Four Hundred Ninety-Two Years Ago: The Americas Belong to Our Lady

On the way back to the Petits-Fosses, Bernadette revealed how at a certain moment the Apparition seemed different from before. Suddenly loud yells, belched from the Gave, had rent the sacred silent of Massabielle. The 'challenged, crossed, collided with one another, like the clamour of a brawling crowd'. One voice, more furious than the rest, dominated them all and roared out: 'Get out of here! . . . Get out of here!' Bernadette guessed rightly that the threatening curse was by no means addressed merely to her humble self, but was an attack directed beyond her to the Vision of Light standing above the eglantine.

The Vision merely glanced in the direction of the rushing stream. This single look, one of sovereign authority, reduced the invisible mob to silence: the enemy of all good would not drive her from the grotto where she gave her audiences. 'He is in a rage. So much the better!' the saintly Cure d'Ars used to say of the grappin. 'He lets me know himself when big sinners are coming!'

At Massabielle, the future was to prove that the Spirit of evil, in this burst o fury, had admitted his defeat; he was not to extinguish the great radiance that would issue from this dark, peaceful nook, where so many sinners would renounce sin! (Abbe Francois Trochu, Saint Bernadette Soubirous, first published in English by Longmans, Green and Company, England, 1957, and reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers, 1985, p. 64.)

The devil and his minions know that they have been defeated by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Easter victory over sin and death that He won on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and manifested when He arose from the dead on Easter Sunday. The devil knows that Our Lady, the New Eve, has crushed his very head with her heel, robbing him of any real power over men other than to try to entice them to fall into his clutches. The devil, the Master of Lies and the Prince of Darkness, is powerless in the face of humility. Who is more humble than the woman who was filled with grace from the first moment of Immaculate Conception in the womb of her mother? One word from the Our Lady and the devil and his minions must flee. All it takes for us to vanquish the devil and his temptations is to say one Ave Maria with fervor. He must go. Our Lady has manifested herself at various times in the past millennium in places where the devil was very busy fighting the true Faith. She appeared to Saint Dominic de Guzman in southern France in 1214 to give him her Psalter, the Most Holy Rosary, with which to fight the heresy of the Albigenses. The devil had been busy inciting the heretics to murder faithful Catholics and to rob their livestock and to burn their farms to the ground. He was powerless to resist the counteroffensive that was launched by Saint Dominic by means of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary. The Albigenses were defeated. The Catholic Faith arose again in southern France where the heretics had had their stronghold.

The devil and his minions held sway in the Americas prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the first priests to set foot on the shores of the Americas since Saint Brendan the Navigator and Irish monks had done so about a thousand years before (see appendix below). Savagery of monstrous proportions, including human sacrifice and cannibalism and the overt worship of the devil, abounded amongst the native peoples, especially amongst the Aztecs and the Mayans in Mexico. Although these savage pagans began to be eclipsed in the early years of the Spanish conquest and colonization of Latin America, the devils were still exercising their sway upon the superstitious until this date in 1531.

Yes, it was on Tuesday, December 12, 1531 (Julian Calendar), that the very Mother of God herself, Mary Immaculate, left an image of herself on the tilma of Juan Diego as he knelt to venerate her after picking up the Castilian roses in the rocks on Tepeyac Hill that Apostolic Administrator (and later Bishop) Monsignor Juan de Zumarraga wanted as proof of Juan Diego's claim that he had first seen Our Lady as he was walking to Holy Mass on Saturday, December 9, 1531 (Julian Calendar). It was during that first apparition that Our Lady had told Juan Diego that she wanted him to go to Monsignor Juan de Zumarraga and to have a shrine built in her honor in Mexico City

For I am your merciful Mother, to you and to all mankind who love me and trust in me and invoke my help. Therefore, go to the dwelling of the Bishop in Mexico City and say that the Virgin Mary sent you to make known to him her great desire.

Our Lady wanted to effect the conversion of the Americas to the true Faith. The Mother of God is not a sappy sentimentalist who is wont to reassure recidivist sinners that they are all going to go Heaven no matter what they believe and no matter how they act. That is the not the message she imparted to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and to Lucia dos Santos in Fatima, Portugal, is it? No, Our Lady warned these shepherd children to pray Rosaries for poor sinners to save them from the fires of Hell, a vision of which she showed them on July 13, 1917:

Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror. (Lucia dos Santos's description of the Second Secret of Fatima.)

Our Lady then instructed the children of Fatima to pray to save sinners from the fires of Hell:

You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world."

Our Lady wanted the millions upon millions of people steeped in the savagery of the pagan superstitions of the Americas to be converted. They were. A thriving Catholic civilization arose in Latin America in a short period of time. Think of all of the great saints that lived in the first century or so after the apparition of Our Lady to Juan Diego atop Tepeyac Hill: Saint Turibius Alfonso de Mogrovejo, Archbishop of Lima, who died in 1606; Saint Francis Solano, who died in 1610; Saint Rose of Lima, O.P., who died in 1617, the very first native-born saint of the Americas; Blessed Martin de Porres, who died in 1639; Blessed John de Massias, who died in 1645. The case of Juan Diego, a simple peasant of such great humility that he tried to avoid Our Lady after missing her on December 10, 1531, to care for his grievously ill uncle, will be clarified when a true pope is restored to the Throne of Saint Peter. A man of such humility and love, who subjected himself to the assaults of Monsignor de Zumarraga's Spanish guards when he tried to present himself to report the news of Our Lady's apparitions, Juan Diego must certainly have had his Heavenly reward.

Catholic universities were established in Mexico City and Lima within decades of Our Lady's apparition to Juan Diego. Our Lady appeared to Mother Mariana Jesus de Torres in Quito, Ecuador, sixty years after she had appeared to Juan Diego, asking Mother Mariana to offer her life in penances for the sins of the Twentieth Century! An American Christendom arose, something that displeased the devil mightily. Oh, yes, some of the Spanish conquistadors and colonial settlers and their descendants were cruel to the indigenous peoples, treating them beneath contempt and subjecting them to various indignities. The missionaries, however, showed for their great love of the peoples whose very salvation Our Lady had appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 to effect so that their daily lives could live in conformity to the Deposit of Faith that her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, had entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and so that they could be given supernatural helps in the sacraments to help them live in accord with the precepts contained in that Deposit of Faith as they attempted to scale the heights of personal sanctity.

The devil really doesn't like it when souls take the Catholic Faith seriously, no less attempt, despite the frailties of fallen human nature, to cooperate with the graces won for them by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, to root out sin in their lives and to build an entire civilization around the glories of the true Faith. The devil is particularly incensed when Our Immaculate Queen is honored publicly with Rosary processions. He hated the fact that his former captives amongst the peoples of the Aztecs and the Mayans flocked by the millions to pray at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He had to plot some kind of scheme to undermine the Faith in Mexico, knowing that he would have to used armed force to do so, just as he was doing in Europe by means of the Protestant Revolt.

The adversary never had to attack the Faith in the United States of America with the sort of protracted violence that he used in Europe and in Latin America. Why? The answer is quite simple: The Cross of the Divine Redeemer was deeply implanted in the soil of Europe. It had to be uprooted by force. The same became true, as noted above, in quick order in Latin America following the apparition of Our Lady on Tepeyac Hill to Juan Diego. The Faith must be attacked violently where it is the focus of all human activity. Such is not the case in the United States of America, where the true Faith was simply one among many.

Oh, yes, there were anti-Catholic movements and assaults in the Nineteenth Century in the United States of America to be sure. The adversary knew, however, that the allure of pluralism and religious indifferentism and religious liberty and the "rush" of partisan politics and the appeal of material well-being would be such that it would be only a matter of time before many Catholics began to view their Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith. The devil could leave well enough alone in the United States of America, knowing that a Church Militant that was not concerned about resisting his own anti-Incarnational lies would be swallowed up by those errors over the course of time.

The adversary's plan to attack Latin America with the same sort of ferocity that he had used in Europe took three centuries to develop as his evil forces of darkness coalesced behind the errors of the American founding and the French Revolution. The former was indifferent to the Incarnation and believed in the semi-Pelagian heresy that men could more or less save themselves and their societies on their own power without having belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. The latter was based an abject hatred of the Incarnation and the pantheistic deification of man. These related errors of Modernity penetrated throughout Latin America, especially with the founding of Masonic lodges in Our Lady's own country, Mexico, in the 1820s, a phenomenon that had the support, at one level or another, of the United States ambassador to Mexico at the time, Joel Poinsett, as is recounted in a thesis written by one Sarah Frahm:

Although during this early period, it appears that lodges were used primarily for political purposes, it can also be seen that the principles of Masonry, the principles of liberty, progress, the perfectability of man as well as strident anticlericalism, have remained constant no matter what the country or age. These principles were introduced by enlightenment thought and adopted by English Masons. They traveled to Spain through English and French influence, arriving in Mexico through various channels, the earliest being French, later through Mexican deputies arriving home from Spain and finally, through Spanish troops arriving to do battle.
Although lodges existed prior to 1825, it was not until that date that a Mexican Grand Lodge was established with authority to organize and control Mexican lodges. There has been a good deal of discussion about the role of the first American ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett. Some have accused him of engineering the idea in order to gain influence for the United States, wresting control from European interests. Members were principally composed of Spaniards and others who sympathized with Spain, favoring centralism and monarchy.

According to José Fuentes Mares, the National archive in Washington, D.C., contains a letter written by Poinsett that reads as follows:

…with the object of counteracting the fanatical party in Mexico City and, if it is possible, to encourage the spreading of liberal principles among those who are in a position to govern, I aided and encouraged a number of respectable people, men of high standing, to form a Masonic York Grand Lodge… 

Others disagree concerning the centrality of Poinsett’s role and claim that several lodges agreed to introduce the York Rite in Mexico. These lodges hoped to provide a good meeting place to discuss political plans, as well as an alternative for those less inclined to the traditional Spanish way of thinking. All Poinsett did, according to this line of thought, was to enable the York Rite to be founded in Mexico. A founding charter was needed and this he was able to provide.

Poinsett, a well-traveled man, fluent in several languages, was an attractive figure in the early years of the young nation. George Fisher, who was a member of the “Independence” Lodge, one of the first lodges founded, of which Lorenzo de Zavala was Worthy Master, tells how Poinsett held weekly “tertulias” every Thursday at his home. These were very popular with the elite who gathered to dance, converse, and play cards.

Those interested in state affairs often withdrew from the festivities to better discuss matters at hand. He claims that Poinsett himself was not affiliated with any lodge and did not visit them. He only provided the authority from New York. He did, however, “give Masonic instruction to those who called on him as his mansion.” The Cross and the Compass: Compromise and Conflict (this is a very pro-Masonic treatise) 

The twin scourges of liberalism and anti-clericalism, both of which were championed by the Masonic "defenders" of the Alamo, a former Catholic mission, mind you, are exalted by apologists of the "American way" as the means of social progress and civil and religious "freedom." Woodrow Wilson appealed to this sense of liberalism to explain to a Father Kelly, representing the American Catholic bishops, why the government of the United States of America was not going to intervene in Mexico to stop the slaughter of Catholics there by the Masonic revolutionaries:  

Wilson replied [in 1915, to Father Francis Clement Kelley, who was a representative of James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, for whom Wilson had such contempt that he addressed him as Mister Gibbons]: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'

"Having thus instructed his caller in the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries (Robert Leckie American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 274.)

Support for the persecution and execution of thousands upon thousands of Catholics continued under the administrations of Presidents Warren Gamaliel Harding and John Calvin Coolidge from 1921 to 1929. Consider this documentary evidence as to the complicity of the government of the United States of America in the slaughter of the thousands upon thousands of Catholics in Mexico in the 1920s.

Father Leonard Feeney's The Point provides a very good summary of the support given by the United States of America to the Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico as the latter were persecuting Catholics in Our Lady's beloved country:

“My desire is to show myself a mother to you and to your people.”

It was in these words that the Mother of God spoke to a Mexican Indian named Juan Diego in the early winter of the year 1531. As a token of her maternal concern for Mexico, the Blessed Virgin gave to Juan Diego a miraculous picture of herself, and which Mexican Catholics still cherish under the title of Holy Mary Ever-Virgin of Guadalupe.

During the first three hundred years after the Guadalupe apparition, the Catholics of Mexico, under the eye of their Mother in Heaven, lived, as it were, the quiet life of Nazareth. They were intimate with the things of God, and blessed with a share of earthly things. Mexico had become for them the happy proving ground of a boundless life to come, beyond the limitations of their mountains and their coasts. It was an indifferent matter that the foreign people who first brought them the news of their Mother in Heaven had remained as their governors. Mexico, for the Mexicans, was birthplace and contentment.

Until, suddenly, as the nineteenth century began, a cry went echoing, “Mexico for the Mexicans!” Whereupon, birthplace gave way to battleground, contentment to contention, and the Holy Mother of Guadalupe prepared her children for an extended Passiontide, whose “long Good Friday” is still within awful memory, and whose delayed Easter Sunday we must yet pray for.

The Revolution which kicked Catholic Spain out of Mexico, and intended that the Church should go tumbling after, has been classified with those European movements of “liberation” which were sparked by the French Revolutionists of the late 1700s. The relationship is close. Mexico’s Revolt was a colonial cousin, somewhat less lettered, but schooled in the same theories and — most important — tutored by the same masters: those apt and apronned enemies of the Church, the Freemasons.

Woven through the history of Mexico’s Freemasonic era (from 1800 to the present) is a variable pattern of American Masonic intervention. Now by means of big business, now through private individuals, now through the American Government itself, the lodges of the United States have kept a firm hand on Mexican developments. Of U. S. Government interference in Mexico, for example, the Jesuit weekly, America, made this briefest of summaries in its issue of June 25, 1927.

“Always, an American hates to say it, there was the sinister shadow of the Power of the north, meddling always, officially and unofficially … Joel Poinsett, American Minister, introduced the York Rite of Masonry, and kept the Mexicans fighting over it for a dozen years. Later, President Polk made an agreement with Santa Ana to fight a fake war — which we call the ‘Mexican War’ — with our forces, in return for some millions of dollars. After our Civil War, General Sheridan allowed Juarez to ‘steal’ American army stores, and conquer his enemies with them. In our time, Bryan and Wilson, by as dark a piece of double-dealing and treachery as history can show, put Carranza into power — and we are reaping the fruits of their policy today.”

The foregoing, an American, hates to say it, is a lenient summary. The names and incidents could be expanded to a thick volume. The impression would remain unchanged: never did the forces of American Freemasonry act so purposefully as when they espoused the anti-Catholic cause in Mexico.

Because the project was already one hundred years old by 1917, and the Faith was still flourishing in Mexico, the Masonic crusade in that year took on a fresh impetus. With no less an adviser than Lenin himself, the Carranza crowd (the creatures of Woodrow Wilson) drafted a new constitution. Detailed oppression of the Catholic Church became the supreme law of the land. The 1917 constitution forbade the Church to own any property, to conduct schools, to preach to the unbaptized natives, to train additional priests. It confirmed the prohibition against religious garb for priests and nuns, and further provided that the government of each Mexican state should decide how many priests it thought it needed; these would be “licensed,” and all others expelled.

After the shooting of Carranza in 1920, the American lodges took up the cause of General Obregon, gave him a $10,000,000 arms credit, and sat back contentedly while he tried to blow up the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1921, and dared to expel, bodily, the Apostolic Delegate in 1923.

Obregon was followed by General Calles, and Calles it was who decided upon a universal and rigid enforcement of the 1917 constitution. To take care of offenders, a new penal code was enacted. The Church would be brought into Masonic line, or else! The date set for the beginning of the new offensive was July 31, 1926 — dramatically enough, the feast day of Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order which had so long labored in Spanish America, and which had still one great glory to give to the Mexican Church. (Father Leonard Feeney, The Point – December 1957.)

It should be pointed out yet again that the American Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, gave public support to Plutarco Elias Calles in the immediate aftermath of the martyrdom of Father Miguel Augustin Pro, who cried out Viva Cristo Rey! as the bullets were fired at him. The folksy American humorist, columnist and actor named Will Rogers, a Freemason, of course, did so as well:

Strong hands, quick to become doubled fists, a hard jaw, and a heavy scowl have sometimes been called the typical externals of President Plutarco Elias Calles. The fact that he once publicly alluded to "the grunts of the Pope" caused some to fear that his mind might resemble his fists. Last week such mistaken impressions were given the lie when Senor Calles proved himself not only supple of body but adept at mellow geniality. Scene: the $375,000 private train of the President of Mexico which puffed all week, from one hospitable ranch in northern Mexican states to another. On board were the new U. S. Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Whitney Morrow (onetime Morgan partner), and tart-witted cowboy-clown Will Rogers. They, and other guests of the President, were privileged to see him in playful mood. At Pabellon Ranch, State of Aguascalientes, Senor Calles seated his guests around a bull ring. He had a surprise for them, he said. Quietly picking up a matador's red cape, he entered the arena.

At a flirt of the red, a small but purposeful bull charged, horns down, to gore the President of Mexico. Swirling the cape through a classic "pass," he pivoted and dodged—his chunky body suddenly achieving grace. While guests Morrow and Rogers gripped their seats, President Calles brought off three more hazardous "passes." Then, having shown his guests the dexterous and dangerous phase of bull-baiting, he strode from the ring. No bull was killed, or even pinked, lest U. S. gorges rise.

Came luncheon, provided on the scale of a local fiesta. Peasants and the local gentry mingled. President Calles, beamingly in his element, led hearty singing of mellow Spanish songs. What did the U. S. guests think?

Mr. Morrow, rising to a toast, said something in English which was apparently not understood. Mr. Rogers then quoted Mr. Morrow in Spanish as having said: "... how could the United States ever enter into armed conflict with people like these? ..." Amid shouted cheers President Calles sprang up and clasped the Ambassador's hand. Later Mr. Morrow said to U. S. correspondents: "All this is very interesting." (President at Play - TIME.)

The same afternoon, Calles demanded that [General Roberto] Cruz make an example of the Pros. In a battle worthy of wits worthy of Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin, Cruz tried to called Calles into allowing some legal cover. But Calles told him "to hell with" legalities and reminded him that he had his orders and only had to obey. Cruz appeared before reporters and explained that evidence had been accumulated showing all the parties guilty in the attempted assassination of [Alvaro Obregon]. Apparently, Calles had ordered that these executions were to have a high profile. So journalists and photographers from all over Mexico and the whole world were invited.

Even so the game was not entirely over. the morning of the execution, an enterprising lawyer, Luis MacGregor, had convinced a quite brave judge, Julio Lopez Masse, to sign an amparo, a stay of execution. It is doubtful that Cruz and Calles would have paid any attention to this paper obstacle. But they did not have to. MacGregor was locked outside of the proceedings at the police station, and the executions--quite odd for such widely advertised events--were carried out a half-hour earlier than scheduled. A last-minute request from the Argentine delegation to Mexico earned Roberto, the youngest of the [Pro] brothers, a reprieve.

When Miguel's body and the body his brother Humberto arrived at the family house, old Miguel, Sr., ordered no one to mourn, for there was nothing sorrowful in such heroic deaths. Don Miguel opened the door later that night and found a half-dozen government agents outside. They came in, knelt, and prayed. A steady stream of workers, women, and professional people arrived. The Rosary was recited; other prayers were said. When the bodies were ready for transport to the Dolores Cemetery, there was an enormous crowd in the streets, even though President Calles had forbidden public demonstrations in support of the martyred brothers. But the crowd was much larger than the police could do anything about, somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand, according to some accounts larger than any ever seen in Mexico, at a funeral. Around five hundred cars took part in the funeral cortege. As the caskets came out, someone shouted, "Make way for the martyrs!" The crowd fell silent. But as the coffins went through the streets "Viva Cristo Rey!" was shouted everywhere.

The day after Fr. Pro's execution, the American Ambassador Dwight Morrow (Charles Lindbergh's future father-in-law) and the humorist Will Rogers, who had become famous as a common-sense mocker of U.S. government foolishness, took a trip with President Calles through Mexico on the presidential train. Calles had deliberately set up the trip as propaganda intended to convince Mexican Catholics that the United States would not help them. Morrow is reported to have known this, but believed he could use the influence thus gained over Calles to turn his government in a different direction. In the next few years, the government killed 250,000 to 300,000 people, many Catholic, even after a compromise had been worked out. (Robert Royal, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 2000, pp. 39-40. See also  Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part one, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part two, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part three, Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part four and Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part five.)

The devil knows that he has lost. He knows that he and his minions will be shut up in Hell for eternity at the end of time. He knows that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Sacrifice of Himself to the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross has vanquished his power, that his very head has been crushed by the heel of the Mother of the Paschal Lamb Who taketh away the sins of the world. The adversary does, however, want to wreak as much havoc as he can before the Last Day, seeking to take souls into Hell with him for all eternity as he plunges their nations into the pit of barbarism, turning souls and nations against the true God Who sustains them and means for them to given Him honor and glory through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother.

The United States of America and its utterly false notions of civil liberty--divorced as it is from the liberating truth of the Holy Cross and a due submission in all that pertains to the good of souls to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church for its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication-- has been a special instrument of election, shall we say, in taking souls out of the Church in Catholic countries and in substituting the "glories" of freedom of speech and freedom of press and freedom of religion as the means by which men are to "order" themselves according to the Judeo-Masonic ethos.

The diabolical absurdity of the Americanist approach to public policy and personal life is such that thirty-degree Freemason President Theodore Roosevelt was aghast at the rabid anticlericalism of Freemasonry in The Philippines following the American "liberation" of this Catholic land from Spain as booty gained the victory of the United States of America in the Spanish-American War.

The solution?

In order to "moderate" the violent tendencies of Freemasonry in The Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted to see the sort of "tolerant" brand of Freemasonry that he practiced introduced in the new American colony, decided to bring Protestant "missionaries" into this thoroughly Catholic country, thereby providing yet another means by which souls could be snatched away from the Catholic Faith and thus be robbed of the means of their salvation while brainwashed into believing falsehoods and acting in accord with such lies. Religious indifferentism, religious liberty and the ever-popular Protestant and Judeo-Masonic principle of the separation of Church and State were introduced into this Catholic land. It is no accident that the secondary Patroness of The Philippines is the same Patroness and Empress of the Americas, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared to Juan Diego in the Octave of her Immaculate Conception. Oh, how the devil hates Our Lady of Guadalupe and what she means for the conversion of souls to the true Faith.

Individual souls are either in states of Sanctifying Grace or they are not. There is no middle ground. Souls that are not in states of Sanctifying Grace are, at least to varying degrees, in the grip of the devil, having their intellects blinded and their wills weakened and their hearts hardened. While such souls are capable of cooperating with Actual Graces to fulfill the duties of their states-in-life and to even give the exterior appearance of natural probity and moral virtue, as Pope Leo XIII noted in his Apostolical Letter, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, to James Cardinal Gibbons, their view of the world is flawed as they do not know God truly as He has revealed Himself through His true Church (or have lost such a knowledge) and thus cannot love Him and serve Him as He wants as members of His Catholic Church who are in states of Sanctifying Grace. The whole of social order depends upon the state of individual souls being freed from the grip of the devil, which he maintains on those in states of Original Sin and on those in states of unrepentant Mortal Sin.

Our Lady's apparition to Juan Diego four hundred ninety-two years ago effected great miracles of grace in the Americas, both North and South. Substantial parts of what now constitute the United States of America and Canada were thoroughly Catholic.

The first true "thanksgiving day" was celebrated by Spanish Catholics in Saint Augustine, Florida, on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It included a Mass of Thanksgiving for their safe arrival in Florida, which had no bad billboards at the time, thank you, and a meal following the Mass, which was offered by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales. The Americas were Catholic and they belonged to Our Lady long before those horrible Catholic-hating, Mass-hating Calvinists, who had particular contempt for the Mother of God, thus placing themselves in full communion with the devil as people to be pitied but never once to extolled for any "contributions" to "American" life whatsoever, arrived here to chart their course in a land where they believed, albeit quite falsely, there had been no "corruption" caused by Catholicism.

The Americas belong to Our Lady, and Our Lady stands at the foot of her Divine Son's Holy Cross each time an alter Christus offers that Sacrifice of Calvary in an unbloody manner. The Americas will always belong to Our Lady,

The first Mass on the mainland of the Americas had been offered in Honduras in 1502. The first Mass in New Mexico was offered in  Mission San Gabriel in 1598. The first Mass offered by French missionaries in New France was in 1615 by Father Denis Jamay, O.F.M., and it was in Quebec that the first Mass in honor of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus was offered and where the cult of the Holy Family, begun under the pioneering Bishop Francois de Montmorency Laval. The first Mass in Texas was on October 12, 1680, 188 years after Christopher Columbus had landed on the Island of San Salvador in the Bahamas Islands. The North American Martyrs, each of whom was so tenderly devoted to the Mother of God, offered their lives between 1642 and 1649 to Catholicize their part of the Americas.

As Father Frederick Faber noted, "Where there is no Mass, there is no Christianity." Protestants do not have the Mass. They do not have Christianity, although some of them may be Christians by virtue of having been baptized validly. "Where there is no Mass, there is no Christianity." The Mother of God wants all people to have access to the Mass, to love Holy Mass, to hear it daily, to spend time on their knees n prayer before her Divine Son's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament after Mass, to bring others to Mass on a daily basis.

The devil does not want this, which is why he has attacked the Mass by means of the Protestant Revolt and Judeo-Masonry and the potpourri of anti-Incarnational and anticlerical political ideologies that have arisen in the past five hundred years. Social order is dependent upon the Mass, which is why there has been such disorder in the world in the years since the promulgation of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination, something that claims it is the Mass but is in fact an abomination in the sight of God that has denied so many millions of well-meaning Catholics, myself among them for many years, the true sacraments. It is no wonder that the vestiges of Catholicism that were able to be maintained in the Americas for so long despite hostile cultural conditions and despite how fully many Catholics immersed themselves in that culture have been almost totally eclipsed as a result of the Novus Ordo.

Look at the savagery of the modern Americas, where a breed of barbarism and crudity exists that puts the Aztecs and Mayans of yesteryear to shame. Four thousand preborn babies are killed by means of surgical abortion. Thousands more are killed every day by means of chemical abortifacients. More and more random killings are taking place in public places. The capitalism of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry has created a monstrous world of economics and finance that rewards dishonesty, undermines legitimate national sovereignty, traffics in usury and keeps whole categories of people in conditions of near-servitude for almost their entire lives.

What is not robbed by the merchants of capital is taken by the apparatchiks of state, eager to control how much disposable income citizens can keep for themselves and how they can use their own private land for just purposes in order to aggrandize their own power in a manner that would make Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin blanche. Due process of law rights that were enshrined in the Magna Carta in Catholic England in the Thirteenth Century are scoffed at as "law enforcement" agencies hide crimes in order to advance the careers of upper level captains, inspectors and chiefs and as the guilty go free and as the innocent are frequently subjected to unjust arrest and prosecution for simply adhering to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

The open savagery of the modern Americas is visible in the bread and circuses of professional and collegiate and even scholastic sports, where the drive to "win" becomes so encompassing that athletes will break just laws in order to gain a competitive "advantage" by cheating. This savagery is demonstrated by spectators, many of whom dress immodestly, yell profanities, and some of whom even congregate in parts of arenas to taunt women to do things opposed to the Virtue of Modesty, as is happening, press reports indicated some years ago, at home games of the New York Jets football team at the now-demolished Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. How many of these "gentlemen" were Catholic? Can anyone say that such behavior would have characterized young Catholic men seventy years go?

The Americas belong to Our Lady.

We must do our part to make sure that they are reclaimed for her and that the seeds be planted for the restoration of Christendom in the Americas. There was once a Christendom in the Americas. It flourished. Souls prospered. This angered the devil, who attacked the Cross of the Divine Redeemer with fury in Latin America and who made sure that it would not be planted in the United States of America and Canada (after the Battle of Montreal in 1763) as a result of the Protestant Revolt and the so-called age of the Enlightenment. As noted before, the devil is powerless. He has schemes. He can implement them all he wants. We have the power to thwart them if only we rely upon the woman who made possible our salvation by her perfect Fiat to the will of the Heavenly Father at the Annunciation, the woman who appeared to Juan Diego with the unborn Baby Jesus in the tabernacle of her Virginal and Immaculate Womb, Mary Immaculate, Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Our Lady told Juan Diego the following on December 9, 1531:

“Know and understand well, you the most humble of my son, that I am the ever virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God for whom we live, of the Creator of all things, Lord of heaven and the earth. I wish that a temple be erected here quickly, so I may therein exhibit and give all my love, compassion, help, and protection, because I am your merciful mother, to you, and to all the inhabitants on this land and all the rest who love me, invoke and confide in me; listen there to their lamentations, and remedy all their miseries, afflictions and sorrows. And to accomplish what my clemency pretends, go to the palace of the bishop of Mexico, and you will say to him that I manifest my great desire, that here on this plain a temple be built to me; you will accurately relate all you have seen and admired, and what you have heard. Be assured that I will be most grateful and will reward you, because I will make you happy and worthy of recompense for the effort and fatigue in what you will obtain of what I have entrusted. Behold, you have heard my mandate, my humble son; go and put forth all your effort.” (Our Lady Of Guadalupe | Relation of the Apparitions.)

Our Lady told the privileged seer the following on this day, December 12, in the year 1531:“Hear me and understand well, my son the least, that nothing should frighten or grieve you. Let not your heart be disturbed. Do not fear that sickness, nor any other sickness or anguish. Am I not here, who is your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not happily within my fold? What else do you wish? Do not grieve nor be disturbed by anything. Do not be afflicted by the illness of your uncle, who will not die now of it. be assured that he is now cured." (Our Lady Of Guadalupe | Relation of the Apparitions.)

Can we not take comfort in these words, being inspired by them to trust Our Immaculate Mother and Queen as never before, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit? Can we not offer her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart all of our sufferings and sorrows and humiliations and penances and mortifications to given by her to the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for the good of souls?

The state of the world depends upon the state of our souls. As we continue to celebrate the Octave of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception and prepare for the birthday of her Divine Son, may we avail ourselves more frequently of the Sacrament of Penance and receive Our Lord in Holy Communion more fervently at Masses offered by true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its falase shepherds, recognizing that our next reception of Holy Communion might be our last reception of Holy Communion.

In other words, reclaiming the Americas for Our Lady depends upon us.

On Gaudete Sunday

Writing in The Liturgical Year, Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., explained that Gaudete Sunday, which we celebrate today, Sunday, December 12, 2021, the Third Sunday of Advent and the Commemoration of the Octave of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, reminds us of the joy that must be ours because we belong to the Catholic Church, she who can make no terms with error: 

O holy Roman Church, city of our strength! behold us thy children assembled within thy walls, around the tomb of the fisherman, the prince of the apostles, whose sacred relics protect thee from their earthy shrine, and whose unchanging teaching enlightens thee from heaven. Yet, O city of strength: it is by the Saviour, who is coming that thou art strong. He is they wall, for it is He that encircles, with His tender mercy all thy children; He is thy bulwark, for it is by Him that thou art invincible, and that all the powers of hell are powerless to prevail against thee. Open wide thy gates, that all nations may enter thee; for thou art mistress of holiness and the guardian of truth. May the old error, which sets itself against the faith soon disappear, and peace reign over the whole fold! O holy Roman Church ! thou hast for ever put they trust in the Lord; and He, faithful to His promise, has humbled before thee the haughty ones that defied thee, and the proud cities that were against thee. Where now are the Caesars, who boasted that they had drowned thee in thy own blood ? where the emperors, who would ravish the inviolate virginity of thy faith ? where the heretics, who during the past centuries of thine existence, have assailed every article of thy teaching, and denied what they listed ? where the ungrateful princes, who would fain make a slave of thee, who hadst made them what they were ? where the empire of Mahomet, which has so many times raged against thee, for that thou, the defenceless State, didst arrest the pride of its conquests ? where the more modern sophists in whose philosophy thou was sent down as a system that had been tried, and was a failure, and is not a ruin ? and those kings who are acting the tyrant over thee, and those people that will have liberty independently and at the risk of truth, where they will be another hundred years? Gone and forgotten as the noisy anger of a torrent; whilst thou, O holy Church of Rome, built on the immovable rock, wilt be as calm as young, as unwrinkled as ever. Thy path through the ages of this world’s duration, will be right as that of the just man; thou wilt ever be the same unchanging Church, as thou hast been during the eighteen years past, whist everything else under the sun has been but change. Whence is thy stability, but form Him who is very truth and justice? Glory be to Him in thee! Each year, He visits thee; each year, He brings thee new gifts, wherewith thou mayest go happily through thy pilgrimage; and to the end of time, He will visit thee, and renew thee, not only with the power of that look wherewith Peter was renewed, but by filling thee with Himself, as He did the every glorious Virgin, who is the object of thy most tender love, after that which thou bearest to Jesus Himself. We pray with thee, O Church, our mother, and here is our prayer: ‘Coe, Lord Jesus! Thy name and Thy remembrance are the desire of our souls; they have desired Thee in the night, yea, and early in the morning have they watched for Thee.’ (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Volume I, Advent, pp. 201-202.)

Although Dom Prosper Gueranger did not foresee the fact that even worse sophists and heretics would arise within one hundred years of his death on January 30, 1875, his description of the glories of Catholic Church can be applied to the counterfeit church of concilarism in no manner whatsoever as the latter entity is an embodiment of sophistry and heresy that has made terms with the ancient enemies of Christ the King and all other false religions and false philosophies and social currents. No one, no matter how prominent he may be nor how wealthy he may have become as a result of enterprise and hard work, can claim that the Catholic Church is institutionally corrupt as her Divine Constitution guarantees her a virginal purity as well as the infallible protection of God the Holy Ghost in her Faith, Worship and Morals.

It is far past time for believing Catholics to understand and then to accept the fact that the problem facing us at this time is not a "heretical pope" but a false church that has been headed by heretics from its inception. All that has happened recently is that the heretics have become bolder and more open about their agenda after a steady dose of five decades of fables that have been designed to convince baptized Catholics to hate Catholic truth as opposed to God's "mercy" and to embrace naturalism as the only legitimate foundation of social order. 

We need Our Lady's help, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, in these troubling times as without the graces she sends us we will be prone to view the world through the eyes of naturalism and not through the supernatural eyes of the Catholic Faith.

May we take solace in these words of Dom Prosper Gueranger about Gaudete Sunday:

There hath stood One in the midst of you, whom you know not, says Saint John the Baptist to them that were sent by the Jews. So that our Lord may be near. He may even have come, and yet by some be not known! This Lamb of God is the holy Precursor’s consolation; he considers it a singular privilege to be but the voice which cries out to them to prepare the way of the Redeemer. In this, St. John a type of the Church, and of all such as seek Jesus. St. John  is full of joy because the Savior has come, but the men around him are as indifferent as though they neither expected nor wanted a Savior. This is the third week of Advent; and are all hearts excited by the great tidings told them by the Church, that the Messias is near at hand? They that love Him not as their Savior, do they fear Him as their Judge? Are the crooked ways being made straight, and the hills being brought low? Are Christians seriously engaged in removing from their hearts the love or riches and the love of sensual pleasures? There is no time to lose: The Lord is nigh!" If these lines should come under the eye of any of those Christians who are in this state of sinful indifference, we would conjure them to shake off  their lethargy, an render themselves worthy of the visit of the divine Infant; such a visit will bring them the greatest consolation here, and give them confidence hereafter, when our Lord will come to judge all mankind. Send thy grace, O Jesus, still more plentifully into their hearts; ‘compel them to go in,’ and permit not that it be said of the children of the Church, as St. John said of the Synagogue: There standeth in the midst of you One, whom you know not. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year, Volume I, Advent, pp. 205-206.)

We need Our Lady's help to make straight the path of her Divine Son into our own souls so that, liberated from the muck and mire of competing sets of naturalists, we may focus on the joy that should be shared by everyone in the world about the fact that He has become Incarnate for us and our salvation and deigned to be born in a lowly estate on Christmas Day. 

This is all the more reason to take seriously this week's Ember Days in order that we might make reparation for our sins by offering up our prayers, fasting and sacrifices to the Throne of the Most Blessed Trinity as the consecrated slaves of Our Lord Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of  Mary and by praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Viva La Virgen de Guadalupe!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

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.