Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell

WHEN I first came to the difficult conclusion more than two years ago that Jorge Bergoglio, aka “Pope” Francis, could not logically be a true pope of the Catholic Church, however much he may embrace some of the Faith, I experienced interesting reactions from readers.

Several told me that I must not endorse the position of “sedevacantism” publicly. If I wanted to retain any respectability, I should keep quiet. Sedevacantism (“sede” is seat, “vacante” is empty) is the view that the papal throne is formally vacant, and has been vacant since 1958, due to the public heresies of the Vatican II popes. It is a common sense position really, not some hard-to-grasp intellectual theory, though it is based on deeper theological considerations. It makes just as much sense to have a non-Catholic as head of the Catholic Church as it would to elect Putin as president of the United States. It is a position fully in conformity with Catholic doctrine, upheld by numerous statements by theologians, canon lawyers and even popes who have rejected the idea that popes or other bishops can be heretics. It is fully in conformity with Catholic doctrine despite grave misconceptions by some that it amounts to rejecting the papacy or that it means the gates of hell have prevailed against the Church in violation of God’s promises in Matthew 16:18 (see the recent post at Novus Ordo Watch on the “gates of hell” argument) or that it means that the sedevacantist upholds himself as a figure of authority when in fact he upholds all the true popes and the Magisterium.

Many people are scandalized by the very word “sedevacantism,” perhaps partly because it has a scary and foreign sound. Some treat the sedevacantist as a borderline lunatic, a brawler crashing down pews, a proud rebel who thinks he’s better than others, an apostate who has left the Church and joined something akin to a voodoo cult. That’s why some readers, who ironically were sedevacantists themselves, warned me to keep my views secret.

What a liar I would be if I did that.

Some Catholic readers stormed off and said insulting things. One was told by a priest that she must never read my blog again. I was scolded for going too far, as if one could go too far in criticizing an imposter in the position of Christ’s vicar on earth. Though the typical sedevacantist does not reject a single dogma of the Church and in fact upholds the papacy, these people were convinced that the position of sedevacantism was not worth considering, even in these dire times, after decades in which the practice of the Catholic Faith has literally imploded in America and Europe and turned into a Protestant cult characterized by buildings as stripped of images of saints and the Virgin as Quaker meeting houses and ski lodges.

This kind of fear and loathing toward sedevacantism amounts to irrational behavior. It’s one thing to think through the arguments, to read and study the issue, to debate and even reject it. It’s another to engage in bullying ostracism.

After all, it is the Vatican II Church that embraces voodoo (more here), eh? Not sedevacantists.

The truth is, the anti-sedevacantist who knows the basics — the doctrines contained in a simple pre-Vatican II catechism such as the Penny Catechism or the Baltimore Catechism — lives with contradiction.

He sees all kinds of blatant heresies coming out of Rome. He sees the strangest of all things: the supposed Catholic Church spreading anti-Catholicism. He stands by as the “pope” publicly blasphemes Christ (more here and here); publicly blasphemes the Mother of God (here and here); embraces Catholic divorce; publicly endorses homosexuality (see here, here, here, here and here); publicly endorses transsexuality; publicly endorses women known for their indecent, pornographic dress (see here and here); affirms Muslims in their unbelief and praises their holy days; insults devout Catholics again and again; insults the Church (more here and here), insults Catholic parents, calling their children “rabbits”; endorses pantheism; turns St. Peter’s Basilica over to a spectacle of environmentalist idolatry put together by anti-Catholic corporations; rejects the ceremonials (more here and here) of the papacy; prays towards Mecca; denies the dogma of Hell; denies the differences between Catholics and Protestants; praises the atheistic, One World government of the UN; pays homage to a Marxist dictator; approves of the destruction of national sovereignty through mass migration; teaches that the Jewish covenant is not over, thereby either consciously or not attempting to eradicate the Catholic Faith off the face of the earth and cruelly leaving the Jews as perpetual outsiders to God’s promises of salvation — you get the idea. This is just a brief catalogue of what the Argentine Apostate has done and what the anti-sedevacantist must incorporate into his view of the papacy presumably without coming smack up against contradiction, which would be contrary to God. Mystery we can have. Not contradiction. Sedevacantism is partly mysterious, but it does not embrace contradiction.

The anti-sedevacantist is divided against himself. If he is at all aware of the things Jorge Bergoglio has said, written and done, he is unable to show the obedience and reverence to him that all Catholics owe to a pope. The anti-sedevacantist often spreads the dangerous idea that Catholics can cut themselves off from the papacy or fight the pope as if he was the chief enemy on earth. The anti-sedevacantist is unable to answer the common sense inquiry of an innocent would-be convert who says, “But the pope doesn’t believe that. And if the pope doesn’t believe that, I don’t have to either,” without denying the indefectability of the Church. He has in effect barricaded himself within contradiction.

All this is by way of introduction to this excellent video by Fr. Anthony Cekada, a tireless apologist for sedevacantism. Fr. Cekada addresses the fears of traditionalists toward sedevacantism and he sums it all up clearly.

The video was posted at Novus Ordo Watch, the outstanding website selflessly run by volunteers who have kept a running log of the defections of the Argentine Bomber and the other Vatican II “popes,” and offered ongoing intellectual defense of sedevacantism.

Let the battle rage! Bring it on! May God forgive me for not waking up sooner. The sedevacantist will uphold the papacy. He will refuse to fight the pope. But he will never shrink from fighting an antipope.

Read More »

A 14th-century illuminated manuscript depicting Mary watching over the circumcision of Jesus.

I WISH you a Happy New Year, dear reader. The Christmas season continues with the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ today. God humbled himself by submitting to this ancient rite of the Israelites, a figure of baptism.

We now learn that He came, not to manifest His power and majesty, but to be made like unto us in all things, as far as it was possible for one who was the Eternal Son of God. We begin to appreciate that He is flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone.

More reflections on the Circumcision of Christ can be found here and here. May this time of wonder and anticipation strengthen you. We are surrounded by the miracle of God’s love even in this troubled world.

Read More »

Fake piety

More fake piety

MIKE KING at The Anti-New York Times theorizes that at least 80 percent of top political figures meet the clinical definition of the psychopath, and I heartily agree:

My case for an 80% psychopathy rate was based upon a very simple analogy to professional basket players. Sometimes, the most effective philosophy is the simplest; like Aesop’s Fable for example. My basketball player analogy worked so well on [a friend], that I decided to submit an expanded version of this concept to my loyal readers.

You see, most of us “normal people” are able to contain our dark sides; being more ‘good’ than we are ‘bad’. Then there is another group of people who are generally more bad than good, yet not totally evil either. Those are the people we talk about as, “He’s a real such and such, but he does have a good side to him.”These types can still be salvaged, or at least contained.”

Then there is the true psychopath; a heartless, soulless, shameless devil who will smile in your face, charm you and flatter you as he (or she) sticks the knife in your back. He is often charismatic, likable and energetic. He lies effortlessly. He will draw anyone into his orbit that can serve to further his ambitions, or fuel his ego with “narcissistic supply”. He manipulates. He cheats. He sucks the lifeblood out of you and then, when you are no longer of any value to him, he will discard you like a used up lemon.

To achieve his nefarious ends, the narcissistic psychopath will play every emotional card in his manipulative arsenal; alternating between outbursts of anger and verbal abuse, empty flattery, fake sympathy for others, false pity for himself, fake smiling or laughing, fake crying, fake humility, false charity and fake piety.

[….]

In the realm of Democracy politics, in which the object of the game is to sell 51% of the brain-dead public on the idea of voting for you, the psychopath will rise to the top more easily than an honest man; just as a 6′ 5″ basketball player will rise to the NBA more easily than a 5′ 11″ player. It is very difficult for a good man to compete with someone who is willing to lie, cheat, make empty promises and take bribes in order to win an election. Compounding the problem are the “team owners”, who are extremely skilled at identifying, recruiting and developing the most promising “players” to their advantage.

A READER writes:

I just want to say how disappointed I am when I read the usual putdowns of Donald Trump. If he wasn’t exactly like he is, the media would never report on him. The things he says, they are forced to report. He cannot be ignored. It is absurd that anyone says the media loves him. Yeah, they are crazy about him. As Phyllis Schlafly says, he is the last hope for America. I love the way he talks, it is honest and true. Si si, no no. Loud and clear. He will make America great again – he is the only one not bought and controlled. As for Ted Cruz, no way. I will suggest a website that says it all: The Last Refuge. Read More »

HERE is a short video about one of the most beautiful and well-known carols.

THE 16th-century carol is sung here by The Sixteen. A description of the carol and another recording can be found here:

The “Coventry Carol” is a Christmas carol dating from the 16th century. The carol was performed in Coventry in England as part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. The play depicts the Christmas story from chapter two in the Gospel of Matthew. The carol refers to the Massacre of the Innocents, in which Herod ordered all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem to be killed. The lyrics of this haunting carol represent a mother’s lament for her doomed child. Read More »

I MAKE no claim to understand fully this complex subject, but a reader highly recommends Vaccine Truth, a website run by Wendy Callahan, who writes:

Since the beginning of time, a mother’s primary role has been to protect her young. It’s a role that most mothers take very seriously. When the medical community introduced vaccines to protect children from the ravages of disease, it was only natural for mothers to want their children protected. It wasn’t until my son started having seizures seven days after his MMR, DTaP, HiB, and Pneumococcal vaccination at fifteen months, that I started researching the wisdom of this practice. Like most of us I thought vaccines were harmless, tested for safety, and a necessity. Since he had just been vaccinated, I had my “What you need to know” fact sheet that had been given to me by my pediatrician. Read More »

Alabama ex-slave Molly Hammond

IT’S ABOUT TIME has posted excerpts from slave memories of Christmas in the American South, taken from The Slave Narratives, a collection of interviews with 3,500 ex-slaves compiled by the Federal Writers Project and archived at the Library of Congress. Molly Ammond is quoted:

“Us was treated fine. Our folks was quality. We had plenty somp’n t’eat, but dem slaves hadda work powerful hard though. Atter dey come home fum de fields dey was so tired dat dey go right to sleep, except when de massa had barbecues. Christmas was de big time; dere was several days to res’ an’ make merryin’…”

Illustrated London News, 1915

STEVE writes:

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is an extremely inspiring story. It is an inspiration to Christians the world over that those soldiers on that cold night in Flanders Fields, initiated by the Germans, came together in a spirit of chivalrous brotherhood with their opponents on the other side of the trenches and laid down their weapons in honor of the Birthday of the Prince of Peace.

It was perhaps the greatest example in world history of a large number of men, particularly soldiers, following Christ’s commandment to be peacemakers, as you can see in this New American article. The 2006 Joyeux Noel movie doesn’t show that the German soldiers took great risks to get the British to agree to the truce.

This story needs to be better told as an inspiration to all, especially in the dangerous and eerily similar world we find ourselves in exactly 100 years later, with the same Rothschild bankster forces that started the First World War now trying to start the third.

Merry Christmas.

SOME say it’s “just a story.” It’s true, it is a story. But it’s not just a story.

God took the form of a human baby. In this way, he conveyed His desire for our love. Almost everyone is touched by, is capable of feeling for, a tender baby.

Why does God want to be loved by us? He doesn’t need our love. He is self-sufficient and needs nothing. His desire for our love must be an extension of His love for us, his creatures.

“He seems to forget that He is God, because of the greatness of this desire. His ever-blessed Majesty will forgive us words of this sort, by which alone we can force upon our dull hearts the conviction of the immensity of His love. He appears to deny His own nature and greatness in order to obtain our love.”

[The Creator and the Creature, Frederick William Faber, D.D., Tan Books, 1961]

There is nothing more humbling than God’s love. It seems unintelligible. It is a mystery. And it accounts for all of the joy of Christmas, whether we realize it or not.

Merry Christmas! May you and your families have peace and happiness today.

FROM a Christmas meditation at Tradition in Action by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira:

There is no human being weaker than a newborn child. There is no poorer dwelling than a cave. There is nothing more rudimentary than a manger crib. However, that Child in that cave, and laid in that manger was to transform the course of History.

And what a transformation! The most difficult of all, because it was to orient men on the path opposed to all their inclinations: the path of austerity, sacrifice and the cross. It was to invite a world broken by superstition, religious syncretism and complete skepticism in order to become a world of Faith. It was to invite a mankind inclined to every iniquity to start to practice justice. It was to make an appeal to detachment from a world that loved pleasure in all its forms. It was to attract to purity a world where every depravity was known, practiced and adopted.

It was an obviously unfeasible task, but the Divine Child began, from His first moment on this earth, to take on that work which neither the force of hatred, power nor human passions could contain. And He conquered: The Prince of Peace established His Kingdom, which shall have no end.  [cont.]

WHY can’t most families live on one income anymore? Because the Federal Reserve System is economic plunder. Inflation is a tax. The median house was worth about $58,000 in 1960 in 2000 dollars. It is close to $200,000 now. Inflation of this type is caused by increases in the money supply, not by increased demand and natural growth. No nation in history has taken on fiat currency, which is the creation of money out of nothing, without having its economy destroyed. Credit cards, the overworked family, skyrocketing national debt, a shrinking birth rate cover up the reality.

This video was made in 2011, but it is as relevant today as ever. Pay particular attention close to the end where the discussion turns to the likelihood of a North American currency and then a single global currency, both of which will be part of the scam and the economic rape of private central banking.

Rooftops in the Snow, Gustave Caillebotte

HERE is the latest installment in “Tales of Chester,” my husband’s recollections of growing up in the factory town of Chester, Pennsylvania, a place alive in memory but long since gone as he knew it.

My first memory of snow is delightfully ambiguous, textured, deeply embedded. On a Monday morning in January when I was five, the house had a different feel, shut off from all light, blessedly isolated. I opened the back door and saw the yard layered in snow untouched by human feet.

From examining the records, I now know this would have been the first major snowstorm in my lifetime. What a magnificent sight, and the wearisome odors of exhaust, factory smoke and decay were replaced by a scent bracing and stunningly fresh.

Yet, the most-enduring memory isn’t visual or olfactory. It is the profound silence. Chester was a noisy place, and never noisier than on a Monday morning when the workweek sounds prevailed with new vigor after a weekend of rest. Low-flying planes were taking off from and approaching Philadelphia International Airport, nine miles away. We lived a half block from busy commuter train tracks. Our street was a major traffic artery. Punctuating the chronic noises were the factory and fire whistles, school bells and church bells. The snow muted them all, as if the city had been sealed in a vault. The only noise was that of distant-sounding tire chains moving slowly atop the snow pack, urban sleigh bells. This was a morning of unprecedented tranquility. I wanted more.

Chester, Pennsylvania was not in an exceptionally snowy area. It was not a place of avalanches or howling blizzards or St. Bernards rescuing travelers buried up to their necks. And yet from Thanksgiving to late March, after that initial snow, I would come to live in anticipation. If it was in the forecast, I couldn’t sleep until I saw the first randomly falling flakes, those wintry fireflies, flashing against the dim street light through a well-rubbed circle of a dirty bedroom window. Then I couldn’t sleep, period.

Worse, I couldn’t hide this passion from adults; no kid wants adults to have access to his inner thoughts, especially thoughts so clearly childlike. And childlike, they were. For snow was bad, and all adults despised it.

Weeks after that initial experience, the snow that had enchanted me long gone, I spied Charlie Buckley, an elderly friend of my father’s who often ate dinner with us, approaching our house on the brick sidewalk. The air smelled of snow. How I so desperately wanted to see the dirt outlines of the bricks iced with white, and then watch the snow make the walkway vanish! I wanted an all-conquering snow, like the one that entombed our house earlier that winter, to erase the concrete and the blacktop, to blanket the homely roofs, to veil the factory smoke, to redefine the hideous town. I ran to meet him and anxiously sought assurance that it was about to snow. He was disappointingly noncommittal. Mr. Buckley was the essence of dignity. He always wore a starched white shirt and a tie to match his perfect suits. My mother said even his toenails were perfectly cropped. He had too much decency to tell me the truth.

While he waited for dinner, Mr. Buckley read the paper in our living room. He called me over to the chair by the lamp. “It is going to snow,” he announced, not looking up from the paper.

How do you know?

“Look.” With an index finger he pointed to an “s” in the far-left column of the front page, and “n” in the third column, an “o” in the fourth, and “w” in the far-right one. “See,” he said. “S-N-O-W. It’s going to snow.” I was ecstatic. I composed a song. “It’s going to snow … It’s going to snow … you can bet your life it’s going to snow.”

You would have lost that life.

In the 1950s, before the Weather Channel, Accu-Weather, Doppler radar and the chat boards, publicly available information about the weather was sparse. Forecasts were delivered soberly on the local TV stations by anti-children weathermen who professed to hate “that white stuff,” although one of them was having a hard time disguising a rooting interest.

My three older brothers were convinced that TV weathermen, being adults, were militantly anti-snow. They believed our lack of snow was tied to a media conspiracy. “You hear that?” my brother Frank would say. “He said ‘snow,’ and then ‘Oops.’” I could not admit that I missed the reference. On another evening, although I missed it once again, a weatherman must have mentioned snow overtly, because my oldest brother, George, insisted that we all report to the basement immediately to sharpen our rusted sled blades.

Of course, it didn’t snow.

My peers and schoolmates also craved snow, but I did not share their casual, practical and outlaw attitudes toward it. They wanted enough to close the inherently loathsome schools. They wanted enough to ride their brakeless sleds down Crosby Street hill, which emptied into the aforementioned Seventh Street, where years before a cousin had been run over by a car and tragically killed. The “big guys” wanted enough to go “car-hopping.” This was another life-threatening practice in which the participants grabbed onto the bumpers of slow-moving vehicles, squatted and used their galoshes for street skis. They wanted at least enough to make snowballs to hurl at the buses and the unfortunate men who inhabited the Rescue Mission. I never saw anyone in the neighborhood attempt anything as wholesome as building a snowman. I was with them on the school issue, but I was wary of brake-less sledding; too wise, if not too chicken to hop cars, and I couldn’t make a snowball, let alone a snowman.

For me it wasn’t about sledding, car-hopping, snowball-hurling or the snowman. It was about the snow itself. I wanted to have it, to luxuriate in it, to roam around the dingy city admiring its power to transform. Read More »

SEVEN recent examples of gag orders and bullying by Paul A. Phillips.

THE New York Times featured an article Saturday about the rise of anti-Muslim crimes in the U.S. Mike King wrote a rebuttal, at the Anti-New York Times (get a reduced price subscription here until Friday):

Putting aside for a moment the bloody damn evil of the whole Zionist-Marxist mendacity machine, one has to stand in awe of the sheer genius of it all — particularly the manner in which these Sons of Satan will so often accomplish multiple objectives with a single play.

Take the War on Iraq, for example. At the behest of the Jewish Power, an enemy ruler, Saddam Hussein, was removed from power in Iraq (and executed) while the “White” Republican’t Party got stuck with all the blame for starting the disastrous war. As a result, the Marxist Democrats took control of Congress in 2006 and the Marxist queers Mr. & Mr. Obongo were installed in the White House in 2008.

The most recent illustration of this two-for-one subversion move involves the back-to-back false flag attacks of Paris and San Bernardino, California. As always, Muslims / Arabs were falsely accused while ignorant Whites and the Republican Party walked right into the trap of spouting overtly bigoted rhetoric that will only serve to alienate non-Whites — pushing them further and further into the Democrat-Marxist camp.

Of course, leave it to the slanderous Slimes [The New York Times] to then piss and whine about the very same “Islamo-Phobia” and “racism” which its own seditious scribblers created by selling one false-flag event after another after another after another to the gullible public. Read More »

DR. Kenneth Stoller contends vaccines can cause autism and disrupt the immune system. “The contents of vaccines are a toxic soup of ingredients that have never been safety tested appropriately,” he states.

“It is time to lift our heads out of the sand about the autism epidemic.”

Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, built before St. Louis became a city of shmoos

ALAN writes:

It is now customary at this time of year to bemoan the latest examples of the War on Christmas.  It is important to do that, but it is more important to remember the larger cultural context and not to be preoccupied with concretes.

Lawrence Auster wrote that the America in which he and his generation were born is being erased.

For me, one of the decisive proofs that that judgment is correct was not the fact that agitators were launching numerous attacks on traditional American cultural celebrations of Christmas, but the way that most Americans responded to those attacks:  In silence or outright capitulation.

That, I thought to myself, is not the reaction of people who are confident in who and what they are.  Americans in 1955 would have laughed at anyone who launched an attack on their cultural celebrations of Christmas, or would have advised them to take a long walk off a short pier.  The mayor and businessmen in St. Louis were just such men in the 1950s. Read More »

PAUL C. writes:

An indication of how fallen we are in the U.S.A. is a TV network having a special tonight with A-list musical talent honoring the seventy-fifth birthday of John Lennon instead of the birth of Our Lord.