March 2025
Priority Prayer and Penance
As we pay our seasonal dues through prayer and fasting we look forward, as ever, to celebrating anew the eternal victory of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and His abiding reward for our fidelity — peace.
Even if, by the grace of God, the current peace-making U.S. President were to discard his Zionist mindset (which obscures his historical understanding of Palestinian cause-and-effect), and to embrace an even-handed strategy for lasting peace in the Middle East, neither he nor any man of great standing and good intentions has the power to grant us abiding rest from worldly strife. This comes only through total conversion to Christ by virtue of His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, the dreadful cost and glorious merits of which will preoccupy us throughout Lent.
Though always welcome, a negotiated peace remains fleeting because we lack His peace, which the world cannot give. As the repentant Augustine finally exclaimed, "Our hearts are restless and will not rest until they find rest in Thee.” And that is why our meditations and penitential offerings over this holy season become more pressing by the year. The totalising asymmetric war being waged against mankind on multiple fronts within and without the Church elicits, ever more urgently, divine contemplation and self-examination; our fragility before the whims of earthly powers, including papal and episcopal ones, being keenly felt by all but the most complacent and wilfully ignorant.
In the secular realm, technocratic socialism tightens its oppressive, atheistic grip on the minutiae of our daily lives. Arrests of innocuous British YouTubers and their interrogation and remanding in custody, for instance, increase by the month, simply for voicing a point of view that triggers woke folk empowered by destructive legislation. Rubber-stamped (as opposed to Westminster-debated) guidelines on 'Islamophobia', together with the onward march of digitisation of society and the de-banking of account holders for holding 'controversial views' (judged by whom, precisely?), look set to take the rising persecution to another level.
This implacable war against the common good weighs heavily upon us — a demonic war to obliterate the "tranquillity of order" (tranquillitas ordinis) that alone brings abiding peace: experienced personally and then collectively once love is directed through virtue and love of neighbour to God. Nonetheless, the principal object and urgent priority of our reparatory supplications and works is our war-torn Church. Always at the centre of our thoughts and prayers, the reign of Francis, like that of demented Joe and despotic Keir in the secular realm, has crystallised our abject state and total dependence on Christ the King. Whether Jorge Bergoglio has brought His Holy Catholic Church to absolute rock-bottom only time will tell. But it seems as if there's a way to fall yet before "the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition" (2Thess:2) — viz., the wicked and great Antichrist, who will come before the end of the world.
The following reminders of the Antichristic nature of Jorge's reign — satanic whispers in his ear made manifest — should encourage us, therefore, to up our prayerful and sacrificial Lenten efforts: for the glory of God; the salvation of souls; the good of Holy Mother Church; our soulful personal peace amid the gathering storm; and, in all charity, for the conversion of the sick and elderly Jorge before his particular judgment.
A Destroyer
In an open letter written to Cardinals in 2023, Austrian philosopher Josef Seifert wrote:
Pope Francis - I say this with a bleeding heart - is not the ‘guarantor of the faith’, but is constantly increasingly destroying the foundations of faith and morals with this and many other statements and pronouncements. As far as I know, there has never been a Pope in the history of the Church who has asserted similar monstrosities?
- his assertion that God positively wills the diversity of religions (Abu Dhabi Declaration);
- his support of homosex concubinates;
- his denial of the existence of acts that are always and everywhere evil, e.g. adultery (Amoris Laetitia);
- his false teaching on the death penalty (CCC);
- his claim that hell is empty;
- his claim that the souls of mortal sinners are "destroyed" after death (also claimed by Jehovah's Witnesses).
Traditionis Custodes
A letter dated March 7, 2020 issued by Cardinal Ferrer, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, contained a survey calling on comments from bishops on Pope Benedict’s 2017 Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum which gave wide permission for every priest to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass. Bishops were asked: "Thirteen years after the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, what is your advice about the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite?"
In the event, leaked documents revealed that most bishops didn't care one way or t'other, while many others praised the TLM communities for enriching their dioceses through their fidelity and devotion. Francis totally misrepresented their responses — lied about them — using the survey to justify his effective banning of the TLM: "Responding to your requests, I take the firm decision to abrogate all the norms, instructions, permissions and customs that precede the present Motu proprio ..."
However, in his memoir Hope, published 14 January 2025, he revealed the real reason; intense hatred for all things traditional. Ever at his ear suggesting, nudging, and cajoling, the influence of his whispering Modernist serpents is laid bare in sulphurous denunciations of Catholic reverence and piety, depicted as "backwardness", "sectarian worldliness" and "rigidity". He writes:
This rigidity is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which then is none other than an ecclesiastic version of individualism. Not a return to the sacred but to quite the opposite, to sectarian worldliness.
Having thus accused young priestly upholders of tradition of rigidity and effeminacy he piles on, adding for good diabolic measure that "these ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited." Talk about projecting one's own psychological and behavioural dysfunction onto others!
Cardinal Sarah condemned the papal "attempt to abolish the traditional Mass as a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ, the apostles and the saints." Bishop Strickland urged that "true shepherds must speak against this attack, and it is an attack." While Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine, wrote: "These are wicked commands from a spiritually abusive father."
The Failure of the Holy Sacrifice
Should this diabolical project and spiritually abusive attack being perpetrated in plain sight not suffice to intensify your Lenten reparatory efforts, placing it in terrifying biblical context should do the trick:
• And strength was given him against the continual sacrifice, because of sins: and truth shall be cast down on the ground and he shall do and prosper. (Dan 8:12)
• The victim and the sacrifice shall fail: and there shall be in the temple the abomination of desolation. (Dan 9:27)
• They shall defile the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the continual sacrifice, and they shall place there the abomination unto desolation. (Dan 11:31)
Diversity of Religions
In response to Francis’ comment that "all religions are a path to God" and that we are "to allow ourselves to be guided by the divine inspiration present in every faith," Bishop Strickland pointed out "the most troubling thing Pope Francis said: to make equivalent Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian. ... Where does Jesus Christ fit into that? Because they don’t believe in Jesus Christ as Who He is."
Worthy Reception
Four bishops (Strickland, Gracida, Schneider, Mutsaerts), several priests and numerous Catholic scholars rebuked Francis for a statement about reception of Holy Communion, according to which "everyone is invited to the supper of the wedding of the Lamb (Apoc 19.9). To be admitted to the feast all that is required is the wedding garment of faith which comes from the hearing of his Word. (Desideria desideravi, 29 June 2022). Omitted, of course, was repentance for sin for the worthy reception of the Eucharist. The episcopal authors wrote that positing "the garment of faith" as the only requirement for the reception of Holy Communion "contradicts the faith of the Catholic Church." They explain:
The Catholic Church has always taught that in order to receive the Holy Eucharist worthily and without sin, Catholics must receive sacramental absolution for any mortal sins they may have committed and obey all other laws of the Church concerning reception of the Eucharist (as, for example, the laws concerning fasting prior to reception of the Eucharist).
New Theology
In his Apostolic Letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam (1 Nov. 2023), Francis wrote that:
Theology can only develop in a culture of dialogue and encounter between different traditions and different knowledge, between different Christian confessions and different religions, openly engaging with everyone, believers and nonbelievers. This approach to theology must be capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women live daily, in different geographical, social, and cultural environments.
Channelling his serpents, Francis caricatured traditional theology as devilishly as any secular critic with an anti-Catholic agenda, contrasting the Modernist approach above with a Catholic theology limited to "abstractly re-proposing formulas and schemes from the past," also repeating his long-standing criticism of "desk-bound theology" (there goes Aquinas!). Instead, he emphasised that theological studies must be open to the world, not as a "tactical attitude" but as a profound "turning point" in their method, which he said must be "inductive" (i.e., as opposed to Thomistic: dogmatic and systematic).
The Communion of Saints — à la Bergoglio!?
"Father, let us think about those who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism: Are these also at home? Yes, these too, even the blasphemers, everyone. We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven."
(General Audience, 2 February 2022)