A major center of Freemasonry in Italy joined today in mourning the death of “Pope” Francis who, it said, “embodied the values ​​of brotherhood, humility and the search for a planetary humanism.” From an official statement by Luciano Romoli, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Italy of the ALAM:

“THE Grand Lodge of Italy of the Ancient, Free, Accepted Masons joins in the universal mourning for the passing of Pope Francis , a pastor who, with his teaching and his life, embodied the values ​​of brotherhood , humility and the search for a planetary humanism . Coming from the “end of the world”, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was able to change the Church, bringing the revolutionary teaching of Saint Francis of Assisi back to the present of history.

In this moment of mourning, our Communion intends to pay homage to the vision of Pope Francis , whose work is characterized by a profound resonance with the principles of Freemasonry : the centrality of the person, respect for the dignity of each individual, the construction of a supportive community, the pursuit of the common good . His encyclical Fratelli tutti represents a manifesto. Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood is the triple value asset of Freemasonry. Overcoming divisions, ideologies, single thought to recognize the richness of differences and build a humanity united in diversity , this is what Francis ardently wanted, the same plan is pursued by the Grand Lodge of Italy.”

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Kudos to the Lodge for doing a remarkable job of describing Francis’s “pontificate:” (more…)

BY NOW, the news of the death of “Pope” Francis on Easter Monday morning has reached you. It was not a surprise by any means. After many weeks of battling the traumatic effects of pneumonia at the age of 88, the life of a man who purportedly occupied the papal chair while publicly rejecting many tenets of the Catholic religion, reveling instead in what he called “the existential peripheries,” came to an end.

In his final days, Francis seemed only desirous of sealing his legacy, which was applauded by millions of fans. It was not a surprise that his final testament used two catchwords of the Masonic overthrow of Christian civilization: “peace” and “fraternity.” Who does not want world peace and brotherhood? Hence the beguiling effectiveness of these phrases. We were made, all of us, for peace and fellowship. True peace and brotherhood, however, only come in this fallen world from the spiritual values of the Catholic religion as revealed by the One, True God, not from the secular humanitarianism and ecumenism Francis triumphantly proclaimed and promoted. God, he said, “willed the plurality of religions.” Or as Pontius Pilate famously said, “What is truth?”

If Francis came to recant of his part in what one commentator aptly calls the “spiritual coup de’état” of Vatican II, it was in his private moments only. May God have mercy on those well-intentioned souls disastrously affected. How few are equal to the skillful and bold seductions of this great counterfeit — a religion that mimics the true Faith in much the same way a counterfeit dollar bill reproduces most of the real thing. How many people, as Gerry Matatics points out, if they saw a counterfeit $100 bill would recognize it as false, unless they stopped and examined it closely, unless they already knew well the details of the real thing?

Will the successor of Francis be a conservative or as boldly radical and worldly as Francis?

The question preoccupies an army of pundits and analysts. The atmosphere of speculation is very much like that before a presidential election and even a major sports championship. (more…)

I WAS walking through the lobby of an 'assisted living' facility when I saw a touching sight. Someone had brought in a glass tank filled with straw. It was placed on a table in the area where residents gathered to watch television or to sit staring into the distance. Racing about in little circles inside the tank were small, fuzzy, energetic baby chicks. An old woman — partly balding, obviously no longer in possession of her full mind, out of touch with the world — sat in front of the tank, lit with a incubator light. She was riveted. Every particle of her being seemed fixed on the sight before her. Sitting as close to the tank as possible and hunching over to see as much as she could, she stared at the chicks without moving or speaking, simply drinking up the sight of these ditzy little birds. It was genius, who ever brought the chicks there. These baby creatures were filled with an energy and newness the old woman no longer possessed. And, like her, their existence was caught up in the tiniest of things. They gave her a taste of new life. Something inside her was reborn. Old or young, rich or poor, happy or sad, smart or senile, we all have the capacity for resurrection. You may seem dead -- and yet rise again. In that way, our daily dramas reflect the greatest event in human history,…

[Photograph from Vintage St. Louis and Route 66, Facebook]

{Reposted]

ALAN writes:

I have written thousands of words about what is wrong in the city of St. Louis.  Here is a photograph that shows what was once right about it.

Taken on Easter Sunday, 1947, it shows hundreds of people streaming out of the New Cathedral, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, on Lindell Boulevard in the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis.  In 1963, my classmate Carol and I were part of a choir in this Cathedral. (more…)

"I give You thanks, who illumine me and deliver me, for You have enlightened me and I have known You.  Late have I known You, O ancient Truth; late have I known You, O eternal Truth!  You were in the light and I was in darkness, and I did not know You, for I had no light without You, and without You, there is no light!"    --- St. Augustine, Confessions I wish you and yours a Happy Easter. May this glorious truth fill your heart with joy and confidence.  

“ALL THE great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.

“In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: (more…)

HOLY WEEK in medieval England involved elaborate ceremony and intense religious emotion. The ceremonials began on Palm Sunday during which the entire community processed around the church courtyard behind a shrine with a silken canopy containing the Blessed Sacrament.

A crucifix was placed in an often elaborate sepulchre on Good Friday. Lay people would “creep to the cross” — a practice later abolished as superstitious during the Protestant Reform. It involved walking barefoot on one’s knees

In The Middle Ages, Thomas J. Shahan writes:

In the very popular fifteenth-century religious manual already referred to, the “Dives et Pauper,” the devotion to the crucifix, and especially the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday known as the “Creeping to the Cross,” is explained with admirable correctness and terseness. Few modern English books of devotion can boast a language so chaste and idiomatic, or so much clearness and conciseness of statement, or so much unction and pathos. And are not the following lines a noble paraphrase of the great mediaeval hymn to the dolors of Jesus Christ Crucified, notably the “Salve Caput Cruentatum “? (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!  

  

FROM The Last Hours of Jesus by Ralph Gorman (1960):

AS we have seen, Jesus was crucified on a hillock overlooking a main thoroughfare just outside the city of Jerusalem. The cross was set up so near the road that the passers-by could speak to the crucified. Unfortunately, this is exactly what many of them did. The Gospels identify them no further than to tell us that they were people who passed by. They were probably those leaving the city rather than those entering, as their mockery reveals that they were familiar with the accusations against Christ. By this time the affair had undoubtedly become the talk of the town. These people stopped momentarily, probably in small groups, and looked up at the three men hanging on their crosses. (more…)

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…)

 "WE KNOW how great is the gift which Our Lord bestows upon us in the Blessed Sacrament when we consider that in this Adorable Sacrament He gives us something of Himself, aye, of His own Person; Himself really and substantial, whole and entire, in His humanity and in His divinity. He announced this to us in establishing this sublime and adorable Sacrament at the Last Supper. For then Jesus, Our Saviour and Redeemer, did not say, "This is bread, and that signifies My body," nor did He say, "This is and remains bread, and shall symbolize to you My body;" nor did the apostles hear from His divine lips, "As this was bread, so it remains bread, and shall be a memorial of My body." No, those truthful, holy lips said clearly and plainly to the apostles,"This which I have in My hand, which you see, which appears like bread is My body." And nowadays, people do violence to the words of Jesus, twisting them at their pleasure, and say we have nothing more in this wonderful Sacrament than in the other sacraments; they say that as in the other sacraments we have water, oil and chrism, so in this Adorable Sacrament we have but bread. Certainly it is true that we are purified by water in baptism; strengthened by chrism in confirmation; anointed in sickness by consecrated oils; but, ye who have true faith, your Lord does not…

"THERE is no sinner, however great may be his crimes, there is no heretic, or infidel, who has not his share in this Precious Blood, whose infinite merit is such, that it could redeem a million worlds more guilty than our own." --- Dom Prosper Guéranger, "Holy Wednesday," The Liturgical Year  

"THIS—to me—looks like part of an overall setup to destroy the American economy and usher in Schwab’s 'Great Reset': plummeting markets, rising inflation, digital currency, massive unemployment, and (eventually) universal basic income and social credit scores. "Just so there is no confusion, let me restate: I am a “pro-tariff man.” But the time to retain those tariffs was 30 years ago, before so many of our industries lay in their graveyards." --- James Perloff  

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“OUR Lord’s word effected what it said. It made her the Mother of men therefore, not merely by an outward official proclamation, but in the reality of her heart. He opened up there new fountains of inexhaustible love. He caused Her to love men as He loved them, as nearly as her heart could come to His. He as it were multiplied Himself in the souls of sinners millions of millions of times, and gave her love enough for all. And such love! so constant, so burning, so eloquent, so far above all earthly maternal love both in hopefulness, tenderness, and perseverance! And what was this new love but a new power of sorrow? We cannot rightly understand Mary’s sorrow at the Crucifixion under any circumstances, simply because it is above us. But we shall altogether miss of those just conceptions, which we may attain to, unless we bear in mind that she became our Mother at the foot of the Cross, not merely by a declaration of her appointment, but by a veritable creation through the effectual word of God, which at the moment enlarged her broken heart, and fitted it with new and ample affections, causing thereby an immeasurable increase of her pains. It was truly in labour that she travailed with us, when we came to the birth. The bitterness of Eve’s curse environed her spotless soul unutterably in that hour of our spiritual nativity.”

— — The Foot of the Cross, Frederick William Faber, D.D. (more…)