March 29, 2024: The Most Solemn Day of the Year: Good Friday

This is the day that our sins transcended time and played their significant parts in putting God to death. The greatest crime in the history of the world was committed this day, Deicide, and we were among the guilty parties putting God on trial and then subjecting Him to horrible and painful humiliations and scourgings before we nailed Him to the wood of the Holy Cross, upon which He paid back to His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father the debt of our sins.

Yes, there is no greater crime than Deicide. There is also no greater act of love in all of human history as Love Incarnate took upon Himself the guilt of our sins though He was guilty of nothing. It was out of love for His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father's Holy Will and His matchless love for us that He, Who had instituted the Priesthood and the Eucharist last evening at the Last Supper, that He subjected Himself to the hands of us sinful men, even going so far as to make excuses for us, His executioners, as He hung on the gibbet of the Holy Cross.

This great act of sacrificial, redemptive love of the God-Man, Who had become Incarnate in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost, is re-presented in an unbloody manner on altars of Sacrifice by true bishops and true priests every day of the year except for today, Good Friday. Our focus today is on mourning for our sins and expressing our gratitude that we have been redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as we ask Our Lady to help us to grow in a greater fervor for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as we grow more and more detached from even our Venial Sins and come to despise them as much as we despise any Mortal Sins that, God forbid, we may have committed.

This is a day of solemnity and sobriety, a day of total withdrawal from the world and its madness. We spend our time in church today as we keep Our Lord company at the Altar of Repose prior to noon and as we participate in the Mass of the Presanctified. Our sins put God to death. We helped to murder God in the very Flesh.

How does God repay us ungrateful and frequently lukewarm sinners? He gives us the true Church, born out of the Blood and Water that flowed forth from His wounded side when It was pierced by Saint Longinus's lance, making possible our regeneration in the Baptismal font and in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, making it possible for us therefore to receive His very Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Most Blessed Sacrament in Holy Communion. And he give us His Blessed Mother, she who is our Co-Redemptrix, our Mediatrix and our Advocate, to be our Blessed Mother as He entrusts her to Saint John the Evangelist, whose fidelity to Our Lord on this day is meant to foreshadow our own fidelity by means of assisting at daily Mass frequently and of persevering until the point of our dying breaths in states of Sanctifying Grace by remaining a as close to Our Lady as he was.

Will we repay Our Divine Redeemer Who was nailed to the Cross this day with a true effort to amend our lives? Will we repay Our Divine Redeemer Who shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood this day with a greater effort to take seriously our consecration to His Most Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary? Will we seek to live at all times in light of First and Last Things as we bear our own crosses with love and joy and gratitude?

Our Lady stands ready to help us to bring us to Calvary every day. Sure, we must make the same kind of effort as Saint Helena made to find the site of the True Cross in the Fourth Century as the Mass has indeed been taken away by spiritual robber barons. However, Our Lady does indeed stand ready to fortify us in our resolve never to return to the muck and the mire of a false church whose "pope" mocks the Holy Cross and makes of It an instrument of socialistic "justice" and Judeo-Masonic globalism.  

May we give thanks and praise to Our Lord through His Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart this day for the wondrous mystery of His love that has made possible our eternal salvation.

I call your attention also to Father Francis X. Weninger's Third Sermon for Good Friday, this day of days.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Republished on March 28, 2024: Saint Robert Bellarmine on Our Lord's Agony in the Garden

Mindful that many of those who read these articles may not have access to those beautiful ceremonies where they live in this time of apostasy and betrayal, I thought that it would be useful service to those who view this site to republish Saint Robert Bellarmine's sermon to assist in their devotional lives during these days of days.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Our Lord Has Entered Into His Passion (2024)

This article, written in 2008 and revised over the years, is a reflection on the suffering that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ endured in the Garden of Gethsemane atop the Mount of Olives.

It is now the hour of darkness. Our Lord suffers in His Sacred Humanity as He contemplates the horror of coming into contact with the very antithesis of His Sacred Divinity, our sins. He sees all of the sins of  all men from the beginning until the end of time as He agonized in the Garden as the same three Apostles who accompanied Him to the top of Mount Thabor as He was Transfigured in glory before their very eyes, Saints Peter, James and John, fell fast asleep. May we stay awake and alert during this night as we keep Our Lord company in His Real Presence on the Altar of Repose (if at all possible in this time of apostasy and betrayal) as we render unto him acts of adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and petition through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Finally, one way to keep Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother company during these hours when He was betrayed, brought before the Jewish leaders for a mock trial and then imprisoned before being brought before Pontius Pilate is to read Chapters XII through XXIX of The New English Edition of the Mystical City of God: The Transfixion, Book Six: The Transfixion.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

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.

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