“WITH profound reverence and sincere contrition of heart, we gather here to meditate on the seven last words of our Saviour on the cross. That we may better dispose ourselves to derive choicest graces from this meditation, let us go back in spirit to the first Good Friday and in spirit take our position on the hill of Calvary, called the Skull. Here we become spectators of the world’s supreme drama—the crucifixion of our Lord. We are not alone. A large congregation has assembled, not to pray and worship, but to blaspheme and persecute. The trial of Jesus had come to an end. Pontius Pilate, the cowardly Roman governor, had pronounced the death-sentence: ‘Take Him away and crucify Him.’ No time was lost. In anticipation of His certain doom, a ponderous cross had been selected for Him. Its crushing weight—symbol of the world’s guilt—now bears heavily on His bruised shoulders, and we see a dismal procession now winding its cruel tortuous way up the steep and rocky road to the summit of the hill. No death-march ever had its equal. Crowned with thorns, covered with wounds, streaming with blood, and staggering under His burden, comes the Saviour, followed by the two condemned thieves, all three tightly bound and closely guarded. Pressing close upon them are the numerous enemies of Jesus, a jostling mob, rending the air with frightful yells, curses and blasphemies. (more…)

Faithful cross, above all other,
One and only noble tree:
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit thy peer may be.
Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
Sweetest weight is hung on thee!

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“IT is bad news for the Arabs to find that Soviet Communism and Israeli Zionism are two claws of one and the same world revolutionary movement — but it is the interests of the whole world which are now at stake, as the scene is set for an East-West conflict designed to draw to their final destruction as national and cultural entities all the peoples of the West and to usher in the kind of totalitarian one-world order which a globally concentrated financial power must have if it is to survive.

“That, for the peoples of the West, is the real meaning of what is happening in the Middle East — or, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned: ‘All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilisation and changes whole epochs.'”

— Ivor Benson (1986). The Zionist Factor

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CATHOLIC apologist Gerry Matatics last night (April 1st post, beginning at minute 1:17:30) discussed for more than an hour the reality of Catholic sacramental life today.

Mr. Matatics holds the correct position — a position strongly advised by faithful priests back in the 1960s — that Catholics must not participate in the Vatican II rites; must stay at home, pray the Mass and make acts of Spiritual Communion (and avoid Traditionalist groups that, inventing unprecedented breaches of authority, operate without papal mandate and outside the juridical structure of the Church).

But where is the Eucharist today? Does it still exist on any altars in the world?

Mr. Matatics, who is not invoking his own authority but the authority of Scripture and nearly 2,000 years of  papal and patristic teaching, explains that it does exist, on the private altars of priests validly ordained in the 1960s or 1970s, and perhaps on the altars of those ordained under special dispensations Pope Pius XII granted to bishops in Communist countries. He discusses the status of valid Eucharists in the Eastern Orthodox churches too.

The discussion goes off into side issues, but he makes many excellent points. I highly recommend it.

See also The Matter, Form and Rites of the Holy Eucharist.

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PANGE LINGUA GLORIOSI CORPORIS MYSTERIUM

SING, my tongue, the Saviour’s glory,
Of His Flesh, the mystery sing;
Of the Blood, all price exceeding,
Shed by our Immortal King,
Destined, for the world’s redemption,
From a noble Womb to spring. (more…)

“THE most important thing to know about the Pharisees is that they are the ancestors of all contemporary Jews. The other sects that existed contemporaneously with them died out shortly after the Second Temple’s destruction. Once they disappeared, the Pharisees no longer were called by that name; their religious practices became normative Judaism. Unfortunately, at the very time all Jews were increasingly identifying as Pharisees, the word began to acquire a new highly-pejorative meaning. The New Testament repeatedly depicted the Pharisees as small-minded religious hypocrites. Eventually, the word ‘pharisees’ came to be synonymous in English with ‘hypocrite,’ a distortion as obnoxious to Jews as the expression ‘to jew’ — meaning to bargain down or to cheat. In actuality, the greatest teachers of Talmudic Judaism, men like Hillel, Rabbi Yokkanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva, were Pharisees.”

— Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy, the Most Important Things to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History (1991)

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“AUGUSTINE Virgil,” author of a new book, Inferno, reimagines Dante’s famous hellscape as a journey through modern media and alt-media, with dizzying circles of “truths and untruths; dialectics and kayfabes; influencers and assets.” From an excerpt on Substack:

To understand the media spectacle in its totality then one could do far worse than beginning with Dante’s vision of Hell. Lamenting expulsion from his much loved Tuscan homeland, the good Florentine envisaged an underworld of concentric rings of torment: when the world seemed strange and foreign to the Poet, he sought to descend through the mire in the hope of finding eventual respite in the summum bonum, the highest good. Which modern searcher of truth could not relate? Naturally for his guide he chose the most modern of the ancients, Virgil, to shepherd him through the fire and ice of a Hades where fraud and treachery, naturally, occupy the lowest circles.

It is a not a perfect but nonetheless useful analogy to conceive of what is best termed the simulacrum – namely the media and alt-media (composed of the largely online podcast based “truthers”) – of occupying similarly a malign Inferno. It is one comprised of concentric rings, burning not with fire but with narrative. Each has their varying degrees of torment reflecting their varying degrees of fraud and treachery. Or, if one would prefer (for optimism’s sake): each possessed of varying degrees of “truth”, floating spectral throughout the ether of the respective rungs of this Hadean ladder. It is pertinent at this point to add that each ring, whilst operating as a discrete and deliberate pen of isolation, also can facilitate mobility to other rings: one may find one’s way to one rung of this waking Hell only to then be shepherded by a denizen of that ring to another ring unawares, as we shall see.

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“THERE are some souls God seems always to be experimenting upon, and only experimenting, and experimenting to the last; but it is real work. This unites the two sufferings of monotony and change together. All the epochs of life are variously represented by the transitory heaps of crosses, while the abiding cross is the deep undertone of the whole of life. Such men walk the world, not merely as memorials to be wondered at, but as living fountains of devotion to all who see them. They are men of power; for it is to the secret intercessions of such souls that all spiritual renewals on the earth are owing. Not unfrequently they carry for a while the whole Church upon the top of their cross. They are monuments of God’s love; for in them we see in fullest revelation the grand truth, which is true also in its measure of the very lowest of ourselves, that the cross is never only a chastisement, but always a reward as well, and the plcntifulness of God’s love to each created soul is measured by the abundance of its crosses.”

— Fr. Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, or the Sorrows of Mary; 1864

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FROM The Foot of the Cross, or the Sorrows of Mary (Tan Books, page 292-293) by Fr. Frederick William Faber, D.D.:

The love of God brings many new instincts into the heart. Heavenly and noble as they are, they bear no resemblance to what men would call the finer and more heroic developments of character. A spiritual discernment is necessary to their right appreciation. They are so unlike the growths of earth that they must expect to meet on earth with only suspicion, misunderstanding, and dislike. It is not easy to defend them from a controversial point of view; for our controversy is obliged to begin by begging the question, or else it would be unable so much as to state its case. The axioms of the world pass current in the world, the axioms of the Gospel do not. Hence the world has its own way. It talks us down. It tries us before tribunals where our condemnation is secured beforehand. It appeals to principles which are fundamental with most men, but are heresies with us. Hence its audience takes part with it against us. We are foreigners, and must pay the penalty of being so. If we are misunderstood, we had no right to reckon on anything else, being as we are out of our own country. We are made to be laughed at. We shall be understood in heaven. Woe to those easy-going Christians, whom the world can understand, and will tolerate, because it sees they have a mind to compromise! (more…)

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“Netanyahu [on Israeli TV] accidentally reveals the REAL reason for the war. It has nothing to do with nukes. He admits the plan is to build oil pipelines through the Middle East straight to Israeli ports, completely bypassing Arab-controlled straits. It is all about money and control.”

Source

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FROM “‘Death Wish’ as Jewish Anti-Gentile Fantasy and Revenge Porn” by Karl:

In much the same way that a wannabe ‘tough Jew’ – and a former director of the ADL – named Nathan Perlmutter could boast in 1982 in a typically tone-deaf way about beating up an old German man on the street because he ‘was a Nazi’ (3) and get no push back from his fellow members of the tribe. The ‘tough Jew’ of Jewish fantasy is Benjamin, the so-called ‘Hebrew Hammer’ and the famous ‘Bear Jew’ of ‘Inglorious Bastards’; where the so-called ‘brave Jew’ gets to torture and murder helpless non-Jews in general – and ‘Nazis’ in particular – without any moral opprobrium attached to doing so ‘because Nazis’.

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“EVERY morning of life we begin anew. We go forth from our doors to encounter a new day on its passage to eternity. It has much to say to us, and we to it; and it carries its tale to God at sunset, and its word is believed, and its message remembered till the doom. Would it not be an unproductive day in which we did not meet our Lord? For is not that the very meaning of our lives? If the day is meant for the sun to shine, it is but half a day, or rather it is night, if only the material sun shall shine, and the Sun of justice also rise not on us with health upon His wings. We go out to meet Jesus in every action of the day; but we require this fourth dolor (of Mary’s meeting Jesus on the path to Calvary) to admonish us that we must rarely expect to meet Him except with a Cross, and that a new one. When we are in sorrow, He Himself “draws near and goes with us,” as He did with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. That is the privilege of sorrow. It is an attraction to our dearest Lord which He can seldom resist. Provided we seek not other comfort, He is sure to draw near and comfort us Himself. Oh, if unwary souls did but know the graces which they miss by telling their griefs and letting their fellow-creatures console them, how saints would multiply in the Church of God! (more…)

FROM “The Shroud of Turin: A Cumulative Case for Authenticity” by Peter S. Williams:

Scientific examination of the Shroud began in 1898, when it was first photographed and the image was found to be a photographic negative – it’s light and dark values were reversed when it was ‘printed’ on a piece of film. The resulting image was far more life-like than the faint original. (Above: negative shroud image on the left, positive image revealed in photographic negative on right). Then, in the 1970’s, microscopic examination of the cloth failed to find anything an artist would have used to paint the image. In 1976, a NASA image analyser connected to a computer discovered that the Shroud image contained ‘three dimensional’ information: ‘a wholly astounding and unexpected discovery, and one which still has no convincing explanation.

The Shroud is perhaps the most intensely investigated artefact in history, and has come under the scrutiny of a diverse group of scholars and researchers including: historians, archaeologists, chemists, physicists, botanists, engineers, doctors, forensic pathologists and experts in painting, photography, textiles, as well as philosophy, theology and apologetics.

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“EARLY in the morning of this day, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, leaving Mary His Mother, and the two sisters Martha and Mary Magdalene, and Lazarus, at Bethania. The Mother of sorrows trembles at seeing her Son thus expose Himself to danger, for His enemies are bent upon His destruction; but it is not death, it is triumph, that Jesus is to receive today in Jerusalem. (more…)