This is the day that our sins transcended time and played their significant parts in putting God to death. The greatest crime in the history of the world was committed this day, Deicide, and we were among the guilty parties putting God on trial and then subjecting Him to horrible and painful humiliations and scourgings before we nailed Him to the wood of the Holy Cross, upon which He paid back to His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father the debt of our sins.

Yes, there is no greater crime than Deicide. There is also no greater act of love in all of human history as Love Incarnate took upon Himself the guilt of our sins though He was guilty of nothing. It was out of love for His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father's Holy Will and His matchless love for us that He, Who had instituted the Priesthood and the Eucharist last evening at the Last Supper, that He subjected Himself to the hands of us sinful men, even going so far as to make excuses for us, His executioners, as He hung on the gibbet of the Holy Cross.

This great act of sacrificial, redemptive love of the God-Man, Who had become Incarnate in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost, is re-presented in an unbloody manner on altars of Sacrifice by true bishops and true priests every day of the year except for today, Good Friday. Our focus today is on mourning for our sins and expressing our gratitude that we have been redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as we ask Our Lady to help us to grow in a greater fervor for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as we grow more and more detached from even our Venial Sins and come to despise them as much as we despise any Mortal Sins that, God forbid, we may have committed.

This is a day of solemnity and sobriety, a day of total withdrawal from the world and its madness. We spend our time in church today as we keep Our Lord company at the Altar of Repose prior to noon and as we participate in the Mass of the Presanctified. Our sins put God to death. We helped to murder God in the very Flesh.

How does God repay us ungrateful and frequently lukewarm sinners? He gives us the true Church, born out of the Blood and Water that flowed forth from His wounded side when It was pierced by Saint Longinus's lance, making possible our regeneration in the Baptismal font and in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, making it possible for us therefore to receive His very Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Most Blessed Sacrament in Holy Communion. And he give us His Blessed Mother, she who is our Co-Redemptrix, our Mediatrix and our Advocate, to be our Blessed Mother as He entrusts her to Saint John the Evangelist, whose fidelity to Our Lord on this day is meant to foreshadow our own fidelity by means of assisting at daily Mass frequently and of persevering until the point of our dying breaths in states of Sanctifying Grace by remaining a as close to Our Lady as he was.

Will we repay Our Divine Redeemer Who was nailed to the Cross this day with a true effort to amend our lives? Will we repay Our Divine Redeemer Who shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood this day with a greater effort to take seriously our consecration to His Most Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary? Will we seek to live at all times in light of First and Last Things as we bear our own crosses with love and joy and gratitude?

Our Lady stands ready to help us to bring us to Calvary every day. Sure, we must make the same kind of effort as Saint Helena made to find the site of the True Cross in the Fourth Century as the Mass has indeed been taken away by spiritual robber barons. However, Our Lady does indeed stand ready to help us to make whatever sacrifices we need to make to assist exclusively at Masses offered by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds who cater to the ancient enemies of the Faith and who promote one falsehood after another.

Will we let Our Lady lead us to these true offerings of Holy Mass so that we can be ready to die at any time and thus to enjoy an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Heaven?

May we give thanks and praise to Our Lord through His Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart this day for the wondrous mystery of His love that has made possible our eternal salvation.

We have arrived at the time of the Paschal Triduum of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Today is Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Paschal Triduum of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

This is the day on which Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ instituted the Holy Priesthood and the Eucharist at the Last Supper for our sanctification and salvation. Although Our Lord would enter deep into His Passion immediately after the completion of the Last Supper as He suffered His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, He wonderfully gave us the Holy Priesthood of the New Dispensation as He instituted the New and Eternal Covenant that He would ratify by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross tomorrow, Good Friday. We must express our gratitude to Him at all times for giving us the Priesthood so that we can have access on a daily basis to His own Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in Holy Communion, made present for us on altars of Sacrifice by true bishops and true priests in this time of apostasy and betrayal.

This is a day to keep watch with Our Lord in His Real Presence at the Altar of Repose, remembering most importantly to beg Our Lady to make more and more voluntary sacrifices to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son through her own Immaculate Heart for our sins and those of the whole world.

Finally, although I will have a new Good Friday reflection tomorrow to accompany an older one, I am not going to post any commentary on the many fast breaking events in the world until Easter Monday.

A most blessed Paschal Triduum to you all.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Although I will have a brief original article published tomorrow, Spy Wednesday, Sharon has taken the time to provide you, the readers of this website, with devotional prayers in honor of Our Lady of Sorrows. The prayers are taken from the Servite Manual, BEHOLD THY MOTHER: A Collection of Devotions Chiefly in Honor of OUR LADY OF SORROWS. that she purchased in the late-1990s at Queen of Angels Church in Newhall, California. This wonderful prayer book, which is laden with prayers and devotions, is very hard to find now as it is out-of-print (a friend told us recently that a copy was sold on eBay for over three hundred dollars).

Please do say three Hail Marys for Sharon for being inspired to volunteer to undertake this work, remembering to include Lucy, who typed a few of the prayers, as well!

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Tomorrow, Tuesday of Holy Week, March 31, 2015, marks the tenth anniversary of the court-ordered execution of Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo, a brain-damaged human being who was no closer to death than anyone of us, by the cruel process of starvation and dehydration. As one who wrote extensively on the killing of this innocent human being and who spoke at a rally directly across from the hospice where her death sentence would be carried out six days later, it is saddening--so very saddening--to have reviewed the facts of Mrs. Schiavo's case in this retrospective that was written five years ago now. It is also very sad to have that Catholics have to be reminded of the simple moral truth that no one may undertake any action that has as its only direct end the death of an innocent human being. The removal of the provision of food and water from a living human being can result in only one possible end, the death of that person, something that can never be willed for one who is innocent. Why is it so difficult to recognize that the two of the Corporal Works of Mercy are to "feed the hungry" and to "give drink to the thirsty"?

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Eternal rest grant unto the soul of Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all of the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

This is Palm Sunday. We have now entered into the most solemn week of the year as we withdraw more and more from the world and its false allurements to unite ourselves as never before with the events of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Passion and Death prior to experiencing the glory of His Resurrection following the Mass on Holy Saturday, April 4, 2015, and on Easter Sunday, thus beginning a marvelous celebration of the Octave of Easter and the Easter season.

We need Our Lady’s help to keep and to intensify our Lenten penances this week. May our reliance upon the Most Sorrowful Mysteries of her Holy Rosary aid us in understanding what our sins did to her Divine Son and to her and how grateful we must be for being the unmerited beneficiaries of the Mercy won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross and for being given from that Cross so great and wonderful and perfect a mother as she, Our Blessed Mother, is to us by Our Divine Redeemer Himself.

From Eden to Palm Sunday is a substantial revision of a reflection that I wrote for the printed pages of Christ or Chaos in 1997. Given the vastness of the subject, this reflection is pitifully, woefully inadequate. The revised article is really a condensed version of what is gone into in greater detail in the Living in the Shadow of the Cross lecture program. About half of the lecture program deals with material condensed in the current article. Obviously, Holy Week is not time to watch this lecture program! However, it is there for those who are interested at some point during the months that follow.

To greet Christ the King this Palm Sunday and every day of our lives, we must not let anything get in the way of letting Him treat us according to the tender mercies of His Most Sacred Heart, remembering that nothing anyone does to us, says about us or causes us to suffer is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His fearful Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that caused those Swords of Sorrow to be pierced through and through the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother.

Our fervor during this week of weeks must be genuine, and we must beg Our Lady, especially by meditating upon the Sorrowful Mysteries of her Most Holy Rosary, to help us persist in this fervor moment by moment, day by day, week in and week out, month after month, year after year until the time when we meet Christ the King, Our Crucified and Risen Saviour, at the moment of our Particular Judgment.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Many of the conciliar revolutionaries have smashed statues of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and Our Lady and Saint Joseph and other saints with an iconoclastic abandon. The great saint we commemorate today on the Feast of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Passiontide, Saint John Damascene, fought the iconoclasts in his day. And while many, although far from all, of our Catholic churches are now in the hands of the conciliar iconoclasts, we can festoon our homes with images of Our Lord and Our Lady and Saint Joseph and other saints as we use these images to remind us of we are united to the saints represented in these images by means of the Communion of Saints and that we hope to share Heaven with them for all eternity in the glory of the Beatific Vision.

Today is, of course, our daughter Lucy’s thirteenth birthday and the seventh anniversary of her First Holy Communion. The years have just flown by. I look at our daughter and see a tall girl a who stands over five feet tall now entering her teen years. We are very blessed to have our dear daughter, who is being taught by a mother possessed of a pure love of the Holy Catholic Faith and a deep, tender devotion to the Mother of God. I give thanks every day and night for the blessings represented by my family. Deo gratias! Please do pray for Lucy Mary Therese Norma Droleskey on her birthday today.

Thank you.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint John Damascene, pray for us.

Unfathomable. Just unfathomable

Only a handful of genuine mystics and truly gifted spiritual masters have been able to comprehend the unfathomable mysteries of grief that overwhelmed the fairest creature of our race, Our Lady, as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were plunged through and through her Immaculate Heart.

We sin so casually, so thoughtlessly, so repeatedly, rarely giving a moment’s worth of a meditation to how our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer unspeakable horrors during His Passion and Death, horrors that penetrated the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother as she, conceived without any stain of Original or Actual Sin, suffered in a perfect communion of Hearts with Him.

It cannot be that way with us from this day forward. We are on the cusp of Holy Week, ending now the first week in Passiontide, Passion Week. We must enter deep into the mysteries of our salvation, which was wrought for us by the perfect obedience of the Word made Flesh in Our Lady’s Virginal and Immaculate Womb to the Will of His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father. We must quit our sins once and for all, recognizing how they caused the God-Man and His Most Blessed Mother to suffer, how they wound our own souls, which have been purchased by the shedding of every single drop of the Divine Redeemer’s Most Precious Blood, and how they have brought great sorrow into the Heart out of which was formed Our Redeemer’s Most Sacred Heart. No more sin. No more joking about sin. No more dismissiveness about the gravity of sin. We must repent and amend our lives as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Our Lady brought forth her Divine Son painlessly and miraculously. She brought us forth in great pain as the adopted children of the Living God as she stood so valiantly by the foot of the Cross on Good Friday. She stands by the foot of her Divine Son’s Most Holy Cross in every true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by a true bishop or a true priest. We must stand by her each day at Holy Mass as we make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world with every beat of our hearts, making sure as well to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Saint John Damscene, pray for us.