Courtesy of the hard work of one of this site's readers who transcribed the prayers contained herein from various sources, I present to you prayers for the last half hour of 2023 and the first half hour of 2024. 

The only thing that I would recommend to be added to the prayers below is to end the old year by praying two thirds of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary and to start the New Year by praying the fiinal third, namely, the Glorious Mysteries.

May we always offer up all our thoughts, words, prayers, sacrifices, sufferings, penances, joys, and sorrows to the Throne of the Most Holy Trinity as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Viva Cristo Rey!

Jmmaculate Heart of Mary,  pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

This is the concluding part of the last two-part commentary to be published on this website this year, which ends in just about twenty-three hours, forty-three minutes of this posting.

The commentary concludes with my annual reflection on Pope Saint Sylvester I, whose feast day is commemorated today, Sunday within the Octave of Christmas, as I found it useful to contrast Pope Saint Sylvester's defense of the Catholic Faith with Jorge Mario Bergoglio's abandonment of it.

Let us give thanks to Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother for the graces that have been bestowed upon us during the year of 2023 as we beg for even more graces during the year of 2024.

Another new commentary should appear on the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, Tuesday, January 2, 2024, or on the Octave Day of Saint John the Evangelist, Wednesday, January 3, 2024.

A blessed New Year of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ 2024 to you all.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Pope Saint Sylvester I, pray for us,

This is part one of a two-part commentary, Part two should appear tomorrow, December 30, 2023.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Thomas a Becket, pray for us.

There was a time when there were real, honest-to-goodness Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury.

Let's see here, that would be from the time of Saint Augustine of Canterbury in 597 A.D. to the time of Reginald Cardinal Pole in 1558, a period of nearly a millennium.

The fortieth legitimate Archbishop of Canterbury is the saint whose feast we celebrate today, Saint Thomas a Becket, who was indeed a martyr for the Church's liberties. Saint Thomas a Becket asserted the rights of Christ the King as the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisting that clerics accused of civil crimes be tried in ecclesiastical, not civil, courts. This led him to clash with his onetime friend, King Henry II of the House of Plantagenet. Prefiguring another English king named Henry (this one, number The Eighth, from the House of Tudor), Henry II could not abide his former friend's resistance to his, Henry's attempt to assert royal power over the Church, leading him to uttering the words that would inspire three of his barons to murder the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket, on this date in 1170, eight hundred forty-seven years ago now. The latter Henry, the one called "The Eighth," had Saint Thomas a Becket's relics destroyed as his martyrdom was a reminder to one and all that the Church has Divine Rights superior to those of the civil state.

King Henry II had to do public penance for uttering the words that resulted in the martyrdom of Saint Thomas a Becket. His son, King John I, having been slow to learn the lessons of his public penance, was forced by his barons and noblemen in the year 1215 to sign the Magna Carta to guarantee the rights of the Church under civil law in England. This was a victory for the liberties of the Catholic Church that had been won by the blood of this great champion of the Social Reign of Christ the King, Saint Thomas a Becket, whose intercession we seek this day and every day for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King in all nations, including the United States of America. Indeed, the situation we face in the United States of America today is the direct result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry.

Nations founded in the belief that men can pursue the common temporal good without subordinating themselves to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explications who believe that they can be "good" and "virtuous" on their own powers without belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace--are bound to degenerate over the course of time.

Statism is the only end result of the process of decay that must occur when nations reject the simple truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. And it is the statists of the present moment, enabled as they are at this time by Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his band of conciliar revolutionaries, who sacrifice the legitimate national sovereignty and national security of their own nations in order to demonstrate their "solidarity" with "bettering" the world on a "global" basis.

A new commentary should appear within twenty minutes of this posting.

A continued blessed Christmas and a blessed Feast of Saint Thomas a Becket to you all!

Our Lady, Mother of God, pray for us.

Saint Thomas a Becket, pray for us.

Today, the Fourth Day within the Octave of Christmas, is the Feast the Holy Innocents, the children who were put to death at the orders of the jealous titular King of Judea who had been installed by the Roman occupiers to pacify resistance to their unjust occupation of the Holy Land.

King Herod the Great, whose sons Herod and Philip were no less corrupt and violent than he was, wanted to kill the Baby King Whom he thought to be a threat to his own political suzerainty, such as it was as a puppet ruler under the Roman occupiers. It meant nothing to him to wipe out so many innocent children in his quest to kill the Baby King, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who was born in Bethlehem to save, his, Herod the Great's, own immortal soul by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

There have been imitators of Herod the Great throughout history who have sought to put to death the followers of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in an insane effort to wipe the Faith off of the face of this earth. The names of these imitators are legion. Their likes are to be found in our own midst today as politicians of both major organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America, the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, believe that a just social order can be established and maintained while innocent preborn human beings are slaughtered under cover of law and while the Sovereignty of Christ the King is denied in favor of the sovereignty of men and their false, naturalistic, semi-Pelagian and anti-Incarnational ideas.

That having been noted, however, it is important to point out that the Holy Innocents are honored as saints because they died in the place of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as a political potentate drunk with his own self-importance sought to kill the Newborn Baby King with a furious rage. The slaughter of the innocent preborn today, as horrible as it is and as deserving of our attention especially by means of praying Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary and by means of sidewalk counseling, is different in that the children being killed today are not being targeted specifically in the place of Our Lord.

Unlike the speculative conclusions offered by the "International Theological Commission" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism in 2007, the Catholic Church has never held out "hope" that the souls of unbaptized infants go to Heaven, which is why the crime of the killing of the preborn is so monstrous as it kills the souls of those involved in the execution and denies the slaughtered babies the glory of the Beatific Vision. The Holy Innocents are saints because they were targeted quite specifically because of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and thus shed their blood on His account.

We need to invoke the intercession of the Holy Innocents today and every day to stop the shedding of the blood of the innocent under cover of law, praying to them especially that Catholics blinded by the allure of various naturalistic "strategies" to end the social evils of the day will be reminded of this truth stated by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must reign as King of men and nations, my friends. Accept no naturalistic substitutes from the "Herods" of this world and their enablers in the counterfeit church of conciliarism who reject the Social Reign of the Newborn King, Our Divine Redeemer Whom Herod the Great sought to kill.

Work continues on the next original article.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

The Holy Innocents, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, a son of Zebedee, was the youngest of the twelve Apostles. He was a virgin, a man who offered to His Divine Master, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, pure love in a heart that was not sullied by the world, the flesh and the devil.

This youngest Apostle with the purest heart was permitted to lean on Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's chest, wherein beat His Most Sacred Heart, at the Last Supper. And it was this purity of heart possessed by Saint John the Evangelist that led him to be present at the foot of the Holy Cross and to be given the singular privilege by Our Divine Redeemer of caring for His own Most Blessed Mother until the time of her death and bodily Assumption into Heaven.

Despite what the now retired Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI contended blasphemously in his Jesus of Nazareth book concerning the "disputed" nature of the human authorship of the Fourth Gospel, Saint John the Evangelist is indeed the human author of the Fourth Gospel and of his epistles and the Book of the Apocalypse.

Saint John is the Evangelist of the Incarnation of the Word whose Gospel provides us with Scriptural proofs for the doctrine of the Eucharist and for the Sacrament of Penance. And the Charity preached by Saint John the Evangelist was no exercise in empty sentimentality. For it was Saint John himself who wrote:

"Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God. And every one that loveth him who begot, loveth him also who is born of him. In this we know that we love the children of God: when we love God, and keep his commandments. For this is the charity of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not heavy. " (1 John 5: 1-3.)

This reflection has been revised and expanded in several places over the years.

The next original article for this site, which deals with Fiducia Supplicans, should be published within twenty-four to twenty-six hours of this republished reflection,

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us to remain faithful to the Catholic Faith.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

The Mohammedan Mayor of Bethlehem canceled all public celebrations of Christmas in the place where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was born to the Most Pure Virgin Mary, at Midnight, in piercing cold, and there are leftist ideologues all over the world who have blasphemed Our Lord’s Nativity by asserting nothing is “more important” than the massacre of innocent Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Force.

Tragic people, misguided people, uninformed people—all seeking salvation in the wrong places, all failing to recognize that Christ is the King and that without Him and His true Church all must fall into disarray.

A commentary on Fiducia Supplicans will appear by the Feast of the Holy Innocents, Thursday, December 28, 2023. Suffice it to say for the moment that I have long believed that an open schism within the conciliar sect would not occur. However, it appears to be that Fiducia Supplicans will be the causus belli that may prompt Jorge Mario Bergoglio to start whacking off the heads of those who are promising to disobey him. Anyhow, the commentary should appear no later than two days from now.

Also, non-tax-deductible financial gifts would be very welcomed at this time!

A continued blessed Christmas to you all!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Stephen the Protomartyr, pray for us.

The shadow of the Holy Cross hung over the cave in Bethlehem even as the shepherds who had been called by angels from the nearby fields adored the Infant King alongside the Mother of God and her Most Chaste Spouse, Saint Joseph.

Holy Mother Church directs our attention to this fact today as we focus on the truth that the Birth of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in Bethlehem on Christmas Day was to make possible our own spiritual rebirth in the Baptismal font and our birth unto eternal life at the moment of our deaths if we persist to the very end in states of Sanctifying Grace. The path to our salvation runs directly through the Holy Cross and it requires us to be willing to sacrifice riches and honors and pleasures and human respect and even our very lives to bear witness to Christ the King as He has revealed Himself to men exclusively through the Catholic Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.

Saint Stephen the Protomartyr was willing to lay down his life as he preached the Gospel of the Divine Redeemer in an attempt to convert the Jews who were listening to him and engaging him in disputation. He exhibited the Virtue of Fortitude as he proclaimed the Gospel in the midst of insults an threats. And Saint Stephen the Protomartyr exhibited the Virtue of Charity as he prayed for his executioners, one of whom was the fire-breathing anti-Catholic zealot named Saul of Tarsus.

Saint Stephen's prayers at the time of his martyrdom and from eternity thereafter won the conversion of Saul, who became the Apostle to the Gentiles, Saint Paul the Apostle. Saint Stephen wanted to effect the conversion of his executioners. He did not seek to reaffirm them in their act of murder or to reaffirm them in the practice of Judaism. Saint Stephen did not dismiss or denigrate the gravity of their crimes. He simply did not hold those crimes against his persecutors as he prayed for their conversion.

We must pray always for those who hate us, for those who calumniate us, for those who have done us some injury in the past, for those who have rejected us for one reason or another. Praying for and forgiving those from whom we are estranged is not an option for a Catholic. It is an obligation of the interior life imposed directly by the God-Man Himself in the Sermon on the Mount.

If He forgives us so readily in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, why are we so slow to forgive others who owe us but an infinitesimally small portion of what we owe Him for our own forgiven sins?

As the late Father John Hardon, S.J., noted in a 1996 conference in Sterling Heights, Michigan, at which I gave two presentations, "God permits us to sin so that we can forgive each other. Let me repeat myself here: God permit us to sin so that we can forgive each other."

A sinner who is contrite and thankful to God never withholds forgiveness from his fellow sinner. Saint Stephen teaches us that lesson today.

Are we going to learn it once and for all?

A continued merry and most blessed Christmas to you all.

A new article will be published within fifteen minutes of this posting. 

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Stephen the Protomartyr, pray for us.

This is the third and final republished reflection on the Nativity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to be posted for your consideration.

Once again, a blessed Christmas to you all!

(A new article, A Personal Remembrance of Father Louis J. Campbell, R.I.P., was published a little over twenty-four hours ago.)

This is the second of three reflections on the Feast of the Nativity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to be posted for your consideration.

Venite Adoremus!

The Newborn Babe, Christ the King has been born for us.

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

Saint Joseph, pray for us.