THE weeks of hectic preparation have ended.

The mad, rushing rivers of traffic have come to a halt. The parking lots are empty. The stores are finally closed.

Human activity seems to cease. The famous stillness of Christmas Eve descends.

But there is something more — or rather something less.

From that very first moment, nature expressed its reverence. The ox and the ass lay by the crib in sacred stillness. The rock walls of the cave, with the immovable gravity and wordless wisdom of all stone, represented the mountains and hills of this wondrous earth, frozen in heavenward momentum.

The brilliant stars were so unlike any other that peasant shepherds, humble in heart, were struck dumb.

Nature is witness to God’s artistry every day. But on Christmas Eve, the very respiration of the trees slows, small creatures cease to stir in their winter lairs, the slumbering birds want for no food, the flames of candles leap upward and in this mysterious silence we hear the ineffable majesty of God and the peacefulness of his love.

O holy night, silent night, when creation itself adores and throngs of angels sing.

POPE Pius X, in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, resoundingly condemned the methods and philosophy of the men who today claim to be leaders of the Catholic Church (and that includes traditionalists who have set up their own independent hierarchy):

To penetrate still deeper into Modernism and to find a suitable remedy for such a deep sore, it behoves Us, Venerable Brethren, to investigate the causes which have engendered it and which foster its growth. That the proximate and immediate cause consists in a perversion of the mind cannot be open to doubt. The remote causes seem to us to be reduced to two: curiosity and pride. Curiosity by itself, if not prudently regulated, suffices to explain all errors. Such is the opinion of Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI., who wrote: A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty, when against the warning of the Apostle it seeks to know beyond what it is meant to know, and when relying too much on itself it thinks it can find the fruit outside the Church wherein truth is found without the slightest shadow of error (Ep. Encycl. Singulari nos, 7 Kal. Jul. 1834). Read More »

PLEASE be patient with the amateurish quality of this outstanding interview. It is well worth your time. Gerry Matatics, a former agnostic and then Protestant minister, is a brilliant apologist. No one is better at defending the truth today. And the interviewer here does a great job of asking common-sense questions.

This interview was made a month ago, before ‘Fiducia Supplicans,’ “Pope” Francis’s diabolical Christmas gift to the world. Read More »

IN MORE interviews at Children’s Health Defense, Jill Smith and Kay Mueller, here and here, tell the stories of the final days of their husbands, who both went into the hospital reasonably healthy and died while treated under COVID protocols. Jill Smith and Kay Mueller believe the drug Remdesivir, mandated by the CDC, and ventilators, as well as other drugs, were responsible for their husbands’ deaths.

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

BY Christina Rossetti

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

FROM English Folk-Carols by Cecil J. Sharp (The Wessex Press, 1911):

There is, perhaps, no branch of folk-music in the creation of which the unconscious art of the peasant is seen to greater advantage than the carol. For his peculiar and most characteristic qualities, mental and emotional, are precisely those which in this case are most needed — his passion for simple, direct statement, his dislike of ornament and of the tricks of circumlocution, his abhorrence of sentimentality, and above all his courage in using, without hesitation, the obvious and commonplace phrase, of words or music, whenby its means the required expression can most easily be realized. What cultivated musician would dare to set to such words as “The Virgin Unspotted ” the graceful, flowing, 3-time melody given in this collection, even if he had the luck or skill to think of it ? What, again, could be more concise in its diction or clearer in its meaning, than the last stanza in “King Herod and the Cock,” or more vivid than the following lines in ” The New Year’s Carol “

Then Christ He called Thomas
And bid him: Come and see
And put thy fingers in the wounds
That are in my body;
And be not faithless, but believe!
And happy shalt thou be

which will, I venture to think, bear comparison with the parallel stanza of the Easter carol “Ye Sons and Daughters,” translated by Neale.

It is just his transparent sincerity, his freedom from affectation, self-consciousness and conventional restrictions, that makes the unlettered rustic pre-eminently fitted to translate into music and poetry the dramatic incidents of the Christ story. His simplicity disarms criticism; just as his pious, intense, child-like belief in every detail ot the Gospel narrative banishes scepticism. Nor did he trouble himself about the place of performance; village Church or village inn —it mattered not. A tune, so long as it expressed his feeling, harmonized with the sense and fitted the metre of the words, served his purpose wherever and whenever it was destined to be sung.

“Dearly beloved brethren, we were placed by Almighty God in this world for no other purpose than that we might love and serve Him with our whole hearts, and with our whole souls. This is the duty of every human being, no matter in what age he may exist, no matter for what greatness or lowliness, for what riches or poverty he may be distinguished.’Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.’ This is the great commandment addressed by God alike to all men. Any man, therefore, and much more, any Christian, who through fear or shame of his fellow-man, neglects, when occasion requires, to manifest his love for God, or for his neighbor, offers a deliberate insult to the majesty of his Creator; he prefers the esteem of his fellow-man to the esteem of God; he apprehends the sneer or the contempt of some imbecile fellow-creature, and dreads not the anger of the Almighty; he abides by the judgment of the world in preference to the judgment of the great and living God. All created things united together bear no comparison to God, and yet the victim of human respect prefers the opinion of one miserable fraction of humanity to the opinion of the mighty Lord of Heaven, by whose breath all created things sprang into existence. What greater insult than this could be offered to God? [emphasis added]

(Source)

FROM Children’s Health Defense comes another interview with a nurse who worked in hospitals during the COVID protocols. Nicole King is a registered nurse in Florida. She states:

There were things that happened in healthcare that I had never seen before in my entire life.

And I want people to understand that we cannot undo what happened.

And I am deeply sorry that our profession failed many, many people.

But hopefully, you know, moving forward, we can try to work together to have our communities trust us again, and that we could have done things a lot better.

Children’s Health Defense is interviewing people around the country about their experiences during the government-enforced pandemic. These interviews are live testimony in what should be a public trial. But we have had no trials. No one has yet faced criminal charges for the fraud and treason that occurred. And not until those at the very top who were responsible (that includes both Donald Trump and Joe Biden) are brought to justice can the medical system ever regain the public’s trust.

But don’t expect that to happen. Most Americans are unable and unwilling to comprehend the level of deception that occurred and idolize both government and medical authorities.

There are terrible penalties still for health workers who speak the truth, as King says:

I really wish more people would come forward but what the communities don’t understand is when we get hired by hospital systems and other private companies they have you sign forms to say it’s almost like an NDA if you will that if we’re caught on camera talking about it etc that you are immediately terminated you know you can’t even be seen with a [health freedom] shirt on you can’t even be seen at a governor’s rally nothing so people really feel like we’re part of the issue because we’re not coming forward but people who do have lost everything, you know, doctors, nurses, healthcare workers.

They have lost everything trying to come forward and help their patients.

THE OPERA singer Bryn Terfel sings with great restraint and feeling the gentle, soothing Welsh song “Ar Hyd y Nos,” or ‘All Through the Night,” often sung at Christmas time. This recording with the Welsh National Opera Orchestra is the most beautiful performance of this song I have ever heard.

An English translation by A. G. Prys-Jones:

Ev’ry star in heaven is singing
All through the night,
Hear the glorious music ringing
All through the night.
Songs of sweet ethereal lightness
Wrought in realms of peace and whiteness;
See, the dark gives way to brightness
All through the night.

Look, my love, the stars are smiling
All through the night.
Lighting, soothing and beguiling
Earth’s sombre plight:
So, when age brings grief and sorrow,
From each other we can borrow
Faith in our sublime tomorrow,
All through the night.

“WHILE the True Mass was being withdrawn from them, the people watched and endured it helplessly, uncomprehendingly, resignedly. And all the while it was being done, they were being ‘re-educated’: on the one hand, while the True Mass was being hidden from view, erased from their memory, every kind of irreverent, pseudo-liturgical, and specious criticism was being made against it by their clerical indoctrinators; on the other hand, as the parts of the Replacement were being eased in, various and sundry equally implausible rationalizations were being pumped into their bewildered brains. Those who showed mistrust and suspicion or who raised objections were subjected to withering scorn. Even now, most Catholics are unaware of the immeasurable dissimilarity between the True Mass and its perfidious Plagiarism. Read More »

KATHY writes:

As an RN forced into retirement due to refusing to take the shot, I consider this a good summation of what went down in hospitals. My small town had very little “Covid”, so I did not experience the horrors of the big cities.

It was Trump’s giving blanket liability immunity for all things “Covid” that allowed, actually facilitated, most of this to happen. It allowed non-medical administrators to practice “medicine”, sidelined the medical people, and enabled outright killing of people. This is not spoken of, but without that, these [bureaucrats] would never have risked their necks. And that immunity is why the pharma companies were pushing for getting it on the childhood “vax” schedule: liability immunity is a license to experiment, sterilize, kill. Read More »

“FLIES harass us less by what they do than by reason of their multitude, and so great matters give us less disturbance than a multitude of small affairs. Accept the duties which come upon you quietly, and try to fulfill them methodically, one after another. If you attempt to do everything at once, or with confusion, you will only cumber yourself with your own exertions, and by dint of perplexing your mind you will probably be overwhelmed and accomplish nothing.

“In all your affairs lean solely on God’s Providence, by means of which alone your plans can succeed. Meanwhile, on your part work on in quiet co-operation with Him, and then rest satisfied that if you have trusted entirely to Him you will always obtain such a measure of success as is most profitable for you, whether it seems so or not to your own individual judgment.”

— St. Francis de Sales

TAUGHT by the world around her that housewives are failures in life, it’s no wonder this woman ended up where she is —  divorced, childless and past her prime.

From The New York Post:

Melissa Persling recently wrote an essay for Business Insider titled, “I’m 38 and single, and I recently realized I want a child. I’m terrified I’ve missed my opportunity.” She said after it went viral in November, hate began to pour in from men telling her that she’s lived a selfish life. Persling has a much different account of her story.

When Persling was 22, she married a traditional man and moved to a rural community in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she grew up.

“He wanted a simple life with children and home-cooked meals,” she said. However, Persling – despite coming from a religious Christian background – made it clear to her husband-to-be that she did not want children.

“At that time I felt very strongly I did not want children, that I wasn’t going to be like the traditional housewife. I knew I did want to pursue a career,” she told Fox News Digital in an interview. “And I felt very strongly that that would never change. And I guess I was wrong.”

Millions of women like her have been betrayed by feminism during their young and impressionable years. It takes courage to buck the conditioning and become a housewife or support the ideals of domestic life. At least Persling has the humility to admit she was wrong.

By the way, the media, after glorifying careerism in women every day of the week, seems to take perverse delight in stories like this that frighten and demoralize young women with the specter of childlessness and a lonely old age. Creating fear, depression and anxiety is a big business. The reality is, whatever a woman has experienced, however much she has been betrayed by falsehoods and however many bad decisions she has made, she can still find happiness at any age in life by pursuing truth and virtue. (Persling could make some progress in this direction by dressing with feminine dignity and modesty.)

Read More »

MR. S. writes:

I know it’s not Christmas yet, but ….

This delightful carol is an excellent example of what Dr. Jop Pollman said about high culture music ultimately coming from folk music. I hear Shubert in this piece, and not just because it’s German.