Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J. (1805-1888): A Maundy Thursday Sermon

Today is Maundy Thursday.

The Paschal Triduum of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection actually began with the Office of Tenebrae yesterday evening, and it will end on Easter Sunday.

These are the holiest days are the zenith of Holy Mother Church’s liturgical year. This is the day on which Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ instituted the Holy Priesthood and the Eucharist at the Last Supper for our sanctification and salvation. Although Our Lord would enter deep into His Passion immediately after the completion of the Last Supper as He suffered His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, He wonderfully gave us the Holy Priesthood of the New Dispensation as He instituted the New and Eternal Covenant that He would ratify by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross tomorrow, Good Friday. We must express our gratitude to Him at all times for giving us the Priesthood so that we can have access on a daily basis to His own Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in Holy Communion, made present for us on altars of Sacrifice by true bishops and true priests in this time of apostasy and betrayal.

This is a day to keep watch with Our Lord in His Real Presence at the Altar of Repose, remembering most importantly to beg Our Lady to make more and more voluntary sacrifices to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son through her own Immaculate Heart for our sins and those of the whole world.

Additionally, though, I am providing those who access this site with a sermon written by Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J., who was an Austrian missionary to the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century after the revolutions that shook Central Europe in 1848.

Father Weninger was a fearless defender of the Holy Faith and a prolific writer. One of his most important books was Protestantism and Infidelity.

The Catholic Encyclopedia describes his work as follows:

Jesuit missionary and author, born at Wildhaus, Styria, Austria, 31 October, 1805; died at Cincinnati, Ohio, 29 June, 1888. When already a priest and doctor of theology, he joined the Society of Jesus in 1832 and in 1841 was sent to Innsbruck, where he taught theology, history, and Hebrew. As the Revolution of 1848 impeded his further usefulness at home, he left Europe and went to the United States. During his forty years he visited almost every state of the Union, preaching to vast multitudes in English, French, or German, as best suited the nationality of his hearers. In the year 1854 alone he delivered nearly a thousand sermons, and in 1864 he preached about forty-five missions. His zeal also prompted Father Weninger to win souls with the pen and he published forty works in German, Sixteen in English, eight in French, three in Latin. Among his principal works are: "Manual of the Catholic Religion" (Ratisbon, 1858); "Easter in Heaven" (Cincinnati, 1862); "Sermons" (Mainz, 1881-86). (Father Francis X. Weninger, S.J.)

Omitted from this list, however, is Father Weninger’s Protestantism and Infidelity, which is a superb critique of Protestantism’s complete infidelity to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Sacred Deposit of Faith.

As Our time and our heart belong entire to Our Lord and His Paschal Triduum as we keep ever close to Our Lady, who was with Him every step of the way as he participated the Queen of Martyrs in His Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. 

My own republished reflection on Maundy Thursday can be found by scrolling below.

A most blessed Paschal Triduum to you all. 

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

A Maundy Thursday Reflection (2024)

The Last Supper that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shared with His Apostles in the Upper Room on the first Maundy Thursday marked the beginning of the New and Eternal Testament of the New Moses Who is Himself, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Living in a World of Treacherous Deceit

We live in a world of treachery and deceit. Practitioners thereof are to be found in every nook and cranny of the Judeo-Masonic world of Modernity and throughout the quarters of  Modernity's adjunct, Modernism's counterfeit church of conciliarism.

This commentary discusses how two men who have many differences, Donald John Trump and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, are continuing to wax romantically about the "vaccines" designed under Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" even in spite of all the evidence of the harm that they continue to cause, to say nothing of the fact the poisoned jabs were developed by the use of stem cells harvested from butchered babies. 

This will be my last original commentary until Easter Monday. A series of republished reflections will appear between tomorrow and Easter Monday. (There will be an original commentary on Easter Monday.)

Two republished reflections, one on Spy Wednesday and one on Saint John Damascene, whose feast is downgraded to a commemoration today, Wednesday of Holy Week, can be found by scrolling below.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint John Damascene, pray for us.

A Spy Wednesday Reprise: Conciliarism's Patron "Saint": Judas Iscariot

As today is Wednesday of Holy Week, which is commonly known as Spy Wednesday, I thought it appropriate to republish a commentary about the conciliar fascination with the salvation of the traitor named Judas Iscariot. 

The Office of Tenebrae this evening commences the Paschal Triduum of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Passion, Death, and Resurrection, May Our Lady send us all the graces we need to retreat from the world and its distractions so that we can be focused solely on all that her Divine Son's sufferings that our sins, having transcended time, imposed upon His Sacred Humanity. Indeed, it was the fearful thought of coming into contact with sin, which is the very antithesis of His Sacred Divinity, that caused Our Lord to sweat droplets of His Most Precious Blood in His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemani. Our Lord did all of this in perfect obedience to His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal God the Father and out of the ineffable love for us stupid, self-centered, ungrateful and erring sinners from the depths of His Most Sacred Heart, which Itself was formed out of the Immaulate Heart of Mary that would be pierced through and through with the sword of suffering that had been prophesied by the aged Simon in the Temple at her Purification. 

Additionally, of course, we must remember that Our Lady suffered a martyrdom of her most pure soul as she shared perfectly in the sufferings of her Divine Son, which was the subject of Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the Biggest Fool of Them All, which was written several years ago.

Dom Prosper Guranger's reflection on Wednesday of Holy Week, which concentrates on Our Blessed Lord and Saviour's love for us sinful creatures, is appended below, and appended below that is a tribute to the great son of Spain, Saint Hermegild, written by Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who counted Saint Leander as one of his closest friends. Saint Hermegild refused communion with heretics and he refused to take Holy Communion from heretics. Herein lies a lesson for us all.  (All feasts, including tomorrow's of Saint John of Capistrano, are suppressed because of the Paschal Triduum and the first three days of the Easter Octave, thereafter being commemorated rather than celebrated through Low Sunday.)

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint John Damscene, pray for us.

On the Commemorated Feast of Saint John Damascene, Foe of Iconoclasm

The great saint whose feast whose feast is commemorated today, Wednesday, March 27, 2024, Wednedsay of Holy Week (Spy Wednesday),  Saint John Damascene, fought the iconoclasts in his day, and while many, although far from all, of our Catholic churches are now in the hands of the conciliar iconoclasts, we can festoon our homes with images of Our Lord and Our Lady and Saint Joseph and other saints as we use these images to remind us that we are united to the saints represented in these images by means of the Communion of Saints that we hope to share Heaven with them for all eternity in the glory of the Beatific Vision.

Today, course, is our daughter Lucy’s twentieth-second birthday and the sixteenth anniversary of her First Holy Communion. Please pray for her today.

Another republished commentary and an original commentary will be published within a haf hour of this posting.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint John Damascene, pray for us.

"Give Us Caiphas!" "Give Us Caiphas!"

The conciliar “bishops” of the United States of America have been in the vanguard of following the lead of the “Second” Vatican Council and of the “popes” who have been faithful to its false agenda of appeasing the Talmudic claimants of the dead, superseded religion that is Judaism.

This commentary explains how a recent “pastoral note” about the Passion according to Saint John the Evangelist, which, yes, is read or sung in Novus Ordo churches on Good Friday, must not be interpreted in a way that connote that the Jewish people or religion have been rejected or that all Jews bear the guilt of Our Lord’s Crucifixion.

Efforts have been made to make the necessary distinctions on a matter that has become “controversial” even though the Catholic Church has made it plain that Judaism lost its status as the true religion when Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ took His last breath on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. The earth shook, darkness covered the world, the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, signifying the public ratification of the New and Eternal Testament that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had instituted at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday, thereby ending the Levitical priesthood of heredity and replacing it with His own priesthood with a dignity far exceeding that of the Old Dispensation.

A blessed Palm Sunday to you all.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel (whose feast is impeded this year), pray for us.

A Holy Week Reflection: From Eden to Palm Sunday (2024)

Today, Sunday, March 24, 2024, is Palm Sunday. I do not know about you, but this Lent seems to have flown by very rapidly.

We have now entered into the most solemn week of the year as we withdraw more and more from the world and its false allurements to unite ourselves as never before with the events of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Passion and Death prior to experiencing the glory of His Resurrection following the Mass on Holy Saturday, March 30, 2024, and on Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024, thus beginning a marvelous celebration of the Octave of Easter and the Easter season.

We need Our Lady’s help to keep and to intensify our Lenten penances this week. May our reliance upon the Most Sorrowful Mysteries of her Holy Rosary aid us in understanding what our sins did to her Divine Son and to her and how grateful we must be for being the unmerited beneficiaries of the Mercy won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross and for being given from that Cross so great and wonderful and perfect a mother as she, Our Blessed Mother, is to us by Our Divine Redeemer Himself.

"From Eden to Palm Sunday" is a substantial revision of a reflection that I wrote for the printed pages of Christ or Chaos in 1997. Given the vastness of the subject, this reflection is pitifully, woefully inadequate. The revised article is really a condensed version of what was gone into in greater detail in the Living in the Shadow of the Cross lecture program. About half of the lecture program dealt with material condensed in the current article. Obviously, Holy Week is not a time to watch this lecture program! However, it is there for those who are interested at some point during the months that follow.

To greet Christ the King this Palm Sunday and every day of our lives, we must not let anything get in the way of letting Him treat us according to the tender mercies of His Most Sacred Heart, remembering that nothing anyone does to us, says about us or causes us to suffer is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His fearful Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that caused those Swords of Sorrow to be pierced through and through the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother.

Our fervor during this week of weeks must be genuine, and we must beg Our Lady, especially by meditating upon the Sorrowful Mysteries of her Most Holy Rosary, to help us persist in this fervor moment by moment, day by day, week in and week out, month after month, year after year until the time when we meet Christ the King, Our Crucified and Risen Saviour, at the moment of our Particular Judgment.

A new commentary will be posted within ten minutes after this republished reflection. I will do everything possible to have another new commentary published in around twenty-seven hours. Thank you.

I once again ask readers to make a non-tax-deductible financial gift if at all possible.

A blessed Palm Sunday and a blessed Holy Week to you all.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel (whose feast is impeded by Palm Sunday this year), pray for us.

On the Feast of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Passiontide (2024

Unfathomable.
 
Just unfathomable
 
Only a handful of genuine mystics and truly gifted spiritual masters have been able to comprehend the unfathomable mysteries of grief that overwhelmed the fairest creature of our race, Our Lady, as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were plunged through and through her Immaculate Heart. We sin so casually, so thoughtlessly, so repeatedly, rarely giving a moment’s worth of a meditation to how our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer unspeakable horrors during His Passion and Death, horrors that penetrated the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother as she, conceived without any stain of Original or Actual Sin, suffered in a perfect communion of Hearts with Him. It cannot be that way with us from this day forward.
 
We are on the cusp of Holy Week, ending now the first week in Passiontide, Passion Week. We must enter deep into the mysteries of our salvation, which was wrought for us by the perfect obedience of the Word made Flesh in Our Lady’s Virginal and Immaculate Womb to the Will of His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father. We must quit our sins once and for all, recognizing how they caused the God-Man and His Most Blessed Mother to suffer, how they wound our own souls, which have been purchased by the shedding of every single drop of the Divine Redeemer’s Most Precious Blood, and how they have brought great sorrow into the Heart out of which was formed Our Redeemer’s Most Sacred Heart.
 
No more sin.
 
No more joking about sin.
 
No more dismissiveness about the gravity of sin.
 
We must repent and amend our lives as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady brought forth her Divine Son painlessly and miraculously. She brought us forth in great pain as the adopted children of the Living God as she stood so valiantly by the foot of the Cross on Good Friday. She stands by the foot of her Divine Son’s Most Holy Cross in every true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by a true bishop or a true priest. We must stand by her each day at Holy Mass as we make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world with every beat of our hearts, making sure as well to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.
 
As a courtesy to Catholics worldwide, the entire text of The Servite Manual: BEHOLD THY MOTHER: A Collection of Devotions Chiefly in Honor of OUR LADY OF SORROWS has been placed online at the website of Saint Augustine Chapel (Carrollton, Virginia): The Servite Manual: BEHOLD THY MOTHER. Devotions in honor of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary run from pages 169-234.
 
Part twenty-two of "Sin: More Deadly Than the Coronavirus" will be published tomorrow, Saturday of Passion Week, April 1, 2023. My work on it is nearly complete. However, I still need to write my conclusion, review the text for content and (cough, cough) typrographical errors before beginning the tedious process of formatting it for posting on this site. Thank you for your patience.
 
Finally, the unprecedented, unjuet, and poltically-motivated indictment of former President Donald John Trump by a Soros-backed district attorney who dismisses or downgrades charges against recidivist violent criminals in the name of "social justice" is, not matter its newsworthiness, meant by the adversary to agitate people during this holy time of Passiontide. Our time is not to spent wasting a single moment on the former president's arraignment, possibly as early as next week, Holy Week, the very week of weeks in our liturgical year, but on the sacred mysteries of our Redemption and how our sins caused the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that caused Our Lady to suffer in perfect communion with Him.
 
A blessed Feast of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary to you all!
 
The next original article for this site is nearing completion.
 
Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.
 
Saint Isidore the Farmer, pray for us.
 
Saint Catherine of Genoa, pray for us.

On the Feast of Saint Benedict of Nursia, the Founder of Western Monasticism

This reflection contrasts the work of Saint Benedict of Nursia with that of the two most recent conciliar “popes.”

Much time is spent in this reflection giving attentionto Bergoglio’s denial of the commission that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ gave to the Eleven on Ascension Thursday to convert all men to the true Faith. Saint Benedict of Nursia, the father of western Monasticism and thus of Europe itself, had an intolerance for such teaching. So should we.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us. 

Saint Benedict of Nursia, pray for us.

The Sacrament of Confirmation: To Be Foot Soldiers in the Army of Christ, Now and Forever

This is a brief republished reflection on the Sacrament of Confirmation sixty-three years to the day after I received it at the hands of the late Bishop Walter P. Kellenberg, the founding bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, Long Island, New York.

Another original article should appear by the Feast of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Passiontide or, at the very latest, by Saturday of Passion Week. 

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint Benedict of Nursia, pray for us.

Saint Isidore the Farmer, pray for us.

Saint Maria de la Cabeza, pray for us.

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