Et Verbum Caro Factum Est

by Thomas A. Droleskey

In prinicipio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est. In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum: et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt. Fuit homo missus a Deo, cui nomen erat Joannes. Hic venit in testimonium, ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine, ut omnes crederent per illum. Non erat ille lux, sed ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine. Erat lux vera quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum. In mundo erat, et mundus per ipsum factus est, et mundus eum non cognovit. In propria venit, et sui eum non receperunt. Quotquot autem receperunt eum, dedit eis potestatem filios Dei fieri, his qui credunt in nomine ejus. Qui non ex sanguinibus, neque ex voluntate carnis, neque ex voluntate viri, sed ex Deo nati sunt. ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST, et habitavit in nobis et vidimus gloriam ejus, gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre, plenum gratiae et veritatis.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men: and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness to give testimony of the light, that all men might believe through him. He was not the light, but was to give testimony of the light. That was the true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them He gave great power to become the sons of God: to them that believe in His name: who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

The Last Gospel (John 1:1-14) is read at the end of most Traditional Latin Masses during the course of the liturgical year. It is no accident that the Last Gospel found its way into the offering of the Mass of the ages over the course of time. As the Mass itself is incarnational, making present the very same Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity Who was made Flesh in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate womb by the power of the Holy Ghost at the moment of the Annunciation, the Holy Ghost saw to it that the Gospel of the Incarnation would be read most days of the liturgical year in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Each of us needs to be reminded over and over and over again that the Incarnation of the Word as Flesh in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb changes everything about our own lives and the larger life of the world. The daily reminder provided by the Last Gospel in most of the Traditional Latin Masses offered by priests around the world helps us to leave Holy Mass with the realization that we are called to make Our Lord incarnate in every aspect of our own lives, making time to keep Him company in His Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, where He abides incarnate as the Prisoner of Love in tabernacles until the end of time.

Today, April 4, is the transferred Feast of the Annunciation. The actual feast day, March 25, was impeded by its falling on Good Friday this year. As I noted in several other commentaries during Holy Week, it is an ancient tradition of the Church that the first Good Friday occurred on March 25, thus completing the parallelism of the Incarnation. Our Lord became incarnate in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb by the power of the Holy Ghost so as to assume a perfect human nature, that of Adam before his fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, with which to pay back the blood debt of Adam's sin to Himself in His Infinity as God on the wood of the Holy Cross. The entire world is meant to be shaped by a specific and categorical acceptance of the Incarnation as the defining moment in human history, making it therefore possible for God to enter human history as one of us in all things except sin so as to undergo His Passion and Death and thus to destroy the power of sin and death forever. The fact of the Incarnation and its meaning was entrusted by Our Lord in the Deposit of Faith He gave Holy Mother Church to be safeguarded and transmitted as the means for each person and each nation to organize the reality of daily living.

The importance of the Incarnation is signified in no small measure by the fact that the Annunciation of Our Lord to Our Lady by Saint Gabriel the Archangel is the most painted scene in all of the history of art. Every Ave Maria we pray is a reminder of the Annunciation and the Incarnation that took place as soon as Our Lady gave her perfect fiat to the Father's will. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis, peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and the hour of our death. Amen. Every Angelus that we pray at six o'clock in the morning, noon, and six o'clock in the evening outside of Eastertide is a reminder of the Incarnation.

Angelus Domini, nuntiavit Mariae;

Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Ecce ancilla Domini.

Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Et Verbum caro factum est.

Et habitavit in nobis.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genetrix.

Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.

Oremus. Gratiam tuam, quaesumus, Domine, mentibus nostris infunde; ut qui, Angelo nuntiante, Christi Filii tui incarnationem cognovimus, per passionem ejus et crucem, ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur. Per eundem Christum Dominum nostrum.

Amen.

The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.

And she conceived by the Holy Ghost.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.

Behold the handmaid of the Lord.

Be it done unto me according to thy word.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.

And the Word was made Flesh.

And dwelt among us.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.

Pray for us, O holy Mother of God.

That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray: Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection. Through the same Christ Our Lord.

Amen.

The centrality of the Incarnation is important to meditate upon at all times. It is especially important now to remember during the Papal interregnum. One of the worst features of the liturgical revolution was the elimination of the Last Gospel in the years leading up to the Novus Ordo Missae. The Ordo Missae of 1965 suppressed The Last Gospel, which, according to the scholarship of Dr. Adrian Fortescue (see the late Michael Davies' The Wisdom of Adrian Fortescue), had started to become a private devotion said by priests by heart as they left the altar following the conclusion of Holy Mass several centuries before being mandated universally by Pope Saint Pius V in 1570. The suppression of a universal practice in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church for four centuries was, obviously, maintained in the Novus Ordo Missae itself. This has wrought incalculable damage in the lives of those Catholics who assist at Holy Mass in their local parishes. The Novus Ordo Missae of its nature has diminished, if not entirely obliterated in many places, belief in and respect for the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament. The distinction between the hierarchical priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood that each Catholic has by means of his Baptism has been blurred in a spirit of egalitarianism, fostered in large part by the invasion of the sanctuary by the laity during the offering of Mass. The focus in the Novus Ordo Missae, offered as it is facing the people, a Protestant novelty that had no parallel in any liturgical rite of the Catholic Church, East or West, prior to 1965, is on the person of the particular priest rather than on the action of the priest acting in persona Christi as the sacerdos. All of this, in additional to many other things I point out in G.I.R.M. Warfare, helps to mitigate against the incarnational reality of the Mass and thus makes it more difficult, although not impossible (God's grace is more powerful than any impediment raised by revolutionaries to deify man and to denigrate the glories of Tradition), for the average Catholic in his local parish to understand that the Incarnation of the Word in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb at the moment of the Annunciation is meant to change everything about how he lives and the choices he makes in his daily life without exception.

The State itself is meant to be organized around the centrality of the Incarnation, Nativity, Hidden Years, Public Ministry, Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of the Word made Flesh in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb to the Father's right hand in glory. Modernity has waged an unremitting and relentlessly violent war on the necessity of belief in everything Our Lord entrusted to Holy Mother Church in the Deposit of Faith as the foundation of all personal sanctity and hence all social order. Martin Luther himself sought to separate the "private" belief of a Christian prince from the "praxis" of his civil rule, thus giving Machiavellianism an ostensibly Christian gloss. Freemasonry is of its nature a society that exists to make the Incarnation a matter of private belief that has no relationship at all to the pursuit of the common good, founded as that pursuit is on man's ability to live a life of "civic virtue" unaided by belief in, access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace. It is precisely the insidious influences of the so-called philosophies and ideologies of Modernity and the influences of Protestantism and all of its bewildering contradictions and permutations that helped to give rise to the heresy of Modernism within the true Church, condemned so effectively and thoroughly in the critique of it offered by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, issued on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, September 8, 1907.

An acceptance of Modernity's rejection of the Incarnation as absolutely essential for the right ordering of men and their nations has become one of the most troublesome feature of the conciliarist era. Camillo Cardinal Ruini, the late Pope John Paul II's Vicar for Rome and the Primate of Italy, is very sanguine about Modernity and is quite conscious of rejecting the unbroken patrimony of the Church in this regard prior to the election of Pope John XXIII. Consider this excerpt from a recent report written by the respected Italian journalist, Sandro Magister, who covers Church affairs:

For example, Ruini has a more positive opinion of modernity than either of them [Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II] . He does not see the centrality of man as the origin of the evils of the modern world, in detracting from the primacy of God, because at the center of the Christian faith is Jesus, true God and true man, and it is on his behalf that the Church must present its witness and its reasoning. He also sees risks in democracy, but for him these do not reach the worrisome extent of the “subtle totalitarianism” that Wojtyla denounces in his recent book and testament. For Ruini, civil liberties must no longer be founded upon “truth” as opposed to error, as the Church taught for centuries until Vatican Council II, but upon the person, whose guaranteed rights naturally include that of seeking and professing the truth.

Contrast Cardinal Ruini's emphasis on the person with this passage from Pope Saint Pius X's Pascendi Dominici Gregis:

Thus far, Venerable Brethren, We have considered the Modernist as a philosopher. Now if We proceed to consider him as a believer, and seek to know how the believer, according to Modernism, is marked off from the philosopher, it must be observed that, although the philosopher recognizes the reality of the divine as the object of faith, still this reality is not to be found by him but in the heart of the believer, as an object of feeling and affirmation, and therefore confined within the sphere of phenomena; but the question as to whether in itself it exists outside that feeling and affirmation is one which the philosopher passes over and neglects. For the Modernist believer, on the contrary, it is an established and certain fact that the reality of the divine does really exist in itself and quite independently of the person who believes in it. If you ask on what foundation this assertion of the believer rests, he answers: In the personal experience of the individual. On this head the Modernists differ from the Rationalists only to fall into the views of the Protestants and pseudo-mystics. The following is their manner of stating the question: In the religious sense one must recognize a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the reality of God, and infuses such a persuasion of God's existence and His action both within and without man as far to exceed any scientific conviction. They assert, therefore, the existence of a real experience, and one of a kind that surpasses all rational experience. If this experience is denied by some, like the Rationalists, they say that this arises from the fact that such persons are unwilling to put themselves in the moral state necessary to produce it. It is this experience which makes the person who acquires it to be properly and truly a believer.

How far this position is removed from that of Catholic teaching! We have already seen how its fallacies have been condemned by the Vatican Council. Later on, we shall see how these errors, combined with those which we have already mentioned, open wide the way to Atheism. Here it is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with that of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true. What is to prevent such experiences from being found in any religion? In fact, that they are so is maintained by not a few. On what grounds can Modernists deny the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? Will they claim a monopoly of true experiences for Catholics alone? Indeed, Modernists do not deny, but actually maintain, some confusedly, others frankly, that all religions are true. That they cannot feel otherwise is obvious. For on what ground, according to their theories, could falsity be predicated of any religion whatsoever? Certainly it would be either on account of the falsity of the religious .sense or on account of the falsity of the formula pronounced by the mind. Now the religious sense, although it maybe more perfect or less perfect, is always one and the same; and the intellectual formula, in order to be true, has but to respond to the religious sense and to the believer, whatever be the intellectual capacity of the latter. In the conflict between different religions, the most that Modernists can maintain is that the Catholic has more truth because it is more vivid, and that it deserves with more reason the name of Christian because it corresponds more fully with the origins of Christianity. No one will find it unreasonable that these consequences flow from the premises. But what is most amazing is that there are Catholics and priests, who, We would fain believe, abhor such enormities, and yet act as if they fully approved of them. For they lavish such praise and bestow such public honor on the teachers of these errors as to convey the belief that their admiration is not meant merely for the persons, who are perhaps not devoid of a certain merit, but rather for the sake of the errors which these persons openly profess and which they do all in their power to propagate.

There is yet another element in this part of their teaching which is absolutely contrary to Catholic truth. For what is laid down as to experience is also applied with destructive effect to tradition, which has always been maintained by the Catholic Church. Tradition, as understood by the Modernists, is a communication with others of an original experience, through preaching by means of the intellectual formula. To this formula, in addition to its representative value they attribute a species of suggestive efficacy which acts firstly in the believer by stimulating the religious sense, should it happen to have grown sluggish, and by renewing the experience once acquired, and secondly, in those who do not yet believe by awakening in them for the first time the religious sense and producing the experience. In this way is religious experience spread abroad among the nations; and not merely among contemporaries by preaching, but among future generations both by books and by oral transmission from one to another. Sometimes this communication of religious experience takes root and thrives, at other times it withers at once and dies. For the Modernists, to live is a proof of truth, since for them life and truth are one and the same thing. Thus we are once more led to infer that all existing religions are equally true, for otherwise they would not survive.

The accommodation made with Modernity by the ethos of conciliarism, which rejects the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ as the absolute necessity for the possibility of a stable and just social order, leads to all manner of internal contradictions that are impossible to reconcile absent a return to the patrimony of the Church's consistent Social Teaching as enunciated so clearly by Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Saint Pius X, and Pius XI. Everything must be centered around the fact of Our Lord's Incarnation and His Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross. Pope Leo XIII noted this in Tametsi, issued on the Feast of All Saints, November 1, 1900:

It is surely unnecessary to prove, what experience constantly shows and what each individual feels in himself, even in the very midst of all temporal prosperity-that in God alone can the human will find absolute and perfect peace. God is the only end of man. All our life on earth is the truthful and exact image of a pilgrimage. Now Christ is the "Way," for we can never reach God, the supreme and ultimate good, by this toilsome and doubtful road of mortal life, except with Christ as our leader and guide. How so? Firstly and chiefly by His grace; but this would remain "void" in man if the precepts of His law were neglected. For, as was necessarily the case after Jesus Christ had won our salvation, He left behind Him His Law for the protection and welfare of the human race, under the guidance of which men, converted from evil life, might safely tend towards God. "Going, teach ye all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matthew xxviii., 19-20). "Keep my commandments" john xiv., 15). Hence it will be understood that in the Christian religion the first and most necessary condition is docility to the precepts of Jesus Christ, absolute loyalty of will towards Him as Lord and King. A serious duty, and one which oftentimes calls for strenuous labour, earnest endeavour, and perseverance! For although by Our Redeemer's grace human nature hath been regenerated, still there remains in each individual a certain debility and tendency to evil. Various natural appetites attract man on one side and the other; the allurements of the material world impel his soul to follow after what is pleasant rather than the law of Christ. Still we must strive our best and resist our natural inclinations with all our strength "unto the obedience of Christ." For unless they obey reason they become our masters, and carrying the whole man away from Christ, make him their slave. "Men of corrupt mind, who have made shipwreck of the faith, cannot help being slaves. . . They are slaves to a threefold concupiscence: of will, of pride, or of outward show" (St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, 37). In this contest every man must be prepared to undergo hard ships and troubles for Christ's sake. It is difficult to reject what so powerfully entices and delights. It is hard and painful to despise the supposed goods of the senses and of fortune for the will and precepts of Christ our Lord. But the Christian is absolutely obliged to be firm, and patient in suffering, if he wish to lead a Christian life. Have we forgotten of what Body and of what Head we are the members? "Having joy set before Him, He endured the Cross," and He bade us deny ourselves. The very dignity of human nature depends upon this disposition of mind. For, as even the ancient Pagan philosophy perceived, to be master of oneself and to make the lower part of the soul, obey the superior part, is so far from being a weakness of will that it is really a noble power, in consonance with right reason and most worthy of a man. Moreover, to bear and to suffer is the ordinary condition of man. Man can no more create for himself a life free from suffering and filled with all happiness that he can abrogate the decrees of his Divine Maker, who has willed that the consequences of original sin should be perpetual. It is reasonable, therefore, not to expect an end to troubles in this world, but rather to steel one's soul to bear troubles, by which we are taught to look forward with certainty to supreme happiness. Christ has not promised eternal bliss in heaven to riches, nor to a life of ease, to honours or to power, but to longsuffering and to tears, to the love of justice and to cleanness of heart.

From this it may clearly be seen what con sequences are to be expected from that false pride which, rejecting our Saviour's Kingship, places man at the summit of all things and declares that human nature must rule supreme. And yet, this supreme rule can neither be attained nor even defined. The rule of Jesus Christ derives its form and its power from Divine Love: a holy and orderly charity is both its foundation and its crown. Its necessary consequences are the strict fulfilment of duty, respect of mutual rights, the estimation of the things of heaven above those of earth, the preference of the love of God to all things. But this supremacy of man, which openly rejects Christ, or at least ignores Him, is entirely founded upon selfishness, knowing neither charity nor selfdevotion. Man may indeed be king, through Jesus Christ: but only on condition that he first of all obey God, and diligently seek his rule of life in God's law. By the law of Christ we mean not only the natural precepts of morality and the Ancient Law, all of which Jesus Christ has perfected and crowned by His declaration, explanation and sanction; but also the rest of His doctrine and His own peculiar institutions. Of these the chief is His Church. Indeed whatsoever things Christ has instituted are most fully contained in His Church. Moreover, He willed to perpetuate the office assigned to Him by His Father by means of the ministry of the Church so gloriously founded by Himself. On the one hand He confided to her all the means of men's salvation, on the other He most solemnly commanded men to be subject to her and to obey her diligently, and to follow her even as Himself: "He that heareth you, heareth Me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth Me" (Luke x, 16). Wherefore the law of Christ must be sought in the Church. Christ is man's "Way"; the Church also is his "Way"-Christ of Himself and by His very nature, the Church by His commission and the communication of His power. Hence all who would find salvation apart from the Church, are led astray and strive in vain.

As with individuals, so with nations. These, too, must necessarily tend to ruin if they go astray from "The Way." The Son of God, the Creator and Redeemer of mankind, is King and Lord of the earth, and holds supreme dominion over men, both individually and collectively. "And He gave Him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve Him" (Daniel vii., 14). "I am appointed King by Him . . . I will give Thee the Gentiles for Thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession" (Psalm ii., 6, 8). Therefore the law of Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and teacher of public as well as of private life. Since this is so by divine decree, and no man may with impunity contravene it, it is an evil thing for the common weal wherever Christianity does not hold the place that belongs to it. When Jesus Christ is absent, human reason fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light, and the very end is lost sight of, for which, under God's providence, human society has been built up. This end is the obtaining by the members of society of natural good through the aid of civil unity, though always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above nature. But when men's minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at.

Pope Leo XIII's writings resonate with clarity. Once again, for the sake of emphasis, a quotation contained from the passage above:

By the law of Christ we mean not only the natural precepts of morality and the Ancient Law, all of which Jesus Christ has perfected and crowned by His declaration, explanation and sanction; but also the rest of His doctrine and His own peculiar institutions. Of these the chief is His Church. Indeed whatsoever things Christ has instituted are most fully contained in His Church. Moreover, He willed to perpetuate the office assigned to Him by His Father by means of the ministry of the Church so gloriously founded by Himself. On the one hand He confided to her all the means of men's salvation, on the other He most solemnly commanded men to be subject to her and to obey her diligently, and to follow her even as Himself: "He that heareth you, heareth Me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth Me" (Luke x, 16). Wherefore the law of Christ must be sought in the Church. Christ is man's "Way"; the Church also is his "Way"-Christ of Himself and by His very nature, the Church by His commission and the communication of His power. Hence all who would find salvation apart from the Church, are led astray and strive in vain.

There is no wiggle room here, no "appreciation" for the ability of false religions to contribute to the establishment of States and to the pursuit of the common good. There is simply the truth of the Catholic Faith that belief in everything Our Lord has entrusted to Holy Mother Church is necessary for personal sanctity and hence all social order. In other words, the Incarnation matters and must be the foundation of everything in social life without exception (culture, entertainment, the arts, literature, politics, economics, home life, education--and any other aspect of social life one wants to name).

Sandro Magister's report on Cardinal Ruini indicated that he is a leader in the fight against abortion in Italy. Ultimately, though, as I have noted recently in my commentaries on the state-sponsored murder of Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman whose humanity was taken from her by the use of a so-called medical "diagnosis" that does not actually exist (as Pope John Paul II noted in his March 20, 2004, statement on the treatment of brain-damaged patients), efforts to restore full legal protection for the unborn will fail absent a return of men and nations to the Catholic Faith. Everything else will fail. The ethos of conciliarism does not seek--and in fact rejects--the necessity of a return to the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ and of the Queenship of Our Lady.

You see, the King of Kings Who condescended to become one of us in Our Lady’s womb was teaching us from the moment of His Incarnation. He taught us from within Our Lady that all human life is inviolable from the moment of conception through all subsequent stages until natural death. He is in solidarity with every child conceived in every mother’s womb, no matter the physical condition of the child or the conditions in which the child was conceived. He became Flesh in Our Lady’s womb to redeem all flesh. And it is on His authority alone that we are to defend the inviolability of all innocent human life. Indeed, the Annunciation is a feast day which is meant to remember that He Who is Life Himself became Flesh for our sakes so that we would be able to use this mortal life of ours in cooperation with the graces He won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross so as to enjoy an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise.

There would have been no Incarnation or Redemption without Our Lady, however. It was she, the New Eve, who untied the knot of Eve’s prideful disobedience in the Garden of Eden by her fiat to the Father’s will in the garden in Nazareth. Our Lady made it possible for the Gates of Heaven to be reopened. She became the Ark of the New Covenant, the woman who enfleshed the Word with her perfect human nature. She was the first and most perfect Christ-bearer. Our Lady wants each one of us to be Christ-bearers. No, we cannot enflesh Him the way that she did. We in the laity cannot enflesh Him the way that a priest does in the Canon of the Mass. But she wants us to let His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity so nourish us that we will bear Him courageously and lovingly to an unbelieving world today, especially to our fellow Catholics to be brave apostles of Tradition. She wants us to be as quick to do the Father’s will now as she was at the Annunciation. And the Father’s will is quite simple: to follow His Son in Spirit and in Truth through the true Church founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, so that we will scale the heights of personal sanctity.

May Our Lady help each one of us to pray, fast and to make sacrifices for the restoration of the glories of the Immemorial Mass of Traction so that every Roman Rite Catholic will leave Holy Mass fortified by having heard the Last Gospel to make Our Lord incarnate in every human heart, consecrated as each heart must be to her own Immaculate Heart and to her Divine Son's Most Sacred Heart. May Our Lord help us to find Our Lord as He is incarnate as the Prisoner of Love in the tabernacle every day of our lives so that we can obey Him through His Church with readiness and announce His sacred truths with joy to all men.

We continue our prayers for the repose of the soul of Pope John Paul II. We continue our prayers for the cardinal-electors who have gathered in Rome for the occasion of the deceased pontiff's burial and the election of his successor. We pray for a pope who will fulfill Our Lady's Fatima Message and thus restore that which so many of the Church's own cardinals and bishops think impossible and even inadvisable: the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel, pray for us.

Saints Peters and Paul, pray for us.

Saint Isidore, pray for us.

ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST.

Vivat Christus Rex!