“THE Church will not be perceptible at that time, with the impious persecutors raging beyond measure and with all fear aside as if the good fortune of the world were smiling with approval, while they say: ‘Peace and security.'”
— Saint Augustine, Epistle CXCIX, par. 39; in Collectio Selecta Ss. Ecclesiae Patrum, vol. CXLVIII (Paris: Parent-Desbarres, 1835), pp. 126-12
It is a sign of God’s love to me, a sign of future salvation, when the Lord gives me to drink of the cup of suffering. — St. Thomas of Villanova
Prayer to St. Thomas of Villanova
Most glorious Saint Thomas, pattern of Christian perfection and perfect model of priestly zeal, by that glory which as a reward of thy merits, has been granted thee in heaven, turn thine eyes of mercy upon us and come to our assistance before the throne of the Most High. While living on earth thou didst have as thy chief characteristic the very charity of Christ. Armed with this thou didst spend thine entire life in giving aid to the wretched, counsel to the doubtful, and consolation to the afflicted; thou didst draw back to the paths of virtue those who had gone astray, thus bringing to Jesus Christ the souls redeemed by His Precious Blood. Now that thou art so powerful in heaven, continue thy task of giving help to all and be our watchful protector, so that, through thine intercession, being delivered from all temporal misfortunes and confirmed in our faith and in love, we may be victors in our struggle with the powers of evil and may merit with thee to praise and bless our Lord through all eternity. Amen.
“FIRST, Our Lord Jesus Christ, who wants everyone to achieve salvation through Religion, must necessarily want everyone to be part of the society that he himself founded to preserve and teach that Religion;
“Second, since all men are obliged to embrace the religion of Jesus Christ, they are by this same fact obliged to use the means that Our Lord established to arrive at the true knowledge of Religion, and to render to God a legitimate worship;
“Third, the Church is a necessary society to which we are all obliged to belong, by virtue of natural and divine law, and therefore, whoever knowingly and willingly remains outside its bosom cannot expect salvation. The gates of eternal life, says the Savior, will not open except for those who have kept the commandments; whoever knew the commandment and refused to keep it will be condemned.
“WE lose ground perhaps more on account of the truths that good men have not the courage to proclaim than because of the errors that the wicked have been cunning enough to multiply. . . . It is not the Catholic Religion that you make acceptable to them but your persons, and the fear of ceasing to be amiable deprives you in the end of the manly courage of stating the full truth. Why are they loud in your praises? Because of your weak silences and cowardly denials.”
— Louis Veuillot, 1813-1883
“JUST as all the efforts which culminated in the death on Calvary of Our Lord Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, were either controlled or inspired by the the leaders of the Jewish people who had rejected the Supernatural Life in Person, so all the efforts making for the destruction of the Supernatural Life of the Mystical Body in the modern world are largely controlled by the leaders of the same people.”
— Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp.
“PORPHYRY and the Emperor Julian (the Apostate) will have it that the account of this call of Matthew is either a stupid blunder on the part of a lying writer, or else that it showeth what fools they were who followed the Saviour, to go senselessly after any one who called them. But there can be no doubt that before the Apostles believed they had considered the great signs and works of power which had gone before. Moreover, the glory and majesty of the hidden God, which shone somewhat through the Face of the Man Christ Jesus, were enough to draw them which gazed thereon, even at first sight. For if there be in a stone a magnetic power which can make rings and straws and rods come and cleave thereunto, how much more must not the Lord of all creatures have been able to draw unto Himself them whom He called?
“And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with Him. They saw how that a publican who had turned to better things had found a place of repentance, and therefore they also hoped for salvation. It was not, as the Scribes and Pharisees complained, sinners clinging to their sinfulness who came to Jesus, but sinners repenting, as indeed appeareth from the next words of the Lord, where He saith: I will have mercy and not sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The Lord went to eat with sinners to the end that He might have occasion to teach, and to break spiritual bread unto them which bade Him.” [bold added]
— Homily by St. Jerome, Bk. i. Comment, on Matth. ix.
“THE sublime function, to which the faithful owe their fathers and guides in the spiritual life, has, however, a special interest, at this period of the year, which, more than any other, is in keeping with the present state of the world, which is one of rapid decline towards ruin. Our year, too, is on the fall, as we say. The sun, which, we beheld rising at Christmas, as a giant who would burst the bonds of frost asunder, and restrain the tyranny of darkness, now, as though he had grown wearied, is drooping towards the horizon; each day, we see him gradually leaving that glorious zenith, where we admired his dazzling splendour, on the day of our Emmanuel’s Ascension; his fire has lost its might; and though he still holds half the day as his, his disc is growing pale. All this foretells the approach of those long nights, when nature, stripped of all her loveliness by angry storms, seems as though she would bury her self, for ever, in the frozen shroud which is to bind her. So is it with our world. Illumined as it was by the light of Christ, and glowing with the fire of the Holy Ghost, it sees, in these our days, that charity is growing cold, and that the light and glow it had from the Sun of Justice, are on the wane. Each revolution takes from the Church some jewel or other, which does not come back to her when the storm is over; tempests are so frequent, that tumult is becoming the normal state of the times. Error predominates, and lays down the law. Iniquity abounds. It is our Lord himself who said: ‘When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find, think ye, faith on earth?’
“Lift up, then, your heads, ye children of God! for your redemption is at hand. But, from now, until that time shall come, when heaven and earth are to be made new for the reign that is to be eternal, and shall bloom in the light of the Lamb, the Conqueror, days far worse than these, must dawn upon this world of ours, when the elect themselves would be deceived, if that were possible!” [emphasis addded]
— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Ember-Days of September,” The Liturgical Year (Transl. Dom Laurence Shepherd), 1875
******
Who are the elect to whom the holy abbot refers, quoting Scripture, in these words that come from the tumultuous 19th century?
They are, and can be none other than, Catholics (and all would-be Christians.)
Guéranger knew, as all the Fathers of the Church knew, that Catholics would fall into a terrible deception. This deception would bring down even the most pious and well-intentioned among them. And that is exactly what has happened. The elect have been deceived. Not only have the lukewarm been deceived by the Great Apostasy of Vatican II, but the most zealous have been taken in, especially by the Big Traditionalist Swindle with its seductive outposts, its incense and mitres purchased on Amazon, its sublime virgins singing Gregorian chant on Twitter and Facebook, its brilliant and erudite analysts who dissect with dazzling flare every heresy of Vatican II, its innocent children dressed in neat uniforms and preserved by the best-intentioned parents from the perversions and atheism of “education” — yes, these oases and refuges, these wolves in vestments, are renegade each and every one by all the disciplinary standards of the Church. They have been deceived — organized deception, not the bloody persecution of martyrs in the Colosseum being the dominant strategy of the combined forces of anti-Christ naturalism at this time, aimed not at the body but at the mind and heart and the deepest recesses of the soul. For Satan wants your soul more than he wants your body.
‘When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find, think ye, faith on earth?’
Like the Pharisees who turned away from Jesus when he spoke of his coming death and refused to accept a Messiah on these humbling and disgraceful terms, Catholics in their immense pride and ingratitude for all the treasures God has given them over the course of 2,000 years — and continues to give them every day, a perpetual and unceasing deluge of gifts — scorn to believe that, yes, this ruin and death, far from the appalling theatrics of celebrity “popes,” far from the cheering crowds of false brotherhood and the desolating ugliness and mediocrity of One Worldism — this beautiful and lonely wilderness is none other than their glorious and immaculate Bride of Christ. They turn their backs and walk away.
The embers of Christian civilization smolder about us. Rejoice, ye children.
Rejoice ye unworthy ones, ye losers by the standards of the world, ye who have by some inexplicable miracle of grace retained some threads of childish simplicity and thus can see through the shadows and lies — ye children, your redemption is at hand.
“THERE is nothing in the world so real and substantial as the love of God. One act of Divine Love is a more finished thing than a statue [of a Greek god.] It is more firm than the foundations of the Alps. It is more enduring than the round world which God hath made so strong. All things are bubbles to it. They have nothing in them. They mean little. They soon pass away. An act of love is a complete work, and has greater power and greater consequence than any other act. The mere act of dying is not equal to it. And yet this act of love can be made by a mental glance, quick as lightening, and piercing heaven.”
— Fr. Frederick William Faber, All for Jesus, or the Easy Ways of Divine Love (1854)
A SERIES on the vast number of “heresies, errors and novelties” found in the official catechism of the Counterfeit “Catholic” Church in Rome continues at the Spanish website, Pro Deo et Pontifice. (Please use translation program on your browser to read in English.)
The catechism is a clever synthesis of truths and falsehoods that would have been placed, less than 100 years ago, on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Holy Office. Catholics wouldn’t have been permitted to read it, let alone use it for religious instruction. The abandonment of Catholic worship in the true Mass is only one sign that the Vatican II Church is not the Catholic Church. The cause of this loss is a change in beliefs, and that is fully illustrated in the catechism of John Paul II, in which ideas forcefully rejected by the popes of nearly 2,000 years are openly promoted. No one can adhere to this catechism and to the beliefs of the apostles, saints and popes without living in a state of formal contradiction, apathy or dangerous ignorance.
The new religion, under the appearance of humanistic compassion and the utopian fusion of the world’s foremost creeds, works for the triumph of ancient, inhuman, and anti-Christian forces, once kept in check by the immense power of the papacy. This power remains, in the undying moral legacy of the last pope, Pius XII — in a state of eclipse, as Fathers of the Church and saints predicted would eventually come to pass, leaving Catholics who strive for obedience despite their own unworthiness in a wilderness, with prayer, good works and the riches of their inheritance to sustain them. Not their own authority they follow, but the authority of St. Peter and his successors, whose rule is perpetual and can never be taken away no matter what the future brings.
This Wilderness Church, despite its seeming nothingness, is the sole reservoir of divine truth in this chaos of confusion and civilizational decline. It resembles nothing so much as the Savior Incarnate nailed to a cross.
“SUFFERING is a trustworthy guide to the secrets of a man’s heart. That is why false friends never stand the test of adversity. (Eccles. vi. 8). Suffering is the furnace, so to speak, in which God puts his chosen ones to the test: ‘The furnace trieth the potter’s vessels, and the trial of affliction just men.’ (Eccles. xxvii. 6). ‘Afflicted in few things, in many they shall be well rewarded: because God hath tried them, and found them worthy of Himself. As gold in the furnace He hath proved them, and as a victim of a holocaust He hath received them, and in time there shall be respect had to them. The just shall shine, and shall run to and fro like sparks among the reeds.’ (Wisdom iii. 5-7). But for this suffering was necessary – ‘many are the afflictions of the just’ (Psalm xxxiii. 20) – in order to prove their forbearance, humility, gentleness, and perseverance to the end.”
THREE days of fasting and abstinence this week — today, Friday and Saturday — mark the traditional observance of Ember Days.
Fasting cures our illnesses, dries up the excess humors in our bodies, drives out demons, casts out evil thoughts, purifies the spirit, cleanses the heart, sanctifies the body, and raises people to the throne of God. Finally, fasting is the food of angels, and those who practice it can be considered among those blessed spirits.
— -St. Athanasius
“HER prevision of all her sorrows, at least from the moment of St. Simeon’s prophecy, was so vivid and real, that, without a peculiar succour from the omnipotence of God, it must have separated her soul and body. She could not have lived under so dense a shadow. She could not have breathed in so thick a darkness. She must have been suffocated in the deep waters in which her soul was continually sinking. It was impossible in so perfect a creature that her reason should be perturbed. It was impossible that peace should ever be dislodged from a heart in such transcendently close union with God. But her beautiful life might have been, nay would have been, extinguished by excess of sorrow, unless God had worked a perpetual miracle to hinder this effect, just as through her whole life she was always on the point of dying from excess of love, and when His appointed moment came, and He withdrew His extraordinary succour, she did in fact die of simple love. What then must that sorrow have been, which required a standing miracle not to force body and soul asunder; and this too in a sinless soul, where remorse could never come, where doubt never harassed the judgment, unless it were once during the Three Days’ Loss, and where perpetual peace reigned amid the quietness and subordination of all the passions?”
— Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Foot of the Cross, or The Sorrows of Mary, 1886
“NOW our Lady’s whole being was flooded with light. Not only did a reason and intelligence of the most consummate perfection illuminate every faculty, and secure the utmost excellence in the exercise of it; but she lived within herself in a very atmosphere of supernatural air and light. In her dolours this light was a torture to her. We may well suppose that no one, except our Blessed Lord Himself, ever fully understood the Passion, or grasped all its horrors in their terrible and repulsive completeness. Yet Mary’s knowledge of it is the only one which came at all near to His, and simply because of the excess of heavenly light which shone unsettingly upon her sinless soul.
[…]
“Ignorance is so completely our atmosphere, that we can conceive less of an excess of spiritual light, an intellectual effulgence, than of anything else. So here again the extent of our Lady’s sorrows escapes us, as we have no means of measuring the supernatural enlightenment to which they were proportioned, or which perhaps rendered them co-extensive with itself.”
Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Foot of the Cross, or The Sorrows of Mary, 1886 (more…)
“TWICE over to say the least, if not a third time also, did He crucify her, once by His Human Nature, once by His Divine, if indeed Body and Soul did not make two crucifixions from the Human Nature only. No martyrdom was ever like to this. No given number of martyrdoms approach to a comparison with it. It is a sum of sorrow which material units, ever so many added together, ever so often multiplied, do not go to form. It is a question of kind as well as of degree; and hers was a kind of sorrow which has only certain affinities to any other kinds of sorrow, and is simply without a name, except the name which the simple children of the Church call it by, the Dolours of Mary.”
— Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Foot of the Cross, or The Sorrows of Mary, 1886
NOW that it’s time to sleep,
sleep, son, and don’t cry;
for the time will come soon enough
when crying is needed.
O my dearest, my heart:
lullaby and sleep now.
Close those divine eyes
as other babies do;
for soon a dark veil
will deprive the sky of light
O my dearest, my heart
lullaby and sleep now.
Or take this milk
from my immaculate breasts;
for a cruel magistrate
is preparing vinegar and gall for you.
O my dearest, my heart
lullaby and sleep now.
Find here meditations on the Feast of the Seven Sorrrows of Mary, which are:
“HOW true it is that in the day of judgment many will be known to have wrought great achievements within the dominions of Christ’s kingdom, who passed for insignificant and useless persons in the world, arid were held in no repute even amongst good men. And as true it is, that the great and wonderful deeds of many which made so much noise and rendered those who wrought them so famous, will be found empty, full of the self-seekings of nature, and devoid of the Spirit of God.”
— Henri-Marie Boudon, The Hidden Life of Jesus: a Lesson and Model to Christians, (Transl.,Edward Healy Thompson); 1869
LITANY OF THE HOLY CROSS
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.
God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.
Holy Cross, whereon the Lamb of God was offered for the sins of the world,
Deliver and save us.
Hope of Christians,
Save us, O Holy Cross* [Repeat after each asterisk below]
Pledge of the resurrection from the dead,*
Shelter of persecuted innocence,*
Guide of the blind,*
Way of those who have gone astray,* (more…)