Today’s Martyrology

The Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass

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“That understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church once declared; and there must never be a recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding”
(Blessed Pope Pius IX, 1st Vatican Council, S.3, C.2 on Revelation, 1870 ex cathedra)

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Vatican II:

the Great Apostasy

and

The Myth called Ecumenism

“at the name of

Jesus

every knee should bow

At the Name of Jesus every knee should bend

of those that are in Heaven,

on earth, and under the earth.”

(Philippians 2.7-9)

We no longer bow our heads at the Sacred Name of Jesus

When was the last time you saw a priest, a bishop, a cardinal or even a pope bow his head at the Sacred Name — even during Mass? You may observe it in one or two elderly women in the pews, or in the young college student three pews ahead. You may be perplexed as to why I ask the question at all — and that is very much to the point.

Prior to Vatican II every priest, every Catholic bowed their heads whenever they heard the Sacred Name of Jesus uttered. Many of you were never taught. Some had never so much as seen the gesture — ever. Over the ensuing years most Catholics just went with the increasingly secular flow of the “post-Conciliar Church” that had once been the “Roman Catholic Church” … until that decade of decadence (the 1960s) infected even the Bride of Christ Herself through Vatican II’s Aggiornamento or “updating” — and that holy (and still binding) obligation fell into disuse … and eventually disrepute as a visible impediment to “Ecumenism”.

We had gone from being 2000-year-old “Roman Catholics” to thoroughly “Modernist Enlightened Catholics” ... in less than 10 years! That is to say, we became gradually, but ineluctably, indistinguishable from our erstwhile “lamentably separated brethren” in the Protestant “churches”. Indeed, we outpaced their secular agenda of creating a world of worship that is aggressively parallel to presently “correct” — albeit perverse — social, political, and even environmental ideologies (of course you understand that ideologies are not religions at all until, say, the environmentally enshrined primitive and idolatrous notion of Mother Earth supplants the Scriptural concept of God the Father — as we see in the case of Francis and the Amazon “Synod ” ) Intent on not only imitating but surpassing Protestant progressivism we have gone so far as to abolish many of our “Churches” altogether and establishing “Worship Spaces” and “Faith Communities” in their stead. In the new and adventurous world of the apotheosized Self, the notion of a “Church” is repressive — and in retrospect an archaic, staid, and fastidious concept ...

Prior to this grotesque mutation from “Roman Catholicism” to “Modern Ecumenical Catholicism-lite” one of the most notable marks of Catholics that fell into desuetude was the instinctive bowing of their heads upon hearing the Sacred Name of Jesus. Again, this, of course, was before Catholics at large lost every sense of sanctity following the Second Vatican Council — for we now deem ourselves greater than Saint Paul himself, who insisted:

“That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in Heaven, on earth, and under the earth.” (Philippians 2.7-9)

After 2000 unbroken years of Catholic practice it all suddenly ended! Why?

When speaking of, or making reference to Jesus Christ in a homily, virtually every priest assiduously avoids the Messianic title “Christ” (χριστός, “the Anointed of God”) … using, instead, the Sacred Name of “Jesus”? Does that ever strike you as odd? You never hear about “Christ”!

Why the sudden break with antiquity? Why this dramatic change which oddly “coincided” with Vatican II when the world (together with the flesh and the devil) made its way into our Church together with the “progressive” and socialistic egalitarianism that swept through the Sanctuary and pews when “Good Pope John XXIII” (of infamous memory) — and with no discernible, let alone compelling reason — just capriciously “threw open its windows” to let “the stale air” out and the fresh air of the Brave New World in. Unfortunately, together with “the stale air”, the equally “stale” Faithful were also ejected as the world clambered in.

Why?

Do not be deceived by the petulant nonsense that so many bishops in complicity with avant-garde theologians peddle as “Progressive Catholicism” — that is to say, “modern Catholicism” unlike its antiquated Medieval specter, a Catholicism “more-deeply-researched” and “more-profoundly-understood” — especially in light of the Protestant Arch-Heresiarchs Luther, Calvin — and on the Catholic fringe, Hans Kung, Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Bernard Haring, John Courtney Murray, Josef Frings, Joseph Ratzinger, and especially Annibale Bugnini — an abridgement of Christianity that has virtually no historical, dogmatic, or magisterial connection with the “Roman Catholic Church” preceding Vatican II (think The Jesuits — who should have been suppressed 60 years ago as both heretics and apostates). There was absolutely no compelling need for a Council. None.

By repeatedly uttering the sacred Name of Jesus priests (together with “Lectors” of both genders,— but usually female “victims of patriarchal oppression”) have systematically desensitized us to this Biblical mandate to bow our heads at the Name of the Son of God. Perhaps they realized that if they casually uttered it enough (less aware of the power implicit in the Name than the demons themselves who trembled before it ^*) it would lose that formidable transcendence between God-the-Creator and created-Man and eventually become — as all things holy became, following Vatican II — a mere commonplace: one name among a great many others. What is more, what priest could endure the spectacle of the incessant bowing of heads in the entire congregation each time he routinely used the Sacred Name — which is precisely why priests spoke of “Christ”, or “Our Blessed Lord” far, far, more than simply “Jesus” — and then only with great deference — prior to the many ... “innovations” ... in the Mass following Vatican II? The Sacred Name does indeed have its place in worship, as in The Litany of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, that beautiful litany of humble petition. But it is uttered in piety and in solemnity as befitting the Name of God — not as the tagline of a calculated homiletic “joke” at Mass. But still the congregation giggles and laughs — much as Christ’s tormentors did at the foot of the Cross.

Christ became our “buddy” after Vatican II and was simply “one of us” (“we’re tight with Him”). That is to say, Jesus is now only parenthetically “the Christ” in our viciously egalitarian and democratic society where no one Person possesses anything verging on pre-eminence, let alone a “title” such as “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords” — for that would carry the odor of a superiority that transcends the communal stench of the sweating masses — even if that Person is God Himself!

Such hierarchical language, after all, disappeared with Victorian England — and, quite appositely, was abolished with the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Thereafter, you may recall, everyone was “comrade” — until December 25, 1991 when Communism collapsed in Mother Russia’s womb which had conceived it, delivered it, tortured it, killed and finally buried it — just as every priest rendered the Sacred Name defunct following Vatican II.

As the psychologist Carl Rogers — together with 60 “facilitators”^* famously eviscerated an entire community of 560 devout Catholic nuns of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, or the IHM, in California through bringing all that was transcendentally sacred and holy to them into the marketplace of “modern” therapeutic ideas ... even concerning sex — and so destroyed the nuns and their holy community, so we have increasingly found in our Church the complete devolution from the sacred to the profane, to the mere commonplace, to the morbidly prosaic, and the utter banal. The Church has become a democracy: no one should aspire to holiness, for holiness (literally, being “set apart for God”) implies hierarchy, and therefore scale, magnitude, and distinction — even among the Angels! The Company of Martyrs and the Saints in fact possess a holiness far exceeding ours! That is why we are to honor them, to emulate them. Would we dare disdain Mary — the very Mother of God — as not possessing a holiness that none of us can possibly attain? But in our Brave New Church all are holy! All are deserving of God. Not so much as a head will bow any longer in that decidedly submissive gesture that is an affront to egalitarian democracy! It was a Rogerian coup **... a desacralization of the sacred itself! Within a year 300 of these consecrated women petitioned Rome for dispensation from their vows. The remaining numbers dwindled to a handful of Feminist ideologues.

It is very much the same reason that we no longer accord the Apostles — or anyone whom Holy Mother Church has canonized — as “Saint”. We — unlike all our sinful forebears — are on an intimate first name basis with them as well. Alas, for sorrow, how we hear their blessed names spoken as if they were merely the man or woman down the street.

It would appear that Modernist Ecumenical Catholics would be much more comfortable with Christ’s enemies ... than His friends; indeed, than with Christ Himself.

This says quite a bit — and leaves quite a bit unsaid ...

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^* If any Catholic Religious Order is subjected to the merciless rigors of largely disaffected “Facilitators” — throw them out as so much pestilence and poison! Fight them to the death, ignore them, do not co-operate with them in any way, for everything you say or do will be construed as “hostile”, uncooperative”, “indicative of insecurity”, or “patent immaturity” — and it will be used against you in their own twisted “reports” or “summaries” to bishops much too eager to esteem you as vexsome, inflexible, and troublesome nuisances — and your bishop, in turn, will gladly submit the falsification to whatever Dicastery in Rome is eager to see any vestige of traditional (which is to say, genuine) Religious life rigorously “modernized”. You must very clearly understand this: you are living and holy testimonies to their hypocrisy, and their failure to come to terms with their own stunted vocations.

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
May 1, 2020

Printable PDF Version

Comments? Write us: editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
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^* “What have we to do with thee, Jesus Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” (Saint Matthew 8.28-29)

“in the synagogue there was a man who had an unclean devil, and he cried out with a loud voice, Saying: Let us alone, what have we to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the holy one of God.” (Saint Luke 4.33-34)

** PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING:

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/story-of-a-repentant-psychologist-11932

https://culturewarsmagazine.com/CultureWars/1999/rogers.html

The Crown of death, covid-19,: as a society and culture we deserve no less

The Crown of Death - COVID-19- as a society and culture we deserve no less

COVID-19:

the Crown of Death

An Impolite Reminder

Who gave much thought to it before the Corona Virus — COVID-19 — made the inevitable a distinct possibility? Suddenly we are confronting the possibility of widespread death — even Democrats who have made widespread death through abortion, infanticide, “a woman’s right” to murder her own children, assisted-suicide, and euthanasia, an integral part of their Democratic platform … to make everyone’s life better, you understand (except, of course, those they acrimoniously legislate to kill.)

But this looming death — COVID-19 — even for Democrat ideologues is far more terrible than selectively killing off babies — even those who survive abortion and are butchered alive for it fetches off whom it pleases: Democrat as well as Republican, Liberal as well as Conservative. I mean, who wants indiscriminate death? According to Democratic demagogues, death must be either chosen or legislated and eventually become the 28^th Amendment to the Constitution. But it must NOT be indiscriminate! It must be — to use the now tiresome phrase that applies to anything — “weaponized” against non-liberals, non-Democrats, and everyone else who is not in lock-step with them.

COVID-19? A political device that, in agreement with General Secretary Xi Jinping of China is the fault of President Trump and Conservative Americans who have not been correctly ~~indoctrinated~~ “re-educated” at American universities and colleges — and who maliciously believe the “propaganda” that Chairman Jinping himself, and his CCP, are largely and inexcusably at fault. Yes, there really are people — many of them — mostly Democrats, together with Anarchists and Nihilists — who hold that ideology is dearer than life itself.

Until it comes to them, or waits at their doorstep. They fear dying, even while they mercilessly inflict death on the innocent. They fear death even more than they fear not toeing the Party line.

“And all this — COVID-19, death, sickness, and all the attending inconveniences — are mysteriously because of President Trump and unenlightened social and political conservatives” who are so backward, so ill-informed, that they actually believe in absolute values like life, traditional families, religion and the like. And, oh yes, ,… they are all carrying guns under their jackets and skirts and are secretly white-supremacists ... even if they are black.

Let’s cut to the chase: you are going to die! Sometime. And with absolute certainty. Democrats may sooner or later legislate your death for some capricious reason that for the time being gains superficial and utterly specious social or political traction — and actually sounds “cool” to them — the proof of which resides in the trenchant and profound wisdom of the late night “comedians” who eagerly lend their levitas-cum-gravitas to seal an otherwise bankrupt agendum through derision; ... or you may die by COVID-19, a heart attack, stroke, or “other” serious but non-infectious illness or disease, or even old age (until Democrats eventually find longevity as inconvenient as a baby in a womb).

Allow me to insult you further (as well you deserve) —

It is time to trample upon your factitious, fragile, democratic, and genderless sensitivities ... to invade your “Safe Spaces”. It will give me great pleasure and I will indulge myself.

Allow me to put this appalling state of affairs into perspective: although Holy Mother Church has not declared it so — especially under the extremely sensitive, earthy, idolatrous, profane, and feckless papacy of Francis — the entire matter appears rather clear to me: it is at least plausible — it would certainly be “just”— and therefore extremely likely, that this 21^stcentury plague is entirely and existentially commensurable with this generation’s utter repudiation of God, reason, morality, and decency. To repudiate God is to repudiate all three.

Look around:

The murder of children in — and, if still alive, now outside — their own mother’s wombs. Babies who somehow survive abortions are either butchered alive or left unaided to die unattended while those who botched the abortion stand by.
The depraved lusting of men for boys and other men.
The unnatural lusting of women for other women.
The pretension of “choice-of-gender” or “no gender” — despite all biologically discernible physical appendages (or the absence of them).
The inhumane practice of “Gender-RE-assignment” through cosmetic surgery — however clearly artificial and incongruous the outcome. (think 6’-2” x 220 lbs with a baritone voice, a pronounced Adam’s Apple, and a “5 O’clock shadow”).
Lawsuits between parents, one of whom ideologically insists that their child is the opposite sex of which he or she is born despite the presence of the ineradicable YX (male) or XX (female) chromosome that scientifically defines gender. In other words, the child becomes a means to advocating an abnormal social agendum — despite a 40-50% rate of attempted suicide among those with an artificially engineered sexual identity.¹
“Drag-Queen Story Hours” at local libraries to which “liberal, enlightened, and progressive” mothers bring their innocent children — to introduce them to, and to indoctrinate them in, abnormal gender dysphoria — as though it were “normal” (it is not).
God and prayer banished from schools and public places as an impediment to the corrupt and militantly atheistic agenda of “more enlightened and progressive” men and women who disdain those who are religious as backward, uneducated, ill-informed, and unenlightened ... peasants. They are not among the smug “illuminati” — who know better.
Licentiousness as “liberated sexuality” — despite Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs): HIV, chlamydia, syphilis, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and attending illnesses, co-morbidity, and morbidity.
Pornography as “entertainment” that has become among the most widely accessed venues on the Internet.
Widespread “recreational” drug use — cocaine, methamphetamines (“meth”), opioids, crack, marijuana, ecstasy, heroin, flakka — together with the crime, violence, and death that accompanies it.
Nominally Catholic institutions of higher-learning removing crucifixes and identifiably Catholic statuary, frescoes, and religious art, in obeisance to a “progressive”, liberal, and militantly secular culture.
Nominally Catholic students at Nominally Catholic Colleges crying out for abortion while viciously (often physically) attacking Pro-Life Students and denouncing them (in their typically Democratic “open-mindedness”) with relentlessly repetitive, loathsome, and utterly tiresome mantras. Having failed to mature into adulthood, they neurotically regress to the immature mindset that they learned as spoiled brats: if one repeats something over and over ad nauseam, they will get their way as they always have (“I want it!”, “I want it!”, “I want it!”, “I want it!”) still believing that mere childish repetition will mysteriously overcome adult opposition — and that the word “no” to them (with which most of them are unfamiliar) will finally collapse under the insufferable weight of their adolescent malice, bring acceptance by wearying us into submission with their juvenile ditties: “Keep your Rosaries off my ovaries”, “Right to Life that’s a lie! You don’t care if women die”, “Woman’s body, woman’s choice”, and other such breath-taking profundities. Faces filled with hate , these Socialist pupae denounce what they cannot assail, including sanity, logic, and reason, as they sulk in their “Safe Spaces” against every imaginary “Micro-aggression” possible. Cuddling their university-supplied stuffed comfort animal in one hand, they would throttle an infant with the other. Cool!
The defiance of every form of authority (outside the Democratic Party). That is to say, utter “freedom-from” and absolute “freedom-to” — anything.
A pagan earth goddess — “Pachamama” idolized and formally worshipped in the Vatican Gardens before the approving eyes of Francis and his apostate Bishops who promote a primitive fable of the Amazonian “mother earth goddess” as the paradigm of true spirituality — rather than proclaiming the authentic Evangel of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
PachaPAPA apotheosizes “the environment” while mocking and repudiating the “rigid and outdated” Catholic religion of the 2000 years of his predecessors. PachaPAPA is an unabashed Modernist and, perhaps, a pagan himself.
Francis declares that the current Plague of COVID-19 is NOT a chastisement from God (as a result of all the above) but rather is Mother Earth “having a fit” because of “environmental pollution.” Seriously. Click the link.

In a word, we more than deserve this pestilence

America has become Liberal Amerika, and the jack-boot is on any throat of dissent or defiance.

To advert to a colloquial term presently unacceptable in polite ecclesiastical discourse, the present situation in which we find ourselves amid this escalating pestilence it is not at all unlikely a chastisement from God — and it is altogether appropriate that Godless Communist China was the flail. As a society and culture which has renounced God and that has exponentially grown in depravity and perversity, we deserve no less.

Does this mean that God does not affirm, anoint, and bless us in all our desires, crimes and perversity? Indeed, how can that possibly be, given the gentle, kind, all-loving, all-forgiving, non-demanding, and totally avuncular nature of God Who merely winks at our waywardness — that is to say, the “God” that we have been weaned upon for the past 60 years (since the conclusion of Vatican II) Who holds none accountable and has only one everlasting (and blissful) abode for all of us despite our moral turpitude and His insistent babbling about penance, atonement, and that forever-distant never-never-land that He called Hell in that fairy-tale called Holy Scripture? Such a “God” would never bridle our wantonness ...!

We need to be affirmed ... not saved! He damned-well knows that!

We’ll leave you to argue that line of reasoning at the Last Judgment.

To return to the matter at hand:

You are going to die! 100% Guaranteed!

And Who decides — unless you take your own life — is not you! Nor when you die.

You do not believe in God so why fear? There is no Hell for you or anyone else! It is the extinction of consciousness, or self-awareness — and so there is no “you” to be bothered by whatever transpires after you buy the farm. How quickly, at the hour of your death, will all the illusions you cherish about the continuation of your petty self in some insane form of “energy” or whatever you conceive to be the boat that you will float on forever — how quickly your irresponsible fantasies abandon you when you realize that there is a Judge after all and that there are consequences to the way in which you have squandered your life. Deep down inside you knew it — but hedged your bets on having the best of BOTH worlds.

You won’t.

COVID-19 is a “wake up call” to your delirium (opiated or otherwise) that life will go on forever — for you!

It is equally a call to what appears dreadfully present: the time to repent (remember that long-disdained word abolished after Vatican II?) and to believe what God Himself has revealed to you through His Only-Begotten Son Jesus Christ.

There ARE things that you MUST do! And there are things that you MUST NEVER do!

And there is One in Whom you MUST believe. However “superior” you conceitedly believe your “intellect” to be, there are greater things than the self — and particularly YOURSELF!

The First and foremost is God. But it should be of deeply personal interest to you that there are OTHER things as well … like Heaven, and … yes … Hell. And both are forever.

Whether or not you die today or next month is of little consequence. What is paradoxically vital is that you recognize it. You ARE going to die.

Repent and be converted. “Now is the acceptable time.” (2 Corinthians 6.2)

“How quaint!”, you smugly say — as the corpses increasingly surround you — exponentially, day by day.

I do not agree. But I am, admittedly, among the peasants you disdain: how can I possibly and credibly contend with such progressive, educated, enlightened, sophisticated, and inflexible ideologues?

However, I will suggest that you have everything to gain — and much suffering — even eternal suffering — to lose. Pascals’s Wager^*, I submit, is apropos to the argument — and your wager has never been higher.

I will also remind you that you did not make the world, and had no say in it. This applies equally to what lies beyond it.

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
March 31 2020

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^* Summary:

God exists, or He does not.
We cannot appeal to Reason to determine which proposition is true. It is, however, necessarily the case that the proposition is true or that it is not true.
Both cannot be true and both cannot be false.
Since Reason cannot determine the truth-value (true, or not-true) of either proposition, we must at the very least appeal to the historically universal intelligibility of the proposition itself. The question “God exists or God does not exist” is a coherent question regardless of the answer — affirmative or not. If the question is intelligible, then the concept implicit in the question is intelligible as well. It is in no way answering the question. This is to say that the existence of God is either plausible or implausible — which is another way of saying that whether God exists or does not exist is either possibly true or possibly untrue. Given that it is at least possibly true — and that such a proposition has a conceptual pedigree that appears to historically coincide with humankind itself — the possibly true necessarily admits of the probably true as possible.
Given that the proposition can attain to only probably true at best and that probability “means” “as likely as not” — and given the preponderance of historical evidence (in the absence of any other kind of evidence), probability alone is all that we can invoke — although it will never provide a conclusive answer.
“You must wager (it is not optional)”. That is to say, you are alive and you are going to die. The consequences of each are inevitable. There is no conditional if.
“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
“Wager, then, without hesitation that God is. There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, [that is to say] an infinite chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, [for] what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.”

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The Unedited Argument by Pascal in its Entirety:

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....

...“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.”

Pensées, part III, §233
Blaise Pascal (French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian)

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
April 12 2020

Printable PDF Version

Comments? Write us: editor@boston-catholic-journal.com

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¹ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-transgender-teen-suicide/trans-teens-much-more-likely-to-attempt-suicide-idUSKCN1LS39K

PACHA-PAPA

A PAGAN PONTIFF

Francis approvingly receives the pagan Amazonian goddess Pachamama after the worship ceremony he attended in the Vatican Gardens

“NOT MY POPE”

He abolishes the Commandments of God at will (specifically the 1^st, the 6^th, and the 9^th— we are awaiting the rest)
He has the inconceivable audacity to re-write the ending of the only prayer that Jesus Himself explicitly taught us (the Pater Noster, Our Father) to make it more acceptable to “modern” sensitivities.
He repudiates the explicit Scriptural condemnation of homosexuality in both the Old and New Testaments (“God made you like this.” and “Who am I to judge?”)
He teaches that Hell does not exist — despite Christ’s own frequent teachings concerning it — not simply as a possibility, but as an distinct eschatological reality to be averted at all costs. For Francis unrepentant sinners simply vanish, cease to be, upon their death. The most obvious consequence of this denial involves abolishing the fundamental Christian concept pertaining to the notion of Judgment — both the Particular and the Last Judgment, both of which consequently become meaningless.
For Francis all religions are willed by God — even those that are contradictory and manifestly evil — and which deny or denigrate Christ. Every religion leads to God — despite what Christ said.
Francis insists that, “Women in the Church are more important than bishops and priests.” (Why emphasize women to the exclusion of the laity in general? Francis is a covert Feminist).
Francis reproached Filipinos, telling them that Catholics should not “breed like rabbits” — but practice “Responsible ~~Planned~~ Parenthood.”
The Church, for Francis is not the unspeakably beautiful Bride of Christ — it is simply a “Field Hospital”.
The Church has placed too great an emphasis on abortion. There are other pressing issues — such as Environmentalism. In fact the current plague COVID-19 is not some aboriginal chastisement from God, or even something biological in origin: it is Mother Earth, the environment “having a fit.”
Oh, yes — atheists go to Heaven, too, together with animists, et alia. (Why then did Christ die on the Cross?)
At the Foot of the Cross, Francis insists that “Mary surely wanted to say to the Angel: ‘Liar! I was deceived.’ ”
“I imagine Mary as a normal girl,” Francis said, “a girl of today, open to getting married, to having a family”. However — Mary was not just “any” girl in Holy Scripture: at the Annunciation the Archangel Gabriel hailed her as “full of grace”, saying, “blessed art thou among women” and that she would “conceive the Son of the Most High.”
For Francis, “Proselytism is solemn nonsense. It makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other…” — despite the very last command of Christ in the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you."
“Jesus”, Francis further claims, “came to the world to learn to be a man and, and being man [and with no mention of Christ’s divinity], to walk with men.” Actually, Christ came into the world (the Incarnation) to redeem the world, to suffer for our sins, to overcome the devil and death — and above all to save souls.
Francis presumes to authoritatively pontificate on economics and politics in a way that an economist or a politician would never dare presume to authoritatively speak about matters religious.
On the 50th anniversary of “Earth Day” he reproached the Faithful, stating that “We have sinned against the earth.”
“God”, Francis assures us, “always forgives; we humans sometimes forgive, but the earth never forgives. If we despoil the earth, its response will be very ugly.” Can we really look to Gaia — Mother Earth — to absolve us for using plastic as we look to God to absolve us from our sins?
Instead of teaching the Faith, Francis laments the “increasing use and power of air-conditioning” as inimical to environmentalism — even while Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lives is air-conditioned and has refrigerators as well. “Rigid Catholics” — whom he detests — would ~~rightly~~ “rigidly” call this hypocrisy.

A Reflection on the Sequence

DIES IRAE

Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum, coget omnes ante thronum.

and the Deadly Sin of Presumption

Since the inauguration of the Second Vatican Council Catholics have been illicitly assured that everyone who dies goes immediately to Heaven — no matter how sinful, selfish, and miserable their evil lives. While this clearly is not true (or Christ is a liar) we encourage you during the opening of this Holy Season of Lent to recall that the Dies Irae was the ordinary Sequence for the Requiem Mass for the dead for at least 800 and very likely 1200 years. It is a beautiful and sober reminder of the imminence and inevitability of death. While Vatican II abolished much that is good and holy, it was not able to abolish death.

The one thing most conspicuous about this magnificent Sequence is not so much what is PRESENT in its somber verses — but what is manifestly ABSENT throughout this solemn chant — the sin of Presumption — that is to say, the unwarranted presuming that God must and will absolve us of all sin — despite the absence of any penitential act on our part or any evidence of genuine sorrow for sin. “All dogs go to Heaven”.

While this may be true of dogs, it is decidedly not true of men.

Consequently, the chant was peremptorily expunged following Vatican II in the quite sudden and eminently convenient “pastoral” realization that our now inexplicably fragile and effete sensibilities are incompatible with Holy Scripture and 2000 years of Church teaching explicated in the Dies Irae: that is further to say that the sin of Presumption was necessarily abolished together with the Dies Irae since both are construed to be inimical to “the spirit of Vatican II”, which is to say the Protestant heresy of Ecumenism first conceptualized by the “International Missionary Conference” held at Edinburgh in 1910 and subsequently institutionalized by the Protestant World Council of Churches in 1948.

In his determination to align the Catholic Church with contemporary Protestantism Pope John XXIII (“Good Pope John ...” of Vatican II infamy) appropriately established a “Catholic” replica called the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity in 1961. This, however, required a dialectic in which all competing and mutually contrary religions are reconcilable — and the only possible way forward was to abolish religious distinctions altogether, rendering them superficial only — or failing that, to maintain that the widely divergent roads nonetheless converged in the same Heaven — even while the manifold and conflicting conceptions of Paradise itself turn out to be both logically and mutually irreconcilable.

Here we enter the province of Mortal Sin — and the grave sin of Presumption which permeates all post-Vatican II liturgies and without exception pre-eminently characterizes them. Let us, then, be clear about this deadly sin, together with the reciprocal notions of responsibility and accountability inherent within it. In Catholic theology no less than in moral philosophy a distinction is understood to exist between what are construed as logical contrarieties. Some things (acts, intentions, etc.) are good and others are not. In fact, we often define the one through its contraposition to the other. Were all human acts equally commendable and reprehensible, the world would be deprived of rational order, specifically moral order understood in terms of good and evil, meritorious and culpable, desirable and loathsome. The very notion of responsibility would be superfluous, together with any concept of accountability. Accountable to whom or what? Censurable to what standard and answerable for what? It is not simply an amoral universe of absolute indifference, but an illogical one. Such a universe would not be sustainable on earth — why would we, a fortiori, hold it to be sustainable in Heaven?

It is the presuming of God’s forgiveness of sin and His unquestionable willingness — even irrepressible determination — to bring one who has led a life of unrepentant — even vicious sin — and who without the least compunction presumes God’s forgiveness because of God’s absolute goodness and mercy: in other words, one sacrilegiously anticipates (as the rendering of a justice due the sinner by God) salvation — having done nothing to either acquire it or to repent of the many sins that are invincible impediments to it. It is, in essence, the depriving of the free will (a perfection) of God Who somehow must (is compelled — by some incoherent and inexplicable agency mysteriously superior to God — to forgive every sin and all sins — despite everything His Beloved Son taught — and bring all men, Catholics, heretics, apostates, schismatics, Muslims, Shintoists, Buddhists, Animists, Scientologists, etc. to the same blessed abode where the one who despises and curses Christ on the Cross, and the one who joyfully surrenders himself in perfect love to God, equally enjoy perfect and eternal beatitude.

We may argue that such a conception of Heaven is tantamount to a Mental “Field Hospital” (as Francis understands the Bride of Christ, the Church) or we may simply resign ourselves to the flatus of Vatican II ... observing nothing distinguishable between them.

Indeed, in the end we find that the Mental Hospital and the “Field Hospital” are one and the same.

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
April 2, 2020

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How to Make a

PERFECT

and

HOLY

Confession

Everything a Traditional Catholic needs to know about Holy Confession

Speed-praying to get through it as quickly as possible

You have heard it at every Mass

Indeed, it is very likely that you do it yourself.

It is even more likely that you do it praying the Holy Rosary.

Let us take one very, very, common example: The Apostles Creed:

“I-believe-in-God-the-Father-Almighty-Creator-of-Heaven-and-earth-
and-in-Jesus Christ-His-only-Son-Our Lord-Who-was-conceived-by-
the-Holy-Spirit-born-of the-Virgin-Mary-suffered-under-Pontius-Pilate
-was-crucified-died-and-was-buried-He-descended-into-Hell-the-third-
day-He-rose-again-from-the-dead-He-ascended-into-Heaven-and-sitteth
-at-the-righ-hand-of-God-the-Father-almighty-from-thence-He-shall-
come-to-judge-the-living-and-the-dead-I-believe-in-the-Holy-Spirit-the-
holy-Catholic-Church-the-Communion-of-Saints-the-forgiveness-of-
sins-the-resurrection-of-the-body-and-life-everlasting-Amen.”

All spoken as one sentence as quickly as possible — to get through it.

Worse still is the prayer to the very Mother of God, Mary Most Holy, ESPECIALLY as it is “recited” — rather than “prayed” in that beautiful prayer called the Angelic Salutation, but better known simply as the Hail Mary:

“HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththeeblessedartthouamongstwomen
andblessedisthefruitofthywombJesusHolyMaryMotherofGodprayforus
sinnersnowandatthehourofourdeathAmen.”

Within 14 seconds flat! … and ten times between each sacred Mystery!

REALLY?

Is that how you approach God in prayer? As fast as humanly possible?

Is that how you speak to your wife, your husband, your children — your friends and neighbors? If so, you either have none, and you never will!

“HelloJohnhowareyoulongtimenoseebythewayhowisLydiaIamwellwillyou
beabletocometomyson’sschoolplayOandIamsorrythatyourdogissickI
hopehegetsbetterItwasnicetallkingtoyoubye.”

I am not an expert in Mariology — but I am human, as Mary was and is — and even with so few credentials I cannot imagine that either God or Mary are especially impressed with my piety or devotion when I speak to them, pray to them, much like a 33 rpm record incorrectly played at either 45 rpm or 78 rpm. Try it:

~~Playing~~ Praying at the Wrong Speed

The point of this short essay is simply this: GOD IS A PERSON — and so is Mary. I do not believe that they esteem you more holy or are in the least impressed with the speed of your prayers, or the number of your prayers-recited-as-in-a marathon. In fact, Christ Himself warned us against this:

“And when you are praying, speak not much, as the heathens. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard. Be not you therefore like to them, for your Father knoweth what is needful for you, before you ask Him.” (Saint Matthew 6.7-8)

Is this to derogate from formal and structured prayers such as the Holy Rosary or the litanies of the Saints? By no means! Nor is it written to diminish the piety of the one praying. No. No. No!

This is the point: when you “pray” do not make your prayer a rote “recitation” to be sped through as quickly as possible. Repetition is meaningful — or it can be useless.

Dwell on the words you pray.

Utter them in the same way as you would when sincerely talking to ANY person before you.

In fact, you ARE! You are speaking to God Most High — from your heart.

One single decade of one single Mystery of the Holy Rosary prayed to Mary, and through Mary, to the PERSON of GOD — ex corde (from the heart) in the recognition that you are addressing a real PERSON who is listening to you — exceeds all the decades of all the Rosaries recited since Mary brought this devotion to Saint Dominic in the 13th century.

The beautiful complexities latent within the Holy Rosary are many. Meditating upon a holy Mystery while simultaneously praying the Hail Mary as more than simply words accompanying our meditation is no small feat. It is — dare I say — grace; the grace of simultaneity that proximates what we glimpse of eternity.

Simply because the prayers may be many and identical does not preclude their being uttered in absolute devotion each time… for they extend beyond time to eternity … and are offered in union with Mary to God Who sees the hearts and knows the thoughts of men.

Pray — but only as sincerely as you talk!

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
March 12, 2020

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When the Shepherd Strikes the Sheep

“It is written: I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered.” (Saint Matthew 26.31)

The Sheperd Strikes the Sheep ... and the Sheep are Scattered

“I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered.”¹ We have often heard this. It pertains to the imminent Passion of Jesus Christ on the very night before He was betrayed into the hands of sinful men. He, the Good Shepherd, would be struck (in fact, repeatedly ...) and the Apostles, the Disciples, and the Faithful would be scattered — they would abandon Him, flee for their lives, and their unity in Him would be broken. Their Shepherd, in Whose fold they were one flock, had been struck! What the will become of the sheep? How much anxiety rends them!

But now, in some incomprehensible and ghastly apocalyptic narrative unfolding before our very eyes, the shepherd himself strikes the sheep — and they are scattered! Unfaithful to his trust and careless of the sheep entrusted to him, the shepherd not only abandons them to the wolves who have prowled the fences for 500 years … but he himself strikes them so that they are forced to leave the sheepfold; with his staff he strikes the necks and the backs of the defenseless sheep — not even sparing the Little Lambs — who cry out in their pain as they flee, seeking a fold where they will find pasture and protection. They are confused and frightened, and no other shepherd seems to have the courage to gather the lost and the scattered — not one other shepherd! Homeless and shelterless they are prey to wolves — wolves even more remorseless than the wolves who drove them from the sheepfold.

In the gathering darkness they huddle and tremble, lacerated by a betrayal too appalling to grasp. Behold a vignette of the Holy Catholic Church of this day, under the tyranny of Francis who turns out the faithful to welcome those whose gods are idols and earth. What a terrible pronouncement mutters on the horizon!

Let us not fear. We know Whom we follow even when the hireling has fled. We know the voice of the Good Shepherd — and will not follow another.

He will not abandon us

Let nothing obscure the glory of God — let nothing come between us and the vision of unapproachable glory in the face of Christ Jesus. All that is on the earth and of the earth — will pass away as it came: like breath on wintery glass, and its pretension will come to nothing. The seat of power that evil men have taken to themselves, the desecration of sacred places and sacred things, the betrayal of innocence to things corrupt and vile, the scattering of the sheep who are struck by the shepherd and driven from pasture ... all this is known unto God ... and our littleness and powerlessness before it. For a time we must bend before this infamous wind, but we will not bow ... nor break, nor lose faith. Those that now ruthlessly tower like the cedars of Lebanon, in a time will no longer find their place among us ... nor we among them.

We will not, then, be troubled by recreant men. We are called to glory. What is the fecklessness of man before so great a calling? Let us not be troubled by those who have lost God and trampled His Vineyard. We know the voice of the Shepherd and will not follow another. It may seem that we are bound, hand and foot, like lambs delivered to those who would make a sacrifice of us to false gods, and we are anxious. Let it not be so. Christ goes before us, and we go with Christ to the Father. We need not fear. Has He not told us that none may take us from His Father’s hand?

Away, then, usurpers and liars! We have more pressing concerns than your feeble quest for petty power. We must to God! And we will let no one and nothing persuade us — or drive us away — from that pledge of glory to which we are called in Christ!

_______________________________________

¹ Saint Matthew 26.31

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
March 10, 2020

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The Face

And the Offspring

Demonic Figures in Pope PaulVI Hall la Resurrezione by Pericle Fazzini

of Vatican II

Look carefully at this emblematic vision of Vatican II in the Pope Paul VI Audience Hall.
It is, for want of any other aesthetic description, demonic and blasphemous, hideous and frightening — a sign of times to come — that are now here.

60 Years After its Defection from Catholicism

and its Conversion to the World

Hideous — is it not?

It has not changed much — apart from its growing defection from what the Holy Catholic Church taught for 2000 years before that most pernicious council.

It is increasingly elderly, gray, and disheveled. Its children — fewer and fewer every year — are largely the children of the world, checking off the boxes branded on their young minds by a perverse generation that has lost its Catholic Faith and Identity: for Abortion (yes), Homosexuality (yes), Lesbianism (yes), Transgenderism (yes), Gender Identity Choices (yes), Gender Re-assignment (yes), Euthanasia (yes), Cremation (yes), Pre-Marital Sex (yes), Co-Habitation (yes), “Social Justice” Issues (yes!) — the proper formation of a Catholic Conscience (NO!), Chastity (NO!) Virginity until Marriage (NO!) Sanctity (NO), learning the most fundamental aspects of the Catholic Religion into which they were summarily Baptized (NO!) the Priesthood (NO!), Religious Life (NO!) — Missionary zeal and the conversion of sinners and those who do not know Christ — which Francis (perhaps heretically) calls “solemn nonsense.” (NO!) When they look about them at their fellow “Catholics” and” Priests”, “Nuns” and “Religious” — even the papacy of Francis and the current Episcopacy (bishops and cardinals) — who can blame them? The Faith is not even authentically lived out by the highest prelates — and sadly enough by Francis himself who gives scandal on a routine basis.

A Lie too Big to Possibly Refute?

They would tell us that our conception of the Holy Catholic Church prior to Vatican II is naïve and simplistic — that it has no correspondence with reality and never did. Revisionist history, however, has become an ideology — an iconoclastic tool for suppressing what is not consistent with prevailing values in academia: principal among which is that absolutely nothing in the past was really as it had been taught us. We have all been deceived. All academics and historians preceding the present Ideological Revisionists were not scholars at all; they were biased, mendacious, and inept, with a vested interest in perpetuating myths and lies — although this vested interest is never explained, and cannot possibly be without indicting the present generation of Historical Ideologues as well. Indeed, we no longer have historians at all, but an ideological cadre of iconoclastic “historiographers”, ready to discredit any actually contemporary description of history as it was lived by those contemporaneous with it. It is, after all, their “job”, their income, to discredit anything that had been held as true and authentic. This is what any good “historiographer” does: he speculates upon the most exiguous and often specious evidence to disprove that what actually was ... actually was not what it actually was. The “good guys” become the “villains”, and the “villains” the “good guys”.

Catholicism became “imperialistic” when it abolished human sacrifice in the Aztec ... “faith community” ... as it would now be called. “Let them do their own thing without imposing your colonial values on others!” As Francis might say, they lived “closer to the earth” … and were, eo ipso, better than other cultures that valued women, children and human life several feet above it. Ripping the still-beating hearts of its victims and then hurling them down the temple made of thousands of human skulls to appease the pagan god Huitzilopochtli ¹ is more acceptable by far, you understand, than the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ — especially the Sermon on the Mount. It was foreign to their “culture” after all …

To return to our contention, we must ask, was the Catholic Church prior to its paganization subsequent to Vatican II really a better Church, a holier Church? Was the Faith really taken very seriously? Did it actually produce saints? Was it unsparing in apostolic zeal, in the formation of holy priests, missionaries, nuns, and Religious sisters? Absolutely! Unquestionably! By any metric it flourished and was flourishing — until the convocation of Second Vatican Council ...

It is not the case that the Church quite suddenly attained to the apex of her mission and mandate in 1960 and was ready to usher in the Parousia — after which its religious and moral decline was inevitable. It was thriving! Whence, then, the extraordinarily serious measure of convoking a council in 1962 (given that the 17th century Cardinal Pallavicini — the noted historian of the Council of Trent itself — had famously warned that to propose to convoke any General Council, except through direst necessity, is to tempt God Himself! ²)

There was, however, an excruciating question in the mind of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (John XXIII): a question never quite settled; and it was a question, a doubt, that relentlessly tormented him: was the “inspiration” to convoke a council, which he had experienced— divine or diabolical? Very clearly, as we had noted, there was no dire necessity in 1962. The Church was thriving in Her members, Her seminaries, in Her Religious and Missionary Orders, and consequently in conversions to the Holy Catholic Faith. Whatever manic episode, or turgid epiphany “inspired” Roncalli to move beyond the excruciating doubt that afflicted him (that is to say, as to whether the impetus that motivated him was divine or diabolical) — by the Age of Aquarius, John XXIII, infatuated with the world, rashly and needlessly convoked a Council to deal with a problem that did not exist until he created it.

We invite you to view a vignette of the Holy Catholic Church as it really was — and is no longer. The pictures indeed speak more than any words: http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/the-real-legacy-of-vatican-II-a-renewal-that-became-a-requiem-the-death-of-two-monasteries.htm. And, while I think of it, Vatican II as the Model of the Failed Corporation: http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/vatican-ii-the-model-of-the-failed-corporation.htm

We also invite you to return to the image at the top of this page — to the time when the poisons called Modernism and Ecumenism were first injected into the Body of Christ — and to behold a prophetic vision of what it would become. It is frightening. All that is counterfeit and ugly always is.

________________________

¹ https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion

² History of the Council of Trent, by Cardinal Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicini, translated to Latin by Fr. Giattini, SJ (Antwerp, 1670)

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
editor@boston-catholic-jounal.com
Boston Catholic Journal
www.boston-catholic-journal.com
September 3, 2019

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Martyrology for Today

ROMAN MARTYROLOGY

Wednesday May 27th in the Year of Grace 2020

Paschaltide

This Day, the Twenty-Seventh Day of May

The demise of the Venerable Bede, priest, confessor and doctor, renowned for sanctity and learning.

The birthday of St. John, Pope and martyr, who was called to Ravenna by the Arian king of Italy, Theodoric, and after languishing a long time in prison for the orthodox faith, terminated his life.

At Dorostorum, in Mysia, in the time of the emperor Alexander, the martyrdom of blessed Julius, a veteran soldier in retirement, who was arrested by the officials and presented to the governor Maximus. Having in his presence execrated the idols, and confessed the name of Christ with the utmost constancy, he was condemned to capital punishment.

At Sora, in the time of the emperor Aurelian and the proconsul Agathius, St. Restituta, virgin and martyr, who overcame in a combat for the faith the violence of the demons, the caresses of her family, and the cruelty of the executioners. Being finally beheaded with other Christians, she obtained the honor of martyrdom.

In the territory of Arras, St. Kanulph, martyr.

At Orange, in France, St. Eutropius, a bishop, illustrious for virtues and miracles.

And elsewhere in divers places, many other holy martyrs, confessors, and holy virgins.

Omnes sancti Mártyres, oráte pro nobis. ("All ye Holy Martyrs, pray for us", from the Litaniae Sanctorum, the Litany of the Saints)

Response: Thanks be to God.

V2 = Enrolled prior to Vatican II and deleted after Vatican II

Roman Martyrology by Month

January	February	March	April	May	June
July	August	September	October	November	December

New: the Roman Martyrology can now be downloaded entirely as either a PDF file or as a Microsoft Word File

Why the Martyrs Matter

Each day we bring you a calendar, a list really, of the holy Martyrs who had suffered and died for Christ, for His Bride the Church, and for our holy Catholic Faith; men and women for whom — and well they knew — their Profession of Faith would cost them their lives.

They could have repudiated all three (Christ, Church, and Catholic Faith) and kept their lives for a short time longer (even the lapsi only postponed their death — and at so great a cost!).¹

What would motivate men, women, even children and entire families to willingly undergo the most evil and painfully devised tortures; to suffer death rather than denial?

Why did they not renounce their Catholic Faith when the first flame licked at their feet, after the first eye was plucked out, or after they were “baptized” in mockery by boiling water or molten lead poured over their heads? Why did they not flee to offer incense to the pagan gods since such a ritual concession would be merely perfunctory, having been done, after all, under duress, exacted by the compulsion of the state? What is a little burned incense and a few words uttered without conviction, compared to your own life and the lives of those you love? Surely God knows that you are merely placating the state with empty gestures …

Did they love their wives, husbands, children — their mothers, fathers and friends less than we do? Did they value their own lives less? Were they less sensitive to pain than we are? In a word, what did they possess that we do not?

Nothing. They possessed what we ourselves are given in the Sacrament of Confirmation — but cleaved to it in far greater measure than we do: Faith and faithfulness; fortitude and valor, uncompromising belief in the invincible reality of God, of life eternal in Him for the faithful, of damnation everlasting apart from Him for the unfaithful; of the ephemerality of this passing world and all within it, and lives lived in total accord with that adamant belief.

We are the Martyrs to come. What made them so will make us so. What they suffered we will suffer. What they died for, we will die for. If only we will! For most us, life will be a bloodless martyrdom, a suffering for Christ, for the sake of Christ, for the sake of the Church in a thousand ways outside the arena. The road to Heaven is lined on both sides with Crosses, and upon the Crosses people, people who suffered unknown to the world, but known to God. Catholics living in partibus infidelium, under the scourge of Islam. Loveless marriages. Injustices on all sides. Poverty. Illness. Old age. Dependency. They are the cruciform! Those whose lives became Crosses because they would not flee God, the Church, the call to, the demand for, holiness in the most ordinary things of life made extraordinary through the grace of God. The Martyrology we celebrate each day is just a vignette, a small, immeasurably small, sampling of the martyrdom that has been the lives of countless men and women whom Christ and the Angels know, but whom the world does not know.

“Exemplum enim dedi vobis”, Christ said to His Apostles: “I have given you an example.” And His Martyrs give one to us — and that is why the Martyrs matter.

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Boston Catholic Journal

Note: We suggest that you explore our newly edited and revised “De SS. Martyrum Cruciatibus — The Torments and Tortures of the Christian Martyrs” for an in-depth historical account of the sufferings of the Martyrs.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ROMAN MARTYROLOGY

By J. Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop Baltimore

THE ROMAN MARTYROLOGY is an official and accredited record, on the pages of which are set forth in simple and brief, but impressive words, the glorious deeds of the Soldiers of Christ in all ages of the Church; of the illustrious Heroes and Heroines of the Cross, whom her solemn verdict has beatified or canonized. In making up this long roll of honor, the Church has been actuated by that instinctive wisdom with which the Spirit of God, who abides in her and teaches her all truth, has endowed her, and which permeates through and guides all her actions. She is the Spouse of Christ, without spot or wrinkle or blemish, wholly glorious and undefiled, whom He loved, for whom He died, and to whom He promised the Spirit of Truth, to comfort her in her dreary pilgrimage through this valley of tears, and to abide with her forever. She is one with Him in Spirit and in love, she is subject to Him in all things; she loves what He loves, she teaches and practices what He commands.

If the world has its “Legions of Honor”, why should not also the Church of the Living God, the pillar and the ground of the truth? If men who have been stained with blood, and women who have been tainted with vice, have had their memory consecrated in prose and in verse, and monuments erected to their memory, because they exhibited extraordinary talents, achieved great success, or were, to a greater or less extent, benefactors of their race in the temporal order, which passeth away, why should not the true Heroes and Heroines of Jesus, who, imitating His example, have overcome themselves, risen superior to and trampled upon the world, have aspired, in all their thoughts, words, and actions, to a heavenly crown, and have moreover labored with disinterested zeal and self-forgetting love for the good of their fellow-men, have their memories likewise consecrated and embalmed in the minds and hearts of the people of God? If time have its heroes, why should not eternity; if man, why should not God? “Thy friends, O Lord, are exceedingly honored; their principality is exceedingly exalted.” Whom His Father so dearly loved, the world crucified; whom the world neglects, despises, and crucifies, God, through His Church, exceedingly honors and exalts. Their praises are sung forth, with jubilation of heart, in the Church of God for ages on ages.

The wisdom of the Church of God in honoring her Saints is equaled only by the great utility of the practice thus consecrated. The Saints are not merely heroes; they are models. Christ lived in them, and Christ yet speaks through them. They were the living temples of the Holy Ghost, in whose mortal bodies dwelt all the riches of His wisdom and grace. They were in life consecrated human exemplars of divine excellence and perfection. Their example still appeals to our minds and to our hearts, more eloquently even than did their words to the men of their own generation, while they were in the tabernacle of the flesh. Though dead, they still speak. Their relics are instinct with sanctity, and through them they continue to breathe forth the sweet odor of Christ. The immortality into which they have entered still lingers in their bones, and seems to breathe in their mortal remains. As many an ardent, spirit has been induced to rush to the cannon's mouth by reading the exploits of earthly heroes, so many a generous Christian soul has been fired with heavenly ardor, and been impelled to rush to the crown of martyrdom, by reading the lives and heroic achievements of the Saints and Martyrs of Christ. Example, in its silent appeal, is more potent in its influence on the human heart and conduct than are words in their most eloquent utterances.
The Church knows and feels all this, in the Spirit of God with whom she is replenished ; and hence she sets forth, with holy joy and exultant hope, her bright and ever-increasing Calendar of Sanctity of just men and women made perfect and rendered glorious, under her unearthly and sublime teachings. In reading this roll of consecrated holiness, our instinctive conclusion is, precisely that which the great soul of St. Augustine reached at the very crisis of his life, the moment of his conversion “If other men like me have attained to such sanctity, why not I? Shall the poor, the afflicted, the despised of the World, bear away the palm of victory, the crown of immortality, while I lie buried in my sloth and dead in my sins, and thus lose the brilliant and glorious mansion already prepared for me in heaven? Shall all the gifts, which God has lavished upon me, be ingloriously spent and foolishly wasted, in the petty contest for this world's evanescent honors and riches, while the poor and contemned lay up treasures in heaven, and secure the prize of immortal glory? Shall others be the friends of God, whom He delights to honor, while I alone remain His enemy, and an alien from His blessed Kingdom?”

It is a consoling evidence of progress in the spiritual life in this country to find the Martyrology here published, for the first time, in English, and thereby made accessible, in its rich treasures of Sanctity, to all classes of our population. It will prove highly edifying and useful, not only to the members of our numerous religious Communities of both sexes, but also to the laity generally. Every day has here its record of Sanctity; and there is scarcely a Christian, no matter how lowly or how much occupied, who may not be able to daily peruse, with faith and with great profit, the brief page of each day's models of Holiness. These belong to all classes and callings of life; from the throne to the hovel, from the Pontiff to the lowest cleric, from the philosopher to the peasant, from the busy walks of life to the dreary wastes of the desert.

Let all, then, procure and read daily the appropriate portions of this Martyrology. Its daily and pious perusal will console us in affliction, will animate us in despondency, will make our souls glow with the love of God in coldness, and will lift up our minds and hearts from this dull and ever-changing earth to the bright and everlasting mansions prepared for us in Heaven!

Imprimatur, J. Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop Baltimore, Maryland 1916
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THE APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTION

“QUO PRIMUM ”

(and what “Forever” really means)

“From the very first, upon Our elevation to the chief Apostleship, We gladly turned our mind and energies and directed all out thoughts to those matters which concerned the preservation of a pure liturgy, and We strove with God's help, by every means in our power, to accomplish this purpose. For, besides other decrees of the sacred Council of Trent, there were stipulations for Us to revise and re-edit the sacred books: the Catechism, the Missal and the Breviary. With the Catechism published for the instruction of the faithful, by God's help, and the Breviary thoroughly revised for the worthy praise of God, in order that the Missal and Breviary may be in perfect harmony, as fitting and proper — for it is most becoming that there be in the Church only one appropriate manner of reciting the Psalms and only one rite for the celebration of Mass — We deemed it necessary to give our immediate attention to what still remained to be done, viz, the re-editing of the Missal as soon as possible.

Hence, We decided to entrust this work to learned men of our selection. They very carefully collated all their work with the ancient codices in Our Vatican Library and with reliable, preserved or emended codices from elsewhere. Besides this, these men consulted the works of ancient and approved authors concerning the same sacred rites; and thus they have restored the Missal itself to the original form and rite of the holy Fathers. When this work has been gone over numerous times and further emended, after serious study and reflection, We commanded that the finished product be printed and published as soon as possible, so that all might enjoy the fruits of this labor; and thus, priests would know which prayers to use and which rites and ceremonies they were required to observe from now on in the celebration of Masses.

Let all everywhere adopt and observe what has been handed down by the Holy Roman Church, the Mother and Teacher of the other churches, and let Masses not be sung or read according to any other formula than that of this Missal published by Us. This ordinance applies henceforth, now, and forever, throughout all the provinces of the Christian world, to all patriarchs, cathedral churches, collegiate and parish churches, be they secular or religious, both of men and of women — even of military orders — and of churches or chapels without a specific congregation in which conventual Masses are sung aloud in choir or read privately in accord with the rites and customs of the Roman Church. This Missal is to be used by all churches, even by those which in their authorization are made exempt, whether by Apostolic indult, custom, or privilege, or even if by oath or official confirmation of the Holy See, or have their rights and faculties guaranteed to them by any other manner whatsoever.

This new rite alone is to be used unless approval of the practice of saying Mass differently was given at the very time of the institution and confirmation of the church by Apostolic See at least 200 years ago, or unless there has prevailed a custom of a similar kind which has been continuously followed for a period of not less than 200 years, in which most cases We in no wise rescind their above-mentioned prerogative or custom. However, if this Missal, which we have seen fit to publish, be more agreeable to these latter, We grant them permission to celebrate Mass according to its rite, provided they have the consent of their bishop or prelate or of their whole Chapter, everything else to the contrary notwithstanding.

All other of the churches referred to above, however, are hereby denied the use of other missals, which are to be discontinued entirely and absolutely; whereas, by this present Constitution, which will be valid henceforth, now, and forever, We order and enjoin that nothing must be added to Our recently published Missal, nothing omitted from it, nor anything whatsoever be changed within it under the penalty of Our displeasure.

We specifically command each and every patriarch, administrator, and all other persons or whatever ecclesiastical dignity they may be, be they even cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, or possessed of any other rank or pre-eminence, and We order them in virtue of holy obedience to chant or to read the Mass according to the rite and manner and norm herewith laid down by Us and, hereafter, to discontinue and completely discard all other rubrics and rites of other missals, however ancient, which they have customarily followed; and they must not in celebrating Mass presume to introduce any ceremonies or recite any prayers other than those contained in this Missal.

Furthermore, by these presents [this law], in virtue of Our Apostolic authority, We grant and concede in perpetuity that, for the chanting or reading of the Mass in any church whatsoever, this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this Missal, and that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remains always valid and retain its full force notwithstanding the previous constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, as well as any general or special constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription — except, however, if more than two hundred years’ standing.

It is Our will, therefore, and by the same authority, We decree that, after We publish this constitution and the edition of the Missal, the priests of the Roman Curia are, after thirty days, obliged to chant or read the Mass according to it; all others south of the Alps, after three months; and those beyond the Alps either within six months or whenever the Missal is available for sale. Wherefore, in order that the Missal be preserved incorrupt throughout the whole world and kept free of flaws and errors, the penalty for nonobservance for printers, whether mediately or immediately subject to Our dominion, and that of the Holy Roman Church, will be the forfeiting of their books and a fine of one hundred gold ducats, payable ipso facto to the Apostolic Treasury. Further, as for those located in other parts of the world, the penalty is excommunication latae sententiae, and such other penalties as may in Our judgment be imposed; and We decree by this law that they must not dare or presume either to print or to publish or to sell, or in any way to accept books of this nature without Our approval and consent, or without the express consent of the Apostolic Commissaries of those places, who will be appointed by Us. Said printer must receive a standard Missal and agree faithfully with it and in no wise vary from the Roman Missal of the large type (secundum magnum impressionem).

Accordingly, since it would be difficult for this present pronouncement to be sent to all parts of the Christian world and simultaneously come to light everywhere, We direct that it be, as usual, posted and published at the doors of the Basilica of the Prince of the Apostles, also at the Apostolic Chancery, and on the street at Campo Flora; furthermore, We direct that printed copies of this same edict signed by a notary public and made official by an ecclesiastical dignitary possess the same indubitable validity everywhere and in every nation, as if Our manuscript were shown there. Therefore, no one whosoever is permitted to alter this notice of Our permission, statute, ordinance, command, precept, grant, indult, declaration, will, decree, and prohibition. Should anyone dare to contravene it, know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”

Given at St. Peter’s in the year of the Lord's Incarnation, 1570, on the 14th of July of the Fifth year of Our Pontificate.

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