Giving Unto Caesar What Belongs to God

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The leaders of German national socialism, which considered its rule to have been Germany's Third Reich (the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire and the Second Reich was the reign of the Hohenzollerns from 1871 to 1918), either did themselves in or were executed by the Allied Powers following the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Make no mistake about it, however, the spirit of German national socialism is alive and well in the country that has been wracked in so many different ways ever since a lustful Augustinian monk named Father Martin Luther tacked ninety-five theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.

The twin naturalist influence of national socialism and international socialism, which governed the eastern part of Germany between the end of World War II in 1945 and October 3, 1990, have combined to make the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany a model of the statism that was desired by the Freemason Otto von Bismarck when the German states were united following the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and has been practiced, truth be told, ever since with varying degrees of severity by a variety political actors, including national socialists under Adolf Hitler and international socialists under Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker in the now-defunct German Democratic Republic. Various Nazi-era laws are still being enforced in the Federal Republic of Germany, including a ban on the homeschooling of children, the recent enforcement of which resulted in the spiriting away of fifteen year-old Melissa Busekros from her parents for a period of two months earlier this year.

The latest victim of German national socialism is a Luther pastor named Johannes Lerle, who has been imprisoned for questioning the details of the atrocities committed by Nazi authorities against Jews imprisoned in various concentration camps throughout Eastern Europe during World War II. Although it is definitely the case that atrocities were committed against Jews by the naturalists pagans of the Third Reich, many solid historians who are not at all "anti-Semitic" or motivated by anything other than a concern for the truth have in recent decades begun to examine the claims made by professional "Holocaust" apologists concerning the specific numbers of people that were murdered and the manner in which these murders took place. These historians have produced what the ancients called "facts" and have raised questions on the basis of the facts they have discovered about the claims made by those who contend that any "revision" of "Holocaust history" is indeed "anti-Semitism" and must be punished by imprisonment and monetary fines.

Here is a very factually accurate account of contemporary "thought-control" in the Federal Republic of Germany:

FAITH UNDER FIRE
Germany silences pro-lifers, homeschoolers, creationists
Crime is 'incitement of the people,' court rules in ordering prison term
Posted: June 28, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Chelsea Schilling
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

A 55-year-old Lutheran pastor has been found guilty of "volksverhetzung" or "incitement of the people" by a German court and will spend a year in jail after an Erlangen court claimed he made a statement denying the Holocaust suffered by the Jews at the hands of Nazi-Germany during World War II.

Johannes Lerle compared Germany's abortion rate of 150,000 annually to the murder of Jews in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

According to Life Site, though the pastor has been jailed for anti-abortion activities in the past, his current one-year jail term stemmed specifically from charges of Holocaust denial and not from his statements comparing abortion to the Nazi Holocaust, as it claims news sources erroneously reported.

However, Lerle has faced prison time in the past for voicing his opposition to abortion.

"Previously, he had been jailed for eight months for calling abortionists 'professional killers.' An allegation which the court ruled to be slanderous because the court says the unborn are not human," an anonymous pro-life activist in Germany told Salem Voice Ministries.

"Berlin is Germany's abortion capital. For every 1,000 babies born in Berlin, 344 were killed in their mother's womb," Pro-life With Christ reports. "In the city with 3.4 million inhabitants 10,024 babies were aborted [in 2006]."

However, such figures fail to account for the substantial number of unrecorded abortions – which are estimated to be equal to the total number of reported abortions.

Other high-profile religious leaders have also condemned Germany's growing acceptance of abortion. According to a BBC report, the Roman Catholic Church publicly condemned government plans to allow the sale of abortion pill RU-486 in 1998. Archbishop of Cologne Joachim Meissner made a comparison between taking the abortion pill and the use of gas in the Holocaust.

Gunter Annen is another pro-life activist who has faced a similar fate at the hands of a German court. In 2005, he asked to end "unjust abortions in medical practice" and was sentenced to 50 days in jail because the courts claimed the term "unjust" can be interpreted to mean "illegal." People who have abortions are not prosecuted if patients receive counseling and terminate the pregnancy within three months of conception.

Germany uses threats of "volksverhetzung," a tactic once used by Nazis against their enemies, to intimidate many of its citizens – including homeschoolers.

As WND previously reported, a German court ordered teenager Melissa Busekros to be taken from her home by a police squad and detained in a psychiatric hospital for being homeschooled. She was later returned to her family when an appeals court ruled she was no longer in danger.

In a separate WND report, a federal prosecutor in the German state of Hesse is seeking three-month prison terms for a mother and father who homeschool their six children, even though the family already has paid fines for violating the nation's Hitler-era homeschooling ban and made plans to move.

Officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association, the pre-eminent homeschool advocacy organization in the world, are actively involved in a number of cases. Estimates are that there are about 400 homeschool families in Germany – virtually all of them either forced into hiding or in court.

Many fear the ever-present threat of "volksverhetzung" in contemporary Europe, as it is being used to silence and jail conservative and orthodox citizens for voicing their own deeply felt beliefs.

The charge may soon be used to combat creationism as well. On June 26, the Council of Europe, or CoE, Europe's main human-rights body, is scheduled to vote on a proposal advocating the fight against creationism in its 47 member states.

According to CoE's Parliamentary Assembly report, creationists are dangerous "religious fundamentalists" who propagate "forms of religious extremism."

"Creationism, born of the denial of the evolution of species through natural selection, was for a long time an almost exclusively American phenomenon," the report says. "Today creationist theories are tending to find their way into Europe … [T]his is liable to encourage the development of all manner of fundamentalism and extremism, synonymous with attacks of utmost virulence on human rights."

The "thought-control" exercised by the modern totalitarian state, which, of course, has "liberated" itself from the Social Reign of Christ the King and denounced as "enslavement" any allegiance to the true Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, is not indigenous to the naturalists of Germany. Contemporary "thought-control," which seeks to ape the free submission of one's intellect and will to the Deposit of Faith by imposing state-sponsored penalties upon "dissidents" who dare to put themselves outside of the true secular church, that is, the state and its naturalist dogmas, has been used by all social revolutionaries as the means to render unto Caesar what belongs to God through His true Church: total submission of mind and will on matters pertaining to the nature of man and the end for which he was created.

This has been true from the time of the American Revolution, which featured propagandists advancing the false notions of the "rights of man" as the forerunner to the acceptance of the religiously indifferentist civil state, to the French Revolution, whose catchy slogans replaced rational thought and were the basis of "citizenship," to the Italian Risorgimento, which targeted the sovereignty of the Papal States in the name of the Masonic dream of a "liberated" Italy, to Bismarck's Kulturkampf to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Maoist Revolution and to the various manifestations of the "Mexican Revolution," among so many others. Contemporary technology has made the imposition of this "thought-control" to be so successful that anyone who dissents from the agenda of the Judeo-Masonic naturalists, whether domestically or internationally, stands out so dramatically as to be an easy target for ridicule, harassment, persecution and, ultimately, criminal prosecution. In other words, the modern state, no matter the anti-Incarnational variations of naturalism (pluralism, national socialism, international socialism) it assumes, must seek to enforce its social dogmas and to penalize those who dissent therefrom.

The modern state, founded on the anti-Incarnational principles of naturalism (with a healthy admixture of various heretical notions from Protestantism, including the "separation of Church and State), has thus aped and perverted and distorted attributes that belong exclusively to the true Church that Our Lord founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and outside of which there is not only no salvation but no sure way of knowing what Our Lord taught and how it is to be applied in our daily lives. The modern state believes itself and its decrees to be infallible. Those who dissent from its decrees are disloyal, if not completely unpatriotic. Careful measures must be taken to monitor and to censor dissenting views, especially those belonging to "religious fanatics" who believe that the state's "truth" conflicts with what they, the "fanatics," contend is God's truth. Empowered by this false conception of man and the state, government apparatchiks throughout the nations of the world, whether they be in Western pluralist "democracies" or in Communist oligarchic dictatorships (such as Red China and Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam), ride herd over ordinary citizens to ensure "conformity" with the "right" way of thinking and acting, that is, the way decreed by the dictates of civil law and the ever (leftward) changing trends of popular culture.

It is not only the modern state that considers itself infallible and imposes upon his subjects, whose private property it takes incommensurately by means of confiscatory taxation to fund its naturalist agenda of evil, but the modern states symbiotic partner, the corporation, that does so as it treats its paying customers as little more than mindless morons who must never ask any questions about corporate policies or do anything that gives any impression that the corporation or its officials are capable of error. Wealthy and powerful multinational corporations "train" their employees to "think" in certain ways, especially to accept perversity in the name of "diversity sensitivity" and to subject them to significant pressures to contribute to corporate "giving" programs that fund such nefarious projects as the March of Dimes and Planned Parenthood and the whole host of organizations associated with the Homosexual Collective.

This inversion and perversion and distortion of Catholic principles to serve the end of statists and corporate robber barons has been aided and abetted by conciliarism's "dialogue" with the "modern" world. The counterfeit church of conciliarism no longer believes that it is necessary to seek with urgency the conversion of men and their nations to the maternal bosom of the Catholic Church. Those steeped in false religions have the right, according to the precepts of conciliarism, to propagate their errors publicly and that those erroneous beliefs can "contribute" to the "betterment" of me and their nations. All talk of the the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King has been replaced by the slogan of "healthy security." The counterfeit church of conciliarism demands adherence to its false precepts and disparages those who point out the obvious conflicts between those false precepts and the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church. The Modernist adoption of the approach of Modernity has resulted in the further empowering and institutionalizing of the civil state as the omniscient explicator of all that pertains to the just ordering of individual and social life,.

To render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's means for a citizen to obey all just laws that are in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law and to recognize that the leaders of a civil state do indeed have a wide degree of autonomy in the decisions they make in the pursuit of the common temporal good as long as they keep in bind God's laws and the eternal good of the souls of their citizens. Even in the things of Caesar, however, the things of God appertain. Everything we do must redound to the honor and glory of God and serve the actual interests, both temporal and eternal, of the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

A decision to build a roadway, for example, is not received from the hand of God and it thus one within the competency of civil officials to make. Such a decision concerning a roadway must be premised upon principles of justice (is there a real need for a highway, will it do more good than harm, how many people will be displaced) and, once undertaken, be constructed sturdily for the honor and glory of God and be able to withstand the pressure of the weight of the vehicles that will travel upon it over the years without having to be torn up for reconstruction constantly (thus inconveniencing the traveling public and lining the coffers of the contractors who profit from building highways designed to be torn up every few years as the proceeds of government contracts are returned in part to the office holders who gave the contractors the job to build and rebuild the highway to begin with).

Pope Saint Pius X reiterated this principle in Singulari Quadam, September 12, 1912:

These are fundamental principles: No matter what the Christian does, even in the realm of temporal goods, he cannot ignore the supernatural good. Rather, according to the dictates of Christian philosophy, he must order all things to the ultimate end, namely, the Highest Good. All his actions, insofar as they are morally either good or bad (that is to say, whether they agree or disagree with the natural and divine law), are subject to the judgment and judicial office of the Church

 

Sadly, there are some who believe that they remain a member of the Catholic Church while rejecting her divinely-appointed right to be recognized as the one and only true religion by the civil state and while adopting "Enlightenment" philosophies that place the "sovereignty of man" and his disordered pride at the summit of all things. Each man needs to submit his conscience in humility and docility at all times to the Deposit of Faith and to recognize that no man can persevere in virtue, no less scale the heights of sanctity, unless he has belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. The civil state will naturally degenerate into the totalitarian monster that it has become in the past few centuries when its citizens are not loyal sons and daughters of the Catholic Church and when it does not recognize that that true Church has the right, exercised judiciously and only after the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to intervene with its decisions if the good of souls demands it.

The perfect summary of this teaching is to be found in Pope Saint Pius X's Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-"Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur." He proceeds: "Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- "Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error."

 

No one is free to dissent from this. Although some might like to think that fallen man, who did not create himself and whose body is subject to the corruption of the grave until the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead on the Last Day, is so free, such a false concept of "freedom" places one outside of the Catholic Church and demonstrates that he trusts in "philosophers" who reject the Incarnation and Redemptive Act of Our Lord as the necessary foundation for personal and social order more than he is willing to admit that the words of Pope Pius XI, contained in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, are an absolute and total repudiation of the "right" of "dissent" from the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.

 

Pope Leo XIII explained in A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902, that we must work for the restoration of Catholicism as the foundation of all personal and social order:

So society in its foolhardy effort to escape from God has rejected the Divine order and Revelation; and it is thus withdrawn from the salutary efficacy of Christianity which is manifestly the most solid guarantee of order, the strongest bond of fraternity, and the inexhaustible source of all public and private virtue. This sacrilegious divorce has resulted in bringing about the trouble which now disturbs the world.  Hence it is the pale of the Church which this lost society must re-enter, if it wishes to recover its well-being, its repose, and its salvation.

Just as Christianity cannot penetrate into the soul without making it better, so it cannot enter into public life without establishing order. With the idea of a God Who governs all, Who is infinitely wise, good, and just, the idea of duty seizes upon the consciences of men.  It assuages sorrow, it calms hatred, it engenders heroes. If it has transformed pagan society--and that transformation was a veritable resurrection--for barbarism disappeared in proportion as Christianity extended its sway, so, after the terrible shocks which unbelief has given to the world in our days, it will be able to put that world again on the true road, and bring back to order the states and peoples of modern times. But the return of Christianity will not be efficacious and complete if it does not restore the world to a sincere love of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In the Catholic Church Christianity is Incarnate. It identifies itself with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society, which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for Its visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles. It is the continuation of the mission of the Saviour, the daughter and the heiress of His Redemption.  It has preached the Gospel, and has defended it at the price of Its blood, and strong in the Divine Assistance and of that immortality which has been promised it,  it makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which it has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect itt in its inviolable integrity. Legitimate dispenser of the teachings of the Gospel it does not reveal Itself only as the consoler and Redeemer of souls, but it is still more the internal source of justice and charity, and the propagator as well as the guardian of true liberty, and of that equality which alone is possible here below. In applying the doctrine of its Divine Founder, it maintains a wise equilibrium and marks the true limits between the rights and privileges of society. The equality which it proclaims does not destroy the distinction between the different social classes  It keeps them intact, as nature itself demands, in order to oppose the anarchy of reason emancipated from Faith, and abandoned to its own devices. The liberty which it gives in no wise conflicts with the rights of truth, because those rights are superior to the demands of liberty.  Not does it infringe upon the rights of Justice, because those rights are superior to the claims of mere numbers or power. Nor does it assail the rights of God because they are superior to the rights of humanity.

 

Pope Leo XIII had indicated in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, the natural, logical and inexorable result of any form of naturalism is tyranny of one sort of another wherein crimes against God and man are institutionalized with adherents of truth are considered criminals:

A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

 

Public life will continue to be stained with crime as long as the civil state is separated from and/or hostile to the Catholic Church. The "freedom" promised man by the false "Enlightenment" has wound up enslaving him to one naturalist ideology after another and to the monster state of its own creation. Pope Pius XI noted all of this in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937, in which he condemned the national socialism of Germany and all efforts to replace a Faith in the true God as He has revealed Himself exclusively through the Catholic Church with the false gods of nationalism and/or any and all racialist ideologies:

Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community -- however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things -- whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.

This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.

None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah xI, 15).

The Bishops of the Church of Christ, "ordained in the things that appertain to God (Heb. v, 1) must watch that pernicious errors of this sort, and consequent practices more pernicious still, shall not gain a footing among their flock. It is part of their sacred obligations to do whatever is in their power to enforce respect for, and obedience to, the commandments of God, as these are the necessary foundation of all private life and public morality; to see that the rights of His Divine Majesty, His name and His word be not profaned; to put a stop to the blasphemies, which, in words and pictures, are multiplying like the sands of the desert; to encounter the obstinacy and provocations of those who deny, despise and hate God, by the never-failing reparatory prayers of the Faithful, hourly rising like incense to the All-Highest and staying His vengeance.

We thank you, Venerable Brethren, your priests and Faithful, who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God's rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism. Our gratitude, warmer still and admiring, goes out to those who, in fulfillment of their duty, have been deemed worthy of sacrifice and suffering for the love of God.

No faith in God can for long survive pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in Christ. "No one knoweth who the Son is, but the Father: and who the Father is, but the Son and to whom the Son will reveal Him" (Luke x. 22). "Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent" (John xvii. 3). Nobody, therefore, can say: "I believe in God, and that is enough religion for me," for the Savior's words brook no evasion: "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son hath the Father also" (1 John ii. 23).

In Jesus Christ, Son of God made Man, there shone the plentitude of divine revelation. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by His Son" (Heb. i. 1). The sacred books of the Old Testament are exclusively the word of God, and constitute a substantial part of his revelation; they are penetrated by a subdued light, harmonizing with the slow development of revelation, the dawn of the bright day of the redemption. As should be expected in historical and didactic books, they reflect in many particulars the imperfection, the weakness and sinfulness of man. But side by side with innumerable touches of greatness and nobleness, they also record the story of the chosen people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise, repeatedly straying from God and turning to the world. Eyes not blinded by prejudice or passion will see in this prevarication, as reported by the Biblical history, the luminous splendor of the divine light revealing the saving plan which finally triumphs over every fault and sin. It is precisely in the twilight of this background that one perceives the striking perspective of the divine tutorship of salvation, as it warms, admonishes, strikes, raises and beautifies its elect. Nothing but ignorance and pride could blind one to the treasures hoarded in the Old Testament.

Whoever wishes to see banished from church and school the Biblical history and the wise doctrines of the Old Testament, blasphemes the name of God, blasphemes the Almighty's plan of salvation, and makes limited and narrow human thought the judge of God's designs over the history of the world: he denies his faith in the true Christ, such as He appeared in the flesh, the Christ who took His human nature from a people that was to crucify Him; and he understands nothing of that universal tragedy of the Son of God who to His torturer's sacrilege opposed the divine and priestly sacrifice of His redeeming death, and made the new alliance the goal of the old alliance, its realization and its crown.

The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to draw from the so-called myth of race and blood. Since Christ, the Lord's Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be saved (Acts iv. 12). No man, were every science, power and worldly strength incarnated in him, can lay any other foundation but that which is laid: which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor. iii 11). Should any man dare, in sacrilegious disregard of the essential differences between God and His creature, between the God-man and the children of man, to place a mortal, were he the greatest of all times, by the side of, or over, or against, Christ, he would deserve to be called prophet of nothingness, to whom the terrifying words of Scripture would be applicable: "He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them" (Psalms ii. 3).

Faith in Christ cannot maintain itself pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in the Church, "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. iii. 15); for Christ Himself, God eternally blessed, raised this pillar of the Faith. His command tO hear the Church (Matt. xviii. 15), to welcome in the words and commands of the Church His own words and His own commands (Luke x. 16), is addressed to all men, of all times and of all countries. The Church founded by the Redeemer is one, the same for all races and all nations. Beneath her dome, as beneath the vault of heaven, there is but one country for all nations and tongues; there is room for the development of every quality, advantage, task and vocation which God the Creator and Savior has allotted to individuals as well as to ethnical communities. The Church's maternal heart is big enough to see in the God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts, more than a mere danger of divergency. She rejoices at the spiritual superiorities among individuals and nations. In their successes she sees with maternal joy and pride fruits of education and progress, which she can only bless and encourage, whenever she can conscientiously do so. But she also knows that to this freedom limits have been set by the majesty of the divine command, which founded that Church one and indivisible. Whoever tampers with that unity and that indivisibility wrenches from the Spouse of Christ one of the diadems with which God Himself crowned her; he subjects a divine structure, which stands on eternal foundations, to criticism and transformation by architects whom the Father of Heaven never authorized to interfere.

The Church, whose work lies among men and operates through men, may see her divine mission obscured by human, too human, combination, persistently growing and developing like the cockle among the wheat of the Kingdom of God. Those who know the Savior's words on scandal and the giver of scandals, know, too, the judgment which the Church and all her sons must pronounce on what was and what is sin. But if, besides these reprehensible discrepancies be between faith and life, acts and words, exterior conduct and interior feelings, however numerous they be, anyone overlooks the overwhelming sum of authentic virtues, of spirit of sacrifice, fraternal love, heroic efforts of sanctity, he gives evidence of deplorable blindness and injustice. If later he forgets to apply the standard of severity, by which he measures the Church he hates, to other organizations in which he happens to be interested, then his appeal to an offended sense of purity identifies him with those who, for seeing the mote in their brother's eye, according to the Savior's incisive words, cannot see the beam in their own. But however suspicious the intention of those who make it their task, nay their vile profession, to scrutinize what is human in the Church, and although the priestly powers conferred by God are independent of the priest's human value, it yet remains true that at no moment of history, no individual, in no organization can dispense himself from the duty of loyally examining his conscience, of mercilessly purifying himself, and energetically renewing himself in spirit and in action. In Our Encyclical on the priesthood We have urged attention to the sacred duty of all those who belong to the Church, chiefly the members of the priestly and religious profession and of the lay apostolate, to square their faith and their conduct with the claims of the law of God and of the Church. And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today -- prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God -- the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.

In your country, Venerable Brethren, voices are swelling into a chorus urging people to leave the Church, and among the leaders there is more than one whose official position is intended to create the impression that this infidelity to Christ the King constitutes a signal and meritorious act of loyalty to the modern State. Secret and open measures of intimidation, the threat of economic and civic disabilities, bear on the loyalty of certain classes of Catholic functionaries, a pressure which violates every human right and dignity. Our wholehearted paternal sympathy goes out to those who must pay so dearly for their loyalty to Christ and the Church; but directly the highest interests are at stake, with the alternative of spiritual loss, there is but one alternative left, that of heroism. If the oppressor offers one the Judas bargain of apostasy he can only, at the cost of every worldly sacrifice, answer with Our Lord: "Begone, Satan! For it is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve" (Matt. iv. 10). And turning to the Church, he shall say: "Thou, my mother since my infancy, the solace of my life and advocate at my death, may my tongue cleave to my palate if, yielding to worldly promises or threats, I betray the vows of my baptism." As to those who imagine that they can reconcile exterior infidelity tO one and the same Church, let them hear Our Lord's warning: -- "He that shall deny me before men shall be denied before the angels of God" (Luke xii. 9).

Faith in the Church cannot stand pure and true without the support of faith in the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. The same moment when Peter, in the presence of all the Apostles and disciples, confesses his faith in Christ, Son of the Living God, the answer he received in reward for his faith and his confession was the word that built the Church, the only Church of Christ, on the rock of Peter (Matt. xvi. 18). Thus was sealed the connection between the faith in Christ, the Church and the Primacy. True and lawful authority is invariably a bond of unity, a source of strength, a guarantee against division and ruin, a pledge for the future: and this is verified in the deepest and sublimest sense, when that authority, as in the case of the Church, and the Church alone, is sealed by the promise and the guidance of the Holy Ghost and His irresistible support. Should men, who are not even united by faith in Christ, come and offer you the seduction of a national German Church, be convinced that it is nothing but a denial of the one Church of Christ and the evident betrayal of that universal evangelical mission, for which a world Church alone is qualified and competent. The live history of other national churches with their paralysis, their domestication and subjection to worldly powers, is sufficient evidence of the sterility to which is condemned every branch that is severed from the trunk of the living Church. Whoever counters these erroneous developments with an uncompromising No from the very outset, not only serves the purity of his faith in Christ, but also the welfare and the vitality of his own people.

You will need to watch carefully, Venerable Brethren, that religious fundamental concepts be not emptied of their content and distorted to profane use. "Revelation" in its Christian sense, means the word of God addressed to man. The use of this word for the "suggestions" of race and blood, for the irradiations of a people's history, is mere equivocation. False coins of this sort do not deserve Christian currency. "Faith" consists in holding as true what God has revealed and proposes through His Church to man's acceptance. It is "the evidence of things that appear not" (Heb. ii. 1). The joyful and proud confidence in the future of one's people, instinct in every heart, is quite a different thing from faith in a religious sense. To substitute the one for the other, and demand on the strength of this, to be numbered among the faithful followers of Christ, is a senseless play on words, if it does not conceal a confusion of concepts, or worse.

"Immortality" in a Christian sense means the survival of man after his terrestrial death, for the purpose of eternal reward or punishment. Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order.

"Original sin" is the hereditary but impersonal fault of Adam's descendants, who have sinned in him (Rom. v. 12). It is the loss of grace, and therefore of eternal life, together with a propensity to evil, which everybody must, with the assistance of grace, penance, resistance and moral effort, repress and conquer. The passion and death of the Son of God has redeemed the world from the hereditary curse of sin and death. Faith in these truths, which in your country are today the butt of the cheap derision of Christ's enemies, belongs to the inalienable treasury of Christian revelation.

The cross of Christ, though it has become to many a stumbling block and foolishness (1 Cor. i. 23) remains for the believer the holy sign of his redemption, the emblem of moral strength and greatness. We live in its shadow and die in its embrace. It will stand on our grave as a pledge of our faith and our hope in the eternal light.

Humility in the spirit of the Gospel and prayer for the assistance of grace are perfectly compatible with self-confidence and heroism. The Church of Christ, which throughout the ages and to the present day numbers more confessors and voluntary martyrs than any other moral collectivity, needs lessons from no one in heroism of feeling and action. The odious pride of reformers only covers itself with ridicule when it rails at Christian humility as though it were but a cowardly pose of self-degradation.

"Grace," in a wide sense, may stand for any of the Creator's gifts to His creature; but in its Christian designation, it means all the supernatural tokens of God's love; God's intervention which raises man to that intimate communion of life with Himself, called by the Gospel "adoption of the children of God." "Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God" (1 John iii. 1). To discard this gratuitous and free elevation in the name of a so-called German type amounts to repudiating openly a fundamental truth of Christianity. It would be an abuse of our religious vocabulary to place on the same level supernatural grace and natural gifts. Pastors and guardians of the people of God will do well to resist this plunder of sacred things and this confusion of ideas.

It is on faith in God, preserved pure and stainless, that man's morality is based. All efforts to remove from under morality and the moral order the granite foundation of faith and to substitute for it the shifting sands of human regulations, sooner or later lead these individuals or societies to moral degradation. The fool who has said in his heart "there is no God" goes straight to moral corruption (Psalms xiii. 1), and the number of these fools who today are out to sever morality from religion, is legion. They either do not see or refuse to see that the banishment of confessional Christianity, i.e., the clear and precise notion of Christianity, from teaching and education, from the organization of social and political life, spells spiritual spoliation and degradation. No coercive power of the State, no purely human ideal, however noble and lofty it be, will ever be able to make shift of the supreme and decisive impulses generated by faith in God and Christ. If the man, who is called to the hard sacrifice of his own ego to the common good, loses the support of the eternal and the divine, that comforting and consoling faith in a God who rewards all good and punishes all evil, then the result of the majority will be, not the acceptance, but the refusal of their duty. The conscientious observation of the ten commandments of God and the precepts of the Church (which are nothing but practical specifications of rules of the Gospels) is for every one an unrivaled school of personal discipline, moral education and formation of character, a school that is exacting, but not to excess. A merciful God, who as Legislator, says -- Thou must! -- also gives by His grace the power to will and to do. To let forces of moral formation of such efficacy lie fallow, or to exclude them positively from public education, would spell religious under-feeding of a nation. To hand over the moral law to man's subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction. The resulting dereliction of the eternal principles of an objective morality, which educates conscience and ennobles every department and organization of life, is a sin against the destiny of a nation, a sin whose bitter fruit will poison future generations.

Such is the rush of present-day life that it severs from the divine foundation of Revelation, not only morality, but also the theoretical and practical rights. We are especially referring to what is called the natural law, written by the Creator's hand on the tablet of the heart (Rom. ii. 14) and which reason, not blinded by sin or passion, can easily read. It is in the light of the commands of this natural law, that all positive law, whoever be the lawgiver, can be gauged in its moral content, and hence, in the authority it wields over conscience. Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend. In the light of this principle one must judge the axiom, that "right is common utility," a proposition which may be given a correct significance, it means that what is morally indefensible, can never contribute to the good of the people. But ancient paganism acknowledged that the axiom, to be entirely true, must be reversed and be made to say: "Nothing can be useful, if it is not at the same time morally good" (Cicero, De Off. ii. 30). Emancipated from this oral rule, the principle would in international law carry a perpetual state of war between nations; for it ignores in national life, by confusion of right and utility, the basic fact that man as a person possesses rights he holds from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or neglect. To overlook this truth is to forget that the real common good ultimately takes its measure from man's nature, which balances personal rights and social obligations, and from the purpose of society, established for the benefit of human nature. Society, was intended by the Creator for the full development of individual possibilities, and for the social benefits, which by a give and take process, every one can claim for his own sake and that of others. Higher and more general values, which collectivity alone can provide, also derive from the Creator for the good of man, and for the full development, natural and supernatural, and the realization of his perfection. To neglect this order is to shake the pillars on which society rests, and to compromise social tranquillity, security and existence.

 

It is indeed more than a little ironic, and not at all accidental or coincidental, that one can be imprisoned in various countries for speaking out against abortion and/or for attempting to correct the historical record concerning the nature and extent of the grave atrocities committed by the German national socialists during Word War II while those who ignore the atrocities committed by the "Allied Powers," including the United States of America, the United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, on the civilian population of Germany (which was attacked mercilessly by the United States and the United Kingdom) and Eastern Europe (which was attacked and then enslaved by the Soviet Union and its puppets in the various nations of that region) are never held to account for their historical distortionism, shall we say.

Moreover, it is indeed more than a little ironic, and once again not at all accidental or coincidental, that one can be imprisoned in various countries for seeking to correct the historical record about Nazi atrocities while those who deny the one and only Holocaust, that is, the immolation of the God-Man on the wood of the Holy Cross that is perpetuated in an unbloody manner on altars of Sacrifice every time a true Catholic priest offers the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, remain perfectly free to mock and spit upon Our Lord mystically and His Sacrifice of Love as they seek to place tragic human atrocities above the greatest crime that man has ever committed: putting God in the Flesh to death on the wood of the Holy Cross. Not only are such true Holocaust-deniers free to spit upon Our Lord mystically, they are enabled by the likes of Joseph Ratzinger, who claims that the "Church" has lost the right to convert adherents of the Talmud because of what happened during World War II, thus making the Holocaust of the God-Man in atonement for human sins subordinate and to the crimes committed by the naturalists and pagans of the Third Reich. Talk about an inversion of reality.

The Caesars of the modern world will only get more and more powerful as the years pass until the time that God sends upon us all a chastisement that will make our current chastisements seem like so much child's play. There is no secular, religiously indifferentist, inter-denominational or naturalistic way to retard the power of men who believe themselves to be the arbiters of right and wrong and who seek to crush all opposition to their never-ending thirst for unjust power and control over the thoughts of the citizens who dissent from their agendas of evil. One cannot fight secularism or naturalism or positivism or statism with anything other than Catholicism.

Pope Leo XIII pointed this out in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error.

 

We can, as His Excellency Bishop Daniel Dolan noted in his sermon (not yet posted at Traditional Catholic Sermons Home) at Saint Gertrude the Great Church on the Feast of the Most Precious Blood, Sunday, July 1, 2007, change the world one family at a time, starting with the Enthronement of our homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. (See: Enthroning the Heart of Love in Our Homes on this site.) This is very true. Enthroning our homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary will help to fortify us when the statists of both naturalistically-based political parties in this country begin to clamp down more and more upon us in the years ahead. We will be more ready to withstand the pressures of the world, the flesh and the devil as we offer our daily acts of reparation for our sins and those of the whole world to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially by praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life will permit.

A home that is enthroned to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary will eschew the false pleasures and cheap thrills of naturalism as it seeks to surround itself with the odor of sanctity, if you will, concentrating on First and Last Things as we count it as a pure joy to suffer more and more for Christ the King and for Mary our Immaculate Queen. We must stand fast for the fullness of Catholic truth at all times and without any exception whatsoever as Pope Leo XIII exhorted us to do in Sapientiae Christianae:

To recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamors are raised against truth, is the part of a man either devoid of character or who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes to believe. In both cases such mode of behaving is base and is insulting to God, and both are incompatible with the salvation of mankind. This kind of conduct is profitable only to the enemies of the faith, for nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good. Moreover, want of vigor on the part of Christians is so much the more blameworthy, as not seldom little would be needed on their part to bring to naught false charges and refute erroneous opinions, and by always exerting themselves more strenuously they might reckon upon being successful. After all, no one can be prevented from putting forth that strength of soul which is the characteristic of true Christians, and very frequently by such display of courage our enemies lose heart and their designs are thwarted. Christians are, moreover, born for combat, whereof the greater the vehemence, the more assured, God aiding, the triumph: "Have confidence; I have overcome the world." Nor is there any ground for alleging that Jesus Christ, the Guardian and Champion of the Church, needs not in any manner the help of men. Power certainly is not wanting to Him, but in His loving kindness He would assign to us a share in obtaining and applying the fruits of salvation procured through His grace.

 

These words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus should be kept near and dear to the hearts of those who live in homes enthroned to His own Most Sacred Heart and to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother:

Jesus answered them: Do you now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, and it is now come, that you shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. These things I have spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world. (Jn. 16: 31-33)

 

Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 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.

Pope Saint Leo II, pray for us, pray for us.

Saint Athanasius, pray for us.

Saint Irenaeus, pray for us.

Saints Monica, pray for us.

Saint Jude, pray for us.

Saint John the Beloved, pray for us.

Saint Francis Solano, pray for us.

Saint John Bosco, pray for us.

Saint Dominic Savio, pray for us.

Saint  Scholastica, pray for us.

Saint Benedict, pray for us.

Saint Joan of Arc, pray for us.

Saint Antony of the Desert, pray for us.

Saint Francis of Assisi, pray for us.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Saint Bonaventure, pray for us.

Saint Augustine, pray for us.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, pray for us.

Saint Francis Xavier, pray for us.

Saint Peter Damian, pray for us.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.

Saint Lucy, pray for us.

Saint Monica, pray for us.

Saint Agatha, pray for us.

Saint Anthony of Padua, pray for us.

Saint Basil the Great, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Cecilia, pray for us.

Saint John Mary Vianney, pray for us.

Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

Saint Athanasius, pray for us.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.

Saint Isaac Jogues, pray for us.

Saint Rene Goupil, pray for us.

Saint John Lalonde, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel Lalemont, pray for us.

Saint Noel Chabanel, pray for us.

Saint Charles Garnier, pray for us.

Saint Anthony Daniel, pray for us.

Saint John DeBrebeuf, pray for us.

Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, pray for us.

Saint Dominic, pray for us.

Saint Hyacinth, pray for us.

Saint Basil, pray for us.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

Saint Sebastian, pray for us.

Saint Tarcisius, pray for us.

Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.

Saint Gerard Majella, pray for us.

Saint John of the Cross, pray for us.

Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us.

Saint Bernadette Soubirous, pray for us.

Saint Genevieve, pray for us.

Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us

Pope Saint Pius V, pray for us.

Saint Rita of Cascia, pray for us.

Saint Louis de Montfort, pray for us.

Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, pray for us.

Venerable Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.

Father Miguel Augustin Pro, pray for us.

Francisco Marto, pray for us.

Jacinta Marto, pray for us.

Juan Diego, 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.