Souls? Who Cares About Souls?

by Thomas A. Droleskey

We are in the Holy Season of Lent, a time for us to meditate upon the great love that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ endured to redeem us erring, ungrateful, recidivist sinners. Our Lord, the very Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost,  would have undertaken every single bit of His most fearful Passion and Death to redeem the soul of just one sinner. Just one. One sinner. He died for you. He died for me.

We are supposed to be doing spiritual reading in Lent, not spending our time reflecting on all that Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother, our Co-Redemptrix who stood so valiantly by the foot of the Cross as the Queen of Martyrs, suffered to redeem us and thus to be inspired to have a true hatred and detestation of our sins and to come to appreciate more and more that even the thought of coming into contact with sin, the very antithesis of Our Lord's Sacred Divinity, caused the Divine Redeemer to sweat droplets of His Most Precious Blood during His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane atop the Mount of Olives.

As noted just above, Our Lady suffered in perfect compassion with her Divine Son, to give birth to us spiritually as the adopted sons and daughters of the living God. Father Frederick Faber noted this very clearly in The Dolors of Mary/The Foot of the Cross when referring to how much heresy and sacrilege and abomination have caused Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to suffer:

 

The love of God brings many new instincts into the heart. Heavenly and noble as they are, they bear no resemblance to what men would call the finer and more heroic developments of character. A spiritual discernment is necessary to their right appreciation. They are so unlike the growth of earth, that they must expect to meet on earth with only suspicion, misunderstanding, and dislike. It is not easy to defend them from a controversial point of view; for our controversy is obliged to begin by begging the question, or else it would be unable so much as to state its case. The axioms of the world pass current in the world, the axioms of the gospel do not. Hence the world has its own way. It talks us down. It tries us before tribunals where our condemnation is secured beforehand. It appeals to principles which are fundamental with most men but are heresies with us. Hence its audience takes part with it against us. We are foreigners, and must pay the penalty of being so. If we are misunderstood, we had no right to reckon on any thing else, being as we are, out of our own country. We are made to be laughed at. We shall be understood in heaven. Woe to those easy-going Christians whom the world can understand, and will tolerate because it sees they have a mind to compromise!

The love of souls is one of these instincts which the love of Jesus brings into our hearts. To the world it is proselytism, there mere wish to add to a faction, one of the selfish developments of party spirit. One while the stain of lax morality is affixed to it, another while the reproach of pharisaic strictness! For what the world seems to suspect least of all in religion is consistency. But the love of souls, however apostolic, is always subordinate to love of Jesus. We love souls because of Jesus, not Jesus because of souls. Thus there are times and places when we pass from the instinct of divine love to another, from the love of souls to the hatred of heresy. This last is particularly offensive to the world. So especially opposed is it to the spirit of the world, that, even in good, believing hearts, every remnant of worldliness rises in arms against this hatred of heresy, embittering the very gentlest of characters and spoiling many a glorious work of grace. Many a convert, in whose soul God would have done grand things, goes to his grave a spiritual failure, because he would not hate heresy. The heart which feels the slightest suspicion against the hatred of heresy is not yet converted. God is far from reigning over it yet with an undivided sovereignty. The paths of higher sanctity are absolutely barred against it. In the judgment of the world, and of worldly Christians, this hatred of heresy is exaggerated, bitter, contrary to moderation, indiscreet, unreasonable, aiming at too much, bigoted, intolerant, narrow, stupid, and immoral. What can we say to defend it? Nothing which they can understand. We had, therefore, better hold our peace. If we understand God, and He understands us, it is not so very hard to go through life suspected, misunderstood and unpopular. The mild self-opinionatedness of the gentle, undiscerning good will also take the world's view and condemn us; for there is a meek-loving positiveness about timid goodness which is far from God, and the instincts of whose charity is more toward those who are less for God, while its timidity is searing enough for harsh judgment. There are conversions where three-quarters of the heart stop outside the Church and only a quarter enters, and heresy can only be hated by an undivided heart. But if it is hard, it has to be borne. A man can hardly have the full use of his senses who is bent on proving to the world, God's enemy, that a thorough-going Catholic hatred of heresy is a right frame of man. We might as well force a blind man to judge a question of color. Divine love inspheres in us a different circle of life, motive, and principle, which is not only not that of the world, but in direct enmity with it. From a worldly point of view, the craters in the moon are more explicable things than we Christians with our supernatural instincts. From the hatred of heresy we get to another of these instincts, the horror of sacrilege. The distress caused by profane words seems to the world but an exaggerated sentimentality. The penitential spirit of reparation which pervades the whole Church is, on its view, either a superstition or an unreality. The perfect misery which an unhallowed  touch of the Blessed Sacrament causes to the servants of God provokes either the world's anger or its derision. Men consider it either altogether absurd in itself, or at any rate out of all proportion; and, if otherwise they have proofs of our common sense, they are inclined to put down our unhappiness to sheer hypocrisy. The very fact that they do not believe as we believe removes us still further beyond the reach even of their charitable comprehension. If they do not believe in the very existence our sacred things, how they shall they judge the excesses of a soul to which these sacred things are far dearer than itself?

Now, it is important to bear all this in mind while we are considering the sixth dolor. Mary's heart was furnished, as never heart of saint was yet, yet with these three instincts regarding souls, heresy, and sacrilege. They were in her heart three grand abysses of grace, out of which arose perpetually new capabilities of suffering. Ordinarily speaking, the Passion tires us. It is a fatiguing devotion. It is necessarily so because of the strain of soul which it is every moment eliciting. So when our Lord dies a feeling of repose comes over us. For a moment we are tempted to think that our Lady's dolors ought to have ended there, and that the sixth dolor and the seventh are almost of our own creation, and that we tax our imagination in order to fill up the picture with the requisite dark shading of sorrow. But this is only one of the ways in which devotion to the dolors heightens and deepens our devotion to the Passion. It is not our imagination that we tax but our spiritual discernment. In these two last dolors we are led into greater refinements of woe, into the more abstruse delicacies of grief, because we have got to deal with a soul rendered even more wonderful than it was before by the elevations of the sorrows which have gone before. Thus, the piercing of our Lord with the spear as to our Blessed Lady by far the most awful sacrilege which it was then in man's power to perpetrate upon the earth. To break violently into the Holy of Holies in the temple, and pollute its dread sanctity with all manner of heathen defilement, would have been as nothing compared to the outrage of the adorable Body of God. It is in vain that we try to lift ourselves to a true appreciation of this horror in Mary's heart. Our love of God is wanting in keenness, our perceptions of divine things in fineness. We cannot do more than make approaches  and they are terrible enough. (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title of The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 291-295.)

This is so little regard for the horror of personal sin in the world today. One of the reasons that most Catholics have lost their sense of the horror of personal sin is that the men who have served as the "popes" and "bishops" and priests and presbyters in the counterfeit church of conciliarism have embraced and promoted various heresies and have engaged in the worst kind of abominable sins against the First and Second Commandments imaginable.

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, for example, has committed what are, in the objective order of things leaving subjective judgment to God alone, the most heinous of Mortal Sins against Faith, Morals and Worship.

Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has denied the nature of dogmatic truth from the earliest days of his priesthood, including in what he wrote in 1971, twenty years after he was ordained on June 29, 1951:

 

In theses 10-12, the difficult problem of the relationship between language and thought is debated, which in post-conciliar discussions was the immediate departure point of the dispute.

The identity of the Christian substance as such, the Christian 'thing' was not directly ... censured, but it was pointed out that no formula, no matter how valid and indispensable it may have been in its time, can fully express the thought mentioned in it and declare it unequivocally forever, since language is constantly in movement and the content of its meaning changes. (Fr. Ratzinger: Dogmatic formulas must always change.)

 

He does not care his false beliefs, which are philosophically absurd on their face, have been condemned by the authority of Holy Mother Church:

 

These firings, therefore, with all diligence and care having been formulated by us, we define that it be permitted to no one to bring forward, or to write, or to compose, or to think, or to teach a different faith. Whosoever shall presume to compose a different faith, or to propose, or teach, or hand to those wishing to be converted to the knowledge of the truth, from the Gentiles or Jews, or from any heresy, any different Creed; or to introduce a new voice or invention of speech to subvert these things which now have been determined by us, all these, if they be Bishops or clerics let them be deposed, the Bishops from the Episcopate, the clerics from the clergy; but if they be monks or laymen: let them be anathematized. (Sixth Ecumenical: Constantinople III).

• For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward

  • not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence,
  • but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated.
• Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.

 

God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth.

The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either: the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.

Therefore we define that every assertion contrary to the truth of enlightened faith is totally false. . . .

3. If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.

And so in the performance of our supreme pastoral office, we beseech for the love of Jesus Christ and we command, by the authority of him who is also our God and saviour, all faithful Christians, especially those in authority or who have the duty of teaching, that they contribute their zeal and labour to the warding off and elimination of these errors from the church and to the spreading of the light of the pure faith.

But since it is not enough to avoid the contamination of heresy unless those errors are carefully shunned which approach it in greater or less degree, we warn all of their duty to observe the constitutions and decrees in which such wrong opinions, though not expressly mentioned in this document, have been banned and forbidden by this holy see. (Pope Pius IX, Vatican Council, Session III, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Chapter 4, On Faith and Reason, April 24, 1870. SESSION 3 : 24 April 1870.)

Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical' misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. . . . The purpose of this is, then, not that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age; rather, that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed to be different, may never be understood in any other way. (Pope Saint Pius X, The Oath Against Modernism, September 1, 1910.)

Moreover they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

 

Most Catholics are not aware of any of this. Some of those who are or are informed about them simply shrug their shoulders, saying something along the lines of "He's the pope. Whatever he says goes. He's not bound by anything other popes say." Apart from the fact that Ratzinger/Benedict offends the very nature of the immutability of God and hence His Sacred Deposit of Faith by his of-stated apostate beliefs about the nature of dogmatic truth, those who believe that "one pope is free to teach contrary to the pronouncements of dogmatic councils, each of which met under the infallible guidance and direction of God the Holy Ghost, must come to realize that such a contention render makes the words of this current "pope" subject to rejection or "modification" by a successor. Why pay attention to anything any of these men say if it is all subject to further "modification" as it is never "possible" to adequately express truth fully at any one point in time?

Ratzinger/Benedict XVI believes in a notion of ecclesiology that asserts that Protestants are members of the "church"  and have "mission" to "spread the Gospel even though this proposition been condemned by pope after true pope, including Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943:

 

Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. "For in one spirit" says the Apostle, "were we all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free." As therefore in the true Christian community there is only one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one Baptism, so there can be only one faith. And therefore, if a man refuse to hear the Church, let him be considered - so the Lord commands - as a heathen and a publican. It follows that those who are divided in faith or government cannot be living in the unity of such a Body, nor can they be living the life of its one Divine Spirit. (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943.)

Who cares about the simple fact that Ratzinger/Benedict offends God by saying that Protestants are "members of the Church of Christ" and that they have a "mission" to fulfill, rejecting as he does the "ecumenism of the return" even though pope after pope has exhorted Protestants (and the Orthodox) to return without condition and without delay to the bosom of Holy Mother Church? Who cares that souls, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, are thus deceived or that the very salvation of the souls of Protestants and others is thus further imperiled? Does it not matter that Our Lord died for these souls so that they could be members of His one true Church, which can never give us even the slightest trace of error or confusion?

Who cares that souls are deceived by the hundreds of images such as the one below conveying the impression that Protestant laymen dressing up and acting as clergymen can give joint "blessings" with a putative Vicar of Christ?

 

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the non-pope, with Rowan Williams, the non-archbishop of Canterbury, Friday, September 17, 2010

Who cares that souls have been deceived by forty-three years of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service and by the endless efforts on the part of the conciliar "popes" and "bishops" to promote "religious liberty" and "separation of Church and State" and to put into question Holy Mother Church's dogma on Purgatory as well as the writings of various Church Doctors and Fathers?

 Very, very few.

Catholics have lost their sense of the horror of personal sin, including the sins of heresy and sacrilege committed by the conciliar revolutionaries.

Once one loses the horror of the sense of sin and thinks not about the great price that Our Lord paid to redeem just one soul, you see, it is easy to seek to minimize or rationalize away sins of one sort or the other as being "no big deal." This is what so many of the conciliar "bishops" and their chancery factotums have done by seeking to protect and promote clergymen amongst their ranks who have been guilty of grave crimes against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. It has been more important to these clerical thugs, men who have badly abused the trust that Catholics put in their supposed authority, to protect their friends and their institutions and their property and the financial holdings of their diocese (or archdiocese) than it has been to take measures to protect souls from being placed in the paths of unrepentant, recidivist moral predators.

This is what the late, disgraced Anthony "Cardinal" Bevilacqua, the conciliar "archbishop" of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from February 11, 1988, to July 15, 2003, did when he ordered the destruction in 1994 of thirty-four of his clergymen who had been reassigned to parishes despite their being moral predators:

 

Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua ordered aides to shred a 1994 memo that identified 35 Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests suspected of sexually abusing children, according to a new court filing.

The order, outlined in a handwritten note locked away for years at the archdiocese's Center City offices, was disclosed Friday by lawyers for Msgr. William J. Lynn, the former church administrator facing trial next month.

They say the shredding directive proves what Lynn has long claimed: that a church conspiracy to conceal clergy sex abuse was orchestrated at levels far above him.

"It is beyond doubt that Msgr. Lynn was completely unaware of this act of obstruction," attorneys Jeffrey Lindy and Thomas Bergstrom wrote.

Their motion asks Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina to dismiss the conspiracy and endangerment charges against Lynn, or to bar prosecutors from introducing Bevilacqua's videotaped testimony at trial.

The cardinal died Jan. 31.

The revelation is likely to further cloud Bevilacqua's complicated legacy in the handling of clergy sex abuse and could shape what happens at the historic trial, the first for a cleric accused of covering up sex abuse. Jury selection began this week. Opening statements are March 26.

Prosecutors say that Lynn, as the secretary for clergy, recommended priests for assignments despite knowing or suspecting that they would sexually abuse children. Facing trial with him are two former parish priests accused of molesting a boy in the 1990s, the Rev. James J. Brennan and Edward Avery.

In their motion, Lynn's lawyers argue that the new documents show he was one of the few church officials trying to confront the issue of abuse.

After becoming secretary for clergy in 1992, they say, Lynn began combing the secret personnel files of hundreds of priests to gauge the scope of misconduct involving children. He did it, his lawyers said, because he "felt it was the right thing to do."

The result was his February 1994 memo that identified 35 priests suspected of abuse or pedophilia. Lynn allegedly gave it to his superior, Msgr. James Molloy, the assistant vicar for administration, who shared his duties documenting abuse complaints.

Bevilacqua discussed the memo in a March 15, 1994, meeting with Molloy and Bishop Edward P. Cullen, then the cardinal's top aide, the filing says. After the meeting, Bevilacqua allegedly ordered Molloy to shred the memo. (Lawyers: Bevilacqua ordered memo on priests to be destroyed.)

 

Hide the truth. Protect the guilty. Put into jeopardy the souls of children, whose harm wound up embittering countless numbers of Catholics, driving some away from the Faith altogether, and costing ordinary Catholics yet attached to the conciliar structures over two billion dollars in payments made to victims and their families. Who cares about this? Who cares about the rank intimidation used by conciliar officials to browbeat victims and their families and witnesses into maintaining silence lest they become victimized a second time by being being castigated openly for their "causing scandal."

Hiding the truth about the such matters is second nature to the conciliarists. Second nature. It has been the case all too frequently that nothing on this earth gets to break the organized crime family code of omerta unless a lawsuit is filed and disclosure begins prior to the taking of depositions. It was the filing of such a lawsuit by lawyers for victims of "Bishop" Daniel Leo Ryan in 1999 for the conciliar authorities in the Vatican to do what they had theretofore refused to do in light of all of the courageous work by Stephen G. Brady, the president and founder of the now defunct Roman Catholic Faithful, Inc., for the three years prior to that time: demand that Ryan resign, albeit for the face saving reasons of "health." It took over three more years for a special commission in this country to acknowledge that Francis "Cardinal" George, the conciliar archbishop of Chicago, Illinois, told Mr. Brady in January of 1998, namely, that the American "bishops" "had known all about Ryan for years." George promised Steve and Roman Catholic Faithful a "relationship" with the "church" if he cooperated. To his credit, Mr. Brady refused, proceeding with a press conference that I covered for The Wanderer at the time (see More Witnesses Emerge in Bishop Ryan Case).

There have been other cases, however, that have remained "open" because those who possessed information, including documentary evidence that that chancery officials admit off the record were being covered-up, refused to think of the souls whose safety was put at risk by their desire for self-protection, whether personal or institutional or both. Some take this information to their graves even after the harm that their refusal to protect the souls of others continues unabated.

It's a funny thing about truth, however. It comes out on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the living and the dead. There will be no hiding places then. No cover-ups. No excuses. Documents shredded to protect personal and/or institutional self-interest will be revealed. One can succeed in this passing, mortal vale of tears in an effort to shrink from his duties before God and man to protect souls. There will be no hiding place on the Last Day. None. Indeed, one of the reasons that the General Judgment takes place is for all know whether the good that they had done while alive outlived the evil that they done, evil that can have a ripple effect long after death (a man, for example, who writes a stage play or a script for a motion picture or a television production glorying sin, whether natural or unnatural in nature produces evil consequences as long as his work is being read or watched or produced).

No matter the outcome of any human investigation or the weight of public opinion or the outcome of any trial, which can be a very hit and miss proposition given the vagaries of juries and the manner in which attorneys present evidence, the full truth of every situation and the intentions of every human heart and the circumstances of each human life will be known for all to see on the Last Day.

This means that there will be no place for the conciliar revolutionaries to hide on that same Last Day from the massive harm to souls caused by their blasphemies, apostasies and sacrileges. They will see the billions upon billions of souls, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who have harmed, perhaps for all eternity, by their spread of the diabolical lies of conciliarism.

This is why we must be vigilant in praying for the conversion of the conciliar officials everyday as the harm that they have done to souls is astoundingly vast. Indeed, it is beyond comprehension.

For our prayers to be efficacious, however, we must be honest with ourselves about how our words and actions have harmed souls, making good use of this penitential season of Lent to resolve once and for all to live more penitentially, keeping in mind that the truth about each one of our own lives will be laid bare for all to see on the Last Day. The more that we, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, are willing to suffer, especially by means of humiliation and hardship in the service of the truths of the Holy Faith, is the more that we can "settle accounts" in this life in order to make a better account for us at the moment of own our Particular Judgment, which can come, of course, when we least expect it.

Souls? Who cares about souls?

Our Lord did, to the point of shedding every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Our Lady did, to the point of dying truly a martyr's death of the soul as she saw her Divine Son mistreated and crucified by the very creatures He was redeeming.

Millions of saints, such as Saints Perpetua and Felicity, to the point of shedding their own blood rather than to given even the appearance of utilitarianism in order to save their own skins as they placed love of God above the desire for self-protection and/or self-justification before men.

The Masses at which we assist, the time we spend in prayer before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament, the Rosaries we pray, the private and sometimes public humiliations and embarrassments we suffer---as well as our fasting and almsgiving and spiritual reading--are used by Our Lady to effect our own conversion and that of others as we seek to make reparation for our many sins.

It is good in this season of Lent to remember that the more we care about the salvation of our own soul and how it looks in the sight of God will be the more that we are able to be care authentically for the souls of others, including those we may only meet in eternity but who have nevertheless profited from our prayers and good works offered up to Him through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary with a pure intention.

 

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us, on this your feast day!

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.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saints Perpetua and Felicity, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?