Poof!

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The late comedian and actor Godfrey Cambridge, who poked fun in the early-1960s at some of the idiosyncrasies of his fellow blacks as a means of quite effectively disarming those whites who supported racial segregation and invidious racial discrimination, once noted in a performance that was recorded and turned into a best selling record album (remember vinyl records?) that, "It was great going to France and being hated for the first time in my life solely because I was an American." Yes, at least a few, just a few, of course, of the French are indeed noted for arrogance and rudeness.

What is true of a few, just a few, of course, French in France is also true of a few, just a few, of course, French-Canadians in the Province of Quebec. A few, just a few, of course, Quebeckers are unfriendly and rude and arrogant, filled with a spirit of haughty superiority.

I know this from first-hand experience.

My late paternal grandmother, Mrs. Adrienne Delfausse Droleskey, was the daughter of emigres from Quebec, born in the United States of America, in the then City of Brooklyn, New York, in 1890. She was a caricature of the rudeness and arrogance associated with a few, just a few, of course, of those who are of French heritage.

Filled with haughty airs, my grandmother told my uncle, who had dated my mother in the late-1930s before he wound up marrying the sister of the woman that my father was dating at the time, that she would never accept my mother as his wife because my mother had been born out-of-wedlock and put up for adoption, therefore lacking any "background" "worthy" of her son's consideration as a wife. This crushed my mother, who had very little understanding of the Faith into which she had been baptized, causing her, steeped in the sentimentality of naturalism, most unjustly, of course, to blame the "Church" for the human faults of her future mother-in-law, who was a very active parishioner of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Queens Village, New York, as a member of the Altar Rosary Society and a Catholic Daughter of America.

The bad impression given to my mother by my grandmother continued unabated after my mother wound up marrying my father, who had more backbone in standing up to his mother than did his older brother, as my mother refused to accept her eldest son's explanation, given to me by the Reverend Sisters of Mercy at Saint Aloysius School in Great Neck, New York, that Holy Mother Church is not to blame for the bad example of some of her children. "Mama," I tried to explain over and over again, "Grandma is simply weak. Don't blame the Church for her own faults."  This fell on deaf ears. Indeed, long after my grandmother died on February 26, 1962 at the age of seventy-one and one-half, my mother continued to use the bad examples of famous Catholics in public life as her excuse for remaining away from the practice of the Faith.

Unbeknownst to my mother, however, it was her residual Catholicism--and the Actual Graces that flowed out of the true Masses that were offered in every Catholic parish in the 1950s--that moved her good heart to care for her mother-in-law after she had suffered from a number of what was then called "shower strokes" (now called "mini-strokes") that weakened her considerably, especially mentally. My mother even continued caring for her mother-in-law after my grandmother had insulted her very rudely by demanding to check through her carrying case to see if she was stealing any of her jewelry after my mother had spent an entire day cleaning my grandparents' home at 92-39 219th Street in Queens Village (pictured in Waiting for the Bungalow Bar Man). My mother, who was thirty-eight years old at the time, was crushed, saying, "The French can sure be cruel."

Well, of course, each of us can be cruel, can we not? This is not a characteristic to be blamed on the French, although there are a few, just a few, of French ancestry who might had a tendency, at least now and again, to be a tad bit arrogant and rude and, quite possibly, even cruel. The tendency of human beings to be cruel is one of the consequences of the concupiscence caused by the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin and of our own Actual Sins. It is unfair and unjust to blame an entire people for a particular trait that some of their number may exhibit with greater frequency than others as each of us is capable of great cruelty, especially to those who are closest to us.

France is the elder daughter of Holy Mother Church, giving us so many wonderful saints who will inspire--and intercede for--believing Catholics of all nations until the end of time.

France has given us the magnificent Saint Louis IX as a superb exemplar of the Social Reign of Christ the King. She has given us the Apostle of Charity, Saint Vincent de Paul, and his Congregation of the Mission and the Sisters of Charity, which was favored with Our Lady herself appearing to two of its sisters, Saint Catherine Laboure and Sister Justine Bisqueyburo, as she gave two of the sacramentals, the Miraculous Medal and the Green Scapular, that she knew would be so important in these days of apostasy and betrayal. France has given us the Little Flower, Saint Therese of Lisieux of the Holy Face and the Child Jesus, and two great saints to combat the hardness of Jansenism with the tender mercies of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and Blessed Claude de la Colombiere, S.J. True Devotion to Mary comes to us from a son of the French soil, Saint Louis de Montfort. France owes its very sovereignty to Saint Joan of Arc, who was favored with visions from God to prompt the Dauphin, the future King Charles VII, to claim France from the English for the Lord of Heaven, Christ the King, once and for all.

There are, of course, countless other examples of saints from France, including Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast we celebrate today, who helped to revive devotion to Our Lady at a time when moral corruption had made so many souls so cynical in the Twelfth Century. Among the many, many other great saints of the soil of France are Saint Genevieve, the Patroness of Paris, Saint Clotilde, the wife of the King Clovis, and the great Saint Martin of Tours, an Hungarian who served his adopted kingdom so well as the Bishop of Tours. Saint Denis, France's protomartyr and its principal patron saint, laid down his life for the Faith in the Third Century A.D., as did so many thousands of others during the French Revolution, which claimed the lives, among others, of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne and the great heroes of the uprising at the Vendee. One of the priests who lived as a young boy during the French Revolution and its aftermath was the future Father John Mary Vianney, whose family made no compromises at all with the "Constitutional Church" that had made its own "reconciliation" with the principles of the French Revolution, as has Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and his counterfeit church of conciliarism.

It was because the Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, was implanted so deeply in the soil of the Church's elder daughter, France, that the devil had to try to attack the Faith there so consistently, starting with the Mohammedan invasion of the Eighth Century A.D. that was repelled by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D., and including the violent attacks against the Faith and against the lives and property of believing Catholics by the Albigensians, those latter-day Manicheans who were forerunners of the Jansenists, who worked from within the Church to extinguish any though of the tender mercies of Our Lord that would be revealed anew to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque to combat the Jansenist spirit of the hardness of human hearts. The devil even tried to uproot the Cross of the Divine Redeemer from the soil in France by means of the Protestant Revolt, failing in his attempt to do so despite some successes among the Huguenots, those French disciples of the wretched John Calvin.

Alas, the devil's most effective tool in his quest to root out the Cross of Christ the King from the soil of France was the pride of fallen creatures. In His ineffable Mercy, which is so inscrutable to us finite creatures whose intellects are darkened and whose wills are weakened by the after-effects of Original Sin and our Actual Sins, the King of Heaven and Earth chose a personally immoral king of this world, King Louis XIV, to be the instrument by which France would be consecrated to His Most Sacred Heart and show forth her greatness as the elder daughter of the Church once again despite all of the tumults in France that had been caused by the Protestant Revolt and by Louis XIV's own needless wars.

France could have been spared the bloody upheavals caused by the French Revolution in 1789 (and eruptions it has caused since that time) if only an earthly king, whose own birth was considered nothing other than miraculous when it had occurred after his parents' estrangement over the course of two decades, had put aside his pride and the bishops who were afraid to offend him had taken seriously the words that Christ the King gave to Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque:

There is to the devotion of the Sacred Heart a private side and a social side. Margaret Mary begins with the first.

"In fine, my dear Mother," she writes, " are we not all consumed in the burning heart of His pure love? It will reign, this amiable Heart, in spite of Satan, his imps and his agents. This world transports me with joy. But to be able to express to you the great graces and benedictions it will attract upon all that shall have procured it the most honor and glory is what I cannot do in the way that He has given me to understand it.

"He has made me see the devotion to His Sacred Heart as a beautiful tree, from all eternity to spring up and take root in the midst of our Institute, and to extend its branches into the houses that compose it, so that each may gather from it fruits most pleasing to her liking and taste. But He desires that the daughters of the Visitation should distribute abundantly to all that will eat of it the fruits of this sacred tree. By this means He desires to restore life to many; and, by withdrawing them from the way of perdition, and destroying the empire of Satan in their heart, to establish in them that of His love."

Behold the first design, the supernatural, the social side of devotion to the Sacred Heart, that which regards souls at all times and in all places. Margaret Mary continues: "But He does not wish to stop here. He has still greater designs, which can be executed only by His almighty power."

Which are those designs that the Saint calls the greatest, and for which she invokes the All-powerful?

"He desires, then, it seems to me, to enter with pomp and magnificence into the palaces of kings and princes, therein to be honored as much as He has been despised, humiliated, and outraged in His Passion. May He receive as much pleasure therein at seeing the great ones of the world abasing and humbling themselves before Him as He once felt bitterness at beholding Himself annihilated at their feet!"

The tone of these words convinces one that Margaret Mary, when uttering them,. was in a sort of ecstasy. What follows leaves no room for doubt on the subject.

"Here are," she continues, "the words that I heart on this point: 'MAKE KNOWN TO THE ELDEST SON OF MY HEART,' SPEAKING OF OUR KING, 'THAT AS HIS TEMPORAL BIRTH WAS OBTAINED THROUGH DEVOTION TO THE MERITS OF MY HOLY CHILDHOOD, IN THE SAME MANNER HE WILL OBTAIN HIS BIRTH OF GRACE AND ETERNAL GLORY BY THE CONSECRATION THAT HE WILL MAKE OF HIMSELF TO MY ADORABLE HEART, which wishes to triumph over those of the great ones of the world. IT WISHES TO REIGN IN HIS PALACE, TO BE PAINTED ON HIS STANDARDS AND ENGRAVEN ON HIS ARMS, IN ORDER TO RENDER HIM VICTORIOUS OVER ALL HIS ENEMIES.'"

Margaret Mary spoke only of the king, because, in the spirit of those times, the king and France were one. The king personified all the souls of France living and breathing in one single soul.

To comprehend Almighty God's request with regard to the standard, we must recall that, from the earliest ages, France had always had a sacred standard, one that was not borne to vulgar combats; one that rested in the sanctuary of St. Denis under the shadow of the country's holy protectors. It was removed from its sacred shrine only when the monarch headed the army, when it was solemnly sought in the hour of the greatest danger, or when it was to be carried afar to the holy wars. It symbolized the religious soul of France, and floated like a sacred prayer amid the nation's banners. It was a standard of this kind that God had given to Joan of Arc. He had prescribed its form and emblems, and communicated to it the secret virtue that roused exhausted France to unhoped-for triumphs. Today, through the lips of the virgin of Paray, God asked of the king of France something of the same kind, a sacred standard which was to symbolize an act of faith. It was to be borne side by side with the nation's flag, and, in a voice that could be distinctly heard above the proverbial bravado of her enemies, proclaim that France places her trust in the blessing of God.

Mother de Saumaise was probably rather surprised by so serious a communication and one that tallied so little with what she knew of Margaret Mary's humility. She made no reply, and our sweet and humble Marguerite became anxious at her silence. Were her letters lost? Would Mother de Saumaise, until then so courageous for the interests of the Heart of Jesus, hesitate before this new perspective? Again she wrote to her, August 12, 1689: "I declare to you, my dear Mother, that your silence regarding the two long letters that I have had the honor to write you has given me a little pain. I know not to what to attribute it, except that perhaps I have set down my thoughts too freely and simply. I should perhaps have kept them concealed under a humble silence. You have only to tell me this, and I assure you that it will greatly gratify my inclination never to speak of these things, but to bury them in the secret of the Sacred Heart of my Divine Master. He is witness of the violence that I must do myself to speak of them. I should never have resolved to do so, had He not made known to me that it is for the interest of His glory; and for that I should cheerfully sacrifice millions of lives, if I had them, through my great desire to make Him known, loved, and adored. But perhaps you have not received my letters, and that would be still more afflicting to me." It was perhaps in the fear that these letters were lost, and that in the event of her death her secret might not descend with her into the tomb, that Margaret Mary reduced to writing the following. It was in the month of August, some days after the 12th, perhaps the 25th, the feast of St. Louis. It is less a letter than a sort of declaration, throughout which reign unaccountable solemnity and majesty:

"Live + Jesus!

"August, 1689,

"The Eternal Father, wishing to repair the bitterness and agony that the Adorable Heart of His Divine Son endured in the palaces of earthly princes, amidst the humiliations and outrages of His Passion, wishes to establish His empire in the heart of our great monarch, of whom He desires to make use in the execution of His designs, which is to have an edifice erected in which shall be a picture of His divine Heart, to receive the consecration and homage of the king and all the court.

" Moreover, this divine Heart wishes to make itself the defender of the sacred person of the king, his protector against all his enemies. Therefore has it chosen him as its faithful friend, to have the Mass authorized by the Holy Apostolic See, and to obtain all the other privileges that ought to accompany devotion to this divine Heart.

"It is by this divine Heart  that God wishes to dispense the treasures of His graces of sanctification and salvation, by bestowing His benediction on the king's undertakings, according a happy success to his arms, and making him triumph over the malice of his enemies."

A consecration of the nation to the Heart of Jesus, a national temple raised to the Heart of Jesus, an inscription to the Heart of Jesus on the national standard--this is what Our Lord asked of the blessed Sister. Under this condition: He will render the king, that is, France, victorious over all her enemies, and will give her an eternal reign of honor and glory.

Saint Margaret Mary then goes on to recount the best means for realizing this plan; the best means for reaching the ears of Louis XIV. She mentions Pere de la Chaise, the king's confessor, who at this time enjoyed great favor: "If the goodness of God," says she, "inspires this great servant of the Divine Majesty to employ the power He has given him, he may rest assured that he has never done an action more useful to God's glory, more salutary to his own soul, nor for which he will be better recompensed.

"It will be very difficult, on account of the great obstacles Satan purposes putting in the way, as well as of all the other difficulties God will permit in order to His power seen. He can effect all that He pleases, though He does not always do so, not wishing to do violence to man's will. For this we must pray much and get prayers."

We may have remarked that in all these letters there breathes a deep and holy enthusiasm. The Heart of Jesus will reign in spite of its enemies! All that God wishes from France--that national consecration, that national temple, that inscription to the Heart of Jesus on a standard,--all will be accomplished; but it will take time, and nothing less than the omnipotence of God is necessary. Fearful misfortunes will, moreover, take place in the mean time.

We have not Mother de Saumaise's answer to his letter of August, 1689. She who had known how to reach Rome and arouse the thoughts of the Sovereign Pontiffs would neglect nothing to to reach even Louis XIV. We know that she had recourse to the Superioress of the Visitation of Chaillot, the refuge of Mlle. de la Fayette, where dwelt the queen of England, and which held, so to say, its door open to the court of Louis XIV. Might it happen that Pere de la Chaise would not dare to speak of it to the king? Might it happen that Louis XIV's soul would not be sufficiently humble to comprehend the Christian grandeur of such a thought? Be that as it may, those tender and magnanimous advances to the Heart of Jesus were not understood, and Margaret Mary's last admonitions were without avail, were lost in oblivion. They were, indeed, her last words, we are at the close of 1689, and she was nearing her death.

1689! Involuntarily we pause at this date, for it evokes another, 1789! A century has just rolled by between the epoch in which the humble virgin, hidden in the depths of a cloister, pointed out to Louis XIV the ark of salvation prepared for him by the goodness of God, and that other epoch in which arose the storm that was to sweep away the monarchy, and with it all other monarchies. If told in the days of his splendor of the perils in store in France, of the necessity of seeking a remedy, a shelter far above man, yea, even in the Adorable Heart of Jesus, Louis XIV would have smiled incredulously. And yet this was true. From Louis XIV France descended to Louis XV, from Louis XV to Voltaire, from Voltaire to Robespierre and Marat; that is to say, from pride to corruption, from corruption to impiety, and from both the one and the other to a hatred of God and man which was to bring about her universal punishment.

Ah, this was only the beginning of our sorrows! From 1789 let us go to 1889. There we find a new century, one scarcely les sad than its predecessor; one in which minds are darkened and hearts chilled; one in which nothing is lasting; one whose every cycle of fifteen years witnessed a storm that carried away a throne; one in which man lives amidst constantly recurring political convulsions, in distrust of the present, in uncertainty of the future.

It was for such times that had been providentially prepared, and it was in the midst of such catastrophes, that we see making its way, painfully but surely, devotion to that Heart which is meek and humble, which suited so well the age of Louis XIV; which is pure, for it was of purity that Louis XV's reign had so much need; which was consumed by love and devotedness, qualities that would not have proved prejudicial to the age of such as Robespierre; which raises sad hearts and comforts crushed souls; which suits our own time and all times. (Right Reverend Emile Bougaud, The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Published in 1890 by Benziger Brothers. Re-printed by TAN Books and Publishers, 1990, pp. 267-273.)

 

Yes, a private revelation, dismissed in 1689 by the King of France and by his country's bishops, eager to curry favor with him, was rejected. Human pride dictated a "compromise" that had not been authorized by Christ the King: the consecration of the City of Paris to His Most Sacred Heart. A Chastisement followed within a century, swallowing up France and paving the way for one violent social revolution after another as it helped to pave the way for the theological and philosophical revolution of Modernism that has produced the counterfeit church of conciliarism, that ape of the Catholic Church which is in and of itself a form of Chastisement by God against us for our own sins and our own infidelities, our own compromises with the spirit of the world, the flesh, and the devil, our own refusal to defend the Holy Faith against the apostates and the compromises who seek to please those apostates just as the bishops of France in the Seventeenth Century sought to please King Louis XIV in his stubborn refusal to obey the King of Heaven and Earth, Christ the King.

Imagine that. The fate of France--and of much of the world--depended upon an earthly king's obedience to a private revelation. Imagine that. This should give some of the neo-Jansenists in our midst who are prone to dismiss, say, the essential nature of Our Lady's Fatima Message some pause for reflection and reconsideration of their own stubborn and prideful refusal to recognize the simple truth that is before their very eyes: God has given us a path out of the madness of Modernity and Modernism and that it runs through His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ told Sister Lucia in 1931 to warn His ministers that the world itself faced a Chastisement as great as that which was visited upon France as the infidelity to His requests to Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1689 if they persisted in their refusal to consecrate Russia collegially to His Most Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart as He had specified two years before:

 

Make it known to My ministers that since they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My request, that they will follow him into misfortune.

France was Chastised in 1789 and thereafter, and this Chastisement took its toll eventually on the French living in what was once New France but had become part of the British colony of Canada.

France had sent many of her sons and daughters to colonize New France. Many of these shed their blood to implant the Cross of the Divine Redeemer as firmly there as It had been implanted in their own native country's soil. The North American Martyrs (Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil, Jean Lalande, Gabriel Lalemant, Noel Chabanel, Anthony Daniel, Charles Garnier, and John de Brebeuf), each of whom were sons of France, shed their own blood in what is now Canada and the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York. Venerable Mere Marie of the Incarnation of New France, who established the Ursuline sisters in Quebec, labored long and hard on the soil of her adopted land as did the Blessed Margaret Bourgeois.

This rich legacy of apostolic zeal for the honor and glory of the Most Blessed Trinity and for the sanctification and salvation of souls was implanted deep in the Canadian soul for over three hundred years before, little by little, the influences of Modernity began to chip away at the Catholicism of many French-Canadians. Modernism finished off the job of undermining the Faith of the French Canadians even before the late Annibale Bugnini's Consilium had met to begin its work of, to quote Bugnini directly, of stripping "from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants" (Annibale Bugnini, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965) in the construction of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service.

Yes, the false, apostate spirit of the "Second" Vatican Council had taken such root in the minds of fallen creatures in the Province of Quebec that many of them believed they could "relax" and breathe a "sigh of relief," that it was no longer necessary to be "strict" in the observance of the Catholic Faith, that it was now permissible to "think for themselves," that they could even stop going to Mass without suffering the loss of their immortal souls. The spirit of the "Second" Vatican Council convinced many Catholics to abandon the practice of the Faith even before the Novus Ordo service helped to convince them even more strongly that "outward forms of penance" belonged to "another era in the history of the Church" (see Paragraph 15 of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal). Catholic Quebec fell without a shot being fired. The practice of the Holy Faith went "poof" in the years after the "Second" Vatican Council and the promulgation of the Novus Ordo service. The very paganism that was eradicated by the missionaries that had been sent there by the elder daughter of the Church, France, returned.

An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper recounted this loss of Faith in a favorable manner, exalting the "liberation" of Quebeckers from the "restrictions" that had been "imposed" upon them by Catholicism:

Church attendance, which stood at more than 90 per cent before 1960, didn't so much collapse as vaporize – at least among those born after 1945. “At a precise moment, during the year 1966 in fact, the churches suddenly emptied in a matter of months. A strange phenomenon that no one has ever been able to explain,” Father Leclerc, the priest in Denys Arcand's Barbarian Invasions , tells a French appraiser to whom he is trying to peddle church artifacts. The appraiser declares them commercially worthless, of value only to Quebeckers' collective memory.

Mr. Arcand overstates, for dramatic effect, the rapidity with which the pews were vacated. A sizable cohort of pre-boomers continued to attend mass regularly. But as they die off, the crisis in Quebec's churches intensifies. Unlike elsewhere in Canada, immigration has not provided the Catholic Church in Quebec with an infusion of new disciples. Holy Spirit is now home to the members of two neighbouring parishes whose churches were recently sold by the diocese. They were bought by evangelical Baptist congregations, whose members are largely Haitian immigrants.

According to a 2008 Léger Marketing poll, the proportion of Quebec's nearly six million Catholics who attend mass weekly now stands at 6 per cent, the lowest of any Western society. But therein lies the paradox. That more than 80 per cent of Quebeckers still declare themselves Catholics, according to the 2001 census, the most recent to survey religious affiliation, suggests an attachment to the faith. If not a spiritual one, at least a cultural one. . . .

In pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, failure to learn one's catechism by heart would earn you a smack from the nuns who ran the schools. But the generations that have grown up since, almost all of whom attended catechism class, haven't retained much at all. A poll conducted last year for Radio-Canada, for instance, showed that only 11 per cent of Quebeckers could name the four Evangelists. Smack.

Quebeckers, it seems, are Catholic in name only. Quebec has among the highest rates of common-law marriage, children born out of wedlock, abortion and suicide in the developed world. A poll out this week showed that 77 per cent of Quebeckers are in favour of euthanasia, endorsing a recent proposal by the Quebec College of Physicians to debate the legalization of a practice that is pure heresy to any true Catholic.

Baby-boomer Quebeckers still display palpable hostility toward the Church establishment – the one that excommunicated the Patriotes, that forced their mothers and grandmothers into reproductive servitude, that controlled access to higher education, that turned a blind eye to sexual abuse, that flirted with fascists and that colluded with reactionary politicians to keep French-Canadians in a permanent state of backwardness. When, in 2007, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the highest-ranking Catholic in the province, wrote an open letter in which he repented for the Church's sins, it was roundly attacked as an opportunistic ploy to reassert Church authority. (Neither practising nor believing, but Catholic even so.)

 

The poor, misguided author of this article is clueless about the fact that Quebeckers remained strong in the Faith for the better part of three and one-half centuries prior to the "Second" Vatican Council precisely because the Immemorial Mass of Tradition gave honor and glory to the Most Holy Trinity with reverence and grandeur, precisely because the rites of that Mass convey the transcendence and the permanence and the immutability of the Most Holy Trinity, precisely because the truths of the Faith were taught with clarity and surety. The "Second" Vatican Council's "openness" to the world and its "openness" to false religions and its ambiguity of language and the counterfeit church of conciliarism's promulgation of an alleged "Roman rite of the Mass" that featured impermanence and mutability as two of its key features are what destroyed the Faith of French-Canadians as it helped to further destroy the Faith of those Catholics in France herself who still bothered to practice It in spite of the tumults associated with the French Revolution and its aftermath.

The poor, misguided author of this article has no understanding of Who Our Blessed Lord and Saviour is and what He taught and how He taught. Pope Saint Pius X, condemning the errors of The Sillon movement in France that was a presaging of conciliarism's own "reconciliation" with the "principles of 1789, explained in a nutshell simple truths that the author of this article, so contemptuous of a Catholic Faith that had implanted itself deep in the soil of New France, seems not to understand in the slightest:

Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body. Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one's personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

 

That the author of the afore-cited Toronto Globe and Mail article has no understanding of these truths speaks volumes about the apostasies wrought by concilairism, whose "popes" have indeed profaned the House of God with the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service and who have indeed shown their respect to one false idea and one false religion after another. The Faith has gone "poof!" in Canada and France and so many other places precisely because Its immutability has been replaced with mutability and uncertainty and ambiguity, each of which is from Hell, not from the true God of Revelation. It is not accident that the Faith in Canada has disappeared among the faithful as it has disappeared in the hearts and minds of many of the conciliar "hierarchy" and "clergy," a great many of whom are either steeped in or very supportive of perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments and/or almost totally indifferent to the daily slaughter of the preborn, whether by chemical or surgical means.

We should know only too well in our own lives that the Faith can go "poof!" with us. It is easy to get out of the habit of mental prayer. It is easy to make excuses not to go a daily offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition offered by true bishops or true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism when such Masses are accessible to us and the duties of our states-in-life afford us the time to go. It is easy to make excuses not to pray at least one set of mysteries of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary. It is easy simply to give up the quest for sanctity and to become lukewarm or to descend most carelessly into a life of one deliberate Mortal Sin after another. It is easy for women accustomed to dressing as women to lose all sense of their femininity and to dress as men. It is easy for men to forget that the Virtue of Modesty applies to them as well and to refrain from wearing shorts or to unnecessarily expose their arms or their chests.

Yes, our very salvation can go "poof!" if we relax the vigilance of our interior lives by refusing to pray and by slipping into "little" sins that make it easier for us to commit and then to live in habitual states of Mortal Sin.

"Poof!" can go our immortal souls into the flames of Hell for all eternity if we do not cooperate with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a true son of Catholic France and a true spiritual son of the Mother of God herself, had a vision of angels watching the monks in his Cistercian abbey pray. What these angels saw should give us great pause for reflection and for redoubling the fervor of our own interior lives as we seek to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our sins and those of the whole world:

When St. Bernard was assisting one night at Matins, he saw some angels who were carefully noting down the merit of each of the monks. The merit of those who were praying with much fervor, they set down in golden characters; of those who with less fervor, in silver characters; of those with goodwill, but without affection, in ink; of those with sloth and drowsiness, in water; but as to those who were in mortal sin or voluntarily distracted, they wrote nothing, but, standing motionless, they lamented their blindness. (A Member of the Order of Mercy, A Year With the Saints, published originally in 1891 by the Sisters of Mercy in Hartford, Connecticut, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1988, p. 230.)

 

Pretty sobering, wouldn't you say? We need to pray to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux so that the merit of our prayers will be written in golden characters now as a prelude to having a golden crown affixed upon our heads at the moment of our Particular Judgments, begging Saint Bernard as well to help us love Our Lady, she who made possible our salvation by her perfect Fiat to the Holy Will of God the Father at the Annunciation, as he did.

Saint Bernard gave us this advice in times of difficulties, and we do live in times of difficulty, both ecclesiastical and civil, do we not? It would be a pretty good thing, I reckon, to take the following advice from this son of Catholic France and of the Mother of God:

In dangers, in doubts, in difficulties, think of Mary, call upon Mary. Let not her name depart from your lips, never suffer it to leave your heart. And that you may more surely obtain the assistance of her prayer, neglect not to walk in her footsteps. With her for guide, you shall never go astray; while invoking her, you shall never lose heart; so long as she is in your mind, you are safe from deception; while she holds your hand, you cannot fall; under her protection you have nothing to fear; if she walks before you, you shall not grow weary; if she shows you favor, you shall reach the goal.

If we don't want to "poof!" for all eternity, isn't time to pray a Rosary now?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

 

Our Lady of Fatima, 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.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, pray for us.

Blessed Humbeline, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints