We Are Not Suffering From A Lack of "Information"

by Thomas A. Droleskey

As I have noted on other occasions on this little-read, much scorned website, whose detractors presume that it has far greater "clout" in the small universe that is the tiny peapod of traditional Catholics than will ever be the case in actual-point-of-fact, very few people other than professional truck drivers have driven across the entire length and breadth of the United States of America as we have. This is, I believe, an important point that I want to elaborate upon for but a few moments of your time in this penitential season of Lent.

Traditionally-minded Catholics all across and up and down the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide tend to forget that our universe is very tiny. Although so many people within that universe are driven by fits of virtual paranoia over what others think of them, most of our own identities are completely unknown to over 99.9999% of Catholics in the United States of America. Most of our concerns about the state of the Church and of the world are not the concerns of most of our fellow Catholics, to say nothing of the general population at large in the country.

One of the worst aspects, at least as I see it, of the "social networking" phenomenon that has taken such a hold in the world today is that those who spend their time in various chat rooms tend to forget that there is a world outside of their "followers" and fellow "chatters," if you will. The world outside of the chat rooms and the social networking websites is inhabited, at least for the most part, by well-meaning people who have absolutely no clue about or even any interest in First and Last Things. So many ordinary Americans go about their daily business in a stupor of drudgery, daydreaming of the bread and circuses (television, the internet, the "final four," the upcoming baseball season, NASCAR, etc.) that await them upon their arrival home. As I have written in other articles on this site, the average person you encounter at a Stop and Shop or H.E.B. or Kroger's or Albertson's or Piggly Wiggly or King Kullen or Big Y or Winn Dixie or some other large supermarket chain in this nation is oblivious to most of the issues that are in the news.

Libya?

The nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan?

Bahrain?

Syria?

Jordan?

Yemen?

Egypt?

Tunisia?

The bankruptcy of Ireland, Greece or Portugal?

The possible "shut down" of the Federal government because of the laughably modest budget proposals being advanced by Congressional Republicans to blunt Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus's insatiable appetite for spending money that does not exist and that can never be paid back?

Most of the people, for example, who sat for the nearly three hours that I spent yesterday in a motor vehicles office in the heartland of the country were playing video games on their cellular phones. Some were playing the horror of what is considered to be "music" but is actually a vile assault from the devil to agitate human souls. Most had mutilated their bodies by means of body piercing, hair-dying and/or tatoos. A lot were completely unkempt. Many of the younger adults had stocking caps pulled over their heads so as to signify, I suppose, membership in some kind of gang or "fraternal" organization. A few older chaps sported their Masonic rings and spoke to each other about the "final four," whatever that is. Perhaps they were speaking of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. Then again, perhaps not.

These people have never heard a thing about any of our websites or articles. They know nothing about our chapels or us. They do not "follow" traditionally-minded Catholics who are enrolled in various social networking websites. It is such people, however, who comprise the vast bulk of the electorate who participate in the biennial and quadrennial naturalistic farce called elections.

Although readers are free to disagree with me and to continue to believe in the political equivalent of the tooth fairy, it is people such as those who were waiting in that motor vehicles office yesterday who put our caesars in office at the ballot box. Most of them are the products of America's Concentration Camps that go by the name of "public schools," institutions that miseducate the lion's share of children in this country by inculcating them in the ways of relativism and positivism as they are given incentives to live lives of unrepentant sins in the name of "freedom" and "personal expression." Others have been malformed by former Catholic schools who are now in the control of conciliar revolutionaries, possessing "values," if you can call them such, that are indistinguishable from those possessed by their public school counterparts.

It is interesting to note that even though we live in the age when instant information is available even on one's "smart phone" at the touch of an "app," which I believes means software application of one sort or the other, most Americans want to be informed about bread and circuses almost exclusively. No, my friend, we are not suffering from a "lack of information" today. "Information" about world events is readily available. Most Americans do not want their minds cluttered by news and current events. They want to live for the diversions offered by "celebrity news" and sports and noise (what they consider to be "music").

Who in the counterfeit church of conciliarism is evangelizing these people? Indeed, at least some of those who are lost in the bread and circuses of our world of naturalism are lectors and "extraordinary ministers" and "ministers of hospitality" in formerly Catholic parishes that are now in the control of the conciliar revolutionaries. They dress while at the thoroughly Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service in the same slovenly, immodest manner that they dress--or undress--on a regular basis in their ordinary workaday lives. This should serve as something of an ancillary proof of the apostasy of the moment as even illiterate Catholics in the Middle Ages and newly-arrived Catholic immigrants to this country in the Nineteenth Century who could not speak English understood how to dress and act and speak as befits a redeemed creature. That this sensus Catholicus has been lost should speak volumes to those Catholics who think that this ancillary proof of the state of apostasy that is upon us does not indeed reflect the world's influence on conciliarism that makes the latter antithetical to Catholicism.

This is the kind of "information" that should teach us a thing or two about the extent to which the sense of the Holy Faith has been lost as a result of the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions of conciliarism that have produced several generations of young Catholics who participate blithely in the false currents of a world that is in the grip of the devil himself. It does not take advanced degrees in theology or canon law or Sacred Scripture to distinguish between that which is Catholic and that which is from the devil. This is why the conciliar revolutionaries have worked overtime to undermine and to eclipse the sensus Catholicus by accustoming Catholics in the conciliar structures to a stead steam of novelty and change and innovation and instability in an effort to convince them that it is this regime of novelty that is true Catholicism, not the authentic teaching and tradition of the Faith.

Don't we have more than enough "information" about this to recognize this truth once and for all?

 

Would that they had but displayed less zeal and energy in propagating it! But such is their activity and such their unwearying labor on behalf of their cause, that one cannot but be pained to see them waste such energy in endeavoring to ruin the Church when they might have been of such service to her had their efforts been better directed. Their artifices to delude men's minds are of two kinds, the first to remove obstacles from their path, the second to devise and apply actively and patiently every resource that can serve their purpose. They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, and on these they wage unrelenting war. Against scholastic philosophy and theology they use the weapons of ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method. Let the Modernists and their admirers remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: "The method and principles which have served the ancient doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science." They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those "who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church"; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: "We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by everyone of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church." Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: "I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.'' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Indeed you will accomplish this perfectly if, as the duty of your office demands, you attend to yourselves and to doctrine and meditate on these words: "the universal Church is affected by any and every novelty" and the admonition of Pope Agatho: "nothing of the things appointed ought to be diminished; nothing changed; nothing added; but they must be preserved both as regards expression and meaning." Therefore may the unity which is built upon the See of Peter as on a sure foundation stand firm. May it be for all a wall and a security, a safe port, and a treasury of countless blessings. To check the audacity of those who attempt to infringe upon the rights of this Holy See or to sever the union of the churches with the See of Peter, instill in your people a zealous confidence in the papacy and sincere veneration for it. As St. Cyprian wrote: "He who abandons the See of Peter on which the Church was founded, falsely believes himself to be a part of the Church. . . .

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. . . .

Nor can We predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood. It is certain that that concord which always was favorable and beneficial for the sacred and the civil order is feared by the shameless lovers of liberty.

But for the other painful causes We are concerned about, you should recall that certain societies and assemblages seem to draw up a battle line together with the followers of every false religion and cult. They feign piety for religion; but they are driven by a passion for promoting novelties and sedition everywhere. They preach liberty of every sort; they stir up disturbances in sacred and civil affairs, and pluck authority to pieces.(Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

 

There is, of course, a wealth of good Catholic information available in the writings of our saints that show us very clearly that the Catholic Church can never be led by individuals who have shown us that they have lost the Faith of our fathers.

Saint Francis de Sales gave a sermon for Thursday during the First Week of Lent, February 16, 1622, that explained that the truths of the Faith are beautiful and that the things that are not true are not beautiful. Catholicism is beautiful. Conciliarism is not, fraught as it is with novelties that have given issue to blasphemies and sacrileges that have allied baptized Catholics with the forces of the world, the flesh and the devil. These words, delivered three hundred eighty-nine years ago now, speak to us very clearly, providing us with the kind of good Catholic information that should convince us once and for all to recognize that Catholicism and conciliarism are mutually irreconcilable:

On this day preachers praise the virtue of the Canaanite woman in various ways. For myself, I will treat of faith, showing you what it is. I will attempt to show the relationship between what I have to say to you with what occurred in the Gospel between Our Lord and the Canaanite woman [Matt. 15: 21-28.] In this way you will learn the qualities that faith should have.

When the Saviour said: Woman, how great is your faith, was it because the woman's faith was greater than ours? Certainly not as regards its object, because faith has for its object the truths revealed by God or the Church, and it is nothing else but an adhesion of our understanding to these truths, which it finds both beautiful and good. Consequently, it comes to believe them, and the will comes to love them. for just as goodness is the object of the will, beauty is that of the understanding. In our day-to-day life, goodness is coveted through our sense appetites and beauty is loved through our eyes. In our spiritual life, it happens in the same way in regard to the truths of the faith. These truths are good, sweet, and true, and are not only loved and desired by the will, but are also valued by the understanding because of the beauty it finds in them. They are beautiful because they are true; for beauty is never without truth, nor truth without beauty. Moreover, beautiful things which are not true are not really beautiful either. They are false and deceitful.

Now the truths of the faith, being true indeed, are loved because of the beauty of this truth, which is the object of the understanding. I say loved, for although the will has goodness for the direct object of tis love, nevertheless when the beauty of revealed truths is represented to it by the understanding, it also discovers goodness there, and loves this goodness and beauty of the mysteries of our faith. In order to have great faith, the understanding must perceive the beauty of this faith. For this reason when Our Lord desires to draw some creature to knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2: 4) he always reveals its beauty to him. The understanding, feeling itself drawn or captivated by it, communicates this truth to the will, which accordingly loves it for the goodness and beauty it recognizes there. Finally, the love that these two powers have for revealed truths prompts the person to forsake everything in order to believe them and embrace them. This is done spiritually. All this helps to explain how faith can be said to be nothing else but an adhesion of the understanding and will to divine truths.

With reference to its object, faith cannot be greater for some truths than for others. Nor can it be less with regard to the number of truths to be believed. For we must all believe the very same thing, both as to the object of faith as well as to the number of truths. All are equal in this [Droleskey interjection here: so much for the absurd claim that there are a "irreducible minima" of truths by which a conciliar "pope" can remain a member of the Catholic Church even though he denies or puts into question many others], because everyone must believe all the truths of faith--both those which God Himself has directly revealed, as well as those he has revealed through His Church. Thus, I must believe as much as you and you as much as I, and all other Christians similarly. He who does not believe all these mysteries is not Catholic and therefore will never enter Paradise. (Saint Francis de Sales, The Sermons of Saint Francis de Sales for Lent Given in 1622, republished by TAN Books and Publishers for the Visitation Monastery of Frederick, Maryland, in 1987, pp. 34-37.)

 

Does Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI believe in all of the truths of the Catholic Faith?

Does he believe in the nature of dogmatic truth as defined by the Catholic Church?

Does he believe that it is his mission as a putative Successor of Saint Peter to seek with urgency the unconditional conversion of all non-Catholics to the Catholic Church?

Does he believe in the Catholic Church's condemnation of false ecumenism and inter-religious prayer services?

Does he believe in the Catholic Church's condemnation of religious liberty and separation of Church and State?

Is it beautiful in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity for anyone, no less one who is believed by most people in the world to be the "pope," to enter into places of false worship and to esteem symbols of false religions?

Is it beautiful in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity for anyone, no less one who is believed by most people in the world to be the "pope," to call places of false worship "sacred"?

Is it beautiful in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity for anyone, no less one who is believed by most people in the world to be the "pope," to enter into a Talmudic synagogue and to be treated as an inferior, claiming that Jews and Christians "pray to the same Lord"?

Is it beautiful in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity for a putative "pope" to give a joint "blessing" with the "ministers" of Protestant sects and Orthodox churches?

Is it beautiful in the sight of the Most Blessed Trinity for anyone, no less one who is believed by most people in the world to be the "pope," to directly contradict pope after true pope who condemned religious liberty and separation of Church and State and false ecumenism?

Don't we have all of the "information" we need to use our Catholic senses to recognize Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as men who defected from the Catholic Faith long, long ago?

Saint Francis Sales spoke fully two hundred seventy-six years before Pope Leo XIII issued Satis Cognitum on June 29, 1896. The two, however, believed the exact same Faith. They spoke as one on the simple truth that those who defect from the Holy Faith in one matter defect from It in Its entirety:

 

 

With reference to its object, faith cannot be greater for some truths than for others. Nor can it be less with regard to the number of truths to be believed. For we must all believe the very same thing, both as to the object of faith as well as to the number of truths. All are equal in this, because everyone must believe all the truths of faith--both those which God Himself has directly revealed, as well as those he has revealed through His Church. Thus, I must believe as much as you and you as much as I, and all other Christians similarly. He who does not believe all these mysteries is not Catholic and therefore will never enter Paradise. (Saint Francis de Sales, The Sermons of Saint Francis de Sales for Lent Given in 1622, republished by TAN Books and Publishers for the Visitation Monastery of Frederick, Maryland, in 1987, pp. 34-37.)

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88). (Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.)

 

If anyone tells you that it is "impossible" to know what is untrue or heretical, please refer that person to Saint Francis de Sales and to Pope Leo XIII. God has revealed Himself in clearly understandable terms through His true Church. We have all of the "information" we need to recognize the apostasy that is upon us.

While some of you saw all of this from the very beginning while others of us took decades to see it, we must remember that the fact that any of us see it at all is the working of 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 that flow into our hearts and souls from the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. We can lose the Faith. We can lose our perseverance in the truth. It is easy to succumb to the pressures of human respect so as not to be "isolated" from one's grown children or grandchildren or parents or siblings. Better for there to be a little estrangement now, good readers, in behalf of the Holy Faith than an unhappy reunion for all eternity in the fires of Hell. Better for there to be a little estrangement now as we keep those who calumniate us for our perseverance in the truth in our prayers without cease.

No, we are not suffering from any lack of "information" about the true state of the Church Militant in this time of apostasy and betrayal. We are simply suffering from a lack of courage to ask for the graces to accept this information and to act in accord with it no matter the consequences that might occur as result of our doing so.

 

We must, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, attempting to plant a few seeds by means of those Rosaries and our other prayers and penances and sacrifices and mortifications and sufferings and humiliations for a true restoration of the Church Militant on earth, one that will come in God's Holy Providence as He Wills it to come so that the errors of inter-related errors of Modernity and Modernism that have deceived so many hundreds of millions of souls will be wiped away and the Catholic Faith is seen once again as the sole means of personal and social order.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

 

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

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.

See also: A Litany of Saints