by Thomas A. Droleskey
We are in the midst of a week of tremendous feast days. We should celebrate each of these feast days with gratitude for being a Catholic. No person and no nation that does not submit to under the sweet yoke of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen is free. No person and no nation that continues to resist the sweet yoke of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen will ever be free. The only true liberty is that from enslavement to personal sin and from an adherence to the whole panoply of false ideas and beliefs (naturalism, nationalism, religious liberty, religious indifferentism, conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, pluralism, capitalism, socialism, communism, positivism, relativism, utilitarianism, nihilism, statism, pantheism, materialism, Calvinism and Lutheranism and all other forms of Protestantism, Talmudic Judaism, Zionism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism and Hinduism and animism and all of forms pagan "religions," feminism, environmentalism, the amorality of Machiavellianism, racialism of any kind, environmentalism, evolutionism) that propose to "explain" and "resolve" human problems.
The Catholic Church teaches us that the price of true liberty was paid for us on the wood of the Holy Cross as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation offered Himself up to the Father in Spirit and in Truth to atone for the debt of human sins that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God. No one and and no nation is free unless this fundamental fact of true human liberty is acknowledged and heralded by men in their own individual lives and in the lives of their nations, which must refer all aspects of its public policy and of its culture to this fundamental fact of true human liberty, keeping in mind that there is never one single occasion in the lives of men or their nations when the eternal good of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross can be ignored. Not one. Not ever. Not at any time.
Pope Pius XI included the following quote from Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, who lived in the Sixteenth Century, in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929:
The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
It is the Catholic Faith alone that has the ability to guide men in this passing, mortal vale of tears with the Deposit of Faith that has been entrusted exclusively to her by her Divine Bridegroom and Invisible Head, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is the Catholic Faith alone that has the ability to enlighten the minds of men and to strengthen their wills by means of the supernatural helps offered by Sanctifying Grace. It is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that makes even Actual Grace present in the world, which is why the world will end when the last Catholic priest on earth has been captured and killed (see the story of Mr. Blue, written by Myles Connolly) and why the devil has sought crush the Mass throughout history, doing so within the past half of a millennium by means of the Protestant Revolt and the subsequent rise of naturalistic, ideologically-based revolutions that have attacked Catholic churches and smashed high altars and side altars and statues and killed millions upon millions of Catholics worldwide. The hatred of the Mass is what prompted the devil to inspire the concoction of the synthetic service known as the Novus Ordo Missae and to orchestrate the changing of the rites of episcopal consecration and priestly ordination so as to deprive most Catholics of the Roman Rite of a true, valid Mass, depriving them also of most of the other sacraments.
This is the day upon which so many millions of Catholics in the United States of America are giving "thanks" for being a country where they are supposedly "free," a land of religious liberty, if you will, without realizing that there are millions of other people in the United States of America who are taking advantage of their "religious liberty" to thank their false concept of a deity for their living in a land where "women's reproductive rights" are protected under cover of law, a land where people have an unlimited choice of "freedoms" protected by law, including the "right" to purchase magazines and videos that entice people to commit sins and the "right" to propagate all manner of falsehoods as the means of promoting the "common good." As I have noted so many times on this site and throughout my academic and writing and speaking careers, true love for one's nation is not an idolatry of its mythological infallibility. True love of one's nation is premised upon willing its good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization in every aspect of her national life without any exception whatsoever.
Why is it that those who sloganistically accuse advocates of the Social Reign of Christ the King of being "anti-American" when these exact same people close their eyes and shut their eyes in utter (and most willful) ignorance when the proof of the anti-Catholic premises of the Pilgrims and most of the founding fathers is pointed out to them? It is not to be "anti-American" to point out that the Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock in what is now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hated the Catholic Faith and came from a Calvinist sect, the Puritans, that were responsible for the torture and killing of hundreds of Catholics in The Netherlands, and who adherents had attacked Catholic churches with ferocity on the continent of Europe and would do so in England from the time of the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1641 until the "restoration" of the Stuart monarchy in 1660? Why extol people who hated the Catholic Faith and who were giving "thanks to God," as they saw it, for being in a land where there had been, as they falsely believed, no Catholic Mass offered to "pollute" the "new Zion in the wilderness"?
The wretched nature of the Calvinists and how much they contributed to the ruin of men and their nations with their utterly false doctrines and their completely false notion of the nature of man and the rejection of his free will and their attempt to blend Judaism with their warped, heretical view of Christianity was summarized very clearly by Gilbert Keith Chesterton as follows:
"The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England." (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, quoted in Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ the Modern World, p. 16.)
We do not live in a land of true freedom. We do not live in a land that is deserving of God's blessings. Why should God bless America? For the over four thousand children that will be put to death under cover of law this very day as its national leaders either support this daily carnage of the innocent preborn or throw up their hands to exculpate their own inaction on the matter by saying that the "country is not ready to overturn Roe v. Wade"? For the false concepts of separation of Church and State and religious liberty that have been exported throughout the world and that have served as essential cornerstones of conciliarism and its false form of worship in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service? For the exaltation of "civil liberty" without any reference to a due submission to the Deposit of Faith that the God-Man, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church? For its refusal to make any mention of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen in its founding and operational documents? For its promotion of the most vile form of "entertainment" within its own borders and throughout the world in the name of the false, heretical concepts of "freedom of press" and "freedom of speech"? For the styles of dress that its fashion-makers have introduced that have led so many souls into sin here and around the world? For the way in which its money and its used or armed force have attacked Catholic countries and helped to establish Protestant "churches" and Masonic lodges in Catholic land where such thoroughly evil places had never existed before? For its unjust and immoral foreign wars that have killed so many millions of people while enriching American contractors and corporate interests? For its alliance with international Zionism? For its belief that men can be virtuous on their own powers ("we're Americans. . . . We can do anything we put our minds to doing") without belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace? God should bless America for the promotion of evil here and around the world under cover of law and every aspect of popular culture?
We want God to bless America. Those of us who have been born here or who have become naturalized citizens or who are legal resident aliens here must pray for God to bless this nation by means of its conversion to the true Faith. Our Lady appeared in Guadalupe to convert all of the Americas, not simply Latin America, to the true Faith. The North American Martyrs came here to plant the seeds for a Catholic America in the upper reaches of North America, shedding their blood in the process. The Acadians who were forced out of their homes and separated from their families by the British in 1755 offered up their cruel torture and their being sold into white slavery in many of the British colonies up and down the Atlantic seaboard because they refused to participate in false worship by giving up the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, knowing that their sacrifice would be used by God to convert this land. Father Pierre Jean De Smet and Blessed Rose Philippine Duchesne each worked tirelessly in their respective apostolates to convert the peoples of the United States of America. God's true blessing on the United States of America will be known when this land is converted and when its citizens start making reparation for the crimes that have been committed by this nation against souls from its very false inception.
We can help to bring about such a conversion by refusing to participate in the extolling of the false, Judeo-Masonic, self-redemptive premises of this nation, by not worshiping at the altars of the demigods of secularism and naturalism, many of whom wrote horrible screeds about how the Catholic Faith "enslaved" man and kept him in ignorance. We can help to bring about such a conversion of the United States of America to become the Catholic States of America by immersing ourselves in a study of the authentic Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, from which no human being on the face of this earth may dissent legitimately, and by reading about the lives of the saints and trying to imitate them as the foundation of loving God and His Holy Faith more perfectly as we detach ourselves more and more from the things, people and places of this passing world in order to be attached to our Heavenly citizenship here below so that we might possess the glory of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for all eternity.
To wit, we celebrated on Monday, November 19, 2012, the Feast of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, a truly Catholic queen who was born to royalty in Hungary and left her parents at the age of four to prepare for her eventual marriage to Louis of Thuringia, who was six years her elder. Saint Elizabeth became an early follower of Saint Francis of Assisi, mortifying herself and engaging in other severe penances while she served the poor and the sick and unfortunate tirelessly and selflessly as though she was serving Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself. She gave away expensive clothes and jewels only to find that the more she gave away was the more that God bestowed upon her these very things in a miraculous manner so that she could be even more generous the poor and the sick. Saint Elizabeth suffered humiliation and persecution from the hands of her young brothers-in-law following the death of her husband, being banished from the castle and turned out as well by the very same people to whom she had bestowed such generosity and whose children she helped to bring back to health following grave illnesses. She lived the Franciscan way of humility and poverty and suffering and mortification without complaint. She lived, in other words, the Way of the Cross, whose royal standard is the only mark of true liberty for men and their nations. How many Catholics, yes, even in the vast expanse of traditionalism across the ecclesiastical divide, know about Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and see in her the model of good Christian rule over men and their nations?
We celebrated the Feast of Saint Felix of Valois on Tuesday, November 20, 2012. Saint Felix helped Saint John Matha to found the Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives, which received its definitive papal approval in 1198. Although Saint Felix wanted to help rescue Catholics who had been taken captive by the Mohammedans, we can invoke his intercession from Heaven to help us to be rescued from captivity to all of the falsehoods of the present day, including Modernism and its contemporary progeny, conciliarism, in order to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and to subordinate every aspect of our lives to that true Faith, mindful of our Last End. Our Lady appeared to Saint Felix early one morning (in the middle of the night), garbed in the habit which she wanted the Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives to wear, accompanied by angels who were similarly attired. Saint Felix sang the Office with Our Lady and the angels after she had intoned its beginning melody. We must sing the praises of the Blessed Trinity as the consecrated slaves of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, which would be given to Saint Dominic de Guzman, the founder of the Order of Preachers, very soon after the founding of the Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives, so as to be free from our personal enslavement to sin and selfishness and our uncritical immersion in the falsehoods of this passing world. Most Catholics, sadly, would associate the name "Felix" with a fictional cartoon feline and not with the pope or the great saint of Valois who had this name.
We celebrated the Feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary yesterday, November 21, 2012. How many Catholics celebrated--or were even aware of this great feast day, which would be a holiday if we lived in a Catholic world? Saints Joachim and Anne brought their daughter to the Temple at the age of three, leaving here there as she dedicated her life to God, showing what parents must do when they give their daughters away to the service of the consecrated religious life (as we hope to do with our own daughter in eleven and one-half years, God willing and Our Lady interceding).
Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., explained Our Lady's life after her parents had brought her to the temple to be placed in care of its officials:
But our Lady's Presentation also opens new horizons before the Church. On the Cycle of the saints, which is not precisely limited as that of the Time, the mystery of Mary's sojourn in the sanctuary of the Old Covenant is our best preparation for the approaching season of Advent. Mary, led to the temple in order to prepare in retirement, humility, and love for her incomparable destiny, had also the mission of perfecting at the foot of the figurative altar the prayer of the human race, of itself ineffectual to drawn down the Saviour from heaven. She was, as St. Bernardine of Siena, the happy completion of all the waiting and supplication for the coming of the Son of God; in her, as in in their culminating-point, all the desires of the saints had preceded her found their consummation and their term.
Through her wonderful understanding of the Scriptures, and her conformity, daily and hourly, to the minutest teachings and prescriptions of the Mosaic ritual, Mary everywhere found and adored the Messias hidden under the letter; she united herself to Him, immolated herself with Him in each of the many victims sacrificed before her eyes; and thus she rendered to the god of Sinai the homage, hitherto vainly expected, of the Law understood, practised, and made to fructify, in all the fullness that beseemed its divine Legislator. Then could Jehovah truly say: 'As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and return no more thither, but soak the earth and water it, and make it to spring: . . . so shall My word be . . . it shall not return to Me void, but shall do whatsoever I please.
Supplying thus for the deficiencies of the Gentiles as well of the Synagogue, Mary beheld the bride of the Canticle of the Church of the future. In our name she addressed her supplications to Him whom she recognized as the Bridegroom, without, however, knowing that He was to be her own Son. Such yearnings of love, coming from her, were sufficient to obtain from the divine Word pardon for the infidelities of the past and the immorality into which the wandering world was plunging deeper and deeper. How well did this ark of the New Covenant replace of the Jews, which had perished with the first temple! It was for her, though he knew it not, that Herod the Gentile had continued the construction of the second temple after it had remained desolate since the time of Zorobabel; for the temple, like the tabernacle before it, was but the home of the ark destined to be God's throne; but greater was the glory of the second temple which sheltered the reality, than of the first which contained but the figure.
Our Lady wants to present us to the throne of the Most Blessed Trinity upon our deaths. We must, therefore, keep close to her and to do nothing to displease her, to cause more sorrow to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart than our sins caused her suffer once in time as we helped to plunge those Seven Swords of Sorrow into that motherly Heart of our Immaculate Queen. She wants us to know the true liberty that comes from ceasing our lives of sin and striving to scale the heights of personal sanctity so that we may have the highest possible place in Heaven next to her, adored in all of regal splendor. We must be ever ready to present ourselves to her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, at the moment of our Particular Judgments, making sure to wear--and to fulfill the conditions attached to--her Brown Scapular and to be adored always with her Miraculous Medal. We must take seriously her Fatima Message to dress modestly and to do penance for our sins and for those of the whole world.
Today is the great feast of Saint Cecilia. I am sure that more than a few readers have been the Church of Saint Cecilia in the Trastevere district of Rome and have seen where she was put to rest in the Catacombs of Saint Pope Saint Callistus along the Appian Way. Here is the exterior of the Church of Saint Cecilia (we couldn't go in on May 21, 2005, as the church was closed for the lunch break, which lasts three hours, and as our dear Lucy came down with that horrible earache that prompted us to take her to Gesu Bambino Ospitale in Rome, as recounted in
A Roman Pilgrimage in Honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, part 4):
May 21, 2005
Here is a depiction of Saint Cecilia's body resting in the Catacombs of Pope Saint Callistus as found in Our Lady of the Sun Church, El Mirage, Arizona:
November 21, 2006
Let us let Dom Prosper Gueranger describe the scene for us:
Caecilia united in her veins the blood of kings with that of Rome's greatest heroes. At the time of the first preaching of the Gospel, more than one ancient patrician family had seen its direct line become extinct. But the adoptions and alliances, which under the Republic had knot more closely the great families by linking them all to the most illustrious among them, formed as it were a common fund of glory, which, even in the days of decline, was passed on intact to the survivors of the aristocracy.
It has now been demonstrated by the undeniable witness of monuments that Christianity from the very beginning took possession of that glory, by adopting its heirs; and that by a wonderful disposition of divine Providence, the founders of the Rome of the Pontiffs were these last representatives of the Republic, thus preserved in order to give to the two phases of Roman history that powerful unity which is the distinguishing note of divine works. Heretofore bound together by the same patriotism, the Cornelii and the AEmilii, alike heirs of the Fabii, the Caecili, Valerii, Sergeii, Furii, Claudii, Pomponii, Plautii, and Acilli, eldest sons of the Gentile Church, strengthened the connections formed during the Republic and firmly established, even in the first and second centuries of Christianity, the new Roman society. In the same centuries, and under the influence of the religion preached by St. Peter and St. Paul, there came to be grated on the ever vigorous trunk of the old aristocracy the best members of the new imperial and consular families, worthy by their truly Roman virtues, practised amid the general depravity, to reinforce the thinned ranks of Rome's founders, and to fill up, without too sudden a transition, the voids made by time in the true patrician houses. Thus was Rome working out her destiny; thus was accomplished the building up of the eternal city being accomplished by the very men who had formerly, by their blood or by their genius, established her strong and mighty on the seven hills.
Caecilia, the lawful representative of the unparalleled aristocracy, the fairest flower of the old stem, was also the last. The second century was passing away, the third, which was to see the empire fall from the hands of Septimus Severus first to the Orientals and then to the barbarians from the banks of the Danube, offered small chance of preservation for the remnants of the ancient nobility. The true Roman society was henceforth at an end; for, save a few individual exceptions, there remained nothing more of Roman but the name: the vain adornment of freedmen and upstarts, who, under the princes worthy of them, indulged their passions at the expense of those around them.
Caecilia therefore appeared at the right moment, personifying with the utmost dignity the society that was about to disappear because its work was accomplished. In her strength and her beauty, adorned with the royal purple of martyrdom, she represents ancient Rome rising proud and glorious to the skies, before the upstart Caesars who, by immolating her in their jealousy, unconsciously executed the divine plan. The blood of kings and heroes, flowing from her triple wound, is the libation of the old nobility to Christ the conqueror, to the Blessed Trinity the Rule of nations it is the final consecration, which reveals in its full extent the sublime vocation of the valiant races called to found the eternal Rome.
But we must not think that to-day's feast is meant to excite us in a merely theoretical and fruitless admiration. The Church recognizes and honours in Saint Caecilia three characteristics, which, united together, distinguish her among all the blessed in heaven, and are a source of grace and an example to men. These three characteristics are, virginity, apostolic zeal, and the super-human courage which enabled her to bear torture and death. Such is the threefold teaching conveyed by this one Christian life.
In an age so blindly abandoned as ours to the worship of the senses, is it not time to protest by the strong lessons of our faith, against a fascination which even the children of the promise can hardly resist? Never since the fall of the Roman Empire have morals, and with them the family and society, been so seriously threatened. For long years literature, the arts, the comforts of life, have had but one aim: to propose physical enjoyment as the only end of man's destiny. Society already counts an immense number of members who live entirely a life of the senses. Alas for the day when it will expect to save itself by relying on their energy! The Roman Empire thus attempted several times to shake off the yoke of invasion: it fell, never to rise again. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year.)
Will the same be written one day of the United States of America?
Dom Prosper Gueranger's description of ancient Rome, especially in the last paragraph quoted above, could be a description of the United States of America as its has degenerated more and more over the decades as a result of its false premises that stem from the heresies of the Protestant Revolt and the anti-Incarnational naturalism of Modernity, so exemplified by Judeo-Masonry. We can be the leaven in our society that Saint Cecilia was in hers. We can be the witnesses to Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen as were Saint Cecilia and her chaste husband Saint Valerian, who did not get to see her Guardian Angel until converted to the Catholic Faith, and her brother-in-law Saint Tiburtius, and the pope who buried her in the Catacombs of Saint Callistus, Pope Saint Urban I. We can imitate their heroism in behalf of our true Catholic patriotism, which seeks the conversion of our lands, at a time when the scions of the American civil state, who have shed so much Catholic blood in their own day (continuing the "tradition" that had been inaugurated by their Masonic predecessors), are more than willing to use torture against those whom they deem to be "threats" to national security and civil tranquility.
Today, the Feast of Saint Cecilia, provides us with an opportunity to reflect upon the fact that we are called to exhibit the love of the Holy Faith that was demonstrated by Saint Cecilia throughout her life, especially as she faced and endured her martyrdom. It may not be God's Holy Will for there to be a Catholic States of America. The world may be too far gone. We do not know this for sure. We cannot give up the battle for Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. We must live and work and pray for a day when everyone in the midst of the United States of America and the world will be a Catholic, seeing in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass the only true Thanksgiving (the world Eucharist means Thanksgiving, of course) on the face of this earth. Then and only then will a national day of Thanksgiving be properly oriented as an expression of gratitude of an entire nation of men living under the sweet, gentle yoke of Christ the King that liberates them from an enslavement to sin and selfishness and all of the various falsehoods that emanate from the devil and lead souls directly to Hell.
Oh, sure, we can Catholicize the secular thanksgiving day as best we can as long as we do not extol nationalist, naturalist mythologies and as long as we understand that we must be grateful for being given the gift of the true Faith that will enable us to plant a few seeds for the restoration of the Catholic City. More importantly, however, we must celebrate with true joy the liturgical feasts on the calendar of the Catholic Church, making these our days of holiday from work and learning more about the cloud of witnesses in Heaven led lives of ordinary sanctity and/or extraordinary courage in the face of martyrdom to work out their salvation in fear and in trembling. We have a true horn-of-plenty of feasts coming up within the next week prior to the start of Advent (Pope Saint Clement I tomorrow, November 23, Saint John of the Cross, November 24, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, November 25, Saint Sylvester the Abbot and Saint Peter of Alexandria and Saint Leonard of Port Maurice, November 26, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, November 27, Saint Andrew the Apostle, November 28, and Blessed Cuthbert Mayne and the forty English martyrs, November 29. Oh, we have so much to be grateful for as Catholics, do we not?
There are two feasts coming up, however, that should warm the hearts of Catholics in the United States and throughout all of the Americas. The first is the the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on December 8, a Holy Day of Obligation and the Patronal Feast of the United States of America since 1847. The second, of course, is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12. We should celebrate these feasts with great joy, begging Our Lady, who is our Immaculate Queen and the Mediatrix of All Graces, to shower us with graces so that we can be stalwart and valiant champions of the Social Kingship of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We will spend all eternity giving thanks to the Blessed Trinity in her Queenly presence if we die in a state of Sanctifying Grace. Isn't it a marvelous expression of our Catholic Faith to organize public expressions of our love for our King and Queen who set us free from all of the enslavements of the world, the flesh and the devil.
We must, therefore, reject each and every call to exalt in a false sense of civil liberty as so many are doing this day and every day. We must look to the only standard of true liberty, the Holy Cross, and to lift it high as we keep Our Lady company at Its foot each day in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered by true bishops and priests in the catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the nonexistent "legitimacy" of its false shepherds, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.
We must pray for the day when all men will give thanksgiving to the Father through the Son in Spirit and in Truth, offering their Rosaries in a chorus of love and jubilation, as they explain with hearts consecrated to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary:
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us now and the hour of our deaths. Amen.
All to thee, Blessed Mother. All to thy Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, we love you. Save souls!
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
Behold the only standard of true human liberty (not the "liberty bell" or the Masonic "goddess" in New York Harbor.)
Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome, Italy, Sunday, May 22, 2005.
A painting of the Catholic martyrs of Gorkum, The Netherlands, who were tortured and executed in 1572 by Dutch Calvinists, the theological soul-mates of the "Pilgrims" who came to North America less than half a century later who were so "grateful" that they had had a bountiful harvest in a land where there was no Catholic Mass. (Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel, Monroe, Connecticut, the Feast of Saint Cecilia, Thursday, November 22, 2007.)
Here is a description of their martyrdom as found at the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia site:
The year 1572, Luther and Calvin had already wrested from the Church a great part of Europe. The iconoclastic storm had swept through the Netherlands, and was followed by a struggle between Lutheranism and Calvinism in which the latter was victorious. In 1571 the Calvinists held their first synod, at Embden. On 1 April of the next year the Watergeuzen (Sea-beggars) conquered Briel and later Vlissingen and other places. In June, Dortrecht and Gorkum fell into their hands and at Gorkum they captured nine Franciscans. These were: Nicholas Pieck, guardian of Gorkum, Hieronymns of Weert, vicar, Theodorus van der Eem, of Amersfoort, Nicasius Janssen, of Heeze, Willehad of Denmark, Godefried of Mervel, Antonius Of weert, Antonius of Hoornaer, and Franciseus de Roye, of Brussels. To these were added two lay brothers from the same monastery, Petrus of Assche and Cornelius of Wyk near Duurstede. Almost at the same time the Calvinists laid their hands on the learned parish priest of Gorkum, Leonardus Vechel of Bois-le-Duc, who had made distinguished studies in Louvain, and also has assistant Nicolaas Janssen, surnamed Poppel, of Welde in Belgium. With the above, were also imprisoned Godefried van Duynsen, of Gorkum who was active as a priest in his native city, and Joannes Lenartz of Oisterwljk, an Augustinian and director of the convent of Augustinian nuns in Gorkum. To these fifteen, who from the very first underwent all the sufferings and torments of the persecution, were later added four more companions: Joannes van Hoornaer, a Dominican of the Cologne province and parish priest not far from Gorkum, who, when apprised of the incarceration of the clergy of Gorkum, hastened to the city in order to administer the sacraments to them and was seized and imprisoned with the rest, Jacobus Lacops of Oudenaar, a Norbertine, who after leading a frivolous life, being disobedient to his order, and neglectful of his religious duties, reformed, became a curate in Monster, Holland and was imprisoned in 1572; Adrianus Janssen of Hilvarenbeek, at one time a Premonstratensian and parish priest in Monster, who was sent to Brielle with Jacobus Lacops; and lastly Andreas Wouters of Heynoord, whose conduct was not edifying up to the time of his arrest, but who made ample amends by his martyrdom.
After enduring much suffering and abuse in the prison at Gorkum (26 June-6 July) the first fifteen martyrs were transferred to Brielle. On their way to Dortrecht they were exhibited for money to the curious and arrived at Brielle 13 July. On the following day, Lumey, the commander of the Watergeuzen, caused the martyrs to be interrogated and ordered a sort of disputation. In the meantime the four other martyrs also arrived. It was exacted of each that he abandon his belief in the Blessed Sacrament and in papal supremacy. All remained firm in their faith. Meanwhile there came a letter from William of Orange which enjoined all those in authority to leave priests and religious unmolested. Nevertheless Lumey caused the martyrs to be hanged in the night of 9 July, in a turfshed amid cruel mutilations. Their beatification took place on 14 Nov., 1675, and their canonization on 29 June, 1865. For many years the place of their martyrdom in Brielle has been the scene of numerous pilgrimages and processions. The Martyrs of Gorkum
One will notice that the Calvinists, ever eager to make a buck--or the Dutch equivalent thereof, charged admission for the curious to see the martyrs, who would not renounce their belief in the Blessed Sacrament and in papal supremacy. It is that very truth of papal supremacy that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is prepared to "discuss" with the heretical and schismatic Orthodox on the basis of The Ravenna Document. Today the Orthodox and tomorrow the descendants of the Dutch Calvinists and all other Protestants.
Remember this and remember it well: where there is no Mass there is no Christianity. We must seek to plant the seeds for the Catholicization of the United States of America, never ever seeking to lionize people who rejected the true Faith and whose heresies helped to pave the way for the social problems we face today.
