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Wednesday, 29 January 2020

Blessed are the Clean of Heart


Understood in its entirety as embracing its higher grade, that is, perpetual virginity consecrated to God, purity of heart is a gift which only Christianity can give. (Encyclical, Sacra Virginitas, Pope Pius XII, 1954) If we have been called to receive this wonderful gift, let us humbly thank God. It is a sublime dignity to belong, body and soul, to God.
Sacred Scripture says of men: “What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him? You have made him a little less than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honour. You have given him rule over the works of your hands, putting all things under his feet.” (Ps. 8:5; Heb. 2:7) But under a certain aspect those who are living in virginity can be said to be superior to the angels. Since an angel has no body, he offers God only the homage of his spirit. A virgin, on the other hand, must bear the burden of an earthly body. He must offer continually on the altar of his heart (and often after a heroic battle) not only his soul with its appetites and will, but also all the impulses and lower faculties “which wage war against the soul.” (I Peter 2:11)

This is a double sacrifice, which St. Ambrose calls a continual martyrdom of body and soul. But the reward lies in the joy and peace which flow from this perpetual offering of soul and body to the Immaculate Lamb. This happiness is a compensation for any conflict which must be endured, and is a foretaste of the joys of Heaven.

There is a purity of heart and chastity which is an obligation for everybody, even for those who are married or preparing for marriage. Everybody is obliged to avoid any act of impurity in so far as it is opposed to his own particular state, to the natural law and to the divine law. Do not think that this degree of chastity is any easier than the first. Sometimes the obligations it imposes are even more difficult than those of absolute virginity.

There is only one remedy for impurity. It is the practice of virtue to the point of sacrifice. Only a man who is ready with the help of God to make any sacrifice can preserve purity of heart. It is a hard struggle, but only those who win can see God. Our Lord has said: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” (Mt. 5:8). Only the clean of heart will be able to see and enjoy Him forever in Heaven and by means of His grace will be able to see Him in a less perfect manner on earth. St. Thomas says that mental blindness is the main effect of impurity. (Summa, II-II, q. 53, a. 6) This is because anyone who gives himself up to impurity loses all spiritual enlightenment and easily loses his faith as well. He no longer sees God, and he does not believe any more, because his heart is steeped in the mire of impurity. “The sensual man does not perceive the things that are of the Spirit of God, for it is foolishness to him and he cannot understand...” (I Cor. 2:14) He is like the blind mole which creates its own dark little underground world and cannot see the sky any more.

St. Paul warns us in the following words: “Do you not know that your members are the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought at a great price. Glorify God and bear him in your body.” (I Cor. 6: 19-20)

We who are temples of the Holy Ghost, redeemed by the Precious Blood of Jesus, must keep unsullied the purity of our hearts, the lily of our innocence. We must do this no matter what sacrifices it may cost us. Those stern words from the Gospel, “if thy right eye is an occasion of sin to thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee,” (Mt. 5:29) refer in a special way to the obstacles we must overcome and the sacrifices we must make to preserve this beautiful virtue. There can be no half-measures. We must be prepared to go to any length, even to accept death if necessary, like St. Maria Goretti. Even as we should be ready to face martyrdom for the faith, so we must be ready to face martyrdom in order to preserve purity of soul.
by Cardinal Bacci

Thursday, 28 November 2019

The Revolution against the Father



 With thanks to Non-Possumus and a supporter of the blog for a better than google translation!

The Dominicans of Avrillé just published an excellent article about the destruction of the paternal role. It agrees much with the statement made recently by HE Williamson.  A day does not pass, not even an hour, without us witnessing a very serious and unthinkable facts against the father: delusional feminism, procedures and persecutions against the fathers of family by means of revolting wives (even among Catholics of Tradition!) etc .... These poor women do not realise that their fatherless children will be the future slaves of the republic. It is not a simple moral decadence linked to usury but the logical product of the "revolution" organized by the Lodges. To each of us to take the measure and fight against this evil machination.

 The Revolution against the Father
Source: Website of the Dominicans of Avrillé

Fifty years ago, in 1969, Dr. Pierre Simon, a French pioneer in the contraceptive pill, was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France. Ten years later, in 1979, having succeeded in legalising abortion, he explained that it was only the beginning of the Masonic plan. The next step was artificial insemination (now known as IVF: medically assisted procreation), which would eliminate the father:
With the pill, one has a normal sexual life without procreation; with artificial insemination, procreation will take place without sexual act [...]. Sexuality will be dissociated from procreation, and the procreation of paternity. It is the whole family concept that is changing over here: the father is no longer the parent, but the one who raises the child. [...] [There will be] on one side the emotional and sexual couple - the procreative woman, the nonproductive man -; on the other, the society, mediated by the doctor, which brings the demand for children closer to an availability of anonymous seed, controlled and governed by the "sperm bank" [...] [1].
At the time of writing, this shift is reaching its critical point, as the French Parliament is preparing to legalize the "IVF for all". Some children will not even have an adoptive father. What will the consequences be ?

The Janissaries Syndrome

If educators have long observed the shortcomings of children deprived of a father, Bernard Gibello found a striking type in the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire: snatched from their parents to be forcibly conscripted into the Muslim army these unfortunates became fanatical warriors, compensating for their need for a father by unconditional submission to the Turkish tyrant. André Bergevin summarises and comments on the psychologist's analyses:
Character traits presented by children without consistent paternal education were collected by Gibello as Janissary Syndrome; indeed, these elite soldiers (often homosexuals) had their peculiarities to have been taken away from their families (Christian) and to have suffered, in a Muslim environment, a religious destabilization and especially a conditioning making them replace the image of their real father, by the abstract image of the Sultan in whose service they slavishly put their aggressiveness.
[...] Similar personalities were numerous among the Hitlerites. We can also remember that Armand Maloumian who knew the Gulag from the inside, tells that in 1948, the N.K.V.D. organized sexual orgies between deportees and those deportees hitherto rigorously separated. Pregnant women were then told that they would be released after one year to take care of their offspring. Obviously it was not, but their children were confiscated by the Soviet state who raised them in specialized schools, to make, mainly, policemen fully dedicated to the cause of their only identifiable father: the Communist state. It is instructive to see how authoritarian regimes, very varied, and at different times, have perfectly exploited the domesticated and instrumentalised aggression of children without father and without family.
Do those who now demolish paternal authority want the authoritarianism that tomorrow may need "Janissaries" to impose unpopular dictates? Is it a coincidence that (in 1997) a senior officer of the Gendarmerie, in a study meeting, spontaneously and curiously defined his new recruits as: "neither God, nor father! ". The first part of the definition is commonplace in this materialistic age, but the second can surprise those who do not know the work of Gibello. [...]
Men so need a father to honour and follow, that if he is absent or simply fading away, and if God is ambiguous, they can fall back on the image of a state authority, and to be satisfied with this substitute, that with their peers, they will blindly serve the arms in the hand. Any decline of paternalism is a chance for centralized authoritarianism, that is to say, a chance for tyranny [2].
The revolutionary logic
In the Republican values ​​of France, this scenario gives rise to curious resonances. Was it not possible to say that the Declaration of Human Rights was written for a citizen "a born child found and dying unmarried" [3]? "By cutting off the head of Louis XVI - Balzac added - the Republic cut off all fathers' heads." In 1792, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, president of the National Assembly, proclaimed that the State must "seize man from the cradle, and even before his birth, because the child who is not born belongs already to the Fatherland, "while the Revolutionary Deputy Joseph Lequinio, anxious for universal fraternity, proclaimed:" It would be happy for the human species, that all the children do not know their father [6]. "

A devilish relentlessness
After the supernatural authority of the Church, nothing can oppose the Revolution more than the natural authority of the father of a family, precisely because it is natural, that is to say, independent of the State. Like any totalitarian ideology, the Revolution cannot support an authority prior to its own. For two hundred years, under the pretext of "liberating", it has worked tirelessly to isolate individuals, depriving them of all roots, all tradition, all attachment, all human links and all natural protection against the almighty state. As early as 1793, the future editor of the Civil Code proclaimed:
The imperious voice of reason was heard. There is no more paternal power. One man cannot have direct powers over another, even his son [7].
The Civil Code of Napoleon
In this methodical destruction of the family, the responsibility of the Napoleonic Civil Code is overwhelming.  Bishop Delassus noted:
This code was made to destroy families, abolish heredity, destroy local traditions and isolate individuals, annihilate and gradually destroy all territorial and industrial influences for the benefit of anonymous and cosmopolitan capital [...]. There is no more ‘our home’, legally at least, but unstable families. The spirit and the text of the Civil Code are opposed to any consolidation, to any perpetuation. It  attaches to the family,  the idea of ​​a fleeting society which dissolves at the death of one of the contracting parties.
To support his claims, the counterrevolutionary prelate quoted Frederic Le Play lamenting "the lamentable spectacle of the perpetual liquidation forced by the forced sharing of inheritances" and he stressed that this effect was planned and explicitly desired. On June 6, 1806, Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph, who became King of Naples:
I want to have in Paris one hundred families, all having risen up with the throne and remaining dependent on it. Those who do not go along with it will be dispersed through the effect of the Civil Code. Establish this Civil Code in Naples; all that is not attached to you will be destroyed in a few years, and what you want to preserve will be consolidated [9].
This cynical plan came from England. In the eighteenth century, Queen Anne imposed on the Catholic Irish equal and forced division of the land, reserving  to the Protestants the ability to test according to English laws; the soil of Ireland thus passed inexorably into the hands of Protestant lords.

From divorce to common law
The cynicism in the legalisation of divorce. Officially, the Law of Alfred-Isaac Naquet (1881) only covered a few extreme cases, particularly painful. But little by little, all the restrictions disappear. While this law of 1881 still prohibited, in the event of adultery, the marriage between accomplices, the prohibition is abolished in 1904; the delay before a new "marriage" is shortened in 1907 and progressively everything is done to facilitate the procedure.

Is it a drift? Obviously no, since Naquet will publish in 1908 a book very clearly entitled: Towards the free union. But it was necessary to proceed in stages. Naquet confided to his friend P. Abram:
To legitimise free unions, we need a change in our mentality. Because, basically, marriage is rather imposed by our morals than by our laws ... But one does not change the mentality of a nation by a decree or a law, especially when this mentality is, like ours, also imbued with Catholic prejudices [10].
To "deconstruct" these "prejudices", one must resort to trickery and lies. Slowly bit by bit, solemnly assuring at each step that there is no question of going to the next and marking, if necessary, a break long enough to forget the promise.

In 1884, in the Naquet law, divorce was only an exceptional remedy, sanctioning a serious fault. As early as 1886, the procedure is simplified. From 3,000 divorces in 1885 to 23,000 in 1938, 35,000 in 1950 and 110,000 in 1981. In the meantime, in 1975, divorce was legalized by mutual consent.

From contraception to abortion
The same techniques of manipulation to attack the unborn child.
In 1963, to promote contraception, the French Movement for Family Planning (MFPF) presented it as the cure for abortion, and, for the sake of the cause, warned against it:
It destroys a baby's life after it has begun. It is dangerous for your life and your health. It can make you sterile.
 Once contraception is accepted, family planning "forgets" that it was supposed to block the road to abortion, and begins to seek the legalization of it. In 1970, Dr. Elton Kessel confesses to the Congress of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in Tokyo:
If until now abortion has not been advocated by those responsible for family planning, it is because it would have damaged the reputation of the movement. Now that ideas are evolving, Family Planning can change tactics [11].
In parallel, to move public opinion, it does not hesitate to rig the figures, multiplying by six the number of clandestine abortions, and by forty that of women who died from abortion [12].

Towards the fatherless child
The major manoeuvres for the artificial manufacture of fatherless children began in the 1990s. As soon as the IVF was obtained for infertile couples (1994), the campaign for homosexual "couples" was launched.
On 3rd November 1998, Élisabeth Guigou, Minister of Justice, defends in these terms the draft Civil Solidarity Agreement (PACS) in the National Assembly:
The opponents of PACS claim that it would be dangerous for marriage. [...] Some still add a threat: the agreement would be only a first step towards the right to filiation for homosexual couples! Those who claim it involves only themselves. [...] I say with the greatest firmness that this right should not be confused with a hypothetical right to the child. A heterosexual or homosexual couple has no right to have a child outside of natural procreation. The recent laws on medically assisted procreation [...] are not intended to allow procreation of convenience on the basis of a hypothetical right to the child.

I am aware of the possible lawsuits on a possible "follow up" of this bill that would prepare more fundamental changes to our law. This text would be "a double-edged sword ". I resist with the greatest force such suggestions.

This dishonest vocabulary, which suggests that this text would hide something else and that your reporters and the Government would be acting  fraudulently in respect to the law, is unacceptable.
Fourteen years later, the same Élisabeth Guigou explains that it was a ruse:

At the time, the important thing was to pass the PACS. There was fierce resistance to PACS in the Assembly, but also in society with demonstrations, verbal outbursts  [...] So, the important thing was to dissociate PACS from marriage, legally and symbolically. In 1998, it was not possible to put the issue of same-sex marriage on the table, even within the government, I had to insist. At the time it was something that was much less accepted in society, you will not find anyone opposed to PACS nowadays. Today, I have evolved on  marriage. I considered, while speaking with the associations that, since it was about mutual consent between two adults, it was not possible to refuse an equality of  rights. Society has evolved a lot, I keep my questions about adoption to myself; it is necessary to find out how to write in the civil code how to organise the filiation of a child who is adopted by a homo- couple.
In reality, the goal had been clearly made known, as early as 1900, by the great pundits of the League (Masonic) of Human Rights, who declared, at the World Fair in Paris:
Our group is a strong supporter of the integral education of the child by the community, it does not recognize the usefulness of the protection of the parents [...] our group is revolutionary socialist, consequently internationalist anti-patriotic. In the family, we see the very beginning of the clan, the province, the nation; in the paterfamilias, the beginning of the chief, the lord, the king. [...] We want the autonomous personality in the harmonic society. There is no need for the succession of intermediaries: family, province, nation, between the individual and the community. The natural family of the individual is humanity [13].
Behind this cry of hatred against the human family, we easily recognise the revolt of the Prince of selfishness: the demon, Lucifer. Locked in the sterility of his pride, which can only bring forth lies, Satan cannot bear the thought of the God-Father, who not only, from all eternity, gives His Divine Life to the eternal Word but who, in addition, wanted to create men to raise them to this divine filiation, by incorporating them into His only Son.
"The enemies against whom we have to fight are not beings of flesh; it is the Principalities and the Powers of Hell, the leaders of the world of darkness, the evil spirits scattered throughout the universe. Take the weapons of God, to be able to withstand the hour of battle [...]. Above all, have faith; it is the shield where the incendiary arrows of the Evil one will be extinguished. [Eph 6]


[1] - Pierre Simon (1925-2008), Life before all things, Paris, Mazarine, 1979, p. 221-222. Quoted by Christian Lagrave in Salt of the Earth 94, p. 103.

[2] - André Bergevin, Permissive Revolution and Sexuality, From Tolerance as an Argument to Transgression as a Process, Pars, F. X. de Gibert, 2003, p. 366-367.

[3] - The formula is Ernest Renan, in the preface to his Contemporary Questions (Paris, Lévy, 1868, III).

[4] - Do you know, my child, what are the most destructive effects of the Revolution? You would never doubt it. In cutting off Louis XVI's head, the Revolution cut off all fathers' heads. There is no family today, there are only individuals (...). By proclaiming equal rights to paternal succession, they killed the family spirit, they created the taxman! But they have prepared the weakness of superiority and the blind force of the mass, the extinction of the arts, the reign of personal interest (...). We are between two systems: to constitute the State by the Family, or to constitute it by personal interest: democracy or aristocracy, discussion or obedience, Catholicism or religious indifference, that is the question in few words. Honoré de Balzac, The Human Comedy, Scenes from Private Life, Memoirs of Two Young Brides (1840) (Complete Works of H. de Balzac, Volume 2, A. Haussiaud, 1855, 45). - Same interpretation of the Revolution by the feminist Élisabeth Badinter (One is the other, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1986, pp. 192-198).

[5] - Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne (1743-1793), member of the Committee of public instruction of the Convention, speech to the Convention, December 21, 1792.

[6] - Joseph Lequinio (1755-1812), Prejudices destroyed, chapter XV, Bastards, Paris, Desenne, 1793, p. 160.

[7] - Jean-Jacques-Régis of Cambaceres (1753-1824), speech to the Convention, August 9, 1793.

[8] - Bishop Henri Delassus, The Family Spirit in the House, in the City and in the State, Desclée, Lille, 1910, p. 133-135. - See on this subject: Jean Gasselin, "Mgr Delassus and the family spirit" in Salt of the Earth 81, p. 23-28.

[9] - Quoted by Bishop Henri Delassus, ibid., P. 133.

[10] - Quoted by Paul Abram, The Evolution of Marriage (Paris, E. Sansot, 1908, with preface by Léon Blum), p. 117. See also the other quotations given by Christian Lagrave in Salt of the Earth 94, p. 96-97.

[11] - Quoted by Marie-Andrée Lagroua Weill-Hallé, Dad's Abortion, Paris Fayard, 1971, ch. 1.

[12] - On the rigging of statistics by INED, in France, see Bel and Lagrange, Plot against Life (SPF, 1979), and Jean Legrand's article in Routes 322 (April 1988), with INED response in Routes No. 327. - On the rigging of statistics in the United States, see Dr. Nathanson's confession ("We falsified the number of illegal abortions"), in Present of Saturday, November 23, 1985.

[13] - Lucien Brunswick (member of the Central Committee of the League of Human Rights), speech at the feminist congress organized in Paris during the World Expo of 1900 (5-8 September) with Ferdinand Buisson and René Viviani. (International Congress of the Status and Rights of Women, Paris, 1901, pp. 388-389, quoted by Christian Lagrave in "Feminism versus the Family," Salt of the Earth 94, 94.)

Saturday, 16 November 2019

The Cordyceps Pontificate of Pope Francis

Hilary White


(The current crisis in the Church is becoming more and more apparent even to those previously not exposed to traditional arguments against the errors of modernism. The Amazonian Synod, Pachamama and the scandalous comments of Pope Francis are awakening those who, even in spite of their years in the Novus Ordo, are able to see contradict Church teaching. Logically this is turning people towards Tradition which can only be a good thing. However, this brings its own problems as many are still attached to many of the erroneous teachings of Vatican II and the previous Conciliar Pontiff's. It has been pointed out by many that in some parishes of the SSPX this has resulted in a lowering in polemics in order to take the 'newbies' sensitivities into account. The following article written for the Remnant Newspaper way back in 2015 by Hilary White, makes a number of good points which are well worth reading again and passing on to those new to Tradition. As someone recently commented Conservative Catholics "are there just to make sure the Barque stays below the speed limit while headed over the cliff "  -Editor traditionalcatholicresistance blog- )

Beginning of Hilary White article -

People who know me well know that this whole rabid Traditionalist Catholic polemicist thing is mostly kept confined to my professional life. In real day-to-day life, I’m really an amateur naturalist. No kidding. Check it out on my blog where I write long posts about octopi and whelks.

One of my favourite things is going stomping about the Umbrian countryside in my wellies with a collecting basket to see what sort of things I can bring home to cook or make into booze. This year my elderflower champagne was so good, I’m already collecting more bottles and a bigger bucket for ten gallons next spring. And when the rose hips are ripened, I’m going to see how they do as liqueur.

One of the things I love is wild mushrooms, but, Russian Roulette being forbidden by the Church, I strictly confine my collecting to varieties I can be absolutely sure of. Mushrooms and fungi are among the most interesting objects of the natural world, and fungi are as important as bees to the natural world’s ability to make things grow and feed the rest of usNot actually plants at all, since they don’t photosynthesize like green vascular plants, but take their nourishment straight out of the medium they grow in, and in doing so, help to break down that medium. A fungus growing on a dead log or tree stump is doing some very important nature-work in helping to break down deadwood into soil.


This is done through a vast network of almost invisible tendrils called “mycelium,” that live under the surface and pervade every inch of the soil beneath your feet. The huge majority of fungal life is mycelium that you mostly can’t see, unless you’re turning over last year’s leaf pile in the spring.
From these tendrils of mycelium sprout the fruiting bodies that we know and love as mushrooms. But they start their life as spores…

…that shoot out in ways that sometimes defy imagination. 


Nature’s pretty cool huh? But I guess you’re wondering why I’m going on about mushrooms on the Remnant’s blog.

The other day someone made a comment about Pope Francis, (you knew we were going there, right?)“I recently read about a disastrous Pope who made many bad decisions, the Pope who succeeded him immediately upon his election nullified all the previous Pope’s decisions. I hope this happens again.”

…and the first thing that popped into my head was, “Nope. It won’t work, because of the mycelium.”

The trouble with this idea is that Francis isn’t an anomaly; he’s a predictable result of the Neomodernism that has infested the Church since the close of Vatican II. The commenter’s idea is that he is an isolated and inexplicable outlier, something like a tick that has just dropped onto the Church at random and who can be burned off once discovered by saner heads. If that were the case, if there were any saner heads available, he wouldn’t have been elected pope in the first place.
Pope Francis is not the problem. Neomodernism is the problem. Pope Francis is more like the fruiting body of the cordyceps mycelium that has infested every last corner of the Catholic Church’s ecosystem. In the natural world, in the forest floor the mycelium are pervasive, but because of all the other processes at work in the soil, the various chemical processes, bacteria, insects, temperature, etc., it isn’t possible for them to utterly take over the whole ecosystem of the forest and kill and eat every other growing thing in it. Unfortunately, the Church’s theological ecosystem doesn’t work the same way, though I think this is more or less how most “conservative” Catholics think it does.

In the analogy that, I swear, just popped unbidden suddenly into my weird brain – probably because of too many nature shows as a kid – Pope Francis is the cordyceps fruiting body that is sprouting out of the infested body of the host of the papacy. The spores of Neomodernism have been bursting out of him since his first moment on the loggia. (Remember that bow? Remember how all secularist media ate up that absurd, unCatholic, populist gesture and launched the Humble Francis Show even before he’d blessed the crowd?)

But I repeat that Francis himself isn’t the problem, and if it hadn’t been him – if he’d not made it to the Conclave or had died during Pope Benedict’s reign – they’d simply have gone to the next one on the list. In fact, I’ve been maintaining among friends that the Faith, the real Catholic religion that has barely subsisted while being systematically suppressed throughout the world for the last 50 years, would not have survived another long “conservative” pontificate. As painful as it is, Francis is really just what we need.

The last two popes, bless ‘em, created what I have come to call the “conservative Catholic middle ground,” a safe space where nice, friendly, inoffensive and politicized Catholics can live in peace with the world. By asserting that Vatican II could be embraced by the Church while retaining all the deposit of the Faith intact, the Catholic conservatism tried to square the theological circle. This was an error, but it was a comforting one that a lot of people embraced, implying that we didn’t really have much to worry about, and didn’t really have to do very much. Just keep soldiering on and being reasonable and accommodating, and all this “liberalism” in the Church would just die out like bellbottoms and lovebeads.

But the reality is now, finally, being revealed to have been much, much worse, as Traditionalists have been trying to tell the rest of the Church for fifty years. After the Council, whatever happened in the meetings, the strength the Church had to fight off the Neomodernist mycelium appeared to die, and in the intervening decades, since the problem was not rooted out completely, the deadly theological cordyceps has finally taken over everything.
The determined maintenance of the “nothing to see here” lie by the hierarchy, has come at this stage to consume nearly all the Church’s resources. To the point where our “conservative pro-life” hero bishops like Archbishop Charles Chaput have begun lashing out at anyone who points to the absurdity of inviting the pope to a World Meeting of Families that deliberately includes pro-aborts and sodomite lobbyists.

This is the result of warm, friendly, easygoing “conservatism,” in the papacy, which in reality is a slow, one-way ratchet that can finally end only in apostasy. Can you imagine what another 20 or 30 years of a John Paul II-style pontificate of slow, incremental, invisible infiltration of Neo-Modernist ideology would have done to us? Would there be any Faith in Our Lord left on earth on the Last Day?
Well, that deadly, compromised position is disappearing as fast as an ice floe under a polar bear in a Greenpeace propaganda meme, and more and more people are realising it. And it is thanks to Francis, who is making it rapidly impossible to take that conservative middle ground.

What is going to be left when he’s done? Our mycelium analogy is useful again. What would happen to a forest that got totally eaten and replaced by fungi? There would be no trees, shrubs or flowers, or any other kind of life. There would only be fungi, which would then die for lack of anything left to eat.

But what is the Neomodernism mycelium consuming? Not the Church, which cannot be touched by it. No, it’s eating the last of the Novusordoist “great façade” that came into existence and grew after Vatican II. It’s eating itself.

And more and more people are figuring it out. Our good friend the editor of this publication has many times said that since the start of Francis’s rampage, the Remnant’s readership has burgeoned. I have heard the same thing from many others who are publishing critical pieces on the pope in other venues. We know that the incredible outrages of this pontificate, not only those of Francis himself, but from his friends and chosen subordinates, are separating the Faithful from the nominal Catholics. People are at last being forced to choose a side by the most “divisive” pope in Catholic history.
In venues as far away as the neoconservative bastion of Crisis Magazine, the meek and mild English convert William Oddie wrote the other day that Francis “doesn’t do doctrine,” and came to the rather lame conclusion that if nothing else, at least he’s not going to last forever. As Dr. Oddie pointed out, even the pope’s own official spokesman, the unflappable Fr. Federico Lombardi, has said that he’s about had it with the nonsense and doesn’t have the first notion what’s going on.

We might be at the point in the Church where the only way to save the body is to amputate huge and formerly useful parts of it. Or maybe, simply, those dead branches will fall off by themselves. Certainly the increasingly hostile secular world and aggressive Islam will have a role to play.
But whatever is coming next from the outside world, Francis is doing the Church a service that perhaps no one else could; he is demonstrating that the Vatican II, Novusordoist experiment has been, to put it as mildly as possible, a complete, utter and catastrophic failure because it has produced churchmen like him. This pope, the naked, unabashed, unapologetic Neomodernist, is stamping all over the tired, half-deflated balloon of “reform of the reform,” that desperate last ditch effort by Pope Benedict and his well-meaning followers to save the hopeless contradictions of Catholic neoconservatism.

What will be left when he is done? Soon, (..) there will be only two choices. It is rapidly becoming clear that there will be the Church and the antiChurch, as we were told by the Lord Jesus Christ there would be at the end.

Thursday, 1 August 2019

The Gifts of God by Fr Perez

If you remember the last time I was here, I started a series of sermons on the Gifts of God. Now we’re all very used to hearing about the gifts of God that are the Supernatural Gifts. We always pray for the Supernatural Virtues, we thank God for them and things like that. But I found a nice little reprint of an old book — I didn’t plagiarize the sermon, but it gave me an inspiration to talk about the gifts that God gives us for which we may not have enough appreciation to Him. And these are the more natural gifts proper to our nature or just things that He gives us, and I wanted to mention a few words about those today. Also, my whole thrust is to have us appreciate the things God gives us, so one thing at a time. Sometimes we try to take the shot gun effect and blast everything at once and it doesn’t really work for us that way. We’ve got to take one thing at a time and exercise that until it becomes a habit and then move on to the next thing.

Today I’m talking about the gift of hearing. Once again, like sight that I talked about last time, hearing is a gift that we don’t fully appreciate or don’t even start to appreciate until we begin to lose our hearing or we see someone who is maybe born deaf and we have a sympathetic prayer for them and it starts us thinking about it, but otherwise we wouldn’t. Scientists now say we hear before birth so you can hear things while you’re still inside your mother, like Mozart that she’s playing for you. According to the modern recommendations, Mozart’s good anytime, so why not before you’re born, to start out on a good foot there. So today I want to talk about this gift of hearing.

I want to remind you as I reminded you with the gift of sight, that there’s not just one window of the soul. There are many windows of the soul. For those of you who didn’t hear what I said about sight, people often say, oh, yes, the eyes are the window of the soul. But they don’t understand what they’re saying. Like so many of the modern sayings, it has become removed from its’ true meaning and they make it to mean something else. A lot of people think, well you have such pretty eyes, I can look into your eyes and I can see your soul. Isn’t that wonderful? No, it’s not that kind of window. It’s called the window but it’s actually only a window of the soul because it is through sight (and through hearing now) that the soul sees out to the world. It’s the soul’s window out on the world.

Remember, the soul is the seat of our intellect. In fact, the soul is where everything that makes us us, is. That’s in the soul. Our personalities, our memories, everything – our intellect, our will are all in our souls. And so the soul then collects information about its’ environment through its’ various windows, sight being the first one, as I spoke about, hearing being the one I’m talking about today.

One thing I want to mention is the many uses of hearing, some of them very basic. We use hearing to learn about life and the world in general, to warn us of danger of course. That’s what our car horn is supposed to be for. In California we’re pretty good about that, if somebody’s about to step out in front of your car or change lanes without knowing you’re there we beep the horn. In New York they just get in the car, put their hand on the horn and just keep going until they get to their destination. It’s a slightly different philosophy, but it’s the same idea. Hearing can warn us of danger in that way. Hearing a rattlesnake for example tells us not to go over there.

Learning – learning about anything, learning in school, we use our hearing. But the highest use of hearing to learn would be mostly hearing things about God. Now things have a hierarchy of uses. Hearing things about God is a highly exalted use of hearing but there are so many others. You know, one thing that your soul enjoys is that it exalts with the holy things about God, but it enjoys many, many, other things that come to us through hearing. Let’s just take the sounds of nature. We are quite blessed to be where we are. Every day I go out and it’s like being in the aviary of the zoo. Just this morning there was a mocking bird pleading its’ song. There were the mourning doves cooing, there were the little tweety birds singing and sparrows and bird-like conversations. Beautiful, beautiful songs and the soul appreciates those. Why? Because of the beauty of them and then it makes us say thank you to God for that particular thing, for the gift of the songs of the birds.
 
Other things too; for example, good music. Now I have to emphasize good music because everybody will say it’s subjective. Well it is and it isn’t. The ancient Greeks came up, well before the time of Christ, with a philosophy of what constitutes beauty. What are the elements of beauty? Do you apply it to music as well as to things you can see with your eyes? Remember, this is input to your soul. There are kinds of music that are good for your soul, as other sounds that are good for your soul. And I would start with, of course, you know religious kind of singing is good, but it’s not something that is really always pleasing to listen to. I know I sound like a heretic when I say it, but Gregorian Chant for example. Gregorian Chant is a beautiful kind of music, one of the most for singing, because what are you doing? You are singing a beautiful prayer when you sing Gregorian Chant, right? And some of the Gregorian Chants are nice to listen to. You can be forgiven if you don’t go home, put up your feet and put on a disc of Gregorian Chant because most of it is more to be prayed by those singing it than to be listened to. To listen can kind of go on and on and on for a while and you go okay, let’s have some Mozart please. Now Mozart and Bach and others like that, they fit very well the conditions for beauty and their beautiful works of music enter your soul and they please your soul. Later on, Western music [not Cowboy, y’all] started to fall apart and it reached its’ height in the 16th, 17th Century and then began really to disintegrate. So I can’t say that the introduction of other forms of music were its’ destruction, because when you get as far as the modernist composers (not Modernists the same way that Francis is but in the composer sense) you get to Prokofiev and Scriabin, it’s junk. It’s like the sound track for a nervous breakdown. These things do not please your soul, but the symmetry and harmony of the classical music, the older classical music really touches your soul.

I was looking at one of the restaurant places, where they had a TV on and they had somebody who was talking about (it was Black History Month) the contribution of the continental African music to Western music. Well, as I said, Western music was only ailing because of Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff and such people but the African tones were its death knell. The introduction of the jungle rhythms into Western music were the poison that finished it off and is continuing to kill the rest of us. We’re talking about the rhythms they came up with like rap and rock and that type of music. These are positively disturbing for your souls. Now take note: Protestants got this wrong too – that’s a subheading of “Protestants got it all wrong anyway”. But one dictum goes like this: Well we listen to Christian rock so we can listen to our Christian rock because it’s Christian, it’s rejoice in the Lord and and and.  Okay, my friends, it’s not the words that necessarily make a song bad, it’s the rhythm, you see. And a lot of these come from the interior of Africa where many cultures are still very primitive. When my ancestors were playing on Stradivari violins and writing symphonies, their ancestors were beating on animal skulls with sticks. But it hasn’t changed is the problem. It hasn’t risen above what it was. In Africa it’s still that and an end in itself. It’s all about tribal sensualism which is the rhythm of rap and things. These are sensualized rhythms that enter into your soul by hearing. So you should not say, well this is good rock, this is soft rock. I mean, soft rock?  Or as a geologist would say, no soft rock, but not that one. I would think more like tufa or something like that which is a soft rock. But it’s still these rhythms insinuating themselves into your soul.

One further thing though that I would say on the positive side of hearing that you should all do. These things that please your soul by way of language – take opera for example. Of course, that’s an acquired taste too, but you notice there are not many English operas. Why? Because English is a lousy language for opera. I mean it’s good for a musical but it’s not good for an opera. So which language do they write them in? Mostly Italian, sometimes German because the sounds of Italian are just very pleasing sounds.

You know, you don’t have Chinese opera either. I’m not just bashing my own language you see. I think probably an Asian opera – you can’t have Rigoletto or something in Chinese. It would not please the soul. Every language has its’ own sounds. To that end, whatever language you speak I’m sure you have poetry. Ours is English, right? And it does your soul good to read poetry to yourself out loud, to memorize poetry, even if it’s secular poetry because even a pleasing bit of secular poetry makes you appreciate the gifts of God more. A lot of times when you read to yourself it’s not the same, right? I mean to read in your head, not out loud. When I was writing this, I was thinking, so somebody who is born deaf, never hearing anything, what do they do when they read? When I read anything, a book or something, it’s like the words echo in my head. Maybe I’m nuts. I never asked anybody about this – Father, you’re weird, that doesn’t happen with us!! But I hear the words in my head when I’m reading. But somebody who has never heard a word I wonder how that works.

In any case, for those of us who can hear, we should occasionally take a well-written bit of poetry and just read it for the very pleasure that it gives to our souls. I have an example here of one of my favorites and it’s an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Now you say, oh my goodness! An epic poem, he’s going to read us an epic poem. Epic means, goes on forever – I’m not going to read you the whole epic poem, just the first two stanzas because just good poetry does a lot for your soul. So this is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline. I don’t know who has read Evangeline before but if you haven’t I’m sure it’s online, you can go to Amazon Prime and get it tomorrow or download it right now instantly right here in church on your i-Phone and start reading along with me – is more like the modern trend. But here are the opening lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Just listen to the sounds. A good poet is like an artist with the sounds and he just makes a combination of images:


This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

You see, that’s just beautiful to speak and to listen to.

So my dear faithful, by way of appreciating this gift of hearing, I want you to notice when you are here, you are hearing the words of the Mass – nothing more beautiful on God’s green earth. When you go out you will hear many things today. I want you to be conscious and to consciously not just thank God for the source of these things – O God, thank you for this bird, thank you for Father, thank you – whatever, but thank God for the gift of the hearing itself. Thank God for giving us that great overlooked gift that we have and that we need, to be much more thankful for.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Tuesday, 14 May 2019

The Great Exile by Cardinal Bacci


1. God is the great exile. The majority of mankind have banished Him from public and private life. They do not want Him anymore; they do not even think of Him. There is even a minority which hates and curses Him. It is true that there are still faithful and generous communities, like oases in a vast and arid desert, which love God and even dedicate themselves to His service. But the great majority ignore Him. If they remember Him sometimes on important occasions, they do so vaguely and as a matter of form. They think of God as if He were a distant Being Who is not interested in their activities. Obviously, therefore, men no longer live the life of God. They live mechanically and obtusely, devoid of spiritual enlightenment or thought of Heaven. Their lives are like those of blind moles which reside in darkness beneath the ground without any desire to see the light of day. Bound to the earth as they are, they are afraid of the great concepts of eternity, the immortality of the soul, the last judgment, Heaven and Hell. "Since men's natural inclinations are towards worldly things," wrote Pope Pius XII, "his inability to understand the things of the Spirit of God is unfortunately aggravated in our times by the entire nature of his surroundings. Very often God is neither denied nor cursed, it is rather as if He were not there at all. There is constant and open propaganda in favour of a worldly life without God. Men live and die as if there were no such realities as God, redemption, or the Church." (Discourses XI, 14) This is, unfortunately, a true picture. The image of God is no longer seen in created things, in the arrangement of the universe, in the structure of the family and of society. All that men see is a great machine, but they do not wish to consider by whom it is set in motion. There is no longer any appreciation of God nor of His law; even the sense of sin has gone. Once the idea of God as the supreme lawgiver and judge has been taken away, men sin without shame and without restraint. Sin becomes an industry, a dishonourable business carried on by means of the press, cinema, television; and all the media of so-called modern civilisation.
Are you a victim of this unhealthy trend? What place does God hold in your mind and in the course of your life? We are heading for inevitable ruin if we allow ourselves to be swept away by the corruption of the world. Remember the frightening words of Jesus in the company of His disciples. “Not for the world do I pray,” He said, “but for those whom thou hast given me, because they are thine.” (John 17:9) Without Jesus, the world is racing towards utter destruction. It is terrifying, but that is the way it is.

2. Let us turn away from this spectacle of a corrupt and corrupting world and raise our fearful gaze towards Mary. What a contrast! She was wholly pure and beautiful. Her mind was always in contact with God. Her heart was full of the love of God and of her neighbour, whose redemption from the slavery of sin she ardently desired to achieve by co-operating with her divine Son. All her desires and actions were in harmony with the will of God, so that she lived completely in God. Let us think about ourselves. What place has Jesus in our approach to life? Let us try and think of Him more often. Let us meditate on the eternal truths, on the commandments of God and on the precepts of the Church which He has founded. Let us endeavour to make all our actions conform with these commandments. Above all, let us seek to love God more and more, and let us pray constantly for those countless souls who ignore and reject Him. Then we shall be content in the midst of the trials of this world, for we shall have God in our hearts.

3. Holy Mary, my Mother, grant that God may rule my mind and that you may be always in my thoughts. Help me to live always in the presence of God and to dedicate all my thoughts, desires and affections to Him. Grant that all the actions of my poor life may be in accordance with His Will. Amen

Tuesday, 19 March 2019

Loving Father


Fr. Martin Fuchs´s sermon on 3rd March 2019, Prague, Czechia

***
Peter Rosegger, a famous Austrian writer, spoke about his childhood:
His father was very strict. He knew well how to handle with punishment in upbringing. The children were therefore often afraid of him.
One day Peter had committed a prank for which he rightly had to expect a proper beating. In his fear he was looking for a hiding place where he could hide himself from the wrath of his father. There was the spacious clock box in the old grandfather‘s clock in the living room! – He quickly fled inside, before his father could catch him. He felt guilty but safe here! Now he could wait in silence what happened next. Through the keyhole he saw his father was very angry.
Then he heard wenches being sent away to search for the little culprit because he could not be found anywhere. But they all came back unsuccessfully. There was no trace of little Peter. They were wondering about his disappearance but it remained mystery. Could poor Peter fall into one of the deep gorges? Didn´t he harm himself in the agonizing fear of the punishment?
His father was left alone in the living-room with worry and depression. Peter could watch him well from the clock box through the keyhole! Then he saw something he never thought of before! He saw how his father, who was otherwise so hard and strict, put his hands over his face and wept for his little Peter.
The tears of his father touched him so much that he could stay no longer in his hiding place. He could feel his heart beating wildly.
He quickly opened the door. The tears ran over his face and suddenly he was in his father’s arms. Fear and punishment, everything was forgotten over the blissful knowledge: “I have a father who loves me!“
Dear faithful!
Is it not the same with us? For our sins we have to expect punishment. But then we see our Savior’s sufferings. Looking at these sufferings, it makes us forget about God’s wrath and punishment.
The poor souls in purgatory suffer in pure love. We should try to bear all sufferings to do penance and to save souls for God’s glory.
Let us use the time of Lent to offer all sufferings for these goals! Let us think of the fact that we have the Father in Heaven who loves us!
May the history of the Chosen people help us to closer come to perfect love.
The time of Lent lasts 40 days. It is a time of graces.
But also the historical events in the Old Testament with the number of 40 were connected with a lot of graces. Let’s have a look at these historical events:
1) The first time we read about this number it was in the story of the Deluge. Only Noe, his sons, and their women were saved.
Many were the sins people had accumulated. They were unteachable and hardened. Even Noe’s sermon could not change them. So God purified the earth by a palpable punishment, by the Deluge.
In the same way God cleans the earth today: by floods, famine, and war. If His love can no longer achieve anything by words, it can sometimes change things only by a palpable punishment. All disasters (tsunami, earthquakes, forest fires, plagues) are such signs of love of Our Lord. “God does not want the death of the sinner, but his conversion.“
Even in our lives tangible punishments are not missing like illnesses, unemployment, mental sufferings and other crosses. The motive is always God’s love.
2) Israel was lamenting for the death of its father Jacob for 40 days. Let us use the coming Lent for lamenting for the death of Our Savior: “Lord, may Your blood and Your pain not be in vain!“ Let us pray the Way of the Cross, let us meditate the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary and the seven last words of Jesus on the Cross!
3) Moses fasted for 40 days before he went up onto the mountain Sinai to get the Ten Commandments.
So we must break with all earthly things to penetrate deeper into the law of Our Lord. The famous holy penitents and souls of atonement received extraordinary enlightenments from God by fasting and abstinence.
4) Elias was walking for 40 days until he reached Mount Horeb, by virtue of the food and drink which the angel gave him.
The heavenly bread, the Holy Communion, must strengthen us again and again during Lent and during our life journey.
5) The journey of the Israelite people lasted 40 years until they were finally liberated from the bondage of Egypt. The journey led through the Red Sea – a picture of Christ’s blood – further through the desert – a picture for the Christian life, which is a life of repentance and of the cross – to the Promised Land – a picture of our journey to Heaven.
6) The scouts engaged in exploration were there for 40 days before the Chosen people could enter the Holy Land.
And likewise, this Lent we should study the Holy Scripture and other spiritual books to explore Heaven, our final goal.
7) The Chosen people had to endure the yoke of the Philistines until it was liberated by the fight between David and Goliath. Again, it is a picture of our life, of our fight with the devil. Just when we might not suspect it, the devil is near to us with his temptations.
“The devil“, says saint Peter, “goeth about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.“ (I Peter 5:8).  But we can defeat the devil by repentance.
8) Forty days is about the tithe for all gifts and benefits, God gives us over the year.
The tithe is a kind of donation to God, to thank God! Let us use the coming Lent in this sense!
Let us summarize these thoughts briefly:
Let us accept the palpable sufferings, let us lament for the Lord’s death and let us meditate upon His love; let us get rid of everything that binds us to this earth!
Let us make a firm resolution to go to the Holy Communion as often as we can. Let us be aware that we can achieve liberation from the bondage of Satan particularly by penance! Let us study Heaven with its joys; let us remember that we have to fight against the devil for our whole life! And let us make our tithing by imposed and voluntary penances!
Amen.