by
Thomas A. Droleskey
The devil hates Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He hates the fact that the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity became Flesh in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb to redeem sinful men on the wood of the Holy Cross. Thus it is that the devil hates the Holy Cross and the Its very Sign by which we start and close our prayers and all of our other good works.
The devil's hatred of the Holy Cross and of the Sign of the Cross is intense, which is why he inspired his revolutionary minions in Europe to root out the Holy Cross from the soil of once proudly Catholic countries with all of the violence and bloodshed necessary to accomplish this hideous task. It is this same diabolical hatred of the Holy Cross and true Church that exalts in her Divine Bridegroom's victory upon It over the devil and the power of sin and eternal death that cause the adversary to attack the Catholic countries in Latin America with such ready abandon --and with money supplied by the Masonic lodges within the United States of America--within a short frame of time after the founding of the United States of America. The devil hates the Holy Cross, and he is not ashamed to attack it openly when he has to do so.
There was never a need for the adversary to attack the Holy Cross in the United States of America with the same kind of fury employed in Catholic countries as he knew that the prevailing naturalistic ethos of pluralism extant in this country would, over the course of time, coopt most Catholics into viewing the Church through the eyes of the world (egalitarianism, pluralism, democracy) rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith. The devil is perfectly happy that the modern civil state, including the United States of America, was founded in the belief that the Incarnation, Nativity, Hidden Life, Public Ministry, and Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ are matters of complete indifference to personal and social order, that it is indeed quite possible for men of "good will" to pursue the common temporal good without subordinating themselves to the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication in all that pertains to the good of souls. It was only a matter of time before most Catholics would, aided and abetted by the Modernist ethos of conciliarism that it is in and of itself an accommodation to the prevailing naturalistic, anti-Incarnational spirit of Modernity, come to believe that it is inimical to "good citizenship" to even mention the Catholic Faith in the context of public policy and popular culture.
No matter how the devil has attacked the Holy Faith and Its Sign of Triumph, the Sign of the Cross--whether by the overt means of outright violence in Catholic countries or the mostly subtle means employed here in the United States of America, the results are always the same: attacks upon any public display of crucifixes or crosses and/or upon Catholics making the Sign of the Cross in public.
Thus it is that one of the greatest ironies of the conciliar era is that many conciliar churches have gone to great lengths to take down crucifixes in order to take away from the minds of men the sufferings that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ endured to redeem us. Additionally, formerly Catholic colleges and universities have sought to appeal directly to the anti-Incarnational spirit of the world in order to appear more "respectable" in the eyes of naturalists or to appeal to the spirit of religious indifference that is at the heart of pluralism by refusing to "offend" unbelievers with displays of the instrument upon which Our Lord redeemed and with which so many saints, such as Saint Francis of Assisi, performed so many miracles. The conciliarists have done voluntarily what the open enemies of the Faith have done repeatedly and with such violence and hatred over the past nearly two millennia: to take down the very Sign of our Faith.
Pope Pius XII, writing in Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947, warned of the removal of crucifixes from our Catholic churches:
Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer's body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.
Many, although certainly from all, conciliar priests/presbyters have removed crucifixes from their churches. The conciliar spirit is one that eschews an embrace of redemptive suffering in order to make reparation for one's own sins and those of the whole world, signified by a lessening of the penances required during Lent (two days of fast and total abstinence from meat as opposed to forty days of fast and partial abstinence on every day except Sundays, where there is never any fast or abstinence, and Fridays, where one must observe total abstinence from meat and its byproducts) and collects in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo worship service that place less stress on the necessity of penance and mortification in order to grow in sanctity as one makes reparation for his own sins. This conciliar aversion to traditional forms of outward penance was expressed very openly in Paragraph Fifteen of the 1997 General Instruction to the Roman Missal:
The same awareness of the present state of the world also influenced the use of texts from very ancient tradition. It seemed that this cherished treasure would not be harmed if some phrases were changed so that the style of language would be more in accord with the language of modern theology and would faithfully reflect the actual state of the Church's discipline. Thus there have been changes of some expressions bearing on the evaluation and use of the good things of the earth and of allusions to a particular form of outward penance belonging to another age in the history of the Church.
Who says that forms of "outward penance" belong to "another age in the history of the Church? Revolutionaries, that's who. Revolutionaries whose hatred for the need to do personal penance for one's sins is indicative of their lack of appreciation for the horror of personal sin (see Having No Regard for the Horror of Sin and Just A Matter of Forgiveness?). Revolutionaries who, although they would be loath to see the analogy, are just as much in league with the adversary, who hates the Holy Cross and the fact that believing Catholics, despite their own sins and failings, embrace It and love It as they attempt to lift It high with joy and gratitude in their own daily lives, as the social revolutionaries who make no pretense at all of their open hatred for Christ the King and the very instrument upon which He redeemed sinful human beings.
The errors of Russia that have spread in the past ninety-three years as no true pope has consecrated Russia with all of the world's bishops to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart include, of course, a hatred for the Holy Cross, a hatred that, as noted just above, is shared by many of the ultra-revolutionaries of conciliarism and by out-and-out Marxists-Leninists. Behold how the errors of Russia still cause the Cross of the Divine Redeemer to be attacked publicly as the devil knows his enemy very well and will never stop in his efforts to eradicate the Sign of his own defeat from the face of this earth:
Hanoi (AsiaNews) – The crucifix in the cemetery of Hanoi's Dong Chiem Parish Church was blown up with explosives yesterday. Parishioners who came to the site upon hearing the loud explosion were charged and beaten by police. Two youths were wounded and taken away; it is not known how many other were hurt.
The press release by the Archdiocese of Hanoi about the incident reads almost like a war bulletin. "Police attacked the parish today, in the early morning, when both its pastor and the pastor’s assistant were at the annual retreat in the Archbishop Office. An estimated 500 heavily armed and well-entrenched police officers and a large number of trained dogs were deployed in the area to protect an army engineering unit that destroyed a large crucifix erected on a boulder inside the parish cemetery," the statement said.
The attack began at 3 am with the use of explosive. "On hearing explosions, parishioners rushed to the site to protect their crucifix but they were stopped by police who tried to drive them back,” Fr. Joseph Nguyen Van Huu, pastor of Dong Chiem parish, said.
Parishioners reported that they were shot at close range with tear gas canisters as they knelt kneeling praying and asking police officers to stop destroying their crucifix. Some were even beaten with batons.
The exact number of those injured during the clash with police has not been reported.
A similar attack occurred in the parish of Bau Sen in the diocese of Vinh. On 5 November of last year, anti-riot police and a bulldozer were used to remove a statue of the Virgin Mary from a Catholic cemetery. (VIETNAM: Explosive used to demolish crucifix in a Hanoi Catholic cemetery.)
Communism and its hatred of the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer and of His Most Blessed Mother is alive and well. It is alive and well in the "Socialist Republic of Vietnam." It is alive and well in the "Lao's People's Republic" (Laos). It is alive and well in the "People's Republic of China." It is alive and well even in the Russian Federation and many of the former "republics" of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is alive and well in the "Republic of Cuba." It is alive and well in the nooks and crannies of the European Union. It is alive and well in the heart and soul of the administration of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who ordered that all signage, including the letters IHS, be removed from a hall at Georgetown University where he spoke on April 15, 2009 (see
Ashamed of the NAME Above All Names). No need for those prayers after Low Mass?
Every baptized should be outraged by the criminal actions of the Communist thugs in Vietnam, who are doing there exactly what has been done by Communist officials in Red China for the past sixty years now. Like-minded Communists and Freemasons have attempted to blow up the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City and the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal. The diabolical hatred for Our Lord and the tree of eternal life that is His Holy Cross and His Most Blessed Mother knows no limits. We must pray every day that a true pope will be given unto us so that the errors of Russia, which are spreading so rapidly, will cease once Russia is consecrated collegially to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.
Conciliar officials, including Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, will probably denounce the blowing up of the Crucifix in the Catholic cemetery in Hanoi, Vietnam. Rather than denounce Communism and its hatred for the Holy Faith, however, Ratzinger/Benedict and other conciliarists will appeal to the Communist authorities in Hanoi on the grounds of "religious liberty," a concept that Communist tyrants reject out of hand as they do not want any rival to their own "true religion," namely, their own ideological precepts. Even the Communists recognize that there is only can be only one "true religion," and for them it is Communism, which affords no place to any rival, including the one and only true Faith, Catholicism. How ironic that Communists understand, although perversely, the fraud of "religious liberty" that is embraced with such evangelical fervor by the conciliarists as wanton acts against Catholics and symbols of the Catholic Faith are committed worldwide despite over forty-four years of "official" conciliar propagandizing in behalf of what was called by Pope Pius VII in Post Tam Diuturnas, April 28, 1814, a heresy.
Moreover, of course, there is the inconvenient little truth that most of the more "conservative" conciliar revolutionaries in the conciliar Vatican have been deaf to the pleas of ordinary Catholics who have complained to them about the removal of crucifixes and states of Our Lady and Saint Joseph and other saints from their parish churches and schools and colleges and universities. The wreckovation of many Catholic church buildings has involved terrible sacrileges committed against crucifixes and statues and other sacred objects. Many of these sacred objects have been thrown into dumpsters, salvaged by traditional Catholics for their underground chapels. Others have been destroyed with great relish by those who have removed them.
To wit, a life sized crucifix was removed from the entrance to the then named Fromkes Hall at the Saint John's University School of Law in 1995 at the order of the then Dean, Rudolph Hasl, who, in addition to hiring a woman, Tanya Hernandez, who had worked in Puerto Rico as legal counsel for an "abortion rights" group, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Public Policy, in a suit to claim that two pro-life priests, Fathers Norman Weslin and Richard Welch were "opposed" to women because they opposed baby-killing, replaced the crucifix with a mobile featuring a cross, a star of David of equal sizes. A student told me that she had seen workmen spit on the crucifix and curse at it. Yes, this happened at an institution that has not as of yet officially divested itself of its "Catholic" control, which makes it--and incidents like it--quite on a par with what took place recently in Hanoi as the Communist authorities there blew up a crucifix and injured some of its Catholic defenders in the process.
Yes, concilairism is just as much an enemy of the Cross of the Divine Redeemer as Communism. It is just as much a product of the errors of Russia as Marxism-Leninism (see
Spreading Errors Rather Rapidly). We must counteract these errors by our unflagging fidelity to Our Lady's Fatima Message, praying as many Rosaries as our states-in-life permit. We must have the same Apostolic zeal as the Apostles themselves, seeking to cooperate ever more fully with the graces made present in our souls by the working of the Holy Ghost, both by means of Sanctifying and Actual Grace, and that flow into our hearts and souls by His Spouse, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mediatrix of All Graces.
Our souls were truly "born again" in Baptismal font when the flood waters of Baptism washed away Original Sin from our souls and introduced into them the very inner life of the Most Blessed Trinity by means of Sanctifying Grace. Our souls were strengthened when we received the Sacrament of Confirmation, being filled with the seven gifts (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord) and the twelve fruits (charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, long-suffering, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, and chastity)
of God the Holy Ghost. We must ask Our Lady to help us cooperate more fully with these gifts and fruits so that we will know the Faith more surely and defend It more firmly, willing the true good (that is, the eternal salvation) of all others that is of the essence of charity, being especially diligent about praying for the conversion of the propagators of errors of Russia and those in the counterfeit church of conciliarism who aid and abet those errors by refusing to seek the conversion of those outside of the Catholic Church and who, among so many other things (especially the deformation of the souls of the young in institutions of conciliar "learning"), have deconstructed, distorted and perverted Our Lady's Fatima Message. We must spend time before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer, accuse ourselves regularly in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and seek to live penitentially so as to make reparation for our sins and those of the world world by offering our sacrifices to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
As the Very Reverend Andre Prevot wrote in Love, Peace and Joy: Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus According to Saint Gertrude (published first in 1911 and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1984:
It may be said that never was the life of reparation more wanted than it is in our days, for never was God so publicly outraged, so fearlessly blasphemed.
Never has the ruin of souls been so complete, for the faith of the people is sapped to its foundations. Never has scandal been so widespread, for it has become national, nor so disastrous, for it attacks even childhood, our last hope. Now, more than ever, then, has Our need of souls who seriously and generously make reparation, and aid Him in atoning for these outrages against God, in saving souls who seriously form ruin, and in repairing these awful scandals.
Who will respond to the urgent need of the Heart of Jesus and His Church? Without doubt all souls of goodwill who love God and their neighbour, but particularly all eucharistic souls. The life of reparation is their especial portion, for the live always with Jesus in the Tabernacle, and He is the first object, the model and the means of our reparations.
He is in the Tabernacle the principal object of the life of atonement, for, as we have shown elsewhere, it is principally in the Holy Eucharist that Our Lord is most cruelly outraged. Profanation of the Eucharist is for man the most fearful of crimes, since by it he eats and drinks his own condemnation. It is through contempt or abandonment of the God of the Eucharist that nations forsake the sources of life, pass fatally into a kind of practical apostasy, and end, by losing their faith, in irreparable ruin (Father Prevot, 1984 TAN reprint, pp. 106-107.)
A soul striving to make Christ its King and honoring Mary as its Queen will be able to plant a few seeds for the day when the Church herself will proclaim once against the Social Reign of Christ the King and of the Queenship of the Immaculata. A soul striving to make Christ its King and Mary as its Queen will be able to play some small role in planting the seeds for the day when Our Lady's Fatima Message will be fulfilled completely, thus ushering in the Reign of Mary Immaculate.
To this end, we must use our total consecration to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary so that we can make reparation for our our sins (and those of the whole world), planting at least a few seeds for the cessation of errors and the restoration of Catholic truth as the foundation of order and sanctity in the souls of all men and the lives of all nations without exception, lifting high the Cross of the Divine Redeemer as we bear our share of suffering and tribulation that the Gospel entails, trusting always in the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as we do so.
Vivat Christus Rex!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
