"I TELL you that victory consists in conquering self. That is the greatest enemy." --- St. Paul of the Cross  

"I AM at the sea-shore; a drop of water is suspended from my finger. I ask this water: Poor drop, where would you wish to be? It replies: In the sea. And what do I in answer to this appeal? I shake my finger and let the poor little drop fall into the sea. Now, I ask you, is it not true that this drop of water is in the sea? Certainly it is there; but go and seek it, now that it is lost in the ocean, its centre. If it had a tongue, what would it say? Deduce the consequence and apply the parable to yourself. Lose sight of the heavens, the earth, the sea and its rivers, and all created things, and permit this soul that God has given you to lose herself in this infinitely great and good God Who is her first cause." --- St. Paul of the Cross, Flowers of the Passion, p. 61  

[Reposted]

FROM Dom Prosper Guéranger’s “Quasimodo Sunday,” The Liturgical Year:

“To return to our Apostle — Thomas had heard Magdalene, and he despised her testimony; he had heard Peter, and he objected to his authority; he had heard the rest of his fellow-Apostles and the two disciples of Emmaus, and no, he would not give up his own opinion. How many there are among us, who are like him in this! We never think of doubting what is told us by a truthful and disinterested witness, unless the subject touch upon the supernatural; and then, we have a hundred difficulties. It is one of the sad consequences left in us by original sin. Like Thomas, we would see the thing ourselves: that alone is enough to keep us from the fullness of the truth. We comfort ourselves with the reflection that, after all, we are Disciples of Christ; as did Thomas, who kept in union with his brother-Apostles, only he shared not their happiness. He saw their happiness, but he considered it to be a weakness of mind, and was glad that he was free from it!

“How like this is to our modern rationalistic Catholic! He believes, but it is because his reason almost forces him to believe; he believes with his mind, rather than from his heart. His faith is a scientific deduction, and not a generous longing after God and supernatural truth. (more…)

THE DAY last year when “Pope” Francis joined with Buddhist monks in prayer was not particularly unusual. It was yet another public and triumphant avowal of the ecumenism — just a fancy word for good, ol’ polytheism — that typified his reign and those of his Vatican II predecessors.

But still it was shocking. The Great Betrayal of the Modernists, as I wrote at the time, displayed its characteristic audacity. To the Modernist, it is mean and “rigid” not to embrace the gods of other religions. All gods are good.

We have descended into heathenism all because Catholics were afraid of being called mean, such was their vanity, such was their immersion in the things of this world at the expense of their spiritual values.

They have callously abandoned the followers of other religions to a wilderness, a jungle with no clear path to union with God.

Modernism, thou art cruel! With sweet smiles and twisted rhetoric, thou kill! Truth is a rock, and thou art a murderer of souls. (more…)

THE system of beliefs embraced by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), often referred to as Modernism, rejects Catholicism and is not the same religion.

For a sound list and explanation of some of the heresies included in the council documents and promulgated by leaders of the new religion, I recommend the article “The Principle Heresies and other Errors of Vatican II” by John Daly and John Lane. (more…)

“THE truth is that every secret society is framed and adapted to make men the enemies of God and of his Church, and to subvert faith; and there is not one, no matter on what pretext it may be founded, which does not fall under the management of a supreme Directory governing all the secret societies on earth. (more…)

BEN Harnwell searches for grief today in St. Peter's Square, but finds none. There were no nuns crying, but that's because there are no nuns left.  

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.”

Source

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…)