Dry Rot to the Core

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Mrs. Randy Engel's alert (U. S. Coalition for Life Alert) dealing with the "guidelines" for "gay pastoral ministries" that will be reviewed and voted upon by the members of the U.S.C.C.C.B. (United States Conference of Conciliar Catholic Bishops) next week is a masterful analysis of the diabolical disorientation afflicting the wolves who pose as shepherds in the conciliar structures in the United States of America. Mrs. Engel cuts through the slogans and the psychobabble to explain how the "guidelines" are, despite of veneer of Catholicism here and there, part and parcel of the work of the Homosexual Collective to further mainstream an acceptance of a perverted "orientation" as a natural part of human self-identification. It is not.

No human being is "identified" or "defined" by his inclination to commit sinful acts, whether natural or unnatural. Each human being is defined by the fact that he has a rational, immortal soul created in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity, a soul that has been redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on the wood of the Holy Cross. Although each one of us struggles between sin and grace in our own lives following the regeneration of our immortal souls in the baptismal font, where we were truly born again under the Sign of the Cross, we are not defined by our sins. God has willed for all eternity that we come into existence. His Infiniti te Love for us is such that He will send us all of the supernatural helps we need to be united with Him for all eternity in Heaven if we persevere to the point of our dying breaths as Catholics whose souls are in states of Sanctifying Grace.

Our Lord, who suffered unspeakable horrors to redeem us, wants us to hate our sins. He wants us to make reparation for our own sins and for those of the whole world, offering up all of our acts of reparation--and all of the crosses and humiliations that come our way--to Him through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother. He wants us to aspire to the heights of personal sanctity so that we might have the highest place in Heaven next to that of His Most Blessed Mother, Mary our Immaculate Queen, herself. He wants us to use the occasion of our falls into various sins so that we will be more reliant upon His graces, more earnest in our resolve to make confessions that are thorough and coupled with a firm purpose of amending our lives, and to show mercy--genuine mercy--to all of those around us, including those who hate and calumniate us.

What Our Lord does not want us to do, however, is to reaffirm ourselves or others in a life of unrepentant sin, worse yet to convince ourselves that our very identity as human beings comes from some sort of sinful attachment or habit. It is one thing to sin and to be sorry, to seek out the Absolution of Our Lord at the hands and the lips of an alter Christus in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. It is quite another thing to persist in sin unrepentantly and/or to exalt in one's sins as a cause celebre in the public realm.

Our Lord showed compassion to the woman caught in adultery. He did not, though, reaffirm her in her sins, blaming her sins on some genetic defect that predisposed her to unchastity. He told her that He was not going to condemn her, telling her, however, that she was to sin no more. This is the account in the Gospel of Saint John:

And Jesus went unto mount Olivet. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came to him, and sitting down he taught them. And the scribes and the Pharisees bring unto him a woman taken in adultery: and they set her in the midst, And said to him: Master, this woman was even now taken in adultery. Now Moses in the law commanded us to stone such a one. But what sayest thou?

And this they said tempting him, that they might accuse him. But Jesus bowing himself down, wrote with his finger on the ground. When therefore they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said to them: He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again stooping down, he wrote on the ground. But they hearing this, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest. And Jesus alone remained, and the woman standing in the midst. Then Jesus lifting up himself, said to her: Woman, where are they that accused thee? Hath no man condemned thee?

Who said: No man, Lord. And Jesus said: Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more (John 8: 1-11)

As far as we know, ladies and gentlemen, this incident is the only record we have of Our Lord writing something. He wrote on the dust of this earth the sins of the men, whose bodies came from dust and were to return to dust, who were about to stone the woman caught in adultery. There is an important lesson here: the sins of mortal men, whose bodies decay into the dust from which they came, were written in dust so as to blown away by the Redemptive Act of the One Who wrote them down. Our own sins can be blown away, so to speak, by the administration of the healing balm of Absolution administered to us by a Catholic priest in the confessional. We must never despair of our salvation because of our sins. We must, however, never presume that we are saved, never presume that our sins are not serious, never presume to think that we can celebrate our sins and still be considered a Catholic in good standing.

It is the loss of the sensus Catholicus, you see, that is responsible for conciliar bishops' thorough acceptance of a choice on the part of those steeped in perversity to identify themselves by their perverse pleasures and desires. No one who understands the horror of sin is going to base his words or actions on an acceptance of an allegedly "irreversible" self-identification in sinful attitudes or inclinations or actions. A genuine Catholic bishop or priest is going to seek to convert the sinner from his sins and to exhort him to live penitentially to make reparation for them. Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Augustine rose from their lives of sin to the heights of sanctity without seeking to exculpate themselves for their past behavior or by insisting that it was possible to reconcile their behavior with being a disciple of the Divine Redeemer. Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Augustine did not need "pastoral programs" to quit their lives of sin. All they needed was God's ineffable grace to make an act of the will to cooperate more fully with that grace with every beat of their hearts until they died.

The reformation of lives is really quite simple. We must love God with all of our hearts, minds, bodies and souls as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through the Catholic Church. We must hate sin and all of its deceptions. We must love the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, wherein the horror of human sin and the reality of a God Who judges us is communicated seamlessly throughout the course of the liturgical year in the propers and commons of the Missale Romanum. We must spend time before Our Lord in His Real Presence, showing forth our love for Our Beloved in company with Our Lady and Saint Joseph and all of the angels and the saints. We must frequent the Sacraments, especially Penance and the Eucharist. We must consecrate ourselves totally as the slaves of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, saying as many Rosaries as our states-in-life will permit. And we must avoid all vain amusements and the near occasions of sin as we strive to model our own lives according to the pattern of the saints whose feasts we celebrate throughout the course of the liturgical year.

Thus, there is no "program" that is necessary to be devised for people with this or that sinful temptation or predilection, which predilections become worse over time the more that one is steeped in a habit of any particular sin, natural or unnatural. It is not necessary to devise semi-Pelagian, Judeo-Masonic "twelve-step" programs to "recover" from addiction. It is not necessary to devise "pastoral programs" to stop one from stealing or lying or killing. All people need is to have is access to the fullness of the Catholic Faith and to grow so deeply in love with God that even the thought of sin becomes repugnant to them.

Although each of us is a weak vessel of clay whose weaknesses are attacked by the devil and his minions as long as we draw the breath of life, God's grace is stronger than our weakness. Each temptation is a cause for our showing forth the power of God is stronger that the weakness of the flesh. We must, therefore, avoid even the discussion of sinful things, which is one of the reasons that the "pastoral guidelines" studied by Mrs. Engel are manifestations of the larger dry rot facing the conciliar church. We must never place ourselves in situations where we will fall into sin and then become habituated to a life of sin.

Saint Paul wrote the following in his First Epistle to the Corinthians:

It is absolutely heard, that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as the like is not among the heathens; that one should have his father's wife. And you are puffed up; and have not rather mourned, that he might be taken away from among you, that hath done this deed. I indeed, absent in body, but present in spirit, have already judged, as though I were present, him that hath so done, In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, you being gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus; To deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Your glorying is not good. Know you not that a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump? Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new paste, as you are unleavened. For Christ our pasch is sacrificed. Therefore let us feast, not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote to you in an epistle, not to keep company with fornicators. I mean not with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or the extortioners, or the servers of idols; otherwise you must needs go out of this world.

But now I have written to you, not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother, be a fornicator, or covetous, or a server of idols, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner: with such a one, not so much as to eat. For what have I to do to judge them that are without? Do not you judge them that are within? For them that are without, God will judge. Put away the evil one from among yourselves. (1 Cor. 5: 1-13)

One wonders if the conciliar bishops consider themselves bound by such genuine pastoral advice, written under the inspiration of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Ghost. Actually, one does not need to wonder. It is evident that men who have lost the faith and who are members of a counterfeit church consider themselves too "sophisticated" to believe such words, which is why they must find some "contemporary" pastoral approach that is nothing more than a means to propagandize in behalf of people who live unhappy lives in the grip of the devil, ever seeking the approval of others, as Saint Paul noted in his Epistle to the Romans:

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them (Romans 1: 26-32)

Not only do the conciliar bishops and their advisers, many of whom, shall we say, are very favorably disposed to the agenda of the Homosexual Collective, want to do more than seek the approval of others. Oh, no. They desire to inculcate their anti-Catholic propaganda in the souls of the young, defying these very words of Pope Pius XI, contained in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929:

Another very grave danger is that naturalism which nowadays invades the field of education in that most delicate matter of purity of morals. Far too common is the error of those who with dangerous assurance and under an ugly term propagate a so-called sex-education, falsely imagining they can forearm youths against the dangers of sensuality by means purely natural, such as a foolhardy initiation and precautionary instruction for all indiscriminately, even in public; and, worse still, by exposing them at an early age to the occasions, in order to accustom them, so it is argued, and as it were to harden them against such dangers.

Such persons grievously err in refusing to recognize the inborn weakness of human nature, and the law of which the Apostle speaks, fighting against the law of the mind; and also in ignoring the experience of facts, from which it is clear that, particularly in young people, evil practices are the effect not so much of ignorance of intellect as of weakness of a will exposed to dangerous occasions, and unsupported by the means of grace.

In this extremely delicate matter, if, all things considered, some private instruction is found necessary and opportune, from those who hold from God the commission to teach and who have the grace of state, every precaution must be taken. Such precautions are well known in traditional Christian education, and are adequately described by Antoniano cited above, when he says:

Such is our misery and inclination to sin, that often in the very things considered to be remedies against sin, we find occasions for and inducements to sin itself. Hence it is of the highest importance that a good father, while discussing with his son a matter so delicate, should be well on his guard and not descend to details, nor refer to the various ways in which this infernal hydra destroys with its poison so large a portion of the world; otherwise it may happen that instead of extinguishing this fire, he unwittingly stirs or kindles it in the simple and tender heart of the child. Speaking generally, during the period of childhood it suffices to employ those remedies which produce the double effect of opening the door to the virtue of purity and closing the door upon vice.

In other words, all classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments is prohibited. Private instruction may be undertaken with adolescents in certain instances, as noted above, but every precaution must be taken. The use of explicit materials to discuss these matters in classroom settings , no less to discuss them with children in Kindergarten, comes from the devil and leads souls to Hell, which is really at the heart of this whole ugly matter.

The Catholic Church is concerned about teaching her children to love the beauty of the Faith, including the beauty of the interior life of the soul. While she spares no effort to discuss the horror of sin, she does so in the context of the sufferings our sins imposed upon the Divine Redeemer and how our sins caused His Most Blessed Mother, the Co-Redemptrix, to suffer in a perfect communion with Him. The Catholic Church does not entice her children into sin by discussing various sins in graphic detail. The Catholic Church exhorts her children to the heights of sanctity, proposing as models for them the lives of the saints, including the heroic witness of the martyrs, many of whom chose death rather than to succumb to this or that sin (idol worship, impurity, the breaking of religious vows).

The dark forces that are at work in the conciliar church are preternatural. They are not of God. We are to flee from this forces, which do not represent the beauty of the Catholic Church at all. Indeed, they are images and foreshadowings of the Antichrist. Taking nothing away from Mrs. Engel's outstanding work, which continues to be done solely for the love of God and for the good of the souls for whom He shed His Most Precious Blood, it is not the will of God, I believe, that we "fight" these preternatural forces in the dioceses and parishes that are now in the Babylonian Captivity, if you will, of conciliarism. We must have have nothing to do with conciliarism and all of its falsehoods, including the evil that it is the Novus Ordo Missae--and any and all concessions made to its "doctrinal integrity" (such as must be made by those yet attached to the "indult" and the "indult mentality" for the offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition). It is being in the conciliar parishes that makes Catholics susceptible to the all of the lies and rotten programs offered by the conciliarists. What good is done for souls by remaining in places that promote lies and rot?

Some will point out that the "bingo" to be held at Most Holy Redeemer Church in San Francisco was canceled. Isn't that a sign of a victory? No, not really. Is the Novus Ordo still being offered in that parish. Is God still being offended by the horror of the Novus Ordo in that parish? Is the homosexual agenda still being promoted in that parish? Yes, it is a good thing that a particularly egregious phenomenon has been canceled. Fine. All well and good. This is, however, no more of a genuine "victory" than was the election of Republican majorities in both Houses of the Congress of the United States of America back in 1994. These sorts of "victories" are pyrrhic. The minute one thinks that "progress" has been made, you see, another, perhaps even greater, problem occurs, forcing good people to spin their wheels just as much as the fictional Sisyphus did in pushing that boulder up a hill.

The horror of the programs critiqued so very well by Mrs. Engel is but a small shadow of the dry rot that characterizes the entirety of conciliarism. God does not want us to spend our lives in the sewer of these preternatural forces that control but a counterfeit church that is not the Catholic Church, even though it claims to be the Catholic Church. While it is useful to know that such horror exists, we must remember that the underlying causes for the prevalence of this horror is the Modernism that was at work underground in the Catholic Church long before the advent of conciliarism and its false doctrines and its false form of worship.

How wonderful it is, therefore, to have found the oasis of chapels administered by bishops and priests who give no quarter to conciliarism, who recognize that such evils cannot come from the Catholic Church, who are intent solely on forming souls according to the mind of the Divine Redeemer as He has discharged It in the Catholic Church and as that Mind has been understood perennially. We are, as I have noted so frequently in the past few months, grateful to prelates such as Bishop Daniel Dolan and Mark Pivarunas for their guidance and example. We are so happy to have met the humble priests, dedicated religious and sincere laity in the chapels of the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen. It is nice to live in peace and to concentrate on making reparation for one's own many sins as the consecrated slave of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart!

The fact that the conciliar bishops believe that new "guidelines" to deal with those steeped in perversity are the apex of their pastoral work at a time when most Catholics have lost the Faith, including belief in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament and the sacrificial nature of the Mass itself, and feel free to vote for candidates for public office who support moral evils quite openly should teach those who have yet to find their way to the Catholic underground that Saint Athanasius was entirely correct when he wrote:

"May God console you! ... What saddens you ... is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith? The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in the struggle – the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith? True, the premises are good when the Apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way ...

"You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day." (Saint Athanasius, "A Letter to His Flock")

May Our Lady, who will have the Triumph of her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart when we least expect it, help each of us to escape from the dry rot of conciliarism and to seek out the fullness of the Faith in the catacombs as we offer to God through her Immaculate Heart the sufferings of the present moment, never ceasing to pray for all others, including the conciliarists themselves, so that Tradition will be restored in the Church and Christendom will be restored in the world.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady, Queen of All Saints, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.

Saint Augustine, pray for us.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

Saint Sebastian, pray for us.

Saint Jude, pray for us.

Saint Tarcisius, pray for us.

Saint Lucy, pray for us.

Saint Agnes, pray for us.

Saint Agatha, pray for us.

Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.

Saint John of the Cross, pray for us.

Saint John Bosco, pray for us.

Saint John Mary Vianney, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius V, pray for us.

Saint Charles Borromeo, pray for us.

Saint Robert Bellarmine, pray for us.

Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us.

Saint Therese Lisieux, pray for us.

Saint Bernadette Soubirous, pray for us.

Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, pray for us.

Venerable Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.

Francisco Marto, pray for us.

Jacinta Marto, pray for us.

The Longer Version of the Saint Michael the Archangel Prayer, composed by Pope Leo XIII, 1888

O glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Prince of the heavenly host, be our defense in the terrible warfare which we carry on against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, spirits of evil.  Come to the aid of man, whom God created immortal, made in His own image and likeness, and redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil.  Fight this day the battle of our Lord, together with  the holy angels, as already thou hast fought the leader of the proud angels, Lucifer, and his apostate host, who were powerless to resist thee, nor was there place for them any longer in heaven.  That cruel, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil or Satan who seduces the whole world, was cast into the abyss with his angels.  Behold this primeval enemy and slayer of men has taken courage.  Transformed into an angel of light, he wanders about with all the multitude of wicked spirits, invading the earth in order to blot out the Name of God and of His Christ, to seize upon, slay, and cast into eternal perdition, souls destined for the crown of eternal glory.  That wicked dragon pours out. as a most impure flood, the venom of his malice on men of depraved mind and corrupt heart, the spirit of lying, of impiety, of blasphemy, and the pestilent breath of impurity, and of every vice and iniquity.  These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on Her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck the sheep may be scattered.  Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory.  They venerate thee as their protector and patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious powers of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude.  Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church.  Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly conciliate the mercies of the Lord; and beating down the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations.  Amen.

Verse: Behold the Cross of the Lord; be scattered ye hostile powers.

Response: The Lion of the Tribe of Juda has conquered the root of David.

Verse: Let Thy mercies be upon us, O Lord.

Response: As we have hoped in Thee.

Verse: O Lord hear my prayer.

Response: And let my cry come unto Thee.

Verse: Let us pray.  O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon Thy holy Name, and as suppliants, we implore Thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin, immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits, who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of our souls. 

Response:  Amen.