreement to a treaty that he doubted would be kept, Jorge Mario Bergoglio stands fast with the Red Chinese and their American client, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and with the President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, in all efforts to control the minds and activities of believing Catholics. In this regard, therefore, I would not be at all surprised if Plutarco Elias Bergoglio would provide "papal" cover to a "President" Biden if the latter wanted to use the Chinese/Wuhan/China/Covid-19/Coronavirus as a pretext to prevent the 2021 March for Life from taking place just as the conciliar "archbishop" of Mexico is currently siding with his Communist-Masonic government's military seizure of the space around the Metropolitan Cathedral in order to prevent an anti-government rally.
Those who cannot see that Bergoglio is an agent, whether witting or not, of Antichrist and the latter’s One World Ecumenical Religion and One World Governance are not seeing things clearly. While mistakes can be made in matters of diplomacy, Plutarco Elias Bergoglio intends to do what he is doing, and this is far different from the trust that Pope Pius XI put in diplomacy ninety-one years ago.
On the Feast of Saint Joseph Cupertino
Today, Friday, September 18, 2020, is the Feast of Saint Joseph Cupertino and the Commemoration of Ember Friday in September. An account of a remarkable event in the life of this holy priest of pure love for Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament and for the Blessed Virgin Mary that says quite a bit about the necessity of holding to the entirety of the Catholic Faith as It has been handed down to us from the Apostles to the present day without any diminution or any kind of alteration.
Indeed, the event that is found in Father Angelco Pastrovicchi’s Saint Joseph Cupertino reveals that Our Lord Himself has no sympathies for those, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, who do not hold to the entirety of the Sacred Deposit of Faith:
The efficacy of his [Saint Joseph Cupertino’s] prayers is strikingly shown in the conversion to the Catholic faith of a Lutheran prince, John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick. While visiting the principal courts of Europe, in the year 1649, the prince, then twenty-five years of age, came from Rome to Assisi expressly to see Joseph, of whose fame he had heard in Germany. On his arrival in the monastery, he was given lodging in the rooms reserved for persons of rank and, as he wished to speak to Joseph and then continue his journey, he, with two of his retainers (one a Catohlic, the other a Protestant) was led next morning to the door of the chapel, where the servant of God was saying Mass. The saint, who was not informed of their presence, was made aware of it when about to break the sacred host, which he found so hard, that, in spite of all his efforts, he could not break it, but had to replace it on the paten. Fixing his eyes upon the host, he wept and with a loud cry he rose about five paces into the air. With another cry he returned after some time to the altar and broke the sacred host, though with great effort. At the instance of the Duke, the Father Superior asked him why he had wept, and he replied: “My dear compatriot, the persons, whom you sent to my Mass this morning, have a hard heart; for they do not believe all that Holy Mother Church teaches, and therefore the Lamb of God was hardened in my hands so that I could not break the sacred host.” The Duke astonished at this occurrence, deferred his departure in order to consult with the servant of God. This he did after dinner, remaining with the saint till Compline. Moved by divine grace, the Duke wished again to assist at Holy Mass on the following day. At the elevation, the cross on the host appeared black to all present, and the saint, with his usual cry, was raised up on a palm from the floor, and remained about a quarter of an hour in this position, elevating the host. On seeing this miracle the Duke wept, but his companion, the Lutheran, said angrily: “Cursed be the hour in which I came to this country; for at home I was much more at peace and now my conscience is tormented by the furies of doubt” [Author’s footnote: Henry Julius Blume became a Catholic in 1653. See Dr. Andreas Raess, Die Convertien seit der Reformation, vol. VI (Freiburg, Herder, 1868), pp. 450-452, 558-571.] Joseph, enlightened from above, assured one of his friends of the future conversion of the prince in the following words: “Let us be of good cheer, the deer is wounded.” The prince conversed with Joseph till midday. On seeing the Duke return to his cell after Vespers, the saint hurried towards him, girded him with his girdle, and said with great fervor: “For paradise I bind you; go, venerate St. Francis, assist at Compline, follow with devotion in the process, and do all as you see the friars do.” The prince humbly obeyed, promised to become a Catholic, and with his own hand inscribed himself in the register of the Archconfraternity of the Cord of St. Francis. Before publicly abjuring heresy, he returned home to arrange his affairs. The following year he came to Assisi and, as he had promised, knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, and in the presence of Cardinals Facchinetti and Rapaccioli, made profession of faith at the hands of Father Joseph. Even after the Duke remained devoted to his benefactor. (Father Angelo Pastrovicchi, O.M.C., published originally by B. Herder Book Company, St. Louis Missouri, in 1918; republished by TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., in 1980, pp. 43-45.)
Saint Joseph Cupertino sought to convert non-Catholics to the true Faith as he knew that Our Lord Himself was offended by those who did not do so.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of course, does not hold to the unspotted integrity of the Catholic Faith and he has stated very publicly that he has no intention of converting anyone.
Our Lord gave Duke John Frederick a visible sign of His displeasure that one who did not believe in all that He had revealed and entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio shows his displeasure only towards those who hold to the integrity of the Catholic Faith as he heaps warm words of praise upon false religions, including those who deny the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Bergoglio is no more a true Successor of Saint Peter than is Raul Castro or Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro:
It is the teaching of the Catholic Church that anyone who defects from the Faith on one point defects from It in Its entirety and is no longer within her maternal bosom:
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.)
No, “partial credit” does not cut it to retain one's membership in good standing within the maternal bosom of Holy Mother Church.
Second, it is abundantly clear by now that Jorge Mario Bergoglio does not even make any pretense of adhering to the “new ecclesiology” that is standard-issue conciliarism. His ecclesiology is completely Protestant, viewing the “church” as nothing other than an amorphous mass of “believers” who are following Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ while refusing to remain “still” as they quest for a unity that is one of the four marks of the one and only true church, the Catholic Church, and none other.
For the sake of emphasis, therefore, here is what Pope Pius XII, reiterating the entirety of Catholic teaching, wrote in Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943:
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 refuses 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.)
Jorge Mario Bergoglio has nothing but contempt for the “confines” of “mere” dogma. This is why he refers to those who adhere to everything contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith as “Christians who are still,” that is, those who refused to “move” with the “spirit.” Ah, Catholics who adhere, despite their own sins and failings, to everything contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith refuse to move with false spirits and prefer death to doing so.
Feast of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, whose joy was such in offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that he levitated while holding the Sacred Species over his head It is time for some edification from the life of a holy priest whose special gifts were believed by many of his brother Franciscans to be from the devil, not from God:
This Joseph was born, of godly parents, at Cupertino, a small village of the diocecese of Nardo, between Brindisi and Otranto, (six miles from the coast of the Gulf of Tarento, upon the 17th day of June,) in the year of Redemption 1603. The love of God came to him early, and he passed his childhood and youth in great guilelessness and harmlessness. After recovering by the help of the Virgin Mother of God from a long and painful sickness which he bore very quietly, he gave himself altogether to godliness and self-improvement. God called him inwardly to higher things, and to give himself more utterly to His service, he determined in himself to join the "Seraphic" Order. After divers failures and changes, he obtained his wish among the Friars of the convent of "La Grotella." He went first as a lay-brother, on account of his ignorance of letters, but God was pleased to allow him afterwards to be taken among the choir brethren. After taking his solemn vows he was ordained Priest, and then set before him to aim at a more perfect life. To this end (as far as in him lay) he thrust from him all earthly affections and all carnal things, even to such as seem almost needful for life. He tormented his body with haircloth, scourging, spiked chains, and every kind of hardship and affliction. He fed his spirit sweetly upon the constant exercise of holy prayer, and gazing upon the highest matters. And so it came to pass that the love of God, which had been enkindled in his heart from his earliest years, burnt forth day by day more strangely and openly.
The chief outcome of this love of God was the strong and marvellous trances whereinto he oftentimes fell. It was, nevertheless, strange to observe that after he had entirely lost his senses he could be called out of the trance by the mere order of his superiors. To be utterly obedient was one of his chief aims, and he was used to say that those who ruled him could lead him about like a blind man, and that it was better to die than not to obey. He so imitated the poverty of the Seraphic Patriarch, that when he was at the point of death, when the Friars use to dispose of anything they have, he was able to tell his Superior that he had absolutely nothing. Thus bearing about in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus, the life also of Jesus was made manifest in his body. When he saw that certain persons had committed a foul sin of uncleanness, there came from him a strong savour, a proof of that snowy and glorious purity which, in spite of the most hideous temptations whereby the unclean spirit wrestled long to darken it, he kept undefiled, partly by an iron bridling of his senses, partly by the stern punishments he inflicted upon his own body, and partly by the extraordinary protection of the pure Virgin Mary, whom he was used to call his own Mother, whom he honoured and worshipped as his most tender Mother in his very heart of hearts, and whom he was eager that all men should honour, because, as he said, if we have her protection, every good thing comes with it.
This eagerness on the part of the blessed Joseph was but one outcome from his love for his neighbours. So great was his zeal for souls, that he vehemently sought in all ways for the salvation of all. When he saw his neighbour in any trouble, whether it were poverty or sickness or any other affliction, his tenderness went out toward him, and he helped him as well as he could. They who reviled, and slandered, and insulted himself were not cut off from his love. He was used to welcome such with great long-suffering, meekness, and cheerfulness of countenance and he preserved the same constantly amid many hardships and changes when he was sent hither and thither by command of the Superiors of his Order, and of the Holy Inquisition. People and princes alike marvelled at the exceeding holiness of his life, and the spiritual gifts poured upon him from above, but he was so lowly, that he sincerely held himself to be chief among sinners, and earnestly besought God to take away from him the more showy of His gifts. Of men he entreated that after his death they would cast his body somewhere where his memory might soonest perish. But God, Who exalteth them of low degree, glorified His servant during life with the gifts of heavenly wisdom, of prophecy, of discerning the hidden thoughts of the heart, of healing, and of other spiritual gifts in marvellous abundance, gave him a precious death, and made the place of his rest glorious. He fell asleep in Jesus upon the very day and at the very place foretold by himself, that is, at Osimo, (between Ancona and Loretto, upon the 18 th day of September,) in the 61st year of his own age, and in that of salvation 1663. He was famous for miracles even after his death, and Benedict XIV. enrolled his name among those of the Blessed, and Clement XIII. among those of the Saints. Clement XIV., being himself a member of the same Order, extended the use of the Office and Mass in memory of him to the whole Church. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saint Joseph of Cupertino.)
Dom Prosper Gueranger wrote as follows about Saint Joseph Cupertino:
While praising God for the marvelous gifts he bestowed on thee, we acknowledge that thy virtues were yet more wonderful. Otherwise thy ecstasies would be regarded with suspicion by the Church, who usually withholds her judgment until long after the world has begun to admire and applaud. Obedience, patience, and charity, increasing under trial, were incontestable guarantees for the divine authorship of these marvels, which the enemy is sometimes permitted to mimic to a certain extent. Satan may raise a Simon Magus into the air: he cannot make a humble man. O worthy son of the seraph of Assisi, may we, after thy example, be raised up, not into the air, but into those regions of true light, where far above the earth and its passions, our life, like thine, may be hidden with Christ in God! (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year.)
Invoking the protection of Saint Joseph Cupertino (whose life was dramatized—emphasis on dramatized—in The Reluctant Saint, which is a very good motion picture starring the late Maximilian Schell and Ricardo Montalban), whose love of purity made him so very close to Our Lady, we ask Our Lady to give us the holy simplicity that that Saint Joseph Cupertino exemplified as we seek to die to self in order to serve Christ the King as His consecrated slaves through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.
The final victory belongs to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, not to Jorge and his band of spiritual thieves.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Joseph Cupertino, pray for us.