No One is More "Closed-In-On-Himself" or "Self-Referential" Than Jorge Mario Bergoglio

Revolutions are meant by the devil to turn the world upside down.

The Protestant Revolt, for example, so accustomed those who apostatized to its heresies (the rejection of the truths that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded a visible, hierarchical society headed on earth by Saint Peter and his true successors, the belief that one is "saved" when making a “profession of faith” in the Holy Name of Jesus and the subsequent rejection of the Sacrament of Confession and of the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament, the denial of the Mass as the unbloody perpetuation of the Sacrifice of Calvary, the Calvinist heresy that human souls are predestined to Heaven or to Hell by an arbitrary God Who denies free will to His rational creatures) and novelties (new "liturgical rites," the abolition of the altar in favor a table for a “supper,” new prayers, the revival of the iconoclasm that was fought by Saint John Damascene, hatred of devotion to the Mother of God and the saints) that those who remained faithful to the Catholic Faith as it had been handed down to them over the centuries without an iota of change were viewed as “crazy” or “schismatic” or “disloyal” or even “unpatriotic.”

Here is the account in Father Harold Gardiner's book of how Blessed Edmund Campion was paraded through the streets of London following his return to that city after his capture on July 14, 1581, just forty-seven years after King Henry VIII had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church in England and just twenty-three years after Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, restored England to Protestantism after the five-year reign of her half-sister Queen Mary, the daughter of Henry's true wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon: 

When they started their journey through the city--they were paraded from end to end of it—the crowds laughed, and many hissed and booed the prisoners. They rode with their elbows tied behind them, their hands lashed together in front, and their feet secured underneath their horses' bellies. Father Campion was singled out for further ridicule by having a paper pinned to his hat, which read: “Campion the Seditious Jesuit.”

As the parade passed a section of London called Cheapside, they trooped before a cross standing in the market place. It had been battered and defaced in the religious troubles, but it was still a cross. Father Campion raised his eyes to it, bowed his head as far as he could and tried to make the sign of the cross on himself with his fettered hands.

Some of the crowd pressing close to see the famous captive booed and jeered.

“The Papist sign won't save you from the cross that waits you on Tyburn, you traitor.”

“He'll bow to the stone of the cross, but he won't bend his stiff neck to the Queen.”

“Haw, haw, but soon he won't have a head on top of his neck to bow with at all.”

Such were some of the hoots and catcalls, but some of the people looked with respect and sympathy, not to mention shame. Was this England, that an accused man could be treated as though he had already been tried and found guilty? Did he have the ghost of a chance to get a fair trial? What would happen to the country if things like this went on? Could England ever again be thought of as part of Christendom if priests and good Catholics were persecuted and put to death just because they were priests and good Catholics?

These thoughts were in many minds, but they remained locked up there because it would have been dangerous to express them. But Father Campion would express them very soon and in a way that gave, even when he was in his last hours, new heart and courage to those he had come to serve.

Yes, England could still be thought of as part of Christendom, so long as other Campions would follow to carry on his work. And they did follow. From Campion's day to this, priests have continued to preach Christ and His Church and lay people have continued to follow. Persecutions and martyrdoms would continue for more than a hundred years, but peace would finally come to the Church in England, and with peace, growth and vigor. (Father Harold C. Gardiner,  S.J., Edmund Campion: Hero of God's Underground, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957, pp. 132-134.) 

Not even a half century had passed from the time of Henry Tudor's break from the Catholic Church. Not even a quarter century had passed from the time that Elizabeth took England out of the Faith for good. Look at the hatred directed at Father Edmund Campion, S.J., for simply adhering to that which every Englishman believed for nearly a thousand years since the time of Saint Augustine of Canterbury—and which many in Britain, including Saint Helena, had embraced as early as the latter part of the Third Century A.D. as a result of the work of Saint Alban, the Proto-Martyr of England. It was during the closing of his trial that was to conclude with his being sentenced to death by being drawn and quartered that Father Campion himself noted the irony contained in his being condemned for believing what every ancestor of those who had condemned him had believed for nearly a thousand years:

“The only thing I have now to say is, that if my religion makes me a traitor, I am worthy to be condemned. Otherwise I am, and have been, as good a subject as ever the Queen had.

“In condemning me you condemn all your own ancestor—all the ancient priests, bishops and kings--all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter.

“For what I have taught . . . that they did not teach? To be condemned with these lights--not of England only, but of the world--by their degenerate descendants, is both gladness and joy.

“God lives; posterity will live; their judgment is not so liable to corruption as that of those who are now going to sentence me to death." (Father Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., Edmund Campion: Hero of God's Underground, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957, pp. 160-161.) 

The exact same phenomenon has occurred as a result of the conciliar revolution. All but a microscopically small number of Catholics attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism have grown to hate most of what is dismissed derisively as the “pre-conciliar church,” which was the point of They Like It! Nearly thirteen years ago now. Those who have no direct memory of the “pre-conciliar church” have been brainwashed by a highly sophisticated campaign of disinformation that helped to create a “false memory” of the past that even wiped out the true memories of those who lived in that “pre-conciliar church” and loved everything about it until they were "taught" that they could not even trust their own memories. (For a very good description of the Catholic Church and the counterfeit church of conciliarism, please see the appendix below an excerpt from the late Dr. Rama Coomaraswamy's book, The Destruction of the Christian Tradition, Updated and Revised.)

A conciliar presbyter, writing under the pseudonym of “Father X,” put it well in the original Latin Mass Magazine around 1994 or so when he wrote an article entitled, “They Have Burned What They Once Adored,” describing the phenomenon of many older priests who came to hate the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. (The impetus for “Father X’s” article, if I recall correctly, was the horror of a private “Mass” he had “concelebrated” in Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II’s private chapel in the now little used Apostolic Palace, but I shall refrain from identifying the self-impressed idiot who arranged for “Father X” to be invited to the shindig.)

Many men of my own generation who were raised in the Mass of Tradition and catechized by the Baltimore Catechism came to be full-throated supporters of conciliarism who “enjoyed” the novelties of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo service that is hideous in the sight of God and quite open support, if not actively participate in, false ecumenism and inter-religious “prayer” services and inter-religious dialogue, coming to love “parish council” meetings, “liturgical committee meetings,” the use of lectors, girl altar boys and extraordinary ministers of what purports to be the Eucharist. A whole new way of parish life, replete with its own sloganistic language (“ministers of greeting,” “music ministers,” “stewardship ministers,”
“mission statements,” “support communities” for those steeped in unrepentant sins of perversity and for those who are divorced and remarried without even decrees of nullity from conciliar tribunals, etc.), has emerged that is every bit as revolutionary as that which faced Father Edmund Campion, S.J., upon his return to his beloved England in 1580.

Thus, fresh off his scathing attack on believing Catholics that was packaged as his annual address to the conciliar curia, which come on the heels of the conciliar Congregation for Divine Worship’s “clarifications” about Traditionis Custodes, July 16, 2021, the Commemoration of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is completely unmortified as is, say, former President Donald John Trump, used his “homily” during the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to launch yet more salvos in the direction of believing Catholics, including some of the “conservative” “bishops” he inherited from his Girondist/Menshevik predecessor, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI:

Brothers and sisters, as it was for the Magi, so it is for us.  The journey of life and faith demands a deep desire and inner zeal.  Sometimes we live in a spirit of a “parking lot”; we stay parked, without the impulse of desire that carries us forward.  We do well to ask: where are we on our journey of faith?  Have we been stuck all too long, nestled inside a conventional, external and formal religiosity that no longer warms our hearts and changes our lives?  Do our words and our liturgies ignite in people’s hearts a desire to move towards God, or are they a “dead language” that speaks only of itself and to itself?  It is sad when a community of believers loses its desire and is content with “maintenance” rather than allowing itself to be startled by Jesus and by the explosive and unsettling joy of the Gospel.  It is sad when a priest has closed the door of desire, sad to fall into clerical functionalism, very sad.

Interjection Number One:

Unlike the priests described by “Father X” in his Latin Mass Magazine article of twenty-eight years ago, Jorge Mario Bergoglio burns that which he has never adored. Indeed, he is filled with seething hatred for anything to do with what he considers to be the “past,” for which he is constantly apologizing to various and sundry groups of fellow schismatics and heretics. He is thus compelled to caricature those he hates even though he does not realizing that he is blaspheming God the Holy Ghost, Who inspired countless saints in the “past” to the performance of the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy that were motivated solely by their burning love of God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church and for the zealous love of souls for whom His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem.

Bergoglio lives in a completely imaginary world of self-made demons, whom he must villainize at all times in such a relentless manner as would be considered psychotic by any right-thinking Catholic. This wretched revolutionary is driven by emotion and by own his pantheistic proclivity to make of God a projection of his own warped and entirely self-referential, closed-in-on-itself imaginings. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a poster boy for the following description of Modernists found in Pope Saint Pius X’s Pascendi Domini Gregis, September 8, 1907:

You know it from your own dealings with souls, and especially with souls in whom sentiment predominates; you know it also from your reading of works of ascetical theology — works for which the Modernists have but little esteem, but which testify to a science and a solidity far greater than theirs, and to a refinement and subtlety of observation far beyond any which the Modernists take credit to themselves for possessing. It seems to Us nothing short of madness, or at the least consummate temerity to accept for true, and without investigation, these incomplete experiences which are the vaunt of the Modernist. Let Us for a moment put the question: If experiences have so much force and value in their estimation, why do they not attach equal weight to the experience that so many thousands of Catholics have that the Modernists are on the wrong path? Is it that the Catholic experiences are the only ones which are false and deceptive? The vast majority of mankind holds and always will hold firmly that sense and experience alone, when not enlightened and guided by reason, cannot reach to the knowledge of God. What, then, remains but atheism and the absence of all religion? Certainly it is not the doctrine of symbolism that will save us from this. For if all the intellectual elements, as they call them, of religion are nothing more than mere symbols of God, will not the very name of God or of divine personality be also a symbol, and if this be admitted, the personality of God will become a matter of doubt and the gate will be opened to pantheism? And to pantheism pure and simple that other doctrine of the divine immanence leads directly. For this is the question which We ask: Does or does not this immanence leave God distinct from man? If it does, in what does it differ from the Catholic doctrine, and why does it reject the doctrine of external revelation? If it does not, it is pantheism. Now the doctrine of immanence in the Modernist acceptation holds and professes that every phenomenon of conscience proceeds from man as man. The rigorous conclusion from this is the identity of man with God, which means pantheism. The distinction which Modernists make between science and faith leads to the same conclusion. The object of science, they say, is the reality of the knowable; the object of faith, on the contrary, is the reality of the unknowable. Now, what makes the unknowable unknowable is the fact that there is no proportion between its object and the intellect — a defect of proportion which nothing whatever, even in the doctrine of the Modernist, can suppress. Hence the unknowable remains and will eternally remain unknowable to the believer as well as to the philosopher. Therefore if any religion at all is possible, it can only be the religion of an unknowable reality. And why this might not be that soul of the universe, of which certain rationalists speak, is something which certainly does not seem to Us apparent. These reasons suffice to show superabundantly by how many roads Modernism leads to atheism and to the annihilation of all religion. The error of Protestantism made the first step on this path; that of Modernism makes the second; atheism makes the next.

40. To penetrate still deeper into the meaning of Modernism and to find a suitable remedy for so deep a sore, it behooves Us, Venerable Brethren, to investigate the causes which have engendered it and which foster its growth. That the proximate and immediate cause consists in an error of the mind cannot be open to doubt. We recognize that the remote causes may be reduced to two: curiosity and pride. Curiosity by itself, if not prudently regulated, suffices to account for all errors. Such is the opinion of Our predecessor, Gregory XVI, who wrote: “A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty, when against the warning of the Apostle it seeks to know beyond what it is meant to know, and when relying too much on itself it thinks it can find the truth outside the Catholic Church wherein truth is found without the slightest shadow of error.” (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Bergoglio hates the “old” as “fixed” and “rigid” even though Holy Mother Church, guided infallibly by God the Holy Ghost, has raised up to her altars men and women of every rank and from every nation who understood that Divine Revelation closed with the death of Saint John the Evangelist around 125 A.D. and that it is not an “ongoing” process subject to human perfection or the processes of a nonexistent theological “evolutionism.” The Argentine Apostate believes it is impossible to “reach” God when one worships in a “dead language” and has is not open to God’s supposed “surprises” even though the doctrine of Faith is certain and is thus incapable of anything that con contradict itself or, worse yet, is premised a seething hatred of all that passed before the dawning of the age of Aquarius, excuse, me, conciliarism.

Mind you, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, although he is more vulgar and direct in his heresy, believes in the same sort of pantheistic evolution of doctrine as does his more refined and sophisticated predecessor, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict, who constantly spoke and wrote about a “search for God” or a “search for truth” as though the Catholic Faith itself is not a gratuitous gift infused into our souls at the moment of Baptism and that the truth about God and salvation can be found in many places outside the Catholic Church.

Bergoglio’s “homily” for Epiphany of Our Lord on January 6, 2022, included direct references to “finding God” as though Catholics are akin to Hindus, Buddhists or other pagans who are always grasping to find the “divine” within themselves:

The crisis of faith in our lives and in our societies also has to do with the eclipse of desire for God.  It is related to a kind of slumbering of the spirit, to the habit of being content to live from day to day, without ever asking what God really wants from us.  We peer over earthly maps, but forget to look up to heaven.  We are sated with plenty of things, but fail to hunger for our absent desire for God.  We are fixated on our own needs, on what we will eat and wear (cf. Mt 6:25), even as we let the longing for greater things evaporate.  And we find ourselves living in communities that crave everything, have everything, yet all too often feel nothing but emptiness in their hearts: closed communities of individuals, bishops, priests or consecrated men and women.  Indeed the lack of desire leads only to sadness and indifference, to sad communities, sad priests or bishops.

Let us look first to ourselves and ask: How is the journey of my faith going?  This is a question that we can ask ourselves today, each one of us.  How is the journey of my faith going?  Is it parked or is it on the move?  Faith, if it is to grow, has to begin ever anew.  It needs to be sparked by desire, to take up the challenge of entering into a living and lively relationship with God.  Does my heart still burn with desire for God?  Or have I allowed force of habit and my own disappointments to extinguish that flame?  Today, brothers and sisters, is the day we should ask these questions.  Today is the day we should return to nurturing our desire.  How do we do this?  Let us go to the Magi and learn from their “school of desire”.  They will teach us in their school of desire.  Let us look at the steps they took, and draw some lessons from them. (Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord.)

While it is true that we either moving closer to God or farther away from Him with every beat of our hearts by means of our desire to grown in grace or, God forbid, persist in sins of worldliness and vanity, it is not true from that, as implied by Bergoglio, that the Holy Faith itself has to be “on the move” unless he wants Catholics to join something called “Church on the Move” in Tyler, Texas, that is. Bergoglio considers a faith founded in a firmness of belief that does not include some kind of doubt or a desire for the “new” is dead even though the Catholic Church teaches that our Faith is certain, and doubt is excluded thereby.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s concept of Faith was defined perfectly by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominci Gregis:

But when natural theology has been destroyed, and the road to revelation closed by the rejection of the arguments of credibility, and all external revelation absolutely denied, it is clear that this explanation will be sought in vain outside of man himself. It must, therefore, be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. In this way is formulated the principle of religious immanence. Moreover, the first actuation, so to speak, of every vital phenomenon — and religion, as noted above, belongs to this category — is due to a certain need or impulsion; but speaking more particularly of life, it has its origin in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sense. Therefore, as God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and foundation of all religion, must consist in a certain interior sense, originating in a need of the divine. This need of the divine, which is experienced only in special and favorable circumstances, cannot of itself appertain to the domain of consciousness, but is first latent beneath consciousness, or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconsciousness, where also its root lies hidden and undetected.

It may perhaps be asked how it is that this need of the divine which man experiences within himself resolves itself into religion? To this question the Modernist reply would be as follows: Science and history are confined within two boundaries, the one external, namely, the visible world, the other internal, which is consciousness. When one or other of these limits has been reached, there can be no further progress, for beyond is the unknowable. In presence of this unknowable, whether it is outside man and beyond the visible world of nature, or lies hidden within the subconsciousness, the need of the divine in a soul which is prone to religion excites — according to the principles of Fideism, without any previous advertence of the mind — a certain special sense, and this sense possesses, implied within itself both as its own object and as its intrinsic cause, the divine reality itself, and in a way unites man with God. It is this sense to which Modernists give the name of faith, and this is what they hold to be the beginning of religion. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

You see, neither Original nor Actual Sin has any role to pay in Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s false economy of faith and salvation. One’s relationship with God, Bergoglio believes, has nothing to do with the rejection of sin or doing penance for it and thus has everything to do with personal sentiment and experience, noting that the only kind of experience for which he, as a Modernist, has no regard is that of Catholics throughout the ages who adhered to the truths of the Holy Faith without complaint and sought to sanctify their souls in a Sacred Liturgy that was about the worship of God and not about the worship of man.

Pope Saint Pius X amplified this point as follows in Pascendi Dominici Gregis:

It seems to Us nothing short of madness, or at the least consummate temerity to accept for true, and without investigation, these incomplete experiences which are the vaunt of the Modernist. Let Us for a moment put the question: If experiences have so much force and value in their estimation, why do they not attach equal weight to the experience that so many thousands of Catholics have that the Modernists are on the wrong path? Is it that the Catholic experiences are the only ones which are false and deceptive? (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Well, yes, of course, men such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio do believe that what they disparage of as the “closed-in-on-itself” faith of Catholics who worship in a “dead language” are the one “ones which are false and deceptive,” which is why he must denounce believing Catholics with such a demonic ferocity as to show himself to be yet another leftist hypocrite who preaches “mercy” for hardened sinners” but has nothing but hatred and contempt for those who are trying, despite their own sins and weakness, to sanctify and save their souls without dissenting from the binding precepts of the Divine and Natural Laws.

As is the case with leftists in the political realm who are using the events of January 6, 2021 (see True Last Year, True This Year, True Forever: Put Not Your Trust in Princes, in the Children of Men in Whom There is No Salvation, 2022 Edition), and their plandemic, about which two Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America have shown themselves to be completely and perhaps even willfully misinformed (see The Oral Arguments on Biden's Vaccine Mandate Were a Total Disaster), to silence all opposition an inherent threatening to “democracy,” which means ruling as they want without dissent, Jorge Mario Bergoglio wants believing Catholics to disappear. He hates the fact that young people within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are attracted to the incomparable beauty and glory of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition and he is livid about the fact that there are Catholics of any age who take who hold to the immutable truths of the Holy Faith as immutable.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes that “faith” is every-moving, ever-changing, ever-adapting to the circumstances of the moment, and in this, of course, he is as one with his two immediate predecessors, Karol Josef Wojtyla (“living tradition”) and Joseph Alois Ratzinger (“hermeneutic of continuity”) in holding to the philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned precept of dogmatic evolutionism. Bergoglio believes in novelties, thus showing himself to have nothing but contempt for the decrees of our general councils, which met under the infallible guidance of God the Holy Ghost, that condemned novelties in no uncertain terms:

These firings, therefore, with all diligence and care having been formulated by us, we define that it be permitted to no one to bring forward, or to write, or to compose, or to think, or to teach a different faith. Whosoever shall presume to compose a different faith, or to propose, or teach, or hand to those wishing to be converted to the knowledge of the truth, from the Gentiles or Jews, or from any heresy, any different Creed; or to introduce a new voice or invention of speech to subvert these things which now have been determined by us, all these, if they be Bishops or clerics let them be deposed, the Bishops from the Episcopate, the clerics from the clergy; but if they be monks or laymen: let them be anathematized. (Sixth Ecumenical: Constantinople III).

These and many other serious things, which at present would take too long to list, but which you know well, cause Our intense grief. It is not enough for Us to deplore these innumerable evils unless We strive to uproot them. We take refuge in your faith and call upon your concern for the salvation of the Catholic flock. Your singular prudence and diligent spirit give Us courage and console Us, afflicted as We are with so many trials. We must raise Our voice and attempt all things lest a wild boar from the woods should destroy the vineyard or wolves kill the flock. It is Our duty to lead the flock only to the food which is healthful. In these evil and dangerous times, the shepherds must never neglect their duty; they must never be so overcome by fear that they abandon the sheep. Let them never neglect the flock and become sluggish from idleness and apathy. Therefore, united in spirit, let us promote our common cause, or more truly the cause of God; let our vigilance be one and our effort united against the common enemies.

Indeed you will accomplish this perfectly if, as the duty of your office demands, you attend to yourselves and to doctrine and meditate on these words: "the universal Church is affected by any and every novelty" and the admonition of Pope Agatho: "nothing of the things appointed ought to be diminished; nothing changed; nothing added; but they must be preserved both as regards expression and meaning." Therefore may the unity which is built upon the See of Peter as on a sure foundation stand firm. May it be for all a wall and a security, a safe port, and a treasury of countless blessings. To check the audacity of those who attempt to infringe upon the rights of this Holy See or to sever the union of the churches with the See of Peter, instill in your people a zealous confidence in the papacy and sincere veneration for it. As St. Cyprian wrote: "He who abandons the See of Peter on which the Church was founded, falsely believes himself to be a part of the Church . . . .

But for the other painful causes We are concerned about, you should recall that certain societies and assemblages seem to draw up a battle line together with the followers of every false religion and cult. They feign piety for religion; but they are driven by a passion for promotingnovelties and sedition everywhere. They preach liberty of every sort; they stir up disturbances in sacred and civil affairs, and pluck authority to pieces.(Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

7. It is with no less deceit, venerable brothers, that other enemies of divine revelation, with reckless and sacrilegious effrontery, want to import the doctrine of human progress into the Catholic religion. They extol it with the highest praise, as if religion itself were not of God but the work of men, or a philosophical discovery which can be perfected by human means. The charge which Tertullian justly made against the philosophers of his own time "who brought forward a Stoic and a Platonic and a Dialectical Christianity" can very aptly apply to those men who rave so pitiably. Our holy religion was not invented by human reason, but was most mercifully revealed by God; therefore, one can quite easily understand that religion itself acquires all its power from the authority of God who made the revelation, and that it can never be arrived at or perfected by human reason. In order not to be deceived and go astray in a matter of such great importance, human reason should indeed carefully investigate the fact of divine revelation. Having done this, one would be definitely convinced that God has spoken and therefore would show Him rational obedience, as the Apostle very wisely teaches. For who can possibly not know that all faith should be given to the words of God and that it is in the fullest agreement with reason itself to accept and strongly support doctrines which it has determined to have been revealed by God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived? (Pope Pius IX, Qui Pluribus, November 9, 1846.)

As for the rest, We greatly deplore the fact that, where the ravings of human reason extend, there is somebody who studies new things and strives to know more than is necessary, against the advice of the apostle. There you will find someone who is overconfident in seeking the truth outside the Catholic Church, in which it can be found without even a light tarnish of error. Therefore, the Church is called, and is indeed, a pillar and foundation of truth. You correctly understand, venerable brothers, that We speak here also of that erroneous philosophical system which was recently brought in and is clearly to be condemned. This system, which comes from the contemptible and unrestrained desire for innovation, does not seek truth where it stands in the received and holy apostolic inheritance. Rather, other empty doctrines, futile and uncertain doctrines not approved by the Church, are adopted. Only the most conceited men wrongly think that these teachings can sustain and support that truth. (Pope Gregory XVI, Singulari Nos, May 25, 1834.)

In the Catholic Church Christianity is Incarnate. It identifies Itself with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society, which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for Its visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles. It is the continuation of the mission of the Savior, the daughter and the heiress of His Redemption. It has preached the Gospel, and has defended it at the price of Its blood, and strong in the Divine assistance and of that immortality which has been promised it, It makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which  it has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect it in its inviolable integrity. (Pope Leo XIII, A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902.)

There are some, indeed, who recognize and affirm that Protestantism, as they call it, has rejected, with a great lack of consideration, certain articles of faith and some external ceremonies, which are, in fact, pleasing and useful, and which the Roman Church still retains. They soon, however, go on to say that that Church also has erred, and corrupted the original religion by adding and proposing for belief certain doctrines which are not only alien to the Gospel, but even repugnant to it. Among the chief of these they number that which concerns the primacy of jurisdiction, which was granted to Peter and to his successors in the See of Rome. Among them there indeed are some, though few, who grant to the Roman Pontiff a primacy of honor or even a certain jurisdiction or power, but this, however, they consider not to arise from the divine law but from the consent of the faithful. Others again, even go so far as to wish the Pontiff Himself to preside over their motley, so to say, assemblies. But, all the same, although many non-Catholics may be found who loudly preach fraternal communion in Christ Jesus, yet you will find none at all to whom it ever occurs to submit to and obey the Vicar of Jesus Christ either in His capacity as a teacher or as a governor. Meanwhile they affirm that they would willingly treat with the Church of Rome, but on equal terms, that is as equals with an equal: but even if they could so act. it does not seem open to doubt that any pact into which they might enter would not compel them to turn from those opinions which are still the reason why they err and stray from the one fold of Christ. (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes in a faith subject to constant change. He hates stability and immutability. This should be clear to any Catholic with a modicum of intellectual honesty, no less a love of God and a hatred of heresy that is motivated by this love, that Jorge Mario Bergoglio does not believe in the true God of Divine Revelation and is, quite instead, condemned by the following words of Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis:

It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: “These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts.” On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ”Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason”; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ”The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.” Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: “Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries — but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.” (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Each of the conciliar “popes,” including Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has believed in everything condemned by Pope Pius IX in The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864, and solemnly with the Fathers of the [First] Vatican Council, April 24, 1870, by Pope Saint Pius X in Lamentabili Sane, July 1, 1907, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907, Praestantia Scripturae, November 18, 1907, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, The Oath Against Modernism, September 1, 1910, and by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.

Sad it is, therefore, that the leaders of the so-called “Ecclesia Dei Institutes,” who are, after all, the continued objects of derision by the man they believe is the “pope,” have acted as though none of these facts matter, preferring to live a veritable of “see no heresy,” “hear no heresy” “cone of silence” in exchange for the “privilege” for being able to offer/stage a modernized version of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. Their silence in the face of Bergoglio’s withering criticism of them and in the face of the many ways in which the Holy Faith has been denied before men by each of the conciliar “popes” (endless praise of false religions, “ecumenical” “prayer” services, statements about the eternally “valid” nature of Judaism, support for the Judeo-Masonic concept of “separation of Church and State” and “religious liberty, attacks on the very nature of dogmatic truth, which have been and continue to be attacks on the very nature of God Himself) will be rewarded with the extinction of their communities over time. “Papa” Jorge will settle for nothing less.

Indeed, I wrote the following in Jorge Mario Bergoglio Bares His Teeth to Do the Work of Baal six months ago now:

Interjection Number Fifteen:

The meaning of this is quite simple: The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest, the Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem, et al., are now on life support. Each will be given an “apostolic visitator” ‘ere long. Each will be persecuted in the same manner as were the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. Each will be required to have its priests/presbyters stage the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination on a regular basis. Each will fall away over time.

The leaders of these “Ecclesia Dei” communities remained mute as their chief benefactor, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, praised false religions for their nonexistent ability to produce “peace” and/or to be in the service of the sanctification and salvation of souls, gave joint “blessings” with Anglican laymen dressed up as “bishops” and committed numerous other actions contrary to the laws of God and the good of souls and they remained mute when their boy from Bavaria said the following in Cologne, Germany, on August 19, 2005:

"We all know there are numerous models of unity and you know that the Catholic Church also has as her goal the full visible unity of the disciples of Christ, as defined by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in its various Documents (cf. Lumen Gentium, nn. 8, 13; Unitatis Redintegratio, nn. 2, 4, etc.). This unity, we are convinced, indeed subsists in the Catholic Church, without the possibility of ever being lost (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, n. 4); the Church in fact has not totally disappeared from the world.

On the other hand, this unity does not mean what could be called ecumenism of the return:  that is, to deny and to reject one's own faith history. Absolutely not!

It does not mean uniformity in all expressions of theology and spirituality, in liturgical forms and in discipline. Unity in multiplicity, and multiplicity in unity:  in my Homily for the Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul on 29 June last, I insisted that full unity and true catholicity in the original sense of the word go together. As a necessary condition for the achievement of this coexistence, the commitment to unity must be constantly purified and renewed; it must constantly grow and mature. (Ecumenical meeting at the Archbishopric of Cologne English)

Numerous models of unity? No, there is just one "model of unity": unconditional conversion to the Catholic Church of everyone who is outside of her maternal bosom as they adhere to everything contained to the Deposit of Faith without any reservation or qualification at all. It is that simple.

Ratzinger/Benedict thus scoffed at Pope Pius IX's Iam Vos Omnes, September 13, 1868, Pope Leo XIII's Praeclara Gratualtionis Publicae, June 29, 1894, and Pope Pius XI's Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928 (see Appendix B below for excerpts from each) as irrelevant and obsolete, making a mockery of the efforts of the countless saints, including Saint Francis de Sales, the Apostle of Charity, to win Protestants back to the true Church and of Saints Josaphat and Andrew Bobola to exhort the Orthodox to return to the one, true Church, the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

What did that matter to the heads of the "Ecclesia Dei" communities whose very existence is an irritant to Jorge Mario Bergoglio?

Well, we don't know the answer to that question as they have managed to keep silent about such outrages, and in this regard we do not as yet know what they think about Jorge Mario Bergoglio's signing off on the One World Ecumenical Religion as they have remained in the nearly three years since its issuance in Abu Dhabi. Most of these men have made their “peace” with their silent acquiescence to the blasphemies of the conciliar “pontiffs.” oblivious that their silence in the face of these grave offenses given to God has been condemned most solemnly by Pope Saint Leo the Great:

But it is vain for them to adopt the name of catholic, as they do not oppose these blasphemies: they must believe them, if they can listen so patiently to such words. (Pope Saint Leo the Great, Epistle XIV, To Anastasius, Bishop of Thessalonica, St. Leo the Great | Letters 1-59 

As is the right of one who believes himself to be a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter, Jorge Mario Bergoglio wants nothing other than total submission to the “Second” Vatican Council, the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service (which more than one presbyter within the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter had told me decades ago that they hated and wanted to have noting to do with whatsoever), and the magisterium of the postconciliar “popes.” Anyone who thinks that dogmatic evolutionism, no matter how labeled or repackaged and false ecumenism do not constitute “breaks” with the Catholic Church is either intellectually dishonest or a coward who cannot see the reality of the situation for what it is.

“Pope Francis” wants “traditional” Catholics within his structures to “convert” or simply disappear. The same man who “accompanies” adulterers, sodomites, fornicators, and abortionists had made it clear that those who are “closed-in-on-themselves” have no place at the “table” in the “new ecclesiology.” His faith is not the Catholic Faith, but those who recognize him as “Pope Francis” must adhere to what he professes or come to recognize that a failure to profess what he does means one of two things: either they are schismatics and outside the true Barque  of Salvation or that their “pope” is no “pope” at all and is the head of a false sect that whose very beliefs and characteristics have been condemned by our true popes and general councils as the circumstances required.

As noted above, one never—as in never ever—hears Jorge Mario Bergoglio talk about Original and Actual Sin with respect to Faith as he believes in false concepts of “love” and “mercy” that “include” all people even if they fall short of what he calls the “ideal,” an “ideal” he really believes is unattainable.

Theological certainties must be disparaged by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is at all times a Modernist preacher of pantheism and thus of universal salvation even though he might not use the phrase, perhaps because he believes that those who worship in a “dead language” and are “closed-in-on-themselves” are excluded from salvation, not that Jorge Mario Bergoglio himself understands the concept in the slightest. (Please see the Appendix below for the late Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton’s explanation of salvation as taught by the Catholic Church.)

Remember these words of Saint Fidelis of Sigmarigen, O.F.M., Cap., as he was put to death by Calvinists in 1622:

“I came to extirpate heresy, not to embrce it.”

Remember also these words of Dom Prosper Guerager, O.S., in his reflection on the life of Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, who feast is celebrated annually on April 24 if not impeded by the first three days of the Octave of Easter (it will be commemorated on Low Sunday this year):

A Catholic who gives heretics credit for sincerity when they talk about religious toleration proves the he knows nothing about the past or the present. There is a fatal instinct in error, which leads it to hate the Truth; and the true Church, by its unchangeableness, is a perpetual reproach to them that refuse to be her children. Heresy starts with an attempt to annihilate them that remain faithful; when it has grown tired of open persecution it vents its spleen in insults and calumnies; and when these do not produce the desired effect, hypocrisy comes in with its assurances of friendly forbearance. The history of Protestant Europe, during the last three centuries, confirms these statements; it also justifies us in honouring those courageous servants of God who, during that same period, have died for the ancient faith. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year.)

Dom Prosper Gueranger described with prophetic accuracy the very spirit of the likes of Jorge Mario Bergoglio he continues to use insults and calumnies to disparage those who hold fast to the Catholic Faith, including the countless millions of martyrs who have preferred death to apostasy.

One of these was Blessed Margaret Clitherow, who was put to death under the authority of Queen Elizabeth I of England on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, March 25, 1686, as she refused all entreaties to “pray” with Protestants after she had been imprisoned for hiding Catholic priests:

There were present at her martyrdom the two Sheriffs of York, Fawcet and Gibson, Frost, a minister, Fox, Mr. Cheke's kinsman, with another of his men, the four sergeants, which had hired certain beggars to do the murder, three or four men, and four women.

'The martyr coming to the place kneeled her down, and prayed to herself. The tormentors bade her pray with them, and they would pray with her.'

The were still hoping for some act that could be construed as apostasy, not that it would save her life now, but because they needed a little victory to use a propaganda and to offset their shame. So they would intrude even into her converse with God, to confuse her last moments. Who should say, if they prayed with her, that she was not praying with them?

Clear-heaaded to the last, 'the martyr denied, and said, “I will not pray with you, and you shall not pray with me; neither will I say Amen to your prayers, nor shall you to mine.”

'Then they will her to pray for the Queen's Majesty.'

This was intended as a trap. If she refused, she was a traitor; if she prayed, they could and would pray with her. But Margaret Clitherow's ready with did not fail her even now.

'The martyr began in this order. First in the hearing of them all, she prayed for the Catholic Church, then for the Pope's Holiness, Cardinals, and other Fathers that have chage of souls and then for all Christian princes. At which words the tormentors interrupted her, and will her not to put her Majesty among that company; yet the martyr proceeded in this order, “and especially for Elizabeth, Queen of England, that God turn her to the Catholic faith, and that after this mortal life she may receive the blessed joys of heaven. For I wish as much good,” quoteth she, “to her Majesty's soul as to mine own.”  (Mary Claridge, Margaret Clitherow, London, England: Burns and Oates, 1966, pp. 173-174.)

Blessed Margaret Clitherow, who worshiped God in a “dead language” that spoke of the transcendence of God above particular cultures and provided a sense of the Mysterium Tremendum that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, did not have to “discern” anything. Indeed, she preferred death to apostasy, and so must we by refusing even the slightest affiliation with the counterfeit church of conciliarism and its robber barons who are enemies of Christ the King and of the souls whose sins He atoned by offering Himself up to His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal God the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday.

Mindful of our own need to make reparation for our many sins, each of which has worsened the state of the Church Militant on earth and the state of the world-at-large, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, may our daily praying of as many Rosaries as our state-in-life permits help plant seeds for the day when a true and legitimate Successor will be restored to the Throne of Saint Peter, at which point he may rule Holy Mother Church from the Basilica of Saint Peter.

There is really little need to say anything else at this point as the apostasy is so vast and so bold that no only those who are intellectually dishonest or willfully blind can refuse to see the truth for what it is.

We are in the midst of the Great Apostasy, and while it is certainly the case that we are now in the season of great Easter rejoicing, it is nevertheless true as well that we must bear the crosses of the moment with courage and joy as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Every Rosary we pray brings great consolation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Every Rosary we pray with in a spirit of meditative reflection helps to win the favor of the very Mother of God, who showers down grace after grace upon those who trust in her intercessory power and maternal protection with childlike confidence.

Our Lady wants us to be participants in her Divine Son’s Easter victory over sin and death. All we have to do is to be willing to suffer a little bit in this passing, moral vale of tears as we refuse to make any compromises with apostates and are willing to lose everything for love of Our Lord and His Sacred Deposit of Faith, remembering in a special way the Poor Souls in Purgatory during this month of November.

The joys are eternal for those who remain faithful to end after praying fervently for the grace to end their lives well, especially by keeping ever close to Our Lady and Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faith, in the midst of forgettable men who are but minions of Antichrist.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

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.

Appendix A

Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton on the Catholic Church and Salvation

Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton explained the inherent flaws in the Modernist concept of faith and salvation as is being taught at present by the likes of Jorge Mario Bergoglio:

The concept of eternal salvation runs throughout the entire New Testament. It is one of the basic notions in the teaching which Our Lord preached as the divine message He had received from His Father. He described Himself as coming to save what was lost. “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.” [Matt. 18: 11; see also Luke, 19, 19: 10.] Christ is Our Saviour. His work is preeminently that of our salvation.

Now, the term “to save,” employed in sacred theology and in the English translations of the New Testament as the equivalent of the Latin “salvare” designates the process by which a person is removed from a condition in which he is destined for ruin or death and is transferred to a condition in which he may live and prosper. Basically, that is the meaning expressed by the expression “saving someone,” employed in ordinary terminology. Thus, years ago, when we frequently read in the newspapers about the feats of the then young first officer of the steamship America (later Commodore Harry Manning) in saving the lives of the crews of several fishing boats that had been swamped in the Atlantic storms, we all understood that this man and the mariners under his command had taken the victims off the wrecked boats to which they were clinging and had brought them to the safety of the ocean liner to which he was assigned.

The men were saved, in the sense that they were transferred from positions in which they would inevitably have drowned very soon into the security of the liner, and eventually to the shores of their own countries. Med who were transferred at sea from on seaworthy vessel to another could never have been described as “saved”.

The salvation of men, described in divine public revelation, is a salvation in the strict or proper sense of the term. It is a process by which men are removed from a condition or status which would involve them in everlasting death if they remained within it, to a condition in which they may enjoy eternal life and happiness.

It is highly important to understand that this process is quite complex. The terminus a quo, the undesirable condition, from which men are removed in the process of salvation is basically sin, the status of aversion from almighty God. A man is said to be saved, absolutely and simply, when he is taken out of the condition of original or mortal sin and brought into the status of the eternal and supernatural life of grace. Ultimately that process in achieved and perfected when the person saved comes to possess the life of grace eternally and inamissibly, in the everlasting glory of the Beatific Vision. There is genuine salvation, however, when the man who has hitherto been in the state of original or mortal sin is brought into the life of sanctifying grace, even in this world, when that life of grace can be lost through the man's own fault.

There is, however, a definitely social aspect to the process of salvation. In the merciful designs of God's providence, the man who is transferred from the state of original or mortal sin into the state of grace is brought in some way “within” a social unit, the supernatural kingdom of the living God. In heaven that community is the Church triumphant, the company of the elect enjoying the Beatific Vision. On earth it is the Church militant. Under the conditions of the new or the Christian dispensation, that community is the organized or visible religious society which is the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ on earth.

We must not lose sight of the fact that people in the condition of aversion from God, in the state of original or mortal sin, belong in some way to a kingdom or an ecclesia under the leadership of Satan, the moving spirit among the spiritual enemies of God. Hence the process of salvation involves necessarily the transfer of an individual from one social unit or community to another, from the kingdom Satan to the true and supernatural kingdom of the living God.

The opening paragraph of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical against Freemasonry, the letter Humanum genus, brings out the relations between these two communities with unmatched clarity and accuracy.

The race of man, after its miserable fall from God, the Creator and the Giver of heavenly gifts, “through the envy of the devil,” separated into two diverse parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other for those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth, the true Church of Jesus Christ; and those who desire from their heart to be united with it so as to gain salvation must of necessity serve God and His only-begotten son with their whole mind and with an entire will. The other is the kingdom of Satan, in whose possession and control are all whosoever follow the fatal example of their leader and of our first parents, those who refuse to obey the divine and eternal law, and who have many aims of their own in contempt of God, and many aims also against God.

This twofold kingdom St. Augustine keenly discerned and described after the manner of two cities, contrary in their laws because striving for contrary objects; and with subtle brevity he expressed the efficient cause of each in these words: “Two loves formed two cities: the love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, an earthly city; and the love of God, reaching even to contempt of self, a heavenly one.” At every period of time each has been in conflict with the other, with a variety and multiplicity of weapons and of warfare, although not always with equal ardor and assault. [This passage is found in Father Wynne's edition of The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1903), p. 83]

This intrinsically social aspect of salvation is brought out in the account, in the Acts of the Apostles, of the end of St. Peter's sermon on the first Christian Pentecost and of the results of that sermon.

Now when they had heard these things, they had compunction in their hearts and said to Peter and to the rest of the apostles: What shall we do, men and brethren? But Peter said to them: Do penance: and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins. And you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, whomsoever the Lord our God shall call. And with very many other words did he testify and exhort them, saying: Save yourselves from this perverse generation. They therefore that receive his word were baptized: and there were added in that day about three thousand souls. And they were persevering in the doctrine of the apostles and in the communication of the breaking of bread and in prayers. [Acts, 2: 37-42]

According to the inspired word of God in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter exhorted the men who listened to him of that first Christian Pentecost to “save themselves from this perverse generation.” Furthermore, we are told that the individuals who “received his word” received the sacrament of baptism, and that they were “added” to the number of the disciples of Christ who had been with St. Peter and the other disciples before he delivered his sermon. The society of the disciples of Jesus Christ, the organization which we know now as the Catholic Church, continued with this great number of new members, to do exactly what it had been doing since the day of Our Lord's ascension into heaven.

We read that the group, composed as it was of these new converts who had come into the Church as a result of St. Peter's Pentecost sermon and of the disciples who had entered the group during Our Lord's public life, was “persevering in the doctrine of the apostles and in the communication of the breaking of bread and in prayers.” And we read the same sort of account of the activity of the original band of disciples that returned to Jerusalem immediately after the Ascension.

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount that is called Olivet, which is nigh Jerusalem, within a sabbath day's journey.

And when they were come in they went up into an upper room, where abode Peter and John, James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Batholomew and Matthew, James of Alpheus and Simon Zelotes and Jude the brother of James. 

All these were persevering with one mind in prayer, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren. [Acts 1. 12-14]

Both the text and the context of the Acts of the Apostles assure us that the people who heeded St. Peter's injunction to save themselves from this perverse generation entered the true Church of God, the kingdom of God on earth. They entered the Catholic Church.

Now, if St. Peter's words on this occasion meant anything at all, they signified that the individuals to whom he was speaking were in a situation which would lead them to eternal ruin if they continued in it. They were described as belonging to a “perverse generation.” They were told to save themselves by getting out of it. The institution into which they would enter by the very fact of leaving “this perverse generation” was none other that the society of Our Lord's disciples, the Catholic Church itself.

The clear implication of St. Peter's statement is that the Church, the kingdom of God, was the only institution or social unit of salvation. Not to be within this society was to be in the perverse generation within which a man was faced with eternal and entire spiritual ruin. To leave the perverse generation was to enter the Church.

In other words, the clear teaching of this section of the Acts of the Apostles is precisely that given by Pope Leo XIII in the opening passages of his encyclical Humanum genus. The central point of this teaching is that the entire human race is divided between the kingdom of God, the ecclesia, and the kingdom of Satan. To be saved from the kingdom of Satan is to enter the kingdom of God. In this context it is not difficult to see how, by God's institution, the Catholic Church, the one and only supernatural kingdom of God on earth, is presented as a necessary means for the attainment of salvation. By God's institution the process of salvation itself involves a passage from the kingdom of Satan into the ecclesia.

Now, for the proper understanding of this doctrine, especially in view of the teaching on this subject contained in some recent books and articles, it is imperative to understand the religious condition of the people to whom St. Peter delivered his sermon on that first Christian Pentecost. Again, the Acts of the Apostles contains essentially important information.

This book describes them in general with the statement that “there were dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven.” The homelands of these men are enumerated in the statement attributed to the multitude itself.

And they were all amazed and wondered saying: Behold, are not all these that speak, Galileans?

And how have we heard, every man, our own tongue wherein we were born?

Parthinians and Medes and Elamites and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers from Rome, Jews also and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians: we have heard them speak in our own tongues the wonderful works of God. [Acts 2: 7-11.]

According to the text of the Acts, a great many of these people were pilgrims, men and women who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the great Jewish feast of Pentecost. Our Lord had died on the Cross only a little over seven weeks before St. Peter delivered that sermon, and many of the people who listened to St. Peter must have been on their way to Jerusalem at the very time Our Lord died. They had begun their pilgrimage as an act of worship in the Jewish religion at the very time when the Jewish religion was the one approved especially by God and when the Jewish politico-religious commonwealth was actually the supernatural kingdom of God on earth, the ecclesia of the Old Testament.

These people as individuals probably had nothing whatsoever to do with the persecution and the murder of the Incarnate Word of God. They had started on their journey as members of God's chosen people, the people of His covenant. Their journey to Jerusalem was made precisely in order to worship and honor God. They were truly devout individuals.

Yes, seven weeks before, the religious body to which they belonged had ceased to be God's ecclesia. The Jewish politico-religious social unit had definitively rejected Our Lord, the Messias promised in the Old Testament. This company had hitherto enjoyed its position as God's ecclesias or His congregatio fidelium by virtue of the fact this it had accepted and professed its acceptance of the divine message about the promised Redeemer. In rejecting the Redeemer Himself, this social unit had automatically rejected the teaching God had given about Him. The rejection of this message constituted an abandonment of the divine faith itself. By manifesting this rejection of the faith, the Jewish religious unit fell from its position as the company of the chosen people. It was no longer God's ecclesia, His supernatural kingdom on earth. It became part of the kingdom of Satan.

While the great Jewish social unit was rejecting Our Lord and thus repudiating its acceptance of the divinely revealed message about Him, the little company of the disciples, organized by Our Lord around Himself, retained its faith. It continued to accept and to obey Our Lord and to believe the divinely revealed that centered around Him. Thus at the moment of Our Lord's death on Calvary, the moment when the old dispensation was ended and the Jewish religious association ceased to be the supernatural kingdom of God on earth, this recently organized society of Our Lord's disciples began to exist as the ecclesia or the kingdom.

This society was the true continuation of Israel. The men who were within it were the true sons of Abraham, in that they had the genuine faith of Abraham. This society was the new association of the chosen people. Its members were, as St. Paul called them, the elect or the chosen of God.

It must be understood, incidentally, that this society was actually God's supernatural kingdom on earth in a much more complete and perfect sense than the old Jewish commonwealth had ever been. The old Israel had constituted the pople of the covenant. According to God's unfailing promise, the Redeemer was to be born within that company. Yet conditions had never been such that a man had to be within this company in order to attain to eternal salvation.

On the contrary, the new and faithful Israel was completely identical with the supernatural kingdom of God on earth. It was the true ecclesia or company of the faithful in the sense that no man could attain to eternal salvation unless he passed from this life “within” it. This organized society, within which unworthy members would be intermingled with the good until the end of time, was actually Our Lord's own Mystical Body.

So it was that when St. Peter spoke to the crowd on the first Christian Pentecost, the society of which he had been constituted the visible head was actually the ecclesia Dei, the necessary terminus of the process of salvation. His hearers who, a few weeks before had belonged to God's supernatural kingdom on earth by reason of their membership in the old Israelite commonwealth, now actually found themselves in the “perverse generation” precisely by reason of that same membership. When St. Peter first spoke to them, they were in a position from which they needed to be saved. They were no longer members of the chosen people.

By heeding and obeying the words of St. Peter they regained the position they had formerly possessed, and their new possession of the dignity of membership in the ecclesia was much more perfect and complete than that which they had formerly enjoyed. Previously they had been within a company which had been God's congregatio fidelium by reason of the profession of its acceptance of the divine message that centered around the promise of a Redeemer. When they accepted St. Peter's teaching, performed their duty of penance, and by their reception of the sacrament of baptism, were “added” to the society of Our Lord's disciples, they entered the supernatural kingdom of God which enjoyed its status by reason of its acceptance of the divinely revealed teaching about the Redeemer who had become incarnate and had died to reconcile them with God.

It is extremely important for us to remember, however, that the people St. Peter urged to save themselves from the perverse generation in which they were living at the time were definitely not men of no religion at all. They were devout members of the establishment which had bee, less than eight weeks before, God's supernatural kingdom on earth. In that establishment they had learned love for God and zeal in the service of God that they were willing to travel very considerable distances and undergo serious hardships in order to assist at the temple sacrifices in Jerusalem during the days of the great religious festivity of Pentecost.

St. Peter did not recommend the Church to these people merely as something far more perfect than the religious affiliation they already possessed. He did not in any sense imply that, in entering the ecclesia, they would be simply passing to a better religious community Quite on the contrary, he made it clear that it was necessary for them to transfer themselves from the “perverse generation” in which they then existed to a condition of salvation. The acceptance of his teaching was in fact as entrance into the Church. It is in line with this teaching that St. Paul, in his epistles, refers to those within the Church as “saved.” The Epistle to the Ephesians tells us that God, “even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together in Christ (by whose grace you are saved).” [Eph. 2:5.] And it explains that “by grace you are saved through faith: and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God.” [Eph 2:8.] The entire context of the Church, men are actually being saved from the dominion of Satan, the prince of this world.

This is the basic social aspect of the process of salvation. In that process there is always involved a passage or a transitus from the kingdom of God's spiritual enemy into the actual kingdom of God Himself. His ecclesia. St. Peter made it clear that, in entering the Church, the people to whom he was speaking on that first Christian Pentecost were really being saved.

We must not lose sight of the fact that in our own day there is sometimes a tendency to imagine that persons who are in a position comparable with that of the people to whom St. Peter's sermon was addressed are really in an acceptable position. The people who encourage this tendency are careful to state that the Catholic Church is more advantageously placed than other religious bodies in this world. They assert that the Church has the fullness of God's revealed message; but, at the same time, they likewise insist that other religions are really from God, and that they constitute the plenitude of God's teaching for those whom He does not call to the higher position of Catholicism. The Modernist Von Hugel brought out this teaching in a volume recently republished in this country. According to Von Hugel:

The Jewish religion was not false for the thirteen centuries of the pre-Christian operations; it was, for those times, God's fullest self-revelation and man's deepest apprehension of God; and this same Jewish religion can be, is, still the fullest religious truth for numerous individuals whom God leaves in their good faith; in their not directly requiring the fuller, the fullest, light and aid to Christanity. What is specially true of the Jewish religion is, in a lesser but still very real degree, true of Mohammedanism, and even of Hinduism, of Parseeism, etc. [Letters from Baron Freidrich Von Hugel to a Niece (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955) . p.115.]

Von Hugel, like other of his class, was careful to insist that “it is not true that all religions are equally true, equally pure, equally fruitful.” But, as a matter of tact, no one but the most militant and ignorant athiest ever claimed that they were. His own position is completely incompatible with the teaching of St. Peter in his sermon on the first Christian Pentecost. He depicted non-Catholic religions as acceptable, even though less perfect than Catholicism. If his contention had been in any way true, then St. Peter would have been guilty of seriously deceiving the people to whom he spoke on that Pentecost morning. Very definitely it is not true to say that a man is saved when he is transferred from a less perfect to a more perfect conditions. He is saved only by being transferred from a ruinous position into a status wherein he can live as he should.

Von Hugel described the religious condition of the people to whom St. Peter spoke as “still the fullest religious truth for numerous individuals whom God leaves in their good faith; in their not directly requiring the fuller, the fullest light and aid to Christianity.” St. Peter asserted that these individuals were in a perverse generation, and told them to save themselves from it. There is no possibility of any agreement between these two positions.

In every age of the Church there has been one portion of Christian doctrine which men have been especially tempted to misconstrue or to deny. In our own times it is the part of the Catholic truth which was brought out with special force and clarity by St. Peter in his first missionary sermon in Jerusalem. It is somewhat unfashionable today to insist, as St. Peter did, that those who are outside the true Church of Jesus Christ stand in need of being saved by leaving their own positions and entering the ecclesia. Nevertheless, this remains a part of God's own revealed message.

It is a part of Catholic doctrine that entrance into the Church (actually by becoming a member of the Church; and when this is impossible, by at least an implicit though sincere desire or intention) is a part of the process of salvation. It is equally a part of Catholic teaching, however, that this is by no means the only part. A man is saved from the evil of belonging to the kingdom of Satan by his entrance into the Church, but this entrance in no way constitutes a guarantee that he will actually enjoy the Beatific Vision for all eternity. The process of salvation is not fully completed, a man cannot be said to be “saved” in the full sense of the term, until he has attained the Beatific Vision itself.

St. James, writing to men who are already Christians, members of the true Church, warns them to “receive the ingrafted word, which is able to save your souls.” [James 1:21] He was setting forth God's own teaching when he reminded those within the Church that they were still obliged to work, under the direction of the divine doctrine, for the salvation of their souls. It remains possible for a man to be within the Church and to be disloyal to God. Such a man constitutes himself as an unworthy member of the Church and, unless he repents of his sins, he will be cut away from the kingdom of God for all eternity. When he dies. And, if the sinner within the Church turns again toward God, he is being saved by the power of Jesus Christ, working through the sacrament of penance. Obviously he cannot be saved other than in and through the Catholic Church.

Thus, despite the fact that it is possible for a man to be within the Church and to lose his soul, salvation is in itself a process which involves a social aspect. Everyone who has been born since the sin of Adam, with the exception of Our Lord and of His Blessed Mother, has come into the world or begun his existence as a member of the fallen family of Adam, and thus as one who belong to what St. Peter designated as the “perverse generation” and what Pope Leo XIII called the “kingdom of Satan.”

He has likewise begun his existence as a human being in the state of original sin and has very frequently increased his aversion from God by the force of his own mortal sins. The process of salvation is the process by which such men have been brought from that condition of aversion from God into the final and inadmissible possession of His friendship and the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision. Involved in that process, by God's own institution, is a transfer from the kingdom of Satan into the one supernatural kingdom of God on earth. Since the moment of Our Lord's death on the Cross, that kingdom has been, again by God's own institution, the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ on earth. 

Thus, if we examine the actual concept of salvation, we find that the Church as God's kingdom on earth is actually involved in it. Thus, in this process, the Church is not merely an extraneous factor which has been somehow introduced into the Christian teaching about eternal salvation. It is, in the social aspect of salvation, the necessary terminus ad quem of that transfer by which men are brought for sin to grace, by being changed from a position of belonging to the kingdom of Satan, the dominion of “the prince of this world,” into the one and only supernatural kingdom of God on earth. (Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, The Catholic Church and Salvation In Light of the Recent Pronouncements of the Holy See, published in 1958 and reprinted in 2006 by Seminary Press, Round Top, New York, p. 134-144.)

Appendix B

Holy Mother Church's Exhortations for the Conversion of Non-Catholics

It is for this reason that so many who do not share 'the communion and the truth of the Catholic Church' must make use of the occasion of the Council, by the means of the Catholic Church, which received in Her bosom their ancestors, proposes [further] demonstration of profound unity and of firm vital force; hear the requirements [demands] of her heart, they must engage themselves to leave this state that does not guarantee for them the security of salvation. She does not hesitate to raise to the Lord of mercy most fervent prayers to tear down of the walls of division, to dissipate the haze of errors, and lead them back within holy Mother Church, where their Ancestors found salutary pastures of life; where, in an exclusive way, is conserved and transmitted whole the doctrine of Jesus Christ and wherein is dispensed the mysteries of heavenly grace.

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

First of all, then, We cast an affectionate look upon the East, from whence in the beginning came forth the salvation of the world.  Yes, and the yearning desire of Our heart bids us conceive and hope that the day is not far distant when the Eastern Churches, so illustrious in their ancient faith and glorious past, will return to the fold they have abandoned.  We hope it all the more, that the distance separating them from Us is not so great: nay, with some few exceptions, we agree so entirely on other heads that, in defense of the Catholic Faith, we often have recourse to reasons and testimony borrowed from the teaching, the Rites, and Customs of the East.

The Principal subject of contention is the Primacy of the Roman Pontiff.  But let them look back to the early years of their existence, let them consider the sentiments entertained by their forefathers, and examine what the oldest Traditions testify, and it will, indeed, become evident to them that Christ’s Divine Utterance, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, has undoubtedly been realized in the Roman Pontiffs.  Many of these latter in the first gates of the Church were chosen from the East, and foremost among them Anacletus, Evaristus, Anicetus, Eleutherius, Zosimus, and Agatho; and of these a great number, after Governing the Church in Wisdom and Sanctity, Consecrated their Ministry with the shedding of their blood.  The time, the reasons, the promoters of the unfortunate division, are well known. Before the day when man separated what God had joined together, the name of the Apostolic See was held in Reverence by all the nations of the Christian world: and the East, like the West, agreed without hesitation in its obedience to the Pontiff of Rome, as the Legitimate Successor of St. Peter, and, therefore, the Vicar of Christ here on earth.

And, accordingly, if we refer to the beginning of the dissension, we shall see that Photius himself was careful to send his advocates to Rome on the matters that concerned him; and Pope Nicholas I sent his Legates to Constantinople from the Eternal City, without the slightest opposition, “in order to examine the case of Ignatius the Patriarch with all diligence, and to bring back to the Apostolic See a full and accurate report”; so that the history of the whole negotiation is a manifest Confirmation of the Primacy of the Roman See with which the dissension then began.  Finally, in two great Councils, the second of Lyons and that of Florence, Latins and Greeks, as is notorious, easily agreed, and all unanimously proclaimed as Dogma the Supreme Power of the Roman Pontiffs.

We have recalled those things intentionally, for they constitute an invitation to peace and reconciliation; and with all the more reason that in Our own days it would seem as if there were a more conciliatory spirit towards Catholics on the part of the Eastern Churches, and even some degree of kindly feeling.  To mention an instance, those sentiments were lately made manifest when some of Our faithful travelled to the East on a Holy Enterprise, and received so many proofs of courtesy and good-will.

Therefore, Our mouth is open to you, to you all of Greek or other Oriental Rites who are separated from the Catholic Church, We earnestly desire that each and every one of you should meditate upon the words, so full of gravity and love, addressed by Bessarion to your forefathers: “What answer shall we give to God when He comes to ask why we have separated from our Brethren: to Him Who, to unite us and bring us into One Fold, came down from Heaven, was Incarnate, and was Crucified?  What will our defense be in the  eyes of posterity?  Oh, my Venerable Fathers, we must not suffer this to be, we must not entertain this thought, we must not thus so ill provide for ourselves and for our Brethren.”

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

Nor is there any reason for you to fear on that account that We or any of Our Successors will ever diminish your rights, the privileges of your Patriarchs, or the established Ritual of any one of your Churches.  It has been and always will be the intent and Tradition of the Apostolic See, to make a large allowance, in all that is right and good, for the primitive Traditions and special customs of every nation.  On the contrary, if you re-establish Union with Us, you will see how, by God’s bounty, the glory and dignity of your Churches will be remarkably increased.  May God, then, in His goodness, hear the Prayer that you yourselves address to Him: “Make the schisms of the Churches cease,” and “Assemble those who are dispersed, bring back those who err, and unite them to Thy Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.”  May you thus return to that one Holy Faith which has been handed down both to Us and to you from time immemorial; which your forefathers preserved untainted, and which was enhanced by the rival splendor of the Virtues, the great genius, and the sublime learning of St. Athanasius and St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nazianzum and St. John Chrysostom, the two Saints who bore the name of Cyril, and so many other great men whose glory belongs as a common inheritance to the East and to the West. (Pope Leo XIII, Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae, June 29, 1894.)

So, Venerable Brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it. . . .  Let, therefore, the separated children draw nigh to the Apostolic See, set up in the City which Peter and Paul, the Princes of the Apostles, consecrated by their blood; to that See, We repeat, which is 'the root and womb whence the Church of God springs,' not with the intention and the hope that 'the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth' will cast aside the integrity of the faith and tolerate their errors, but, on the contrary, that they themselves submit to its teaching and government. Would that it were Our happy lot to do that which so many of Our predecessors could not, to embrace with fatherly affection those children, whose unhappy separation from Us We now bewail. Would that God our Savior, "Who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth," would hear us when We humbly beg that He would deign to recall all who stray to the unity of the Church! In this most important undertaking We ask and wish that others should ask the prayers of Blessed Mary the Virgin, Mother of divine grace, victorious over all heresies and Help of Christians, that She may implore for Us the speedy coming of the much hoped-for day, when all men shall hear the voice of Her divine Son, and shall be 'careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.'" (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)