Do NOT Go Forth and Baptize

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The Gospel for the feast of Saint Francis Xavier, one of the greatest missionaries in the history of the Catholic Church, is direct and to the point:

At that time, Jesus said to His disciples: Go ye into the whole world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be condemned. And those signs shall follow them that believe: in My name, they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;they shall take up serpents; and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover. (Mark 16:15-18)

News broke last week that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is studying the matter of doing away with the traditional teaching, although not dogmatically defined, in the existence of Limbo, a place where the souls of unbaptized infants go after death. The anticipated "instruction,"  if it is indeed issued and reaches the conclusion that Limbo does not exist, will confuse many Catholics into thinking that there is no urgency at all to baptize their infant children, especially those in danger of death, having been assured by Benedict XVI himself that the souls of unbaptized children do indeed go to Heaven to enjoy the glory of the Beatific Vision for all eternity. Indeed, the discussion of the traditional teaching concerning the administration of conditional baptism over the remains of a miscarried child that I mentioned a week ago in Scaling the Heights of Sanctity is rendered moot by an apparent indifference to absolute necessity of baptism as the only certain guarantee that an infant who dies either before or after birth can enjoy the Vision of God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for all eternity.

Father Brian Harrison, O.S., has written a very good analysis of the forthcoming instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I want to quote several passages from Father Harrison's very sound analysis:

After Pope John Paul II’s retraction, in the final and definitive version of Evangelium Vitae #99 (cf. Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 87 [1995] p. 515) of the initial version’s statement that aborted babies “now live in the Lord” (i.e., are in Heaven), it appears that the only papal statement expressly mentioning the destiny of aborted infants is that of Pope Sixtus V, whose Constitution Effrænatam of 29 October 1588 not only abstains from raising any hopes that they may attain the beatific vision, but positively affirms that they do not attain it!

The main purpose of this document was to reinforce civil and canonical sanctions against those who carry out abortions and sterilizations in the papal states: it goes so far as to prescribe the death penalty for both these offences. The Pope begins by affirming the need for sterner measures to be taken against “the barbarity . . . of those who do not shrink from the most cruel slaughter of fetuses still coming to maturity in the shelter of their mothers’ wombs” (“. . . eorum immanitatem . . . qui immaturos foetus intra materna viscera adhuc latentes crudelissime necare non verentur” – my English translation.) Pope Sixtus then continues, by way of explanation (my translation and emphasis):

"For who would not detest a crime as execrable as this — a crime whose consequence is that not just bodies, but — still worse! — even souls, are, as it were, cast away? The soul of the unborn infant bears the imprint of God’s image! It is a soul for whose redemption Christ our Lord shed His precious blood, a soul capable of eternal blessedness and destined for the company of angels! Who, therefore, would not condemn and punish with the utmost severity the desecration committed by one who has excluded such a soul from the blessed vision of God? Such a one has done all he or she could possibly have done to prevent this soul from reaching the place prepared for it in heaven, and has deprived God of the service of this His own creature."

Thus, three times in the one paragraph, in different ways, the Pope affirms that aborted babies are excluded from the beatific vision. It is obvious he is taking for granted the broader thesis that those infants in general who die unbaptized suffer the same deprivation. It would also be gratuitous, in view of the force of the Pope’s language and his use of the word “eternal” (line 5 above), as well as the whole of the previous tradition of the Church, to postulate that perhaps Sixtus V only meant to affirm here that the “exclusion” of such infants from Heaven is at least temporary, i.e., that he wasn’t rejecting here the possibility that Limbo is really only a kind of Purgatory for infants. The original text of the above paragraph is as follows: “Quis enim non detestetur, tam execrandum facinus, per quod nedum corporum, sed quod gravius est, etiam animarum certa iactura sequitur? Quis non gravissimis suppliciis damnet illius impietatem, qui animam Dei imagine insignitam, pro qua redimenda Christus Dominus noster preciosum Sanguinem fudit, aeternae capacem Beatitudinis, et ad consortium Angelorum destinatam, a beata Dei visione exclusit, reparationem coelestium sedium quantum in ipso fuit, impedivit, Deo servitium suae creaturae ademit?” (ibid.). The Latin text of this Constitution can be found in P. Gasparri (ed.), Codex Iuris Canonici Fontes, vol. I, p. 308.

These expressions certainly do not constitute an ex cathedra definition, and indeed, the Constitution itself is primarily a legislative act — an exercise of the Pope’s governing authority rather than his teaching authority. Nevertheless, in view of the clarity and force of the Pontiff’s teaching, in this preamble to the legislative norms which form the main body of the document, it would seem that the doctrinal proposition in question — namely, that the souls of infants who die without baptism are eternally excluded from the beatific vision — should be seen as belonging at least to the authentic teaching of the magisterium.

This conclusion is reinforced when we consider other magisterial teachings on unbaptized infants. As early as 385, Pope St. Siricius, writing to Bishop Himerius, showed that he felt gravely bound in conscience, for the sake of his own salvation, to warn the latter to insist on the baptism of infants as well as adults in his diocese, “ . . . lest Our own soul be in danger if, as a result being denied the saving font, . . . each one of them, on leaving the world, loses both [eternal] life and the kingdom” (“. . . ne ad nostrarum perniciem tendat animarum, si negato . . . fonte salutari exiens unusquisque de saeculo et regnum perdat et vitam” (DS 184, my translation, not found in earlier editions of Denzinger).

Would not any subsequent pope be wise – in the interests of his own salvation – to follow St. Siricius’ vigilant example in this, if there is any doubt whatsoever that unbaptized infants reach Heaven?

The teaching of the Ecumenical Council of Florence (the Bull Cantate Domino of February 4, 1442) is more emphatic. It says (my emphasis):

Regarding children, indeed, because of danger of death, which can often take place, since no help can be brought to them by another remedy than through the sacrament of baptism, through which they are snatched from the domination of the devil and adopted among the sons of God, [the sacrosanct Roman Church] advises that holy baptism ought not to be deferred for forty or eighty days, . . . but it should be conferred as soon as it can be done conveniently (. . . ). (Denzinger 712 = DS 1349.)

The Latin original of the words emphasized above is: “. . . cum ipsis non possit alio remedio subveniri, nisi per sacramentum baptismi, per quod eripiuntur a diaboli dominatu et in Dei filios adoptantur”. (I have followed the English Denzinger version here except for the first word, cum, which is translated there as “when” instead of “since”. “When” is inadequate here, because if, as it seems to insinuate, there can be circumstances where some “remedy” other than baptism exists and can be “brought to” infants in original sin, then the document would surely have to tell us what this other mysterious “remedy” is. But neither this nor any other magisterial document in history has ever suggested what other “remedy” could be applied by Christians to such infants.)

Also highly pertinent is the Council of Trent’s teaching on justification – infallible at least by virtue of the universal and ordinary magisterium. First, the Council defines “justification” so as deliberately to include the remission of original sin in children (not just of both original and mortal sin in adults): it is said to be “the conversion from that state in which man is born as a son of the first Adam to the state of grace and “adoption as children of God” [Rom. 8: 15]” (translatio ab eo statu, in quo homo nascitur filius primi Adae, in statum gratiae et “adoptionis filiorum” [Rom. 8, 15]”). Then, the Fathers of Trent go on immediately to affirm that this justification “cannot take place without the washing of regeneration [baptism] or the desire for it” (sine lavacro regenerationis aut eius voto fieri non potest – D 796 = DS 1524, my translation and emphasis). How, then, could unbaptized infants, incapable of any desire for baptism, be justified? Are we to suppose that God miraculously ‘fast-forwards’ the mental development of these infants (and gravely retarded persons) in the instant before death, following this up with a special illumination so as to render them capable of an at least implicit desire for baptism? But miracles cannot be gratuitously postulated, so we could never be sure, in the absence of any revealed truth in Scripture or Tradition, that this is in fact what God does. And even supposing He does, this would still not guarantee the salvation of such infants. For on reaching the use of reason, they would also attain the use of free will, and hence be capable, under the burden of original sin, of rejecting, as well as accepting, the actual grace offered for their justification. Indeed, even on the still more gratuitous hypothesis that God offers renders these infants capable of such a choice after death, the same would apply. So, no matter where we look for ‘wiggle room’, the Council of Trent prevents us from attaining any certainty that infants dying without baptism can be saved.

And it is important to emphasize that reaching Limbo does not mean reaching salvation. In a previous e-mail I mistakenly conceded to a correspondent his view that the word limbus, literally meaning “fringe”, “hem”, “margin”, or “border”, was adopted by the Church in order to indicate that Limbo (for unbaptized infants) was at the “border” of Heaven. In fact, as I soon discovered with a little more research, what was meant is that Limbo is at the “border” of Hell! This is evident both from the teaching of two ecumenical councils (Lyons II: D 464 = DS 858; Florence: D 693 = DS 1306); and Pope John XXII’s 1321 Epistle to the Armenians ( 493a = DS 926). All these authorities teach that the souls of those who die in original sin only (i.e., infants and the mentally retarded who never reach the use of reason) “go down without delay into Hell” (mox in infernum descend[unt]), where, however, they suffer “different punishments” (poenis disparibus) form those who die in actual mortal sin. In other words, if Hell is defined broadly, as eternal exclusion from the beatific vision, Limbo is actually the outer “fringe” or “border” of Hell itself. The understanding of these councils and popes is that the only “punishment” of those who die with souls stained by nothing worse than original sin is eternal exclusion from the beatific vision, which is compatible, however, with a natural (as distinct from supernatural) happiness. The “pain of sense” – the torment of hellfire – is reserved only for those who die in mortal sin. This is the teaching of Pope Innocent III in an epistle of the year 1201 (see D 410 = DS 780).

That Limbo is not to be understood as a place or state on the “border” of Heaven – or even an “intermediate” place or state in between Heaven and Hell – was confirmed yet again by Pope Pius VI in 1794, in condemning an opinion of the Jansenist Synod of Pistoia. To understand this condemnation, one first needs to realise that well over a thousand years previously, the regional (non-ecumenical) Council of Carthage (418) had condemned with anathema the Pelagian opinion that in John 14: 12 (“In my Father’s house are many mansions”), Our Lord is to be understand as teaching that “in the heavenly realms there will be some kind of intermediate condition, or some other place, where the little ones who have departed from this life without baptism will live happily” (“. . . in regno caelorum erit aliquis medius aut ullus alicubi locus, ubi beati vivant parvuli, qui sine baptismo ex hac vita migrarunt”) (DS 224 = D102: 4. This canon is not found in earlier editions of Denzinger, including Roy Deferrari’s English version.)

All Catholics should consider themselves indebted to Father Harrison for his fine research on this important matter. Father Harrison's work in this regard is first-rate and he is to be commended very heartily for having undertaken it.

Any document issued by a curial congregation that places this into doubt or denies the existence of Limbo continues the trend in the direction of "universal salvation" that is at the heart of the "theology" of one of the Benedict's chief mentors, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Part and parcel of the "new theology" promoted by the likes of von Balthasar is a rejection of most previous dogmatic decrees and papal pronouncements on matters that they believe must be "re-opened" in the light of "new theological insights." Thus, the following pronouncement on the matter of the fate of unbaptized infants after death by Pope Saint Pius X, the ardent foe of Modernists, in 1905 must be rejected by the neo-Modernists who call themselves proponents of the "new theology":

Children who die without being baptized go to limbo, where they don't enjoy God, but don't suffer either because whilst carrying the original sin...they don't deserve paradise but neither do they deserve hell or purgatory.

It was precisely a zeal for souls that prompted the work of all of the missionaries of the Church, who understood and accepted the simple truth that formal baptism as a member of the Catholic Church is the only sure path to Heaven. The first pope, Saint Peter, began the missionary work of the Church on Pentecost Sunday. His firm preaching brought about the conversion of over 3,000 Jews that very day. (See Papal Preacher to Pope (Saint Peter): You're Wrong.) Saint Francis Xavier, who spent himself for souls and converted the population of Goa near India, begged university students in Europe to join him to seek after souls for Our Lord and His true Church. How ironic it is now that the Jesuits of today in Goa are adopting the rituals of the demonic religion known as Hinduism, driving many Catholics that trace their religious ancestry to Saint Francis Xavier himself out of the Church and into the waiting arms of Pentecosalists and other Protestant sects. The work of Saint Francis Xavier is being undone by Catholic syncretists and religious indifferentists who are in "good standing" with the Holy See and who have thus far not received one iota of warning from any curial official about their work. If the rector of the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal can first deny and then justify Hindu worship in the Shrine of the Apparitions in Fatima, it should come as no surprise that Hindu rituals are being incorporated under the aegis of "inculturation" in the city where Saint Francis Xavier labored so mightily for souls, Goa itself.

As I noted three months ago in A Misplaced Zeal for Souls?, Saint Peter Claver personally baptized over 300,000 souls in his priestly life. The missionaries knew that the souls of the unbaptized go to Hell, that most of the unbaptized did not have a "desire" to, as the Holy Office put it in 1949, to be united by supernatural faith to the Catholic Church. That is why they spent their all for souls. Thus, it is distressing in the extreme to witness the Church in her human elements discourage "proselytism," and to read the Holy Father, who seems to very dismissive of dogmatic decrees concerning the fate of unbelievers, himself attempt to appropriate the writings of Saint Augustine to assert, as he did in his General Audience address of November 30, 2005, that we can have good hope that all of those "who seek peace and the good of the community with a pure conscience, and keeps alive the desire for the transcendent, will be saved even if he lacks biblical faith." This flies in the face of the solemn decree of the Pope Eugene IV, Cantatae Domino, issued in 1441 during Council of Florence:

"The holy Roman Church believes, professes, and preaches that 'no one remaining outside the Catholic Church, not just pagans, but also Jews or heretics or schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life; but they will go to the everlasting fire, which was prepared for the devil and his angels,' unless before the end of life they are joined to the Church. For the union with the body of the Church is of such importance that the sacraments of the Church are helpful to salvation only for those who remaining in it; and fasts, almsgiving, other works of piety, and the exercise of Christian warfare bear eternal rewards from them alone. And no one can be saved, no matter how much alms, he has given, even if he sheds his blood for the name of Christ, unless he remains in the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church."

This is a dogmatic decree. It binds the consciences of all Catholics, including that of Benedict XVI. A contemporary interpretation of the writing of no Church Father, including Saint Augustine, whose work is being much misrepresented in many circles today, takes precedence over solemn dogmatic decrees. No one can repeal such decrees. Joseph Ratzinger, a true son of the ethos of the Second Vatican Council, acts as though such decrees are but mere theological opinions that must yield to the preponderance of the views of modern theologians and the allegedly irreversible "realities" of a world in which the Catholic Faith no longer holds sway the way she did during the Middle Ages.

Discussions about Limbo and the assertion that we can have good hope that nonbelievers can become partakers of eternal life betray a sense of things that is contrary to the authentic patrimony of the Church. With all of the problems besetting the Church in her human elements, you see, why must beliefs, such as Limbo, be subjected to analysis and possible "elimination?" With so many people despondent because they are outside of the true Church and thus not in states of sanctifying grace,deprived of belief in and access to the Sacrament of Penance and the worthy reception of Holy Communion, why is it necessary to propose publicly that unbelievers are not in need of our the immediate help of the Church to bring them into her bosom for their sanctification and salvation? No wonder it was raining in Rome when Benedict XVI spoke of the ability of nonbelievers to be saved. Those were tears from Heaven coming down upon the head of the Sovereign Pontiff as he placed into question, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the missionary zeal that motivated countless numbers of men and women to give up their creature comforts in Europe to travel to distant lands to endure harsh living conditions and sometimes fierce persecutions to bring souls to the baptismal font and thus into a state of friendship with the Blessed Trinity, Whose very inner life was flooded into the souls of those so baptized.

Perhaps a review of Saint Edmund Campion's profession of faith should serve as a very effective antidote to the Modernist influences upon the conciliar church, including upon the mind of the conciliarist-in-chief, Benedict XVI, who told Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in 1985 that he believed Limbo was a mere "theological hypothesis," disregarding the statements of Pope Sixtus V and Pope Saint Pius X.

Addressing  the lords of Queen Elizabeth I's privy council, Saint Edmund Campion bragged:

Whereas I have come out of Germany and Bohemia, being sent by my superiors, and adventured myself into this noble realm, my dear country, for the glory of God and benefit of souls, I thought it like enough that, in this busy, watchful, and suspicious world, I should either sooner or later be intercepted and stopped of my course.

Wherefore, providing for all events, and uncertain what may become of me, when God shall haply deliver my body into durance, I supposed it needful to put this in writing in a readiness, desiring your good lordships to give it your reading, for to know my cause. This doing, I trust I shall ease you of some labour. For that which otherwise you must have sought for by practice of wit, I do now lay into your hands by plain confession. And to the intent that the whole matter may be conceived in order, and so the better both understood and remembered, I make thereof these nine points or articles, directly, truly and resolutely opening my full enterprise and purpose.

i. I confess that I am (albeit unworthy) a priest of the Catholic Church, and through the great mercy of God vowed now these eight years into the religion [religious order] of the Society of Jesus. Hereby I have taken upon me a special kind of warfare under the banner of obedience, and also resigned all my interest or possibility of wealth, honour, pleasure, and other worldly felicity.

ii. At the voice of our General, which is to me a warrant from heaven and oracle of Christ, I took my voyage from Prague to Rome (where our General Father is always resident) and from Rome to England, as I might and would have done joyously into any part of Christendom or Heatheness, had I been thereto assigned.

iii. My charge is, of free cost to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors-in brief, to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith many of my dear countrymen are abused.

iv. I never had mind, and am strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of state or policy of this realm, as things which appertain not to my vocation, and from which I gladly restrain and sequester my thoughts.

v. I do ask, to the glory of God, with all humility, and under your correction, three sorts of indifferent and quiet audiences: the first, before your Honours, wherein I will discourse of religion, so far as it toucheth the common weal and your nobilities: the second, whereof I make more account, before the Doctors and Masters and chosen men of both universities, wherein I undertake to avow the faith of our Catholic Church by proofs innumerable-Scriptures, councils, Fathers, history, natural and moral reasons: the third, before the lawyers, spiritual and temporal, wherein I will justify the said faith by the common wisdom of the laws standing yet in force and practice.

vi. I would be loath to speak anything that might sound of any insolent brag or challenge, especially being now as a dead man to this world and willing to put my head under every man's foot, and to kiss the ground they tread upon. Yet I have such courage in avouching the majesty of Jesus my King, and such affiance in his gracious favour, and such assurance in my quarrel, and my evidence so impregnable, and because I know perfectly that no one Protestant, nor all the Protestants living, nor any sect of our adversaries (howsoever they face men down in pulpits, and overrule us in their kingdom of grammarians and unlearned ears) can maintain their doctrine in disputation. I am to sue most humbly and instantly for combat with all and every of them, and the most principal that may be found: protesting that in this trial the better furnished they come, the better welcome they shall be.

vii. And because it hath pleased God to enrich the Queen my Sovereign Lady with notable gifts of nature, learning, and princely education, I do verily trust that if her Highness would vouchsafe her royal person and good attention to such a conference as, in the second part of my fifth article I have motioned, or to a few sermons, which in her or your hearing I am to utter such manifest and fair light by good method and plain dealing may be cast upon these controversies, that possibly her zeal of truth and love of her people shall incline her noble Grace to disfavour some proceedings hurtful to the realm, and procure towards us oppressed more equity.

viii. Moreover I doubt not but you, her Highness' Council, being of such wisdom and discreet in cases most important, when you shall have heard these questions of religion opened faithfully, which many times by our adversaries are huddled up and confounded, will see upon what substantial grounds our Catholic Faith is builded, how feeble that side is which by sway of the time prevaileth against us, and so at last for your own souls, and for many thousand souls that depend upon your government, will discountenance error when it is bewrayed [revealed], and hearken to those who would spend the best blood in their bodies for your salvation. Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posterity shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes. And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league-all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England-cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored.

ix. If these my offers be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour. I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the Searcher of Hearts, who send us his grace, and see us at accord before the day of payment, to the end we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.

In other words, Saint Edmund Campion sought to be a witness of the Catholic Faith without regard for the fact that doing so would cost him his very life in Elizabethan England. Sadly, the witness given by Saint Edmund Campion is thought by many apologists of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath to be "harmful" today, which is why the madness of "ecumenism" has been embraced with such relish. As a logical and inexorable consequence, however, many Catholics, including bishops and priests, have lost their zeal for souls, believing that there is absolutely no necessity for them to seek out The Lost Sheep, that everyone indeed goes to Heaven, the plain words of Our Lord and the solemn, dogmatic decrees of His Holy Church to the contrary notwithstanding.

The situation is so dire that Walter Cardinal Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, can address the Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the [pro-abortion] World Council of Churches and give a very enthusiastic endorsement of the very ecumenical trends in the early Twentieth Century that were specifically, categorically and absolutely unequivocally condemned by Pope Pius XI in Mortaliam Animos on January 6, 1928. Much like Benedict himself, Cardinal Kasper simply ignores that part of the Church's patrimony that contradicts the Vatican party line concerning ecumenism. Pope Pius XI succinctly summarized the errors of the early ecumenists and said that the Catholic Church must have nothing to do with them. Such inconvenient realities, though, must be brushed aside as souls are left to languish without being in full communion with the Church Our Lord created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and as they support openly and brazenly such abject evils as baby-killing and perversion as perfectly compatible with the Gospel of the Divine Redeemer.

Although I have quoted the entirety of Mortaliam Animos in several recent essays, consider just two passages below as a means of realizing the errors of ecumenism in general and the defense of it offered by the likes of Cardinal Kasper.

Summarizing the though of the early ecumenists, Pope Pius XI went on to warn of the absolute dangers posed by their false beliefs:

Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity? Who would dare to say that he loved Christ, unless he worked with all his might to carry out the desires of Him, Who asked His Father that His disciples might be "one." And did not the same Christ will that His disciples should be marked out and distinguished from others by this characteristic, namely that they loved one another: "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another"? All Christians, they add, should be as "one": for then they would be much more powerful in driving out the pest of irreligion, which like a serpent daily creeps further and becomes more widely spread, and prepares to rob the Gospel of its strength. These things and others that class of men who are known as pan-Christians continually repeat and amplify; and these men, so far from being quite few and scattered, have increased to the dimensions of an entire class, and have grouped themselves into widely spread societies, most of which are directed by non-Catholics, although they are imbued with varying doctrines concerning the things of faith. This undertaking is so actively promoted as in many places to win for itself the adhesion of a number of citizens, and it even takes possession of the minds of very many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed.

Admonished, therefore, by the consciousness of Our Apostolic office that We should not permit the flock of the Lord to be cheated by dangerous fallacies, We invoke, Venerable Brethren, your zeal in avoiding this evil; for We are confident that by the writings and words of each one of you the people will more easily get to know and understand those principles and arguments which We are about to set forth, and from which Catholics will learn how they are to think and act when there is question of those undertakings which have for their end the union in one body, whatsoever be the manner, of all who call themselves Christians.

Can anyone really doubt the wisdom of Pope Pius XI's warnings that the ecumenism would lead to a situation whereby "the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed?" The again, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger did write in The Principles of Catholic Theology in 1982 that it was necessary to "raze the bastions" of the Faith. It is the intent of the disciples of von Balthasar and his ilk to do precisely this by simply ignoring the patrimony of the Church prior to 1958 and consigning it to the Orwellian memory hole.

This gives us even more cause, especially during the penitential season of Advent, to offer up our prayers, our mortifications, our sacrifices, our humiliations, and all of our aches and pains, physical and spiritual, to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be used as she sees fit for the honor and glory of God and for the good of Holy Mother Church. God has known from all eternity that we would be living in these troubling times. The graces He won for us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross are sufficient for us to deal with the counterfeit religion that is conciliarism by simply rejecting it as coming from the devil and leading souls to Hell for all eternity. We must remain absolutely confident in the midst of these troubles and difficulties that the way out of this mess runs only through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, beseeching Heaven daily that a Catholic will once more ascend to the Throne of Saint Peter and consecrate Russia with all of the world's bishops to the Heart that has been united to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus in a perfect communion of love from the first moment of the Incarnation.

Praying daily for the restoration of Tradition in worship and in doctrine, let us use this season of Advent to remind all of our fellow Catholics that Our Lord became man to dwell amongst us so that all men in all places at all times could participate in His Easter victory over sin and death and be regenerated into the life of sanctifying grace in the baptismal font, persevering until their dying breaths in the one, true Church, outside of which there is no salvation.

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saint Michael, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael, pray for us.

Saint Peter, pray for us.

Saint Paul, pray for us.

Saint Jude, pray for us.

Saint Rita,, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Francis Xavier, pray for us.

Saint Peter Claver, pray for us.

Saint Therese Lisieux, pray for us.

Saint Peter Chrysologus, pray for us.

Saint Barbara, pray for us.

Saint Sabbas, pray for us.

Saint Nicholas, pray for us.

Saint Ambrose, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us.