SINCE many people are up in arms about the blatant apostasy of Francis, it’s a good time to remember that his predecessor was, though more subtle, just as dangerous and also head of the counterfeit church of Vatican II. See more here.

[This is not a blanket endorsement of Novus Ordo Watch, which promotes the traditionalist error of independent chapels.]

PART TWO of a recent interview with Gerry Matatics — who comes to all the right conclusions about the state of the papacy and what the ordinary Catholic should do about it — can be found here.

Part One is here.

His explanations are clear and easy to grasp.

“THE wildest rage took possession of them, their hearts were torn with fury against St. Stephen. He failed not to perceive it, and knew well that they would sacrifice him to their rage. Hence, he turned his eyes to heaven, to receive thence strength for the approaching struggle.”

Readings and history of St. Stephen’s Day can be found here and here.

FROM “Keeping the Spirit of Christmas,” G.K. Chesterton, St. Stephen’s Day, 1925:

“Now I notice the same contradiction about Christmas—and, indeed, about Christian traditions generally. It is apparent in the people who tell us, in the papers and elsewhere, that they have emancipated themselves from dogmas, and propose to live by the spirit of Christianity. To which I reply: “All right—go ahead,” or words to that effect. But then I always find myself confronted with this extraordinary fact. They start out to live by the spirit of Christianity, and proceed to fling themselves with frenzy into preventing poor people from getting any beer, preventing oppressed nations from defending themselves against tyrants (because it might lead to war), tearing backward children away from their heart-broken parents and locking them up in some sort of materialistic madhouse, and so on. And then they are quite surprised when I tell them that I think they have far less of the spirit of Christianity than they have the letter of it, of the actual words and terminology of its dogmas. Read More »

      FROM New Heaven, New War
–           —- by Robert Southwell, S.J. (set to Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols)

This little babe, so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake.
Though he himself for cold do shake,
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field;
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitchèd in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall,
The crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes,
Of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound,
The angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to the tents that he hath pight;
Within his crib is surest ward,
This little babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

The Nativity with the Adoration of the Shepherds, Giorgio Vasari

I WISH you joy and happiness this Christmas, dear readers. May the miracle of Christ’s birth fill you with wonder. May it grant you many graces and confidence.

From a beautiful Christmas greeting I received in my e-mail this morning from Patrick Henry:

As we celebrate the birthday of Jesus, the Eternal Truth, I pray that He will obtain for you every grace you need to seek the truth, to find the truth, to understand the truth, to know the truth, to accept the truth, to live your life according to the truth, to love the truth, and to never again reject or impugn any known truth.

I extend my sincere prayers for all of you. Merry Christmas!

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.