Although I will have a brief original article published tomorrow, Spy Wednesday, Sharon has taken the time to provide you, the readers of this website, with devotional prayers in honor of Our Lady of Sorrows. The prayers are taken from the Servite Manual, BEHOLD THY MOTHER: A Collection of Devotions Chiefly in Honor of OUR LADY OF SORROWS. that she purchased in the late-1990s at Queen of Angels Church in Newhall, California. This wonderful prayer book, which is laden with prayers and devotions, is very hard to find now as it is out-of-print (a friend told us recently that a copy was sold on eBay for over three hundred dollars).

Please do say three Hail Marys for Sharon for being inspired to volunteer to undertake this work, remembering to include Lucy, who typed a few of the prayers, as well!

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Tomorrow, Tuesday of Holy Week, March 31, 2015, marks the tenth anniversary of the court-ordered execution of Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo, a brain-damaged human being who was no closer to death than anyone of us, by the cruel process of starvation and dehydration. As one who wrote extensively on the killing of this innocent human being and who spoke at a rally directly across from the hospice where her death sentence would be carried out six days later, it is saddening--so very saddening--to have reviewed the facts of Mrs. Schiavo's case in this retrospective that was written five years ago now. It is also very sad to have that Catholics have to be reminded of the simple moral truth that no one may undertake any action that has as its only direct end the death of an innocent human being. The removal of the provision of food and water from a living human being can result in only one possible end, the death of that person, something that can never be willed for one who is innocent. Why is it so difficult to recognize that the two of the Corporal Works of Mercy are to "feed the hungry" and to "give drink to the thirsty"?

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Eternal rest grant unto the soul of Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all of the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

This is Palm Sunday. 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, April 4, 2015, and on Easter Sunday, 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 is gone into in greater detail in the Living in the Shadow of the Cross lecture program. About half of the lecture program deals with material condensed in the current article. Obviously, Holy Week is not 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.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Many of the conciliar revolutionaries have smashed statues of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and Our Lady and Saint Joseph and other saints with an iconoclastic abandon. The great saint we commemorate today on the Feast of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Passiontide, 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 of we are united to the saints represented in these images by means of the Communion of Saints and that we hope to share Heaven with them for all eternity in the glory of the Beatific Vision.

Today is, of course, our daughter Lucy’s thirteenth birthday and the seventh anniversary of her First Holy Communion. The years have just flown by. I look at our daughter and see a tall girl a who stands over five feet tall now entering her teen years. We are very blessed to have our dear daughter, who is being taught by a mother possessed of a pure love of the Holy Catholic Faith and a deep, tender devotion to the Mother of God. I give thanks every day and night for the blessings represented by my family. Deo gratias! Please do pray for Lucy Mary Therese Norma Droleskey on her birthday today.

Thank you.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint John Damascene, pray for us.

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.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint John Damscene, pray for us.

It was not possible to complete this article overnight, which is why work on it was interrupted shortly after Midnight.

Although my own time and physical limitations did not permit anything near a complete analysis of March 15, 2015, article published by Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s nonagenarian atheist pal Eugenio Scalfari, an attempt has been made to deal with several things that he ascribes as having been said by Jorge Mario Bergoglio even though it is not at all clear when and where, for example, he said that the “lost” soul is “annihilated” after death and that there is no punishment thereafter.

Yes this sounds a little rich even for the Argentine Apostate. Granted. However, the Modernist’s reiteration of his much expressed hatred for precision of doctrine, which he says cannot bring us joy, earlier today at the Casa Santa Marta inside the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River make this more plausible to believe by the moment.
I am done with Jorge and his apostasies until after Holy Week. A revised reflection on the Feast of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Passiontide and a revised reflection on Saint John Damascene, whose feast is commemorated today, Friday, March 27, 2015, will be published late this evening.

Thank you.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Today's article is a slightly revised reflection on the feast we celebrate today, the feast which signifies the moment when the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the very Word through Whom all things were made, personally entered into human history as He was made Incarnate in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, Who overshadowed Our Lady after she had given her perfect Fiat to the Will of the First Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Father, as that Will was made known to her by Saint Gabriel the Archangel. The whole of human history is changed today--and no one can remain neutral about what happened on this day.

If the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity really did become Man this day in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb so as to redeem us on the wood of the Holy Cross thirty-three years later, as we know is indeed the case, then every person and every nation on the face of this earth must acknowledge this fact and subordinate everything to the Deposit of Faith that He has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. We must pray to Our Lady every day so that we will never lose sight of the centrality of the Incarnation in our own lives and in the lives of our nations, never lose sight of the fact that Holy Mass itself is Incarnational as the Word Who was made Incarnate in her Virginal and Immaculate Womb is made Incarnate on altars of sacrifice under the appearances of bread and wine by true bishops and true priests.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ spent nine months in the tabernacle of Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb, thereby sanctifying the wombs of al mothers. He is in solidarity with every child in every mother's womb. Every abortion, whether by chemical or surgical means, is an indirect attack on the Incarnation that took place this very day.

A blessed Feast of the Annunciation of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to His Most Blessed Mother by Saint Gabriel the Archangel to you all.

As yesterday was one of those days when my physical strength was flagging, I could not complete an original article that might appear tomorrow. The new commentary will deal with what can be called a rather strange editorial written by the atheist Eugenio Scalfari, whose interview with Jorge Mario Bergolio in September of 2013 that was published on October 1, 2013, generated worldwide headlines.

Caution, I believe, is needed this time, though, as it is unclear whether Scalfari is summarizing the Argentine Apostate’s thoughts or has had a new interview with him. It is with this cautionary note that my own commentary is being written, although the contentions that Scalfari made in his article are plausibly ascribable to Bergoglio, who, it appears, has given himself an “out” once again given the ambiguous nature of the commentary. More, though, tomorrow or on Friday, the Feast of the Seven Dolors of Our Lady in Lent and the Commemorations of Saint John Damascene and of Friday in Passion Week.

Finally, I urge readers of this site to flock to Mr. Timothy Duff's http://www.neemcog.com/index.htm (New English Edition of The Mystical City of God), where you will find the entirety of the Venerable Mary of Agreda's The Mystical City of God in an easy-to-read format that reflects Mr. Duff's years of painstaking labor to correct various mistranslations of the Spanish original text into the English language. Mr. Duff is one of the foremost experts in the world on The Mystical City of God, and I only discovered that the site was live when doing a search for it last evening. Please avail yourself of the richness provided in this important work, and do say three Aves for Mr. Duff and his large family. Thank you.

Holy Mother, Mary of God, pray for us now, and at the hour our death!

Although there is much familiar material to those who have been reading this site for a while, this is an effort to “refresh” that information in light of Bishop Richard Williamson’s consecration of Bishop Jean-Michel Faure in Brazil on the Feast of Saint Joseph, Thursday, March 19, 2015, without a papal mandate from the man he accepts as a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter, “Pope Francis,” otherwise known as the Argentine Apostate. Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us. Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Today's article is a reflection on Passiontide, which begins today, Passion Sunday, March 22, 2015, and the Commemoration of Saint Isidore the Farmer and of Saint Catherine of Genoa.

One of the recurring themes in my writing is the obligation each of us has as a Catholic to forgive others as we have been forgiven so freely and so readily by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ acting through an alter Christus in the Sacred Tribunal Penance. There is nothing that anyone can do to us, say about us or cause us to suffer, whether emotionally or physically, that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused the God-Man to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death as the Fourth through Seven Swords of Sorrow pierced the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother. If He forgives us recidivist sinners, steeped in the spiritual mediocrity of lukewarmness, so readily and so frequently, who are we to hesitate for a moment to forgive others anything and everything, whether real or imagined or exaggerated, that they have have said about us or done to us?

Our Lord entered His Passion so as to redeem us and thus to make it possible for us to know His forgiveness, first in the Baptismal font and then in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance (and, for our Venial Sins, every time a priest administers Absolution following the recitation of the Confiteor in the offering of Holy Mass). We must make good use of this Passiontide to be more forgiving as we seek out the mercy of the Divine Redeemer through the ministrations of a true priest acting in persona Christi in the confesional.

As a sinner who has been forgiven much in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, I have no energy at all (Deo gratias!) for nursing petty grudges and stewing in my juices about the judgments of others. Our sins imposed an unjust judgment on God in the very Flesh. It is good for us to suffer humiliation and rejection and calumny and scorn and derision. Very good for us. The more we suffer with love and gratitude is the more that we can unite ourselves to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. And even if we are the victims of real injustices and calumnies, so what? So what? Everything gets revealed on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead. Each of the just will be reconciled one to the other at that time. That happy reconciliation then can only take place, however, if we forgive others from our hearts in the here and now of this passing, mortal vale of tears!

Let’s make this the best Passiontide of our lives, grateful to Almighty God that He has brought us to the beginning of yet another Passiontide, uncertain though we may be as to we will live to see Easter Sunday in this passing, mortal vale of tears just two weeks from now on Sunday, April 5, 2015..

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint Isidore the Farmer, pray for us.

Saint Catherine of Genoa, pray for us.