Calling All Space Cadets

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Although my typographical errors result in letters being transposed in words and the use of words that are close to being (but are not in fact) homonyms (could, good) and missing words and other assorted jumbled phrases (simple for simply--or vice versa, signs of dyslexia or fatigue or pre-Alzheimer's or just plain sloth), I do try to be careful in the words that I use to make various points. It was with uttermost care that chose my words to comment, if ever so briefly, on the ruminations of the conciliar Vatican's astronomer, Father Jose Gabriel Funes, on the possible existence of extraterrestrial beings:

Of all the absurdities that conciliarism presents to us on a regular basis, my friends, it is most telling that the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, now in conciliar captivity, believes that ruminations about the possible existence of space aliens is newsworthy. Imagine this. What does this matter to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. He is so steeped in his role as the Modernist academician that he sees no harm in this utter waste of time and effort and newsprint. Does anyone want to assert that Pope Saint Pius X would have tolerated such an article in L'Osservatore Romano during his pontificate? (Simply Bereft of the Faith.)

 

A lot of space cadets and video rangers out there in cyberspace missed the point of this paragraph, which was simply this: that we have more important things to do with our time than to speculate on the possible existence of space creatures, which is what I noted before I pasted a quote concerning the news story of Father Funes's article in L'Osservatore Romano:

Also clear from time to time is the absurdity of the conciliar Vatican's view of the world. At a time when the institutions of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are rife with perverted "bishops" and perverted "priests," at a time when over seventy percent of Catholics who are attached to that counterfeit church do not believe in the Real Presence of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist (a telling sign of that fact that Our Lord is not present in the tabernacles of most conciliar churches), at a time when thousands upon thousands of babies are being killed by chemical and surgical means every day in most of the countries of the world, at a time when Catholics, both alleged clerics and members of the laity, in perfect "good standing" in the conciliar structures reject whole articles contained in the Deposit of Faith and actually support very openly one abject evil after another, what are two of the subjects that interest the editors of the Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano? What? Space aliens and evolution! You can't make this stuff up.

 

Coming days after L'Osservatore Romano had carried yet another article in support of evolutionism, my comments were meant to convey the simple fact that conciliarists live in an unreal world that has no relation to the fact that "Rome," meaning in this instance the Faith in the lives of so many hundreds of millions of Catholics around the world, is burning and the conciliar fiddlers are speculating about things that have no direct bearing on the good souls (space aliens) or contradict the truths of the Holy Faith and even the facts adduced by true science, which can never be in conflict with the Faith (evolutionism).

Are there space creatures? Only God knows if there are such creatures. I tend to doubt their existence, although I had many students over the course of my thirty years of formal classroom teaching in various colleges and universities who were, most assuredly, "spaced out." God will let us know in His own good time if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, not that there's too much here on Planet Earth these days (been to a 7/11 lately)? If one happens to visit me one day,  I will simply say, "Hello, Mr. Space Man, how are you today? How's things on the Planet Mongo."

Folks, we are not to spend our lives on idle speculation about things that have no bearing on our salvation or on the right ordering of our nations in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. Yes, I was aware when I wrote my brief comments in Simply Bereft of the Faith that theologians had speculated in the past on the existence of intelligent life in other parts of the universe. An article by Father T. J,. Zubek, O.F.M., in the American Ecclesiastical Review in 1961, which was called to my attention by Mr. Mark Stabinski, provided a hypothesis explaining the possible existence of such extraterrestrial life at a time when the manned exploration of space had just begun. Father Zubek even developed a theory about how such creatures might not be in need of redemption as they would not be descended from Adam. Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, on the other hand, said in the early 1970s (probably in the year 1972, if I recall correctly), that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ would have had to take up His Cross again to redeem such extraterrestrial beings. One of volumes of the Baltimore Catechismeven has a question and answer dealing with the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, a choice of its editors that was perhaps not the wisest.

Theological speculation is for theologians. The popular dissemination of theological speculation on topics fraught with elements of the fantastic, a realm that has been exploited by those merchandising television programs and motion pictures and books dealing with the general subject of science fiction, distracts people from their real life terrestrial duties to sanctify and to save their souls as members of the true Church, the Catholic Church, that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Worse yet, of course, taken to its logical extreme, a fascination with these topics leads all too readily to the madness of the New Age movement and its allies in "Eastern mysticism" and the occult itself. We have only so much time here in this passing, mortal vale of tears. We must be concerned about making reparation for our own sins--and those of others--on the face of this earth, praying as many Rosaries each day as the duties of our states-in-life permit, not spending time in "UFO communities" or pining for the return of Art Bell to the airwaves on a nightly basis.

Father Frederick Faber has provided us with a healthy antidote to the insanity of articles in the semi-official newspaper concerning irrelevancies or outright contradictions of the Deposit of Faith. We should be spending our time meditating upon the profundities contained in reflections such as Father Faber's, not daydreaming about things that will be known to us in eternity, please God and by His Most Blessed Mother's intercession we die in states of Sanctifying Grace, or here in this life when God wills for us to know them:

The life of the Precious Blood in the Mind of God from all eternity is in one sense a real life, and in another sense an unreal one. It was not an actual life. It was a life of predestination, of foreseen beauty, of multiplied divine intentions. It was a specially divine intervention, if we may use such a word. It was an idea which could not have come to any mind but that of God, and therefore the complacency which it caused in the Divine Mind was immense. It was a sort of second Word to God, a created expression of his uncreated perfection. It was part of the most grand and glorious thought of God, the Incarnation. It wa a most important part of it. It was also a specially chosen part, selected for the accomplishment of our dominion of its Maker. In the mist dear and dread Mind of God it was a fountain always flowing. The beauty of its flowing had been one of his unbeginning gladnesses. It was the fountain which gave forth, multitudinous and beautiful as the creation of the radiant angels, the countless predestinations of the infinitely varying souls of men. The mystery of all election was the first glassed in its beaming depths. It was its spray, which caught the golden light of eternal things, and fell down before the throne, even as it is still falling now, and in starry showers of splendor. It was a mirror too in which the manifold countenances of the divine perfections looked always, and loved to make their beauty bearable to mortal eye. It is there to this day, that the opposition in God are seen to be harmonious most simple and worshipful. All parts of creation give us double views of God, simultaneous views of his seeming opposite perfections, just as on the Mount of Olives the eye may rest at will either on the Dead Sea or on the Holy City. But of no part of creation is this so true, or true in so high a sense, as of the Precious Blood. Redeeming grace tells the whole history of God, so far as it can be told, unfolds his character in all of its breadth which is comprehensible, and as it were recites and magnifies each separate perfection; and redeeming grace is the specialty of the Precious Blood. Moreover, the Precious Blood, dwelt also in the Mind of God as the type and model of all creation, whether fallen or unfallen. In its unity lay the germs of all created loveliness and of all created variety. Mary was its first shadow, its first reflection, the freshest copy of the original. No wonder then that it was an infinite delight to the Three Divine Persons. Tot hem it was none the less real because it was not yet actually created; for to god the solidest created substance is but as shadow compared with the reality of his ideas. Thus from all eternity did the Precious Blood reign like a sovereign thing in the adorable complacency of God.

As it had lived an eternal life in the Mind of God before creation, so also did it live a life of visible effects and real jurisdiction form the beginning of the world, before it had become itself an actual created thing in the mystery of the Incarnation. It was the Precious Blood which hindered the fall of man from being as irretrievable as the fall of angels had been. It did real work in every single soul which was created in those four thousand years. It altered their position in the world. It made the eye of God look differently on them. It rained supernatural graces upon their hearts. It diminished temporal chastisements. Neither was it less influential in the counsels of God than in the souls of men. It caused his compassion to overspread the whole earth. It turned the chronicles of the world into a succession of types, and shadows, and predictions of itself. While it was itself preparing all things for its own coming and shedding,it so controlled all things that they rather seemed to be a preparation for itself. It sounded in every thing that God said. It impressed its character upon every thing that God did. It underlay all heathen life, and all Hebrew life. It was the significance of the most significant, and also of the most insignificant events It moulded all sanctity into an onlooking for itself. It beautified the hearts of men for God with supernatural desires. For all those forty ages it was the secret meaning and the hidden agent of the world. All that blossomed upon earth blossomed only because the Precious Blood watered the soil under the ground. Who would not long to see it, as it would one day be, in the actual Human Heart which was to be its living chalice? Even the patience of long-waiting God might vouchsafe to yearn for the actual creation of the Precious Blood. How sweet then to him must have been that dear sanctity of Mary, whose beautiful compulsion caused the Word to anticipate his time!

But the hour arrived, and the Creator became a part of his own Creation. The Precious Blood was actually created, and rose and fell in pulses of true human life, and filled with joyous being the Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart, and lived its life of Three-and-Thirty Years among men. These Three-and-Thirty Years formed in all true senses the longest and most important epoch of the history of creation. They were filled with countless actions, the value of each one of which was infinite. The vocations stamped upon millions of souls came from those actions of God made man. Their energies are vigorously ruling the world at this hour. The have moulded age after age since then. All holiness has been but an infinitely diversified copy of them. Out of their merits the attributes of God daily drink their fill, and yet those merits still abound and overflow. Out of their merits the Sacraments are drawing incalculable exuberance of grace all day and night; and they are still full to the very brim, and capable of saving unnumbered new creations. Out of the satisfactions of those years the jurisdiction of the Church has drawn unlimited indulgences; yet no visible impression has been mae on their abundance. Poetry and art go to those years as to a school of heavenliest beauty; and all times and all minds find the lessons fresh and new. Theology sits by them as by abysses of divine wisdom, and one while is actively weaving her wondrous science out of them, and another while, captivated by their beauty, forgets to weave, is rapt in contemplation, and becomes devotion. As to devotion, those years are its very cloister and its garden. That life is God made visible to his creatures as the rule of life. It lays bare the very foundations of morals. It reveals the possibilities of human actions, while it also paints as in a picture the indefinable operations of the Holy Ghost. It is a freshness and a joy to think that, at this hour of the peaceful dawn, thousands of souls are silent before God, caught in the sweet snares of the beauty of these earthly years of Jesus. Our Lord revealed to the Blessed Michael of Florence, the Camaldolese, how he longed that those who loved him should honor the Thiry-Three Years with affectionate minuteness. It has been the characteristic devotion of all the saints. The souls that have been most drawn to meditate upon the attributes of God have learned their science in that other science of the Three-and-Thirty Years. Sometimes this devotion takes special possession of a religious order for some length of time. Sometimes it fastens upon a single religious house, and develops itself with marvellous fertility. This appears to have been the case with the Carmelite convent at Dole in the seventeenth century. To Sister Anne of Cross, lay-sister, it was the form and type of her whole life. It came natural to her do even her ordinary actions in thirty-threes. Still more did her penances and devotions take that shape. When that she was asked if she did not weary of such a reiterated devotion, she replied that, so far from it, it always came to hear as new. The devotion of Mother Louisa of Jesus was even yet more remarkable. She could hardly occupy her soul with any thing but the Thirty-Three Years; and the abundant lights she received from God in prayer had chiefly reference to this devotion. The first years of the Sacred Infancy were "delicious" to her soul. She had an especial attraction to contemplate the first time our Lord bent on his knees, and clasped his hands, in prayer to the Father. Her holiness seemed always to be a participation in some of the interior dispositions of Jesus upon earth; and the characteristics of her spiritual life, consequent upon this devotion, were persevering fervor and extreme joyousness. She imprinted this devotion upon the whole community, and also upon the externs who came across her.

We see remarkable traces of the same devotion in our Lord's answer to the prayers of Frances of the Mother of God, Carmelitress at Dieppe, distinguished for her devotion to the Precious Blood. When she was praying for the soul of Sister Catherine of the Angels, she asked our Lord after Communion to apply to Sister Catherine's soul one drop of his Precious Blood in order to achieve her deliverance. Our Lord answered, "I have given her one of my steps," thus showing the value of his least actions. At another time she made the same prayer for Sister Elizabeth of the Nativity, asking for one drop of the Precious Blood; and our Lord answered, "I will give her one of my tears, the efficacy of which is so great that it would turn hell into paradise, if it were applied there." These answers seem to imply a special devotion in Frances of the Mother of God to the Thirty-Three Years; and that saintly religious was one of the most remarkable among the holy persons of the seventeenth century.

We speak very truly when we divide the world into many worlds. We take of the vegetable world, and the mineral world, and the animal world. We even subdivide these into lesser world. We go to the sidereal world to learn the immensities of space. Geology opens a world to us, which overshadows us with its distances of time. We call a man a little world in himself; and the microscopic world, which it is so rife with new aspects of God, delights us with all that it insinuates of the possibilities and likelihoods of the invisible world of immaterial and angelic life. We call these by the name of worlds, because they seem like complete creations in themselves, and are each of them a distinct revelation of God, distinct from all other revelations of him, and yet harmonizing with them all. They are separate shadows of God. The are his wisdom and his beauty, his power and his love, seen from different points of view. He is many Creators in one Creator. We are very right in making his one world into many worlds. So it is with the Incarnation. The whole material universe is not so vast as that one world of the Incarnation, nor capable of so many or such magnificent subdivisions. Intellectually or spiritually, the Thirty-Three Years form a world far vaster than the world of stars. They can even bear to be subdivided into many other worlds, which are still spacious enough for the swift intelligences of angels, as well as the rapidity of glorified human minds, to traverse for eternity, finding fresh wonders evermore. The Precious Blood has one biography in Mary's Womb, where it issued from the lone sanctities of her immaculate heart. It has another in Bethlehem, and another in Egypt, and another in Nazareth, and another on the shores of Gennesareth, and another in Jerusalem, and another in Galilee. Each of these is a world beyond the measures of our science, a cloister for devotion, and yet a cloister in which eternity has ample room. God's vastness is a living vastness. It carries itself everywhere, and everywhere is entire and transcends the necessities of space. Each of these separate worlds of the life of Jesus upon earth is tied by some occult sympathy to some particular attribute, or group of attributes to God. Thus we learn in the life of Mother Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, Carmalitess, at Dijon, that the souls which are called to a special devotion to our Lord's Resurrection have always a peculiar attraction to worship the divine sanctity. These are glimpses of that glad science of the Three-and-Thirty Years, which will be part o four unutterable bliss beyond the grave. Surely it makes the world seem wearier than ever, to think of the unsuspected grandeurs which the mysteries of our sweet Jesus are waiting to pour out into our souls, when he has received us into his kingdom.

It is plain, from what has been said, that our knowledge of the inward life of the Precious Blood during the Thirty-Three Years must be very superficial. Nevertheless, we must put it before ourselves as clearly as we can. Its first beginning was in the thrills of beatific joy. We shall see reasons afterward for carefully noting this. The beginning of the Human Life of Jesus was not gradual. It had no dawn. Its very union with the Divinity rendered this impossible. It broke out of nothingness into the blaze of consciousness and blessed ecstasy. It saw God as not even Mary sees him now. It saw him, went out of sight of all creation toward comprehending him, enjoyed him as not all heaven after the Doom will enjoy him, and adored him as no fabulous number of possible worlds could ever have adored him. This was the first pulse of the Precious Blood. They very first throb had in it an incalculable immensity of gladness. Out of its first moment all worlds might be gladdened beyond their power of bearing gladness. Save the Uncreated Jubilee, the sweet Spirit of the Father and the Son, never was there jubilee like that of the Precious Blood in its beginning. Yet from that hour the jubilee has never ceased; it has never lessened; it has never changed. Its pulses are not tides. They imply no vicissitude. They betoken only an equable impetuosity of immutable delight. The gladness which flashed like lightning out of the eyes of the Infant into the heart of Mary was unabated when the same eyes drooped languidly toward her upon Calvary. The blessedness which broke forth like a creation of light in the glory of the Resurrection had never left the Sacred Heart even during the Way of the Cross. But, with the beatific joy, the Precious Blood had all other joys as well. That Human Life as a joy in itself, a joy in its divine union, independently of its vision of God. It was a joy in the love and possession of so sweet a Mother. It was a joy in the unearthly tranquility of Joseph's deep, loving adorable heart,. It was a joy in the jubilee of the worshipping angels. It was a joy in the very bitterness of its redeeming woes, and it was a joy in the intensity of its own loves of God and men.

But it was a life also of colossal of sorrows, even though they abated not the joy. Never did blood of man throb with such excesses of anguish as the Precious Blood of our most dear Redeemer. Its sorrows were lifelong. Their excesses exceeded all the tortures of the martyrs. There was never a moment which was not occupied with sorrow. The jubilee never commingled with the woe, not tempered it, nor compensated for it. Nay, rather, all joys intensified the sorrows. Joy, surely, is in itself a diviner thing than sorrow; for there can be no sorrow in the Ever-blessed. But sorrow was more human; and therefore it was chosen as the instrument of man's redemption; and thus to us it becomes more divine, because it brings God to us and raises us up to God. Thus sorrow was more natural to the Precious Blood. It was a life more congenial to its nature. Moreover, it was its official life. For by sorrow it was to accomplish its redeeming work. Its shedding was to be not only the consummation of our Lord's suffering, but the chosen suffering, in which precisely the work of redemption was to lie. Jesus--thrice blessed be his most dear Name!--is all our own, neither can we spare any thing of him. Yet it was precisely his Soul which was to redeem us, nor the Passion of his Body which was to be exactly our expiation. It was the shedding of his Blood which was to cleanse us from our sins. The remedy of the Fall was precisely in the Saviour's Blood. All the sorrows of his life grew up to the shedding of his Blood, and were crowned of his life grew up to the shedding of his Blood, and were crowned by it; and his shedding the last drops of its after he was dead was significant of the work it had to do. The Soul, and the Body, and the Blood lay separate; and the sacrifice was thus complete. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, written in 1860 and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1978, pp. 162-167.)

 

Father Faber was a priest for only sixteen years following his conversion to the Faith. He converted from Anglicanism in 1845, being ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1847. He died on September 26, 1863, at the age of forty-nine. Imagine this. He converted at age thirty-three, spending the remaining sixteen years of his life contemplating on the sacred mysteries of our Redemption, writing the following books full of Catholic profundity in the process: All for Jesus, The Precious Blood, The Creator and the Creature, Bethlehem, The Blessed Sacrament, The Dolors of Mary/The Foot of the Cross, Growth of Holiness, and Spiritual Conferences. He also wrote the hymn "Faith of Our Fathers." Father Faber's brief sixteen year priesthood was spent meditating upon and writing about--by hand, mind you--the depths of the mysteries of our Holy Faith. We can spend fifty years contemplating the profundity of such a few pages of Father Faber's exquisite writing. Isn't this a far better use of our time than speculating about the possible existence of space aliens?

It is a pretty efficacious use of our time, ladies and gentlemen, to contemplate Heavenly mysteries while we yet live on the face of this earth. How do you think that we are going to be permitted to enjoy Heaven itself if its joys, described so very well in The Happiness of Heaven, are the source of our fondest desires here now, if we do not see it as our privilege to contemplate upon the mysteries of the Faith as we attempt to impart upon our children such a deep appreciation of supernatural realities that the world of naturalism and scientism (junk science, if you will) and evolutionism and science-fiction and the pure fantasy of television and motion pictures, most of which promotes one abject evil after another, will hold no fascination for them whatsoever. Whatsoever.It is enough to know that we must concentrate first and foremost on our sanctification, giving all of our efforts to replicate Christendom in our own families to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Most of the people around us today do not live in light of the supernatural realities of the true Faith, now do they? Most of the people we know and most of the people we meet during the course of the day are steeped in naturalism, "catechized," if you will, by the curricula of the concentration camps and brainwashing centers known as public schools and by the cesspool of propaganda and disinformation that is disseminated through the channels of the mass media, including from various spokesmen of the false opposites of naturalist "right" and the naturalist "left." Oprah Winfrey and Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Phil and Laura Schlesinger and Sean Hannity and Michael Reagan and Michael Savage and Ed Schultz and Glenn Beck and Hugh Hewitt and Bob Grant and Don Imus and Tim Russert and Christopher Matthews and Keith Olberman and hordes of other "talking heads," each of whom are steeped in naturalism, occupy the time and attention of so many people, including even so many fully traditional Catholics, that is those relatively few Catholics who assist at chapels administreed by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds.

Remarks run in the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, now in its fiftieth year of conciliar captivity, about the possibility of space creatures and in support of the discredited ideology of evolutionism only reaffirm people that it is no waste of time to spend much of their time on idle speculation while leaving no time for contemplating the mysteries of our salvation and while making it appear that human beings are descended from apes. One can get to Heaven without speculating about extraterrestrial beings. One jeopardizes his path to Heaven quite mightily if he wastes his time here on the face of this earth that could have been spent in prayer, especially before the Blessed Sacrament and to the Mother of God by means of her Most Holy Rosary, and Scripture reading and spiritual reading (lives of the saints, meditations such as those as Father Faber's, good Church history books).

We should remember these words of Our Blessed Lord Himself:

And he spoke a similitude to them, saying: The land of a certain rich man brought forth plenty of fruits. And he thought within himself, saying: What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said: This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and will build greater; and into them will I gather all things that are grown to me, and my goods. And I will say to my soul: Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years take thy rest; eat, drink, make good cheer. But God said to him: Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee: and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided? (Luke 12: 16-20.)

 

It is just as foolish to waste one's time as it is to store up goods in the belief that one is providing himself with a sufficiency of this world's goods for many years to come. The conciliar Vatican has been wasting the time of Catholics for fifty years on lots of nonsense. One follows its false shepherds at his own peril.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

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.

See also: A Litany of Saints