The Delusions of Carnal Men Who Try to Remake the World in Their Own Image

There is really little more to write about the mess that President Donald John Trump has created by doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than what I did two days ago in Benedictus Qui Venit in Nomine Domini, Hosanna in Excelsis, part twenty-nine.

As I must make a concerted effort to write less than I have in the past because of the damage that the writing has done to my left wrist (which has a “Terry-Thomas gap” of greater than 6 millimeters, something that I am told by physicians indicates the wrist is very unstable), I am going to make this commentary as short as possible.

1. To reiterate what I have written before: No casus belli existed to justify the Americans’ “Operation Epic Fury” the Israelis’ “Operation Rising Lion.”
2. The claim made both by the President and United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that the United States struck Iran military before Iran could strike “us” is ludicrous as no serious scholar of international or military affairs can provide any evidence that an Iranian strike upon the United States of America was even possible, no less imminent.
3. Despite the Israeli assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khameini and about forty-five to forty-eight other top Iranian leaders on Saturday, February 28, 2026, another Khameini, Mojtab, the late “supreme leader’s” eldest son, has been named by the “revolutionary guard” as the new “supreme leader. So, one Ayatollah Khameini goes, another Ayatollah Khameini comes in, well, at least until the Americans and Israelis find out how where he is and when best to target him, that is.
4. The Iranian military leadership has decided to make the conflict as painful as possible for the United States of America in general and for President Donald John in particular:

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s first priority is to survive. To do that, its leaders will want to drive up the cost of the war for President Trump — in terms of American casualties, energy costs and inflation — to try to persuade him to declare victory and go home.

Faced with the overwhelming firepower of the United States and Israel, diplomats and analysts say, Iran is working to enlarge the battlefield from its own territory to the broader region. The goals are to damage oil and gas infrastructure in neighboring countries, shut the Strait of Hormuz to shipping and curtail air traffic — all to disrupt the economies of the Persian Gulf and drive up global energy prices and inflation. Iran will also be trying to exhaust the number of expensive missile interceptors held by its enemies.

“The war has become a test of wills and stamina,” said Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “Iran is facing qualitatively superior militaries, so the strategy is to test their will by expanding the battlefield, complicating the war and increasing the danger to the world economy.”

The strategy is not complicated.

Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the Brussels-based think tank International Crisis Group, said, “The Iranians want to spread the pain as much as they can, regardless of the cost to themselves and burned relations with their neighbors, hoping to create enough opposition to the war to compel President Trump to back off.”

“For the Islamic Republic,” he added, “survival is a victory, even if it is a Pyrrhic one.”

The plan is so-called asymmetric endurance, accepting initial damage to preserve the ability to escalate when Israeli, American and Persian Gulf air defenses are stretched thin. The thinking behind that strategy is that Mr. Trump, facing midterm elections and a skeptical MAGA movement, will choose to curtail the war before American casualties, and inflation, go much higher.

Already, U.S. and even some European bases and embassies have been attacked, six American troops have been killed and three planes shot down. Hezbollah has entered the war, and the Persian Gulf countries are anxious and running out of expensive interceptors used against cheap Iranian drones. Saudi and Qatari energy installations have been struck. Oil and gas prices have shot up and shipping has practically stopped through the Strait of Hormuz, through which at least a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas normally travels.

Ali Larijani, secretary of the Iranian National Security Council, claimed on social media on Monday that Iran, “unlike the United States, has prepared itself for a long war,” including plans for gradual escalation and expansion of the battlefield.

Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst, called the conflict “a race for and against time.” Israel, the United States and their allies are trying to destroy missiles, launchers and communication nodes as quickly as possible, he said, so that more advanced Iranian missiles cannot easily be launched when interceptors are in short supply.

Even the heavily armed Israel, toward the end of the 12-day war against Iran in June, had to limit its use of interceptors, allowing some Iranian missiles to land if they were not deemed to be close to key sites or cities.

If Iran’s strategy is clear, so are the risks. And those are already coming into view.

On Monday, Mr. Trump vowed to continue the war for at least another month and did not rule out the use of American ground troops. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “The hardest hits are yet to come,” and the Pentagon said it would send more soldiers and fighter jets to the war.

And there are suggestions, analysts say, that the United States is encouraging Iranian minorities, like the Kurds and the Baluchis, to rise up against the government, bombing police and army positions in those territories, hoping to create at least the start of a popular uprising.

Although Iran has attacked Persian Gulf countries, including hotels and airports, Tehran has so far failed to drive a wedge between them and Washington.

The nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Saudi Arabia, issued a statement on Sunday underlining “their unified stance in confronting these attacks, stressing that the security of G.C.C. member states is indivisible” and reserving the right to respond in self-defense.

While calling for a cessation of hostilities, the members have not criticized the U.S.-Israel war against Iran and are likely to allow American forces to have overflight rights, which they denied at the start of the war.

In the past, the Persian Gulf nations have acted as mediators, urging Washington to pursue negotiations with Tehran instead of war. But, under attack from Iran, those countries are now more likely to allow American forces greater operational access to their airspace and territory that would help the United States conduct operations more efficiently, said Hasan T. Alhasan, a Middle East expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London research organization.

Britain, France and Germany, which have criticized Iran but did not initially support this war, have also now indicated that they could act to protect their own troops and interests in the Persian Gulf, Mr. Alhasan told the BBC, “because everyone realizes that the collective global interest here is at stake.”

But having tried to wean itself off Russian gas, Europe is more dependent than ever on energy from the Persian Gulf, while half of India’s oil travels through the Strait of Hormuz. So pressures on Mr. Trump to shorten the war will grow, even if Israel is anxious to force a conclusion to end the threat of the Islamic Republic.

Mr. Trump often talks about wanting to do a deal with Iran and has recently brought up the example of Venezuela, where he was content to capture President Nicolás Maduro but leave his government largely in place. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Mr. Trump told The New York Times on Sunday.

It may be that Iran, too, will replace the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed on the first day of the war, with a less ideological government that could be willing to negotiate a deal on its nuclear program to preserve the system.

As ever, it is hard to know Mr. Trump’s mind, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research group. “Trump already took out Khamenei, which no other president dared to do,” she said. “He has an offramp if he wants, even if Israel sees a momentous window to take out this regime.”

Matthew Kroenig, a former U.S. defense official under Republican presidents who studies Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, agreed. Mr. Trump “is skeptical of long, drawn-out military campaigns” and could be satisfied with a number of outcomes, including the Venezuela model, he said.

“They’ve already achieved several of their objectives,” added Mr. Kroenig, who is vice president of the Atlantic Council in Washington. Ayatollah Khamenei and much of the leadership of a major American adversary are dead, and Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and other military capabilities are badly degraded, Mr. Kroenig noted.

“So I think they could go home almost at any time and declare this a success,” he said. Right now, he added, “I think the strategy is more about what they want to avoid than about exactly what they want to achieve.” (Iran’s Strategy: Expand the War, Increase the Cost, Outlast Trump. Also see Iran uses low-cost UAVs to drive up US defense costs, drone CEO says.)

5. Netanyahu’s government has taken advantage of the conflict to resume its occasional forays into Lebanon in the effort to crush the Iranian-back Hezbollah terrorist organization once and for all—another Israeli “final solution” of the sort it tried for years against the Palestine Liberation Organization and then, more recently, against Hamas, thus subjecting the suffering people of Beirut and also of southern Lebanon to more Israeli bombing and displacement. The Zionists’ contempt for the lives and property of non-Jews is arrogantly epic.
6. Iranian drones are hitting American targets throughout the Persian Gulf States and even Saudi Arabia itself, emboldening some of those states to consider joining the fight against Iran if only for defensive purposes.
7. Although one Trump administration official after another says that the current “military operation” is not Iraq, each slightly different objectives to explain the military, including one offered by Secretary of State Rubio that the Untied States of America had to act preemptively before Israeli forces did:

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he told reporters. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

‘Stunning admission’

The shifting messaging on Tuesday was unlikely to allay the condemnation from Trump critics and supporters alike, including several influential figures within Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) base.

Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told Al Jazeera that “what he’s basically publicly acknowledging would be that the United States was entrapped by the Israelis”.

“The notion that the Israelis were going to do it anyway, and so we had to do it as well – if that’s the case, then there’s a really serious conversation to be had here in the United States about US and Israeli interests, and where those are aligned and where they diverge,” Grieco said.  (Rubio claim of Israeli role in US Iran attack reverberates, despite denial.)

President Donald John Trump himself, after giving multiple and shifting explanations concerning his decision to authorize the American military to attack Iran, has even said:

President Donald Trump said he authorized the strike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before Tehran could act on alleged plots against him, telling ABC: "I got him before he got me. They tried twice … I got him first."

The president’s blunt remark appears to link Khamenei’s killing to previously reported Iranian-backed assassination plots targeting Trump during the 2024 election cycle — plots that U.S. prosecutors tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). (Trump says Iran 'tried twice' to kill him but he took out Khamenei instead.)

The bottom line is obvious, of course: once again, the United States of America is doing the bidding of the Zionist State of Israel, and the man who said on the night of his election victory on Tuesday, November 5, 2024:

We want great education, want a strong and powerful military. And ideally, we don't have to use it. We had no wars four years. We had no wars except we defeated ISIS. We defeated ISIS in record time, but we had no wars. They said he will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars. But this is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. Together, we're going to unlock America's glorious destiny. We're going to achieve the most incredible future for our people. (Trump Victory Speech Transcript.)

No, whatever Israel wants, Israel gets, and Israel might get a defanged Iran, but the moral costs of a “victory” will boomerang when a United States of America, weakened not only military by its expenditure of munitions and the needless loss of American lives but by its continued slaughter of innocent preborn lives and the celebration of sodomy and other evils at home, will go the way all empires by rotting from within to make it easy prey for predators such as Red China.

8. Although only claim made by a non-commissioned officer, an American commander speaking to a group of non-commissioned officers said the following concerning the war’s justification:

Non-commissioned officers (NCO) who attended a briefing Monday told the MRFF that a combat-unit commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”

The commander also argued that Trump “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth" and that the Iran war is part of God's plan, the NCO claimed. (US commanders tell troops Trump 'anointed by Jesus' to start Iran war sparking hundreds of complaints.)

Mind you, Trump himself is not making this claim, but the fact that at least one military commander is saying so demonstrates the reach of the evil that is “Christian Zionism, which is just another vainglorious pursuit of carnal men, that is, men who live for this world and not in light of eternity or within the shadow of the Holy Cross:

Perhaps the following explanation of the vainglorious pursuits of carnal men as found in Father Charles Arminjon’s The End of This World and the Mysteries of Future Life will help to shed some light on what I mean to convey:

This judgment is rightly called universal because it will be exercised over all members of the human race, because it will cover every crime, every misdemeanor, and because it will be definitive and irrevocable.

In the first place, the last judgment will be exercised over all the members of the human race.

The men of every nation, every tribe, and every tongue will appear at it. There will be no more distinction of wealth, birth, or rank among them. Those whose names were Alexander, Caesar, and Diocletian will be jumbled together with herdsmen who, at this moment, are grazing their flocks on unknown, deserted shores, where the ashes of these masters of the world lie scattered. Men will then be ruled by concerns other than those of curiosity and empty admiration. Far more serious spectacles will hold their gaze and attention; the figures of the world will have passed away, and the victories of great captains, the works conceived by genius, the enterprises and great discoveries will be deemed mere shams and child's play.

Just as in the theater, says St. John Chrysostom, when an actor goes off the stage, it is not because of the part he has played that people admire him; they praise neither the fact that he has imitated the personality of a king, nor the fact that the has acted a lackey or a beggar: rather, they praise his skill, and they applaud only the perfection with which he has played his part. So at the last judgment, a man will not be honored because he was a king, an eloquent orator, a minister, and a great statesman. All these honors and distinctions, which the world holds in such high esteem, will be deemed of no merit and of no value. Men will be praised solely for their virtues and good works: Opera enim millrun seguungtur illos.

Secondly, this judgment is called universal, because it will cover every crime and offense. Only then will human history begin. In the clarity of the light of God, all the crimes, public and secret, that have been committed in every latitude and in every age, will be seen clearly and in detail. The whole life of each human being will be laid bare. No circumstance will be omitted: no action, word, or desire will remain unknown. We shall be reminded of the different periods we have gone through; the lustful man will have his disorderly living and libertine speeches set out before him; the ambitious man, his devious, Machiavellian ways.

The judgment will unravel and bring out all the strands and the duplicity of those intrigues, so cleverly hatched; it will set out in their true light all those base repudiation of principles, those craven acts of complicity, that men invested with public authority have sought to justify, whether by invoking the specious reasons of state, or by covering them up with the mask of piety or disinterestedness. The Lord, says St. Bernard, will reveal all those abuses people concealed from themselves, all those unknown dissipations, those planned crimes where the only thing lacking was the actual commission; those pretended virtues and those forgotten, secret sins, blotted out from the memory, will appear suddenly, like enemies darting out form an ambush: Prodient ex improvisio et quasi ex insidiis.

Without doubt there are men so hardened in evil that the thought of this terrible manifestation has little effect upon them. Being familiar with crime, they treat it as a subject of amusement and boasting. They probably boast in assessing the judgment with the same insolence, to defy by their cynical and arrogant attitude the majesty of God and the conscience of [mankind]. Vain hope! sin will no longer be viewed from the opinion of carnal men, ready to excuse the most violent outbursts because they do not harm any neighbor, either in his goods or in his life. The foulness and disorder of sin will be revealed in the ineffable clarity of the light of God. Sin, says St. Thomas, will be judged as God Himself judges it: Tunc confusio, respicie aestimationem Dei quae secundum veritatem est de peccato.

Three main classes of men will draw attention to themselves. The first of these will be the sons of justice and light, whose merits and good works will be extolled, and given public praise and approval by the perspicacious and infallible Judge, whose testimony can admit of no error or contradiction.

In the second class will be the sons of Voltaire, the leaders of free-thought and revolution who, at the present time, are hatching dark and sacrilegious plots against Christ and His Church. They will be terror-stricken, and they will tremble with unspeakable horror, when they see appear in His glory and omnipotence Him whom they had wished to crush, whom they had stigmatized by calling Him the enemy, fool, and the infamous one. They will utter a final scream of rage and malediction, crying out like Julian the Apostate: Thou hast conquered, Galilean!

Finally, the third category of men who will be given special attention at the judgment will be composed of the sons of Pilate, the worshipers of the golden calf and the chameleons of wealth and power. Clouds without water, as St. Jude calls them, drifting along with every opinion and doctrine, with no other religious or political compass than that of their ambition, always ready to ride rough-shod over their conscience and their principles; speculating on the blood of souls, for lack of gold, and delivering up Christ like the Roman money-lender, in order to purchase the honors and goodwill of the master of the moment.

This hideous, repellent type recurs continuously, with the same characteristics, at every period of crisis and social unrest. St. John, in his Gospel, has popularized this archetype of lying and cowardice in a figure of speech forever popular and living, in which all our Pilates in legislation and government, who sell the just man for the sake of procuring favors and lucrative honors, will be eternally recognized. Such men as these will learn at the judgment that it is not expedient to serve two masters. They will curse the straw Caesars to which they rendered that which they refused to render to God, and will exclaim: Ergo erravimus. We have erred then." (Father Charles Arminjon, The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, translated by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2008, pp. 101-104.)

No one in public life in the world today, including Donald John Trump, understand that the following words quoted just above applies to each and every one of them—and us—without exception:

The judgment will unravel and bring out all the strands and the duplicity of those intrigues, so cleverly hatched; it will set out in their true light all those base repudiation of principles, those craven acts of complicity, that men invested with public authority have sought to justify, whether by invoking the specious reasons of state, or by covering them up with the mask of piety or disinterestedness. (Father Charles Arminjon, The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, translated by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2008, pp. 101-104.)

May every Rosary we pray, especially during this holy season of Lent, help us to die to self so that we, vivified by the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour’s Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces, may conquer the infernal enemy of our own salvation and thus be an instrument, no matter how insignificant in human terms, of restoring a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter and restoring the Social Reign of Christ the King and Our Lady, she who is Our Immaculate Queen.

On the Feast of Saint Casimir

Today, Wednesday, March 4, 2026, is the semi-double feast of Saint Casimir, a Prince of Poland who cared not for the luxuries of regal life but preferred to life his short life in the odor of sanctity characterized by austere penances and mortifications that are unknown to anyone, including Catholics, in public life today no matter whether they belong to the organized crime family of the naturalist “left” or of the naturalist “right.” Saint Casimir sought to please God, not men, and he considered himself a great sinner even though all around him knew that he was ever scaling the heights of personal sanctity.

Dom Prosper Gueranger described our Saint as follows:

It is from a Court that we are to be taught today the most heroic virtues. Casimir is a Prince; he is surrounded by all the allurements of youth and luxury; and yet he passes through the snares of the world with as much safety and prudence as though he were an Angel in human form. His example shows us what we may do. The world has not smiled on us as it did on Casimir; but how much we have loved it! If we have gone so far as to make it our idol, we must now break what we have adored, and give our service to the Sovereign Lord, who alone has a right to it. When we read the Lives of the Saints, and find that persons who were in the ordinary walk of life, practiced extraordinary virtues, we are inclined to think that they were not exposed to great temptations, or that the misfortunes they met in the world made them give themselves up unreservedly to God’s service. Such interpretations of the actions of the Saints are shallow and false, for they ignore this great fact—that there is no condition or state, however humble, in which man has not to combat against the evil inclinations of his heart, and that corrupt nature alone is strong enough to lead him to sin. But in such a Saint as Casimir, we have no difficulty in recognizing that all his Christian energy was from God, and not from any natural source; and we rightly conclude that we, who have the same good God, may well hope that this Season of spiritual regeneration will change and better us. Casimir preferred death to sin.

But is not every Christian bound to be thus minded every hour of the day? And yet such is the infatuation produced by the pleasures or advantages of this present life that we, every day, see men plunging themselves into sin, which is the death of the soul; and this, not for the sake of saving the life of the body, but for a vile and transient gratification, which is oftentimes contrary to their temporal interests. What stronger proof could there be than this, of the sad effects produced in us by Original Sin? The examples of the Saints are given us as a light to lead us in the right path: let us follow it, and we shall be saved. Besides, we have a powerful aid in their merits and intercession: let us take courage at the thought that these Friends of God have a most affectionate compassion for us their Brethren, who are surrounded by so many and great dangers.

The Church, in her Liturgy, thus describes to us the virtues of our young Prince:

Casimir was the son of Casimir, king of Poland, and of Elizabeth of Austria. He was put, when quite a boy, under the care of the best masters, who trained him to piety and learning. He brought his body into subjection by wearing a hair-shirt, and by frequent fasting. He could not endure the soft bed which is given to kings, but lay on the hard floor, and during the night, he used privately to steal from his room, and go to the Church, where, prostrate before the door, he besought God to have mercy on him. The Passion of Christ was his favorite subject of meditation; and when he assisted at Mass, his mind was so fixed on God that he seemed to be in one long ecstasy.

Great was his zeal for the propagation of the Catholic faith, and the suppression of the Russian schism. Her persuaded the king, his father, to pass a law, forbidding the schismatics to build new churches, or to repair those which had fallen to ruin. Such was his charity for the poor and all sufferers, that he went under the name of the Father and Defender of the Poor. During his last illness, he nobly evinced his love of purity, which virtue he had maintained unsullied during his whole life. He was suffering a cruel malady; but he courageously preferred to die, rather than suffer the loss, whereby his physicians advised him to purchase his cure—the loss of his priceless treasure.

Being made perfect in a short space of time, and rich in virtue and merit, after having foretold the day of his death, he breathed forth his soul into the hands of his God, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, surrounded by Priests and Religious. His body was taken to Vilna, and was honored by many miracles. A young girl was raised to life at his shrine; the blind recovered their sight, the lame the use of their limbs, and the sick their health. He appeared to a small army of Lithuanians, who were unexpectedly attacked by a large force, and gave them the victory over the enemy. Leo the Tenth was induced by all these miracles to insert his name among the Saints. (Matins, The Feast of Saint Casimir, as founded in The Liturgical Year.)

Enjoy thy well-earned rest in heaven, O Casimir! Neither the world with all its riches, nor the court with all its pleasures, could distract thy heart from the eternal joys it alone coveted and loved. Thy life was short, but full of merit. The remembrance of heaven made thee forget the earth. God yielded to the impatience of thy desire to be with him, and took thee speedily from among men. Thy life, though most innocent, was one of penance, for knowing the evil tendencies of corrupt nature, thou hadst a dread of a life of comfort. When shall we be made to understand that penance is a debt we owe to God—a debt of expiation for the sins we have committed against him? Thou didst prefer death to sin; get us a fear of sin, that greatest of all the evils that can befall us, because it is an evil which strikes at God himself. Pray for us during this holy Season, which is granted us that we may do penance. The Christian world is honoring thee today; repay its homage by thy blessing. Poland, thy fatherland, is in mourning; comfort her. She was once the bulwark of the Church, and kept back the invasion of schism, heresy, and infidelity; and now she is crushed by tyrants who seek to rob her of her faith—pray for her that she may be freed from her oppressors and, by regaining her ancient zeal for the faith, be preserved from the apostasy into which her enemies are seeking to drive her. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year.)

We hath not the likes of Saint Casimir today.

However, we can pray to our Saint for the day in which a true pope will be restored to the Throne of Saint Peter and thus fulfill Our Lady’s Fatima Message for the proper, collegial consecration of Russia, whose conversion was very important to Saint Casimir, back to the true Church, to her Immaculate Heart and thus for the cessation of the spread of the errors that have helped to produce the twin nightmares of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Pray for the conversion of all men and all nations to the Catholic Faith, she alone who provide us with the means of a true world peace—the peace that comes from souls abiding in a state of Sanctifying Grace that overflows the peace of the Prince of Peace into the world in union with the peace that will come from the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us. 

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Casimir, pray for us.

Pope Saint Lucius I, pray for us.