Jorge Mario Bergoglio Blasphemes Saint Alphonsus de Liguori

It is very difficult to return back to the muck of a world that it is the victim of its own iniquities and to the muck that characterizes the entirety of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Indeed, it is beyond hard, it is penitential to do so. However, even though it the Octave of Easter, penance is always in season, and it is still important to do what can be done to call to rise to defense of the Holy Faith and her saints and doctors when they are blasphemed, and their life’s work misrepresented by the lords of conciliarism.

Although so many people are focused on the headlines of the day, one of the purposes of this site is to remind those who read these commentaries that there is little in the false world of a false religious sect, the counterfeit church of conciliarism, that is any way new or different from what has gone before since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958, the Feast of Saint John Leonard and the Commemoration of Saints Dionysius, Eleutherius, and Rusticus.

That is, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who reduces almost everything about the Holy Faith to a level of naturalism as he talks about “God” in almost exclusively pantheistic and other blasphemous terms as he projects onto Him attributes such as “surprises” that are simply the conjurings of his own fertile Modernist imagination, recently tried to make Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri, Holy Mother Church’s Doctor of Moral Theology, into a “witness” on behalf of his own moral relativism.

Such “coerced perjury,” however, is of the essence of the conciliar effort to paint everything about the “past” in light of its own false precepts. This effort to misrepresent the Holy Faith is so pervasive throughout the conciliar structures that even “conservative” priests/presbyters, having succumbed to the rationalism that is infused in even the “best” of conciliar seminaries, are quick to dismiss the miracles attributed to the saints Holy Mother Church has raised to her altars and have honored with liturgical feasts of their own and some within their ranks even go so far as to say that “we know nothing about” Our Lady’s parents, Saints Joachim and Anne, including their very names. The misrepresentation of the past is so widespread within conciliar structures that we were told in 2003 by a then eighteen-year-old freshman at Christendom College that one of her professors said they must view the Council of Trent and the [First] Vatican Council in light of the documents of the “Second’ Vatican Council and the “magisterium” of the conciliar “popes.” There is no need to explain the absurdity of such a proposition that flies in the face of the simple fact that Catholics are to view modern recent developments in light of the teaching of Holy Mother Church’s tradition as elucidated by her true pope and true general councils.

Two Examples of Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s Efforts to Coerce Perjury from the Lives and the Work of Holy Mother Church’s Saints and Doctors

Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s rationalist predecessor in the conciliar seat of apostasy, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the supposed “guardian of orthodoxy” and “restorer of tradition” who has made warfare upon the entire patrimony of the Holy Faith by means of his dogmatically condemned and philosophically absurd “hermeneutic of continuity” (which is nothing other than Modernism’s “dogmatic evolutionism,” which itself is a derivative of both Hegelianism and Darwinism), constantly attempted to portray various saints and doctors as veritable “witnesses” in behalf of conciliarism, including his effort in 2008 to turn Saint Paul the Apostle as “defense witness,” if you will, on behalf of Martin Luther.

This is a very abridged part of what I wrote at the time, including a an excerpt from Ratzinger/Benedict’s general audiences of November 19, 2008, and November 26, 2008:

It is important to review each of these points once again as a preface for dissecting the Modernism of the New Theology contained in Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's efforts to coerce perjured testimony from Saint Paul the Apostle so as to make him a "witness" in behalf of conciliarism, especially as regards "false ecumenism" and a rejection of dogmatic definitions that might make it more possible to forge "unity" between the counterfeit church of conciliarism and Protestants and the Orthodox, for whom Scholasticism is, at least for the most part, a poisonous filter that has "obscured" the "true" meaning of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church.

To wit, there is no need for a Catholic to "revisit" the Doctrine of Justification as it was defined solemnly at the Council of Trent, which convened under and was guided by the infallible presence of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, so as to make it appear that there are major areas of convergence between the beliefs of the wretched heretic named Martin Luther and the very dogmatic council that condemned those beliefs. Bishop Donald A. Sanborn has offered his Critical Analysis of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification to demonstrate the degree to which the "joint declaration" between the conciliarists and the Lutherans, a "declaration" that was brokered by the direct intervention of the prefect of the conciliar Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the time, Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger, defected from the authentic doctrine of the Catholic Church. His Excellency's critical analysis should be read over and over again in order to grasp the extent to which the conciliarists will go in disparaging the dogmatic definitions of the Church (even as they, the conciliarists, protest that they are doing no such thing!).

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is using his false "pontificate" to give "official" voice to his own understanding of the Faith that is drawn from the poisoned well of the New Theology, which has such contempt for Scholasticism and thus for theological and dogmatic precision. One can see this quite clearly in the "general audience" address he delivered last Wednesday, November 19, 2008, in the Vatican:

That is why Luther's expression "sola fide" is true if faith is not opposed to charity, to love. Faith is to look at Christ, to entrust oneself to Christ, to be united to Christ, to be conformed to Christ, to his life. And the form, the life of Christ, is love; hence, to believe is to be conformed to Christ and to enter into his love. That is why, in the Letter to the Galatians, St. Paul develops above all his doctrine on justification; he speaks of faith that operates through charity (cf. Galatians 5:14).

Paul knows that in the double love of God and neighbor the whole law is fulfilled. Thus the whole law is observed in communion with Christ, in faith that creates charity. We are just when we enter into communion with Christ, who is love. We will see the same in next Sunday's Gospel for the solemnity of Christ the King. It is the Gospel of the judge whose sole criterion is love. What I ask is only this: Did you visit me when I was sick? When I was in prison? Did you feed me when I was hungry, clothe me when I was naked? So justice is decided in charity. Thus, at the end of this Gospel, we can say: love alone, charity alone. However, there is no contradiction between this Gospel and St. Paul. It is the same vision, the one according to which communion with Christ, faith in Christ, creates charity. And charity is the realization of communion with Christ. Thus, being united to him we are just, and in no other way.

At the end, we can only pray to the Lord so that he will help us to believe. To really believe; belief thus becomes life, unity with Christ, the transformation of our life. And thus, transformed by his love, by love of God and neighbor, we can really be just in the eyes of God. (On St. Paul and Justification.) 

The entire premise of Ratzinger/Benedict's "general audience" address is based on the implication that Saint Paul the Apostle has a teaching on the Doctrine of Justification that is different than that defined by the Council of Trent. There is not one reference anywhere in Ratzinger/Benedict's remarks, quoted in full above, to the following dogmatic definition of the Doctrine of Justification made by the Council of Trent, whose infallible decrees must bind the consciences of every person on the face of this earth, Catholic and non-Catholic:

Having, therefore, been thus justified, and made the friends and domestics of God, advancing from virtue to virtue, they are renewed, as the Apostle says, day by day; that is, by mortifying the members of their own flesh, and by presenting them as instruments of justice unto sanctification, they, through the observance of the commandments of God and of the Church, faith co-operating with good works, increase in that justice which they have received through the grace of Christ, and are still further justified, as it is written; He that is just, let him be justified still; and again, Be not afraid to be justified even to death; and also, Do you see that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. And this increase of justification holy Church begs, when she prays, "Give unto us, O Lord, increase of faith, hope, and charity." Session VI, Council of Trent, January 13, 1547.)       

Canon IX:  If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.

Canon XXIX: If any one saith, that he, who has fallen after baptism, is not able by the grace of God to rise again; or, that he is able indeed to recover the justice which he has lost, but by faith alone without the sacrament of Penance, contrary to what the holy Roman and universal Church--instructed by Christ and his Apostles--has hitherto professed, observed, and taught; let him be anathema. (Session VI, Council of Trent, January 13, 1547.)

This means that the conciliar “popes” have been anathematized on this one point of doctrine alone, which is one of the reasons that the lavender antipope and friend of all things Marxist, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI, who was absolutely no slouch in distorting the lives and work of Church Fathers, Doctors and numerous Saints, lifted all anathemas that had been imposed prior to that time and also, on July 17, 1967, suppressed Pope Saint Pius X’s Oath Against Modernism and replaced it with a “Profession of [the conciliar] Faith.”

Additionally, the Council of Trent taught dogmatically that Grace may be increased by our penance, prayers, and good works.

Canon XXIV: If any one saith, that the justice received is not preserved and also increased before God through good works; but that the said works are merely the fruits and signs of Justification obtained, but not a cause of the increase thereof; let him be anathema.

Canon XXVI: If any one saith, that the just ought not, for their good works done in God, to expect and hope for an eternal recompense from God, through His mercy and the merit of Jesus Christ, if so be that they persevere to the end in well doing and in keeping the divine commandments; let him be anathema.

Canon XXXII: If any one saith, that the good works of one that is justified are in such manner the gifts of God, as that they are not also the good merits of him that is justified; or, that the said justified, by the good works which he performs through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ, whose living member he is, does not truly merit increase of grace, eternal life, and the attainment of that eternal life,--if so be, however, that he depart in grace,---and also an increase of glory; let him be anathema.

Canon XXIII: If any one saith, that, by the Catholic doctrine touching Justification, by this holy Synod inset forth in this present decree, the glory of God, or the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ are in any way derogated from, and not rather that the truth of our faith, and the glory in fine of God and of Jesus Christ are rendered (more) illustrious; let him be anathema.  (Session VI, Council of Trent, January 13, 1547.)                         

Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI also used his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection to attempt to turn Saint Bernard of Clairvaux into a “witness” on behalf of the “faith of Israel” as still being valid. Here is a brief reminder before moving on to the topic at hand, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s misrepresentation of the life and the work of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori:

Ratzinger/Benedict can, of course, produce no Patristic sources to support his contention that the "beginnings" of a "correct understanding" of what he thinks is the Catholic Church's relationship to the "faith of Israel" as there is no such evidence whatsoever. Indeed, the Church Fathers wrote quite the contrary of what Ratzinger/Benedict contends, which is why he seeks to reinvent, distort and misrepresent their teaching on a variety of subjects in order to present them as "witnesses" on behalf of conciliarism. Saint John Chrysostom, for example, taught us in no uncertain terms that the synagogue is a place of the devil, not of God.

Upon whose writing does he rely to justify his contention that are at "the beginnings" of a "correct understanding" of the Catholic Church's relationship to the "faith of Israel"? Hildegard Brem, a Cistercian abbess who hails from (where else?) Germany. It was Hildegard Brem's commentary on a letter sent by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to Pope Eugene III that Ratzinger/Benedict used to justify his own position that what he thinks is the Catholic Church must not concern herself with the conversion of the Jews:

Here I should like to recall the advice given by Bernard of Clairvaux to his pupil Pope Eugene III on this matter. He reminds the Pope that his duty of care extends not only to Christians but: "You also have obligations toward unbelievers, whether Jew or Greek, or Gentile" (De Consideratione III/1, 2). Then he immediately corrects himself and observers more accurately: "Granted, with regard to the Jews, time excuses you, for them a determined point in time has been fixed, which cannot be anticipated. The full number of Gentiles must come in first. But what do you say about these Gentiles? . . . Why did it seem good to the Fathers . . . to suspend the word of faith, while unbelief was obdurate? Why do we supposed the word that runs swiftly stopped short?" (De Consideratione, III/1, 3.)

Hildegard Brem comments on this passage as follows: "In the light of Romans 11:25, the Church must not concern herself with the conversion of the Jews, since she must wait for the time fixed for this by God, 'until the full number of Gentles comes in' (Rom. 11:25). On the contrary, the Jews themselves are a living homily to which the Church must draw attention, since they call to mind the Lord's suffering (cf. Ep 363 . . ." (quoted in Samtliche Werke, ed. Winkler, I, p. 834.) (Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, pp 44-45.) 

Ratzinger/Benedict has misrepresented the letter of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to Pope Eugene III, implying that the great Saint Bernard believed that there was no necessity to seek the conversion of the Jews when this was not the case at all. Moreover, the false "pontiff" implies by use of highly selective quotes that Saint Bernard did not believe that those who adhered to the Talmud were in any danger of losing their souls for all eternity. In truth, Saint Bernard was merely urging Pope Eugene III to evangelize those of the Gentiles who had not heard and thus had not yet rejected the Gospel as perfidiously as had the Jews, who belonged to a false religion that had the power to save no one. Although Saint Bernard of Clairvaux spoke about "Israel," he did not refer to the "faith of Israel" as he knew that the Jewish faith had been abolished and superseded by the New and Eternal Covenant that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had instituted on Holy Thursday and ratified by the shedding of every single drip of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday.

Here, courtesy of a Latinist, is a translation of paragraphs two through four of De Consideratione, III that were cited selectively by Ratzinger/Benedict and Hildegard Brem (the translator's interpolations are found in brackets):

2. “What?” you say, “You do not deny that I am in charge and you forbid me to dominate?” Clearly so, as if one who rules in solicitous concern were not ruling well. Isn’t the estate a great concern to the superintendant and young boy, even though a lord, subject to his teacher? Nonetheless, the former is not the owner of the estate and the latter is not the master of his lord. Thus may you be in charge so that you may provide, counsel, manage, and serve. May you rule so that you avail {others}; may you rule as a faithful and prudent servant, whom the Lord has established over his household. To what end? That you give food to them in season, that is to say, that you distribute, not command. Do this, and as a man do not aspire to dominate men, lest all injustice dominate you. But this thing has been made more than sufficiently clear above, when we discussed who you are. Nevertheless, I also add this: I fear for you no poison, no sword more than the lust for dominating. If you are not much deceived, in order to grant yourself much, you certainly think that you have received nothing more from the great apostles. Remember now the words of the man who said, “I am a debtor to the wise and the unwise.” And if you think {the quote} is undue, keep in mind at the same time that the troublesome name of “debtor” agrees more with the person serving than the person dominating. In the Gospel, the servant hears, “How much do you owe my master?” Therefore, if you recognize that you are not a dominator of the wise and the unwise, but a debtor, you must be extraordinarily careful and must consider with all vigilance how those who are not wise may be wise, {how} those who have acted foolishly may come to their senses. But no kind of foolishness, so I should say, is more foolish than unbelief. Therefore, you are a debtor also to the infidels, the Jews, the Greeks [some editions omit the word “Greeks’], and the Gentiles.

3. Consequently, it concerns you to see to it, as much as you can, that the unbelievers are converted to the faith, that they who have been converted are not turned away, and that those who have been turned away return; furthermore, {it concerns you to see to it that} the perverse be ordered to righteousness, {and} the subverted be called back to the truth: {that} the subverters be convinced by invincible reasons, so that either they be freed from faults, if it can be done, or if not, that they lose their authority and power of subverting others. You must not wholly neglect this worse class of the unwise, the heretics and schismatics, I mean: for these are subverted and subverters; hounds for tearing, foxes for deception. Men of this sort will be, I say, either corrected with great effort lest they perish or restrained lest they destroy. Let it be that concerning the Jews, time excuses you: they have their limit that will not be able to be anticipated [other editions read “omitted”]. It is necessary that the fullness of the Gentiles come in first.

4. What reason for pretending is there for us? By what assurance, by what conscience do we not assuredly offer Christ to those who do not have {Him}? Do we hold back the truth of God in injustice? Indeed it is necessary whenever the fullness of the Gentiles arrives. Do we wait so that the faith falls upon them? Who has arrived at belief by accident? How will they believe without a preacher? Peter was sent to Cornelius, Philip to the eunuch; and if we look for a more recent example, Augustine, chosen by St. Gregory, handed over the model of the faith to the English. About these things, you {should consider them} thus with yourself. I also add {something} concerning the pertinacity of the Greeks, who are with us and not with us, joined in faith, divided in peace, although in the faith itself they have limped from the straight paths. And likewise concerning heresy, which creeps quietly almost everywhere; among some, it rages openly. For, far and wide and publicly, it hastens to swallow up the little ones of the Church. Do you ask where this may be? Your own people [other editions read “men], who so often visit the land of the South, behold! They know and they can tell you. They go and they return through the midst of them, or they pass through alongside; but what good they have accomplished with them up to now, we have not yet heard. And perhaps we might have heard if the salvation of the people of Spain had not become cheap on account of gold. It is your responsibility to provide a remedy for this plague also. (Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, De Consideratione, III, translated provided as a courtesy to this writer.) 

While it is true that Saint Bernard sought to defend Jews against the murderous designs of the mad monk named Radulph, he did so because he was defending the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment while at the same time trying prevent souls for whom Our Lord had shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem from being dispatched to Hell by dying outside of the Catholic Faith. He made his concerns in this regard abundantly clear, something that Pope Benedict XIV cited in A Quo Primum, June 14, 1751:

The famous monk, Radulph, inspired long ago by an excess of zeal, was so inflamed against the Jews that he traversed Germany and France in the twelfth century and, by preaching against the Jews as the enemies of our holy religion, incited Christians to destroy them. This resulted in the deaths of a very large number of Jews. What must we think his deeds or thoughts would be if he were now alive and saw what was happening in Poland? But the great St. Bernard opposed this immoderate and maddened zeal of Radulph, and wrote to the clergy and people of eastern France: "The Jews are not to be persecuted: they are not to be slaughtered: they are not even to be driven out. Examine the divine writings concerning them. We read in the psalm a new kind of prophecy concerning the Jews: God has shown me, says the Church, on the subject of my enemies, not to slay them in case they should ever forget my people. Alive, however, they are eminent reminders for us of the Lord's suffering. On this account they are scattered through all lands in order that they may be witnesses to Our redemption while they pay the just penalties for so great a crime" (epistle 363). And he writes this to Henry, Archbishop of Mainz: "Doesn't the Church every day triumph more fully over the Jews in convicting or converting them than if once and for all she destroyed them with the edge of the sword: Surely it is not in vain that the Church has established the universal prayer which is offered up for the faithless Jews from the rising of the sun to its setting, that the Lord God may remove the veil from their hearts, that they may be rescued from their darkness into the light of truth. For unless it hoped that those who do not believe would believe, it would obviously be futile and empty to pray for them." (epistle 365). (Pope Benedict XIV, A Quo Primum, June 14, 1751.) 

Yes, one can always count on Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI to distort and misrepresent the truth and to rely upon those who do so themselves as Hildegard Brem edited Saint Bernard's discussion of the role that the Jews serve today, conveniently omitting the following sentence from Saint Bernard's epistle (letter) 363:

"On this account they are scattered through all lands in order that they may be witnesses to Our redemption while they pay the just penalties for so great a crime." (For two other quotes from Saint Bernard about the Jews, please see Appendix B below.) 

How can those such as Ratzinger/Benedict and Hildegard Brem quote a line that speaks of the guilt of the Jews for the sin of Deicide when they do not believe that they share such a guilt? Ratzinger/Benedict does not speak about the Jews paying the "just penalties for so great a crime," does he? And Saint Bernard's plea for the Church to triumph over the Jews by converting them is not exactly the language of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI or the man he will "beatify" two weeks from today, Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II.

Although the Church has not organized a "worldwide mission" to seek the conversion of the Jews since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Pope Pius IX, as mentioned above, did authorize the missionary work of the Jewish converts, Fathers Theodore and Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, to take place in Palestine, and Pope Saint Pius X told the founder of International Zionism that the Church stood ready to open churches to baptize the Jews should they move from Europe to Palestine. (All single indented paragraphs above were extracted from different two articles of mine, one written in 2008 and the other written in 2011. The double-indented paragraphs are the quotations used in those articles.)

A seemingly infinite number of like examples, including distortions of the very words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself, can be provided from the speeches and written works of Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II as well as those from his own immediate successor, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Modernism leaves nothing about the Catholic Faith untouched and unspoiled:

It remains for Us now to say a few words about the Modernist as reformer. From all that has preceded, it is abundantly clear how great and how eager is the passion of such men for innovation. In all Catholicism there is absolutely nothing on which it does not fasten. They wish philosophy to be reformed, especially in the ecclesiastical seminaries. They wish the scholastic philosophy to be relegated to the history of philosophy and to be classed among absolute systems, and the young men to be taught modern philosophy which alone is true and suited to the times in which we live. They desire the reform of theology: rational theology is to have modern philosophy for its foundation, and positive theology is to be founded on the history of dogma. As for history, it must be written and taught only according to their methods and modern principles. Dogmas and their evolution, they affirm, are to be harmonized with science and history. In the Catechism no dogmas are to be inserted except those that have been reformed and are within the capacity of the people. Regarding worship, they say, the number of external devotions is to be reduced, and steps must be taken to prevent their further increase, though, indeed, some of the admirers of symbolism are disposed to be more indulgent on this head. They cry out that ecclesiastical government requires to be reformed in all its branches, but especially in its disciplinary and dogmatic departments They insist that both outwardly and inwardly it must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity and authority which is too much concentrated should be decentralized The Roman Congregations and especially the index and the Holy Office, must be likewise modified The ecclesiastical authority must alter its line of conduct in the social and political world; while keeping outside political organizations it must adapt itself to them in order to penetrate them with its spirit. With regard to morals, they adopt the principle of the Americanists, that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice. They ask that the clergy should return to their primitive humility and poverty, and that in their ideas and action they should admit the principles of Modernism; and there are some who, gladly listening to the teaching of their Protestant masters, would desire the suppression of the celibacy of the clergy. What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed by them and according to their principles?  (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 38)

If someone born in 1951, to pick a random year that just came to me out of the blue, you understand, had gone into hibernation in 1961 at the age of ten and then awoke sixty years later to find Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the apparent “pope,” he would be hard-pressed not to find all the proof that he would need to be convinced that the conciliar religion is false based upon the Argentine Apostate’s antipapacy alone. Bergoglio will not rest until he has “shamed” traditionalists into abandoning a “dead religion of the living” and until he receives universal acclamation from Catholics still attached to the conciliar structures in the tragically mistaken belief that they represent the Catholic Church that it is time to accept his teaching that “cold” “black and white” truths are inadequate to deal with the “smell of the sheep” and thus to provide for the “weaknesses” that he believes are insuperable to overcome and must be accepted as signs of “changing norms.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Effort to Distort and Misrepresent the Doctor of Moral Theology, Saint Alphonsus de Liguori

One of Mario Bergoglio’s many repeated themes over the past ninety-seven months has been to make it appear as though there are no “inflexible,” “irreformable,” “clear-cut,” “black and white” moral truths. As noted just above, Bergoglio has made it very clear that he believes in uncertainty, unclarity, equivocation, and moral relativism. Here is just a brief review of some of his efforts in this regard:

ROME - Pope Francis has fired back at his critics over the document Amoris Laetita, suggesting they suffer from “a certain legalism, which can be ideological.”  The critics now include a group of four cardinals who’ve accused the pontiff of causing grave confusion and disorientation and even floated the prospect of a public correction. 

“Some- think about the responses to Amoris Laetitia- continue to not understand,” Francis said. They think it’s “black and white, even if in the flux of life you must discern.”

The pope’s comments came in a wide-ranging interview with the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire published on Friday, in response to a question about his Jubilee Year of Mercy and its relation with the 1960s-era Second Vatican Council.

 “The Church exists only as an instrument to communicate to men God’s merciful design,” he said, adding that during the council, the Church felt the “need to be in the world as a living sign of the Father’s love.”

The Council, particularly the document Lumen Gentium, according to Francis, moved the axis of the Christian conception “from a certain legalism, which can be ideological,” to God himself, who through the Son became human.

It’s in this context in which he talked about the responses to Amoris Laetitia by those who continue “not to understand” this point. 

Although he gives no names, it’s not a stretch to imagine the pope was thinking about the dubia or “doubts” about the apostolic exhortation presented to him by four cardinals, including American Raymond Burke. (Argentine Apostate Fires Back At Critics.)

The Catholic Church was founded by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to sanctify and to save souls. The first law of the Church is the salvation of souls, and no one can save his soul if he dies in a state of final impenitence.

Actually, the Argentine Apostate has done Catholics who care about doctrinal truth, few in number though they may be after over five decades of a constant flow of Modernism passing as Catholic teaching from "popes" and "priests" and priests/presbyters, a great service by showing very plainly that his belief about an "obscured" Gospel is precisely the same as that professed by the heretic he praised in Lund, Sweden, on October 31, 2016 (see Conciliarism: The Most Dangerous, Destructive and Corrupt Force On Earth).

Jorge Mario Bergoglio thus believes that the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, had failed to guide the Catholic Church, she who is the spotless and immaculate Mystica Spouse of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head and Mystical Bridegroom, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, throughout the course of the centuries. Much like Luther himself, you see, he believes that the truth was lost sometime after the Apostolic Era, whereupon "legalisms" began to obscure the "merciful side" of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he, Bergoglio, thinks cannot coexist with "black and white" concepts of doctrinal and moral truths. 

This is really nothing new. Endless are the numbers of times that Bergoglio has denounced "fundamentalists" who seek to "reduce" everything to "good or evil," and "right and wrong." Indeed, he did this when speaking before a special joint session of the Congress of the United States of America on Thursday, September 24, 2016, the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom:

All of us are quite aware of, and deeply worried by, the disturbing social and political situation of the world today.  Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism.  This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind.  A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms.  But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.  The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.  We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within.  To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.  That is something which you, as a people, reject. (Bergoglio's Address to U.S. Congress.)

This is I wrote at the time (and it does seem like many years ago now!):

This man is a devil.

Bergoglio once again refuses to accept the fact that there is one true religion, Catholicism, and that false religions of their nature are first and foremost acts of violence against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through Holy Mother Church or that many of these false religions, including Talmudism and Mohammedanism, contain exhortation to violence against “infidels” and their shrines.

“Pope Francis’s” swipe against “fundamentalism” was directed also at those Catholics who, despite their own sins and failings, adhere to the Sacred Deposit of Faith without any equivocation, qualification or reservation, those who do indeed see only good and evil as that is what God Himself wants us to see. He wants us to choose the good and reject the evil. How is it possible to do this if one is supposed to see “nuances” in clear-cut matters of moral truth?

Well, that is the point, you see, as Jorge is even yet in a secular setting attempting to propagandize in behalf of the moral opaqueness of his upcoming “synod of bishops” as he warns legislators that there is “good” in almost anything, including those things that “fundamentalist” who engages in moral “reductionism” know are evil in and of their nature. To use the term “violence” in connection with those who call evil by its proper name emboldens those within the echelons of civil power to step up their legal assaults upon those who oppose all of the prevailing evils of the day.

Bergoglio can speak all he wants about “religious freedom.” The plain truth, however, is that to tar and feather those who see “only” good and evil in the world and to make them the objects of persecution for being “bigoted,” “hateful” and “intolerant.” 

Jorge Mario Bergoglio's constant attacks on those who believe in "black and white" are being parroted by some of the "cardinals" to whom he gave their red hats in 2016. Consider how the former conciliar "bishop" of Dallas, Texas, Kevin Farrell, echoed his fellow heretic's rejection of "black and white":

Farrell, asked about the tensions over the divorce issue, appeared to be open toward the pope's prescription for more compassion.

"There is no situation in life that's black and white. Anybody that's lived in this world will have encountered those situations in their personal lives," Farrell said. ( Jorge Stuffs the Ballot Box with More Jacobins/Bolesheviks.)

The then Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen explained that we must have an intolerance about sin and evil. True compassion for the erring is to exhort him to reform his life by making a good Confession of his sins if he is a Catholic, or converting to the Catholic Faith if he is not Catholic:

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broadminded. A bigoted man is one who refuses to accept a reason for anything; a broadminded man is one who will accept anything for a reason—providing it is not a good reason. It is true that there is a demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this unnatural broadmindedness is mental, not moral. The evidence for this statement is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of religion, and, lastly, the love of novelty….

Religion is not an open question, like the League of Nations, while science is a closed question, like the addition table. Religion has its principles, natural and revealed, which are more exacting in their logic than mathematics. But the false notion of tolerance has obscured this fact from the eyes of many who are as intolerant about the smallest details of life as they are tolerant about their relations to God. In the ordinary affairs of life, these same people would never summon a Christian Science practitioner to fix a broken windowpane; they would never call in an optician because they had broken the eye of a needle; they would never call in a florist because they hurt the palm of their hand, nor go to a carpenter to take care of their nails. They would never call in a Collector of Internal Revenue to extract the nickel swallowed by the baby. They would refuse to listen to a Kiwanis booster discussing the authenticity of a painting, or to a tree‐surgeon settling a moot question of law. And yet for the all‐important subject of religion, on which our eternal destinies hinge, on the all‐important question of the relations of man to his environment and to his God, they are willing to listen to anyone who calls himself a prophet. And so our journals are filled with articles for these “broadminded” people, in which everyone from Jack Dempsey to the chief cook of the Ritz Carlton tells about his idea of God and his view of religion. These same individuals, who would become exasperated if their child played with a wrongly colored lollipop, would not become the least bit worried if the child grew up without ever having heard the name of God….

The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth maybe contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults. But for any one to say, ʺSome say this, some say that, therefore there is no truth,ʺ is about as logical as it would have been for Columbus, who heard some say, ʺThe earth is round,ʺ and other say, ʺThe earth is flat,ʺ to conclude: ʺTherefore there is no earth at allʺ…. 

The giggling giddiness of novelty, the sentimental restlessness of a mind unhinged, and the unnatural fear of a good dose of hard thinking, all conjoin to produce a group of sophomoric latitudinarians who think there is no difference between God as Cause and God as a ʺmental projectionʺ; who equate Christ and Buddha, St. Paul and John Dewey, and then enlarge their broad‐mindedness into a sweeping synthesis that says not only that one Christian sect is just as good as another, but even that one world‐religion is just as good as another. The great god ʺProgressʺ is then enthroned on the altars of fashion, and as the hectic worshipers are asked, ʺProgress towards what?ʺ The tolerant answer comes back, ʺMore progress.ʺ All the while sane men are wondering how there can be progress without direction and how there can be direction without a fixed point. And because they speak of a ʺfixed point,ʺ they are said to be behind the times, when really they are beyond the times mentally and spiritually.

In the face of this false broad‐mindedness, what the world needs is intolerance. The mass of people have kept up hard and fast distinctions between dollars and cents, battleships and cruisers, ʺYou owe meʺ and ʺI owe you,ʺ but they seem to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. The best indication of this is the frequent misuse of the terms ʺtoleranceʺ and ʺintolerance.ʺ There are some minds that believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they make ʺintoleranceʺ mean hate, narrow‐ mindedness, and bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is always right because, for them, it means charity, broad‐mindedness, American good nature.

What is tolerance? Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error. 

Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability. The government must be intolerant about malicious propaganda, and during the World War it made an index of forbidden books to defend national stability, as the Church, who is in constant warfare with error, made her index of forbidden books to defend the permanency of Christʹs life in the souls of men. The government during the war was intolerant about the national heretics who refused to accept her principles concerning the necessity of democratic institutions, and took physical means to enforce such principles. The soldiers who went to war were intolerant about the principles they were fighting for, in the same way that a gardener must be intolerant about the weeds that grow in his garden. The Supreme Court of the United States is intolerant about any private interpretation of the first principle of the Constitution that every man is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the particular citizen who would interpret ʺlibertyʺ in even such a small way as meaning the privilege to ʺgoʺ on a red traffic‐light, would find himself very soon in a cell where there were no lights, not even the yellow — the color of the timid souls who know not whether to stop or go. Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in their laboratories, and as all of us are intolerant of a particularly broad‐minded, ʺtolerant,ʺ and good‐natured grocer who, in making our bills, adds seven and ten to make twenty.

Now, if it is right — and it is right — for governments to be intolerant about the principles of government, and the bridge builder to be intolerant about the laws of stress and strain, and the physicist to be intolerant about the principles of gravitation, why should it not be the right of Christ, the right of His Church, and the right of thinking men to be intolerant about the truths of Christ, the doctrines of the Church, and the principles of reason? Can the truths of God be less exacting than the truths of mathematics? Can the laws of the mind be less binding than the laws of science, which are known only through the laws of the mind? Shall man, gifted with natural truth, who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on the mathematician who says two and two make five and the one who says two and two make four, be called a wise man, and shall God, Who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on all religions, be denied the name of ʺWisdom,ʺ and be called an ʺintolerantʺ God?…

Why, then, sneer at dogmas as intolerant? On all sides we hear it said today, ʺThe modern world wants a religion without dogmas,ʺ which betrays how little thinking goes with that label, for he who says he wants a religion without dogmas is stating a dogma, and a dogma that is harder to justify than many dogmas of faith. A dogma is a true thought, and a religion without dogmas is a religion without thought, or a back without a backbone. All sciences have dogmas. ʺWashington is the capital of the United Statesʺ is a dogma of geography. ʺWater is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygenʺ is a dogma of chemistry. Should we be broad‐minded and say that Washington is a sea in Switzerland? Should we be broad‐minded and say that H2O is a symbol for sulfuric acid? …

But it is anything but progress to act like mice and eat the foundations of the very roof over our heads. Intolerance about principles is the foundation of growth, and the mathematician who would deride a square for always having four sides, and in the name of progress would encourage it to throw away even only one of its sides, would soon discover that he had lost all his squares. So too with the dogmas of the Church, of science, and of reason; they are like bricks, solid things with which a man can build, not like straw, which is ʺreligious experience,ʺ fit only for burning.

A dogma, then, is the necessary consequence of the intolerance of first principles, and that science or that church which has the greatest amount of dogmas is the science or the church that has been doing the most thinking. The Catholic Church, the schoolmaster for twenty centuries, has been doing a tremendous amount of solid, hard thinking and hence has built up dogmas as a man might build a house of brick but grounded on a rock. She has seen the centuries with their passing enthusiasms and momentary loyalties pass before her, making the same mistakes, cultivating the same poses, falling into the same mental snares, so that she has become very patient and kind to the erring pupils, but very intolerant and severe concerning the false. She has been and she will always be intolerant so far as the rights of God are concerned, for heresy, error, untruth, affect not personal matters on which she may yield, but a Divine Right in which there is no yielding. Meek she is to the erring, but violent to the error. The truth is divine; the heretic is human. Due reparation made, she will admit the heretic back into the treasury of her souls, but never the heresy into the treasury of her wisdom. Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need, as Mr. [G. K.] Chesterton tells us, ʺnot a Church that is right when the world is right, but a Church that is right when the world is wrong.ʺ

The attitude of the Church in relation to the modern world on this important question may be brought home by the story of the two women in the courtroom of Solomon [see 3 Kings 3:16-28]. Both of them claimed a child. The lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or nothing, for a child is like truth — it cannot be divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to compromise. She was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of broad‐mindedness.

(Monsignor Fulton Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels. New York, New York, The Century Company, 1931. Although I have the book itself, this excerpt was taken from Novus Ordo Watch Wire. I just cannot transcribe anything more at this point.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio heads a false church that wants to be wrong in order to assuage the consciences of sinful, worldly men that there is no such thing as objective right as to contend such a thing is to lack “mercy” and thus make people feel bad.

The cardinal “sin” of conciliarism is thus the same as that found in the world of Judeo-Masonic naturalism: to make people feel “uncomfortable” or “guilty” about their sins. The corollary perverse commandment of conciliarism: Thou shalt make everyone feel happy and welcomed—other than those who believe in Catholic truth, including that of the Social Reign of Christ the King.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio repeated his hatred of hard and fast moral truths when he gave an address at the Alponsianum Academy in Rome, Italy, on Tuesday in Passion Week, March 23, 2021:

One hundred and fifty years ago, on 23 March 1871, Pius IX proclaimed Saint Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori Doctor of the Church.

The Bull of proclamation of Saint Alphonsus as Doctor illustrates the specific nature of his moral and spiritual offering, known how to show “the sure way in the tangle of contrasting opinions of rigourism and laxity” [1].

One hundred and fifty years after this joyous event, the message of Saint Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori, patron of confessors and moralists, and model for the whole of the outbound missionary Church, still vigorously indicates the high road for bringing consciences to the welcoming face of the Father, since “the salvation which God offers us is the work of his mercy” (EG 112).

Listening to reality

The Alphonsian theological approach was born from listening to and accepting the weaknesses of the men and women who were most abandoned spiritually. The Holy Doctor, formed according to a rigourist moral mentality, converted to “benignity” through listening to reality. (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Propaganda Adddress to Redemptorists in Conciliar Captivity, March 23, 2021.)

This is all just blasphemous nonsense.

Saint Alphonsus de Liguori preached with clarity about the existence of objective truths from the pulpit while treating with compassion truly repentant sinners in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance whose consciences had been singed by his sermons and who had been edified by our Saint’s austere live and zeal for souls. There is no conflict for a bishop or a priest to be firm in his preaching while extending the healing balm in the confessional with gratitude that Our Lady’s graces had brought souls made by Mortal Sin to a rebirth of life by means of the absolution provided to those who confess their sins sincerely and demonstrate an ardent desire to amend their lives.

Furthermore, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s statement that Saint Alphonsus de Liguori had a “conversion” from “rigorism” to “benignity” is disproved by Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B. in his panegyric on our Saint’s feast day, August 2. Saint Alphonsus de Liguori was a firm opponent of Jansenism, a movement that was based upon a nonexistent “laxity” and meant to restrict the channels of salvation open to sinners. Nevertheless, however, Saint Alphonsus de Liguori preached moral truths clearly as explained the realities of hell and the simple fact that sinners must resolve to reform their lives sooner rather than later, asking “Who has promised you tomorrow.”

Herewith is part of Dom Prosper Gueranger’s panegyric as contained in his The Liturgical Year:

To this great Saint, great both in works and in doctrine, are directly applied these words of the Holy Ghost: they that instruct many to justice shall shine as stars for all eternity. At the time he appeared, an odious sect was denying the mercy and the sweetness of our heavenly Father; it triumphed in the practical conduct of even those who were shocked by its Calvinistic theories. Under pretext of a reaction against an imaginary school of laxity, and denouncing with much ado some erroneous propositions made by obscure persons, the new Pharisees had set themselves up as zealous for the law. Stretching the commandments, and exaggerating the sanction, they loaded the conscience with the same unbearable burdens which the Man-God reproached the ancient Pharisees with laying on the shoulders of men; but the cry of alarm they had raised in the name of endangered morals had nonetheless deceived the simple, and ended by misleading even the best. Thanks to the show of austerity displayed by its adherents, Jansenism, so clever in veiling its teachings, had too well succeeded in its designs of forcing itself upon the Church in spite of the Church. Unsuspecting allies within the holy city gave up to its mercy the sources of salvation. Soon in too many places, the sacred Keys were used but to open hell; the Holy Table, spread fthe preservation and increase of life in all, became accessible only to the perfect; and these latter were esteemed such, according as, by a strange reversion of the Apostle’s words, they subjected the spirit of adoption of sons to the spirit of servitude and fear. As to the faithful who did not rise to the height of this new asceticism, “finding in the tribunal of penance, instead of fathers and physicians, only exactors and executioners,” they had but to choose between despair and indifference. Everywhere legislatures and parliaments lent a hand to the so-called reformers, without heeding the flood of odious unbelief that was rising around them, without seeing the gathering storm clouds.

Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you yourselves do not enter in; and those that are going in, you suffer not to enter … Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: because you go round about the sea and the land to make one proselyte; and when he is made, you make him the child of hell twofold more than yourselves. Not of your conventicles was it said that the sons of Wisdom are the Church of the just, for it was added: Their generation is obedience and love. Not of the fear which you preached did the Psalmist sing: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom; for even under the law of Sinai the Holy Spirit said: Ye that fear the Lord, believe him: and your reward shall not be made void. Ye that fear the Lord, hope in him: and mercy shall come to you for your delight. Ye that fear the Lord, love him: and your hearts shall be enlightened. Every deviation, whether towards rigor or weakness, offends the rectitude of justice; but, especially since Bethlehem and Calvary, no sin so wounds the divine Heart as distrust; no fault is unpardonable except in the despair of a Judas, saying like Cain: My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon.

Who then, in the somber quietism into which the teachers then in vogue had led even the strongest minds, could find once more the key of knowledge? But Wisdom, says the Holy Ghost, kept in her treasures the signification of discipline. Just as in other times she had raised up new avengers for every dogma that had been attacked: so now, against a heresy which, in spite of the speculative pretensions of its beginning, had only in its moral bearing any sort of duration, she brought forth Alphonsus Liguori as the avenger of the violated law and the Doctor by excellence of Christian morality. A stranger alike to fatal rigorism and baneful indulgence, he knew how to restore to the justices of their Lord their rectitude, and at the same time their power of rejoicing hearts, to his commandments their luminous brightness, whereby they are justified in themselves, to his testimonies the purity which attracts souls and faithfully guides the simple and the little ones from the beginnings of Wisdom to its summits. It was not only in the sphere of casuistry that Alphonsus succeeded, in his Moral Theology, in counteracting the poison which threatened to infect the whole Christian life. While on the one hand he never left unanswered any attack made at the time against revealed truth, his ascetic and mystical works brought back piety to its traditional sources, the frequentation of the Sacraments, and the love of our Lord and his Blessed Mother. The Sacred Congregation of Rites, after examining in the name of the Holy See the works of our Saint, and declaring nothing deserving of censure was to be found therein, arranged his innumerable writings under forty separate titles. Alphonsus, however, resolved only late in life to give to the public, through the press, the lights which flooded his soul; his first work, the golden book of Visits to the Most Holy Sacrament and to the Blessed Virgin, did not appear till the author was nearly fifty years of age. Though God prolonged his life beyond the usual limits, he spared him neither the double burden of the episcopate and the government of the Congregation he had founded, nor the most painful infirmities, nor still more grievous moral sufferings.

“I have not hid thy justice within my heart: I have declared thy truth and thy salvation.” Thus sings the Church in thy name today, in gratitude for the great service thou didst render her in the days of sinners, when godliness seemed to be lost. Exposed to the attacks of an extravagant pharisaism, and watched by a skeptical and mocking philosophy, even the good wavered as to which was the way of the Lord. When the moralists of the day could be forge letters for consciences, the enemy had a good chance of crying: Let us break their bonds asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us. The ancient wisdom revered by their fathers, now that it was compromised by these foolish teachers, seemed but a ruined edifice to people eager for emancipation. In this unprecedented extremity, thou, O Alphonsus, wast the prudent man whom the Church needed, whose mouth uttered words to strengthen men’s hearts. (Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, August 2, Feast of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori.)

As is always the case, of course, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s blasphemous misrepresentation of the life and work of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori was an effort to claim that Holy Mother Church’s Doctor of Moral Theology was a veritable prophet preparing the way for Bergoglio’s own “smell of the sheep” moral relativism that has served as the foundation of entire career as a lay Jesuit revolutionary, most notably in Amoris Laetitia, March 19, 2016.

Although it is sickening to have to do so, I will return to Bergoglio’s transparent effort to portray himself as the “pope” who has “fulfilled” the “missionary vision” to which he claimed that Saint Alphonsus de Liguori was “converted” over the case of his life as a priest, founder, and bishop:

The missionary experience in the existential peripheries of his time, the search for those far away and listening to confessions, the founding and guidance of the nascent Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, and in addition the responsibilities as bishop of a particular Church, led him to become a father and maser of mercy, certain that “God’s paradise is the heart of man” [2].

The gradual conversion towards a decidedly missionary pastoral ministry, capable of closeness to the people, of being able to accompany their steps, to share in their real life even in the midst of great limits and challenges, drove Alphonsus to review, not without effort, even the theological and juridical grounding he had received in the years of his formation; initially marked by a certain rigour, it then turned into a merciful, dynamic approach, an evangelising dynamism able to act by attraction.

In theological disputes, preferring reason to authority, he did not stop at the theoretical formulation of principles, but rather allowed himself to be interrogated by life itself. Advocate of the least, the frail and those discarded by the society of his time, he defended the rights of all, especially the most abandoned and the poor. This approach led him to the final decision to place himself at the service of consciences that sought, even amid a thousand difficulties, the right thing to do, faithful to God’s call to holiness.

Saint Alphonsus, then, was neither lax nor strict. He was a realist in the true Christian sense, because he understood clearly that “at the very heart of the Gospel is life in community and engagement with others” (EG 177). (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Propaganda Adddress to Redemptorists in Conciliar Captivity, March 23, 2021.)

Interjection Number Two:

This is all a complete lie. This is as delusional as anything that comes out of the mouths of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Jennifer Psaki, Charles Schumer, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi, or Robert Manfred. (I omitted any reference to Kamala Harris as she is so busy running the government, it would appear, as to have any time to speak publicly). Indeed, Bergoglio’s effort to claim that Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri as a forerunner of his own moral relativism is nothing other than the delusion of a man who enables sin, a man who is steeped in the sins of heresy, apostasy, sacrilege, and ceaseless blasphemies against Our Lord, Our Lady, and the Saints, and it is very interesting that he quotes not one word from Saint Alphonsus de Liguori and, instead, draws upon his own Evangelii Gaudium, November 25, 2013

This is what Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri had to say about the delusions of sinners:

The Devil brings sinners to hell by closing their eyes to the dangers of perdition. He first blinds them, and then leads them with himself to eternal torments. If, then, we wish to be saved, we must continually pray to God in the words of the blind man in the gospel of this day,” Lord, that I may see." Give me light: make me see the way in which I must walk in order to save my soul, and to escape the deceits of the enemy of salvation. I shall, brethren, this day place before your eyes the delusion by which the devil tempts men to sin and to persevere in sin, that you may know how to guard yourselves against his deceitful artifices.  

2. To understand these delusions better, let us imagine the case of a young man who, seized by some passion, lives in sin, the slave of Satan, and never thinks of his eternal salvation. My son, I say to him, what sort of life do you lead? If you continue to live in this manner, how will you be able to save your soul? But, behold! the devil, on the other hand, says to him: Why should you be afraid of being lost? Indulge your passions for the present: you will afterwards confess your sins, and thus all shall be remedied. Behold the net by which the devil drags so many souls into hell. “Indulge your passions: you will hereafter make a good confession." But, in reply, I say, that in the meantime you lose your soul. Tell me: if you had a jewel worth a thousand pounds, would you throw it into a river with the hope of afterwards finding it again? What if all your efforts to find it were fruitless? God! you hold in your hand the invaluable jewel of your soul, which Jesus Christ has purchased with his own blood, and you cast it into hell! Yes; you cast it into hell; because according to the present order of providence, for every mortal sin you commit, your name is written among the number of the damned. But you say.” I hope to recover God’s grace by making a good confession." And if you should not recover it, what shall be the consequences? To make a good confession, a true sorrow for sin is necessary, and this sorrow is the gift of God: if he does not give it, will you not be lost for ever?  

3. You rejoin:” I am young; God compassionates my youth; I will hereafter give myself to God." Behold another delusion! You are young; but do you not know that God counts, not the years, but the sins of each individual? You are young; but how many sins have you committed? Perhaps there are many persons of a very advanced age, who have not been guilty of the fourth part of the sins which you have committed. And do you not know that God has fixed for each of us the number of sins which he will pardon?” The Lord patiently expecteth, that, when the day of judgment shall come, he may punish them in the fulness of their sins." (2 Mach. vi. 14.) God has patience, and waits for a while; but, when the measure of the sins which he has determined to pardon is tilled up, he pardons no more, but chastises the sinner, by suddenly depriving him of life in the miserable state of sin, or by abandoning him in his sin, and executing that threat which he made by the prophet Isaias “I shall take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be wasted.” (Isa. v. 5.) If a person has cultivated land for many years, has encompassed it with a hedge for its protection, and expended a large sum of money on it, but finds that, after all, it produces no fruit, what will he do with it? He will pluck up the hedge, and abandon it to all men and beasts that may wish to enter. Tremble, then, lest God should treat you in a similar manner. If you do not give up sin, your remorse of conscience and your fear of divine chastisement shall daily increase. Behold the hedge taken away, and your soul abandoned by God a punishment worse than death itself.

4. You say:” I cannot at present resist this passion." Behold the third delusion of the devil, by which he makes you believe that at present you have not strength to overcome certain temptations. But St. Paul tells us that God is faithful, and that he never permits us to be tempted above our strength. "And God is faithful, who will not permit you to be tempted above that which you are able." (1 Cor. x. 13.) I ask, if you are not now able to resist the temptation, how can you expect to resist it hereafter? If you yield to it, the Devil will become stronger, and you shall become weaker; and if you be not now able to extinguish this flame of passion, how can you hope to be able to extinguish it when it shall have grown more violent? You say: "God will give me his aid." But this aid God is ready to give at present if you ask it. Why then do you not implore his assistance? Perhaps you expect that, without now taking the trouble of invoking his aid, you will receive from him increased helps and graces, after you shall have multiplied the number of your sins? Perhaps you doubt the veracity of God, who has promised to give whatever we ask of him?” Ask, “he says,” and it shall be given  you." (Matt. vii. 7.) God cannot violate his promises.” God is not as man, that he should lie, nor as the son of man, that he should be changed. Hath he said, then, and will he not do ?" (Num. xxiii. 19.) Have recourse to him, and he will give you the strength necessary to resist the temptation. God commands you to resist it, and you say: “I have not strength." Does God, then, command impossibilities? No; the Council of Trent has declared that ” God does not command impossibilities; but, by his commands, he admonishes you to do what you can, and to ask what you cannot do; and he assists, that you may be able to do it." (Sess. 6. c. xiii.) When you see that you have not sufficient strength to resist temptation with the ordinary assistance of God, ask of him the additional help which you require, and he will give it to you; and thus you shall be able to conquer all temptations, however violent they may be.  

5. But you will not pray; and you say that at present you will commit this sin, and will afterwards confess it. But, I ask, how do you know that God will give you time to confess it? You say: “I will go to confession before the lapse of a week." And who has promised you this week? Well, then you say:” I will go to confession tomorrow." And who promises you tomorrow? “Crastinum Deus non promisit," says St. Augustine, “fortasse dabit, et fortasse non dabit." God has not promised you tomorrow. Perhaps he will give it, and perhaps he will refuse it to you, as he has to so many others. How many have gone to bed in good health, and have been found dead in the morning! How many, in the very act of sin, has the Lord struck dead and sent to hell! Should this happen to you, how will you repair your eternal ruin?” Commit this sin, and confess it after wards." Behold the deceitful artifice by which the devil has brought so many thousands of Christians to hell. We scarcely ever find a Christian so sunk in despair as to intend to damn himself. All the wicked sin with the hope of afterwards going to confession. But, by this illusion, how many have brought themselves to perdition! For them there is now no time for confession, no remedy for their damnation.  

6. “But God is merciful.” Behold another common delusion by which the devil encourages sinners to persevere in a life of sin! A certain author has said, that more souls have been sent to hell by the mercy of God than by his justice. This is indeed the case; for men are induced by the deceits of the devil to persevere in sin, through confidence in God’s mercy; and thus they are lost.  "God is merciful." Who denies it? But, great as his mercy, how many does he every day send to hell? God is merciful, but he is also just, and is, there fore, obliged to punish those who offend him. “And his mercy,” says the divine mother,” to them that fear him." (Luke i. 50.) But with regard to those who abuse his mercy and despise him, he exercises justice. The Lord pardons sins, but he cannot pardon the determination to commit sin. St. Augustine says, that he who sins with the intention of repenting after his sins, is not a penitent but a scoffer.” Irrisor est non pœnitens." But the Apostle tells us that God will not be mocked.” Be not deceived; God is not mocked." (Gal. vi. 7.) It would be a mockery of God to insult him as often and as much as you pleased, and afterwards to expect eternal glory.  

7. “But”; you say, “as God has shown me so many mercies hitherto, I hope he will continue to do so for the future.” Behold another delusion! Then, because God has not as yet chastised your sins, he will never punish them! On the contrary, the greater have been his mercies, the more you should tremble, lest, if you offend him again, he should pardon you no more, and should take vengeance on your sins. Behold the advice of the Holy Ghost:” Say not: I have sinned, and what harm hath befallen me? for the Most High is a patient rewarder." (Eccles. v. 4.) Do not say: “I have sinned, and no chastisement has fallen upon me.” God bears for a time, but not for ever. He waits for a certain time; but when that arrives, he then chastises the sinner for all his past iniquities: and the longer he has waited for repentance, the more severe the chastisement. “Quos diutius expectat,” says St. Gregory.” “durius damnat.” Then, my brother, since you know that you have frequently offended God, and that he has not sent you to hell, you should exclaim:” The mercies of the Lord, that we are not consumed." (Thren. iii. 22.) Lord, I thank you for not having sent me to hell, which I have so often deserved. And therefore you ought to give yourself entirely to God, at least through gratitude, and should consider that, for less sins than you have committed, many are now in that pit of fire, without the smallest hope of being ever released from it. The patience of God in bearing with you, should teach you not to despise him still more, but to love and serve him with greater fervour, and to atone, by penitential austerities and by other holy works, for the insults you have offered to him. You know that he has shown mercies to you, which he has not shown to others.” He hath not done in like manner to every nation." (Ps. cxlvii. 20.) Hence you should tremble, lest, if you commit a single additional mortal sin, God should abandon you, and cast you into hell.  

8. Let us come to the next illusion. “It is true that, by this sin, I lose the grace of God; but, even after committing this sin, I may be saved.” You may, indeed, be saved: but it cannot be denied that if, after having committed so many sins, and after having received so many graces from God, you again offend him, there is great reason to fear that you shall be lost. Attend to the words of the sacred Scripture: “A hard heart shall fare evil at the last." (Eccles. iii. 27.) The obstinate sinner shall die an unhappy death. Evil doers shall be cut off." (Ps. xxxvi . 9.) The wicked shall be cut off by the divine justice. “For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap." (Gal. vi. 8.) He that sows in sin, shall reap eternal torments. “Because I called and you refused, I also will laugh in your destruction and will mock when that shall come to you which you feared." (Prov. i. 24, 26.) I called, says the Lord, and you mocked me; but I will mock you at the hour of death. “Revenge is mine, and I will repay them in due time." (Deut. xxxii. 35.) The chastisement of sins belongs to me, and I will execute vengeance on them when the time of vengeance shall arrive. “The man that with a stiff neck despiseth him that reproveth him, shall suddenly be destroyed, and health shall not follow him." (Prov. xxix. 1.) The man who obstinately despises those who correct him, shall be punished with a sudden death, and for him there shall be no hope of salvation.  

9. Now, brethren, what think you of these divine threats against sinners? Is it easy, or is it not very difficult, to save your souls, if, after so many divine calls, and after so many mercies, you continue to offend God? You say: “But after all, it may happen that I will save my soul.” I answer: "What folly is it to trust your salvation to a perhaps? How many with this “perhaps I may be saved," are now in hell? Do you wish to be one of their unhappy companions? Dearly beloved Christians, enter into yourselves, and tremble; for this sermon may be the last of God’s mercies to you. ("The Delusions of Sinners: Sermon for Quinquagesima Sunday," as found in Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, The Sermons of Saint Alphonsus Liguori For All the Sundays of the Year, republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1982, pp. 118-119.)

This is not exactly the way that “Father” Jorge Mario Bergoglio or "Bishop" Jorge Mario Bergoglio or “Archbishop” Jorge Mario Bergoglio or “Cardinal” Jorge Mario Bergoglio” or “Pope Francis” has ever spoken or written.

Indeed, consider what the Argentine Apostate wrote in Amoris Laetitia about those who persist in lives of Mortal Sins in the objective order of things:

291. The Synod Fathers stated that, although the Church realizes that any breach of the marriage bond “is against the will of God”, she is also “conscious of the frailty of many of her children”.311 Illumined by the gaze of Jesus Christ, “she turns with love to those who participate in her life in an incomplete manner, recognizing that the grace of God works also in their lives by giving them the courage to do good, to care for one another in love and to be of service to the community in which they live and work”.312 This approach is also confirmed by our celebration of this Jubilee Year devoted to mercy. Although she constantly holds up the call to perfection and asks for a fuller response to God, “the Church must accompany with attention and care the weakest of her children, who show signs of a wounded and troubled love, by restoring in them hope and confidence, like the beacon of a lighthouse in a port or a torch carried among the people to enlighten those who have lost their way or who are 311 Relatio Synodi 2014, 24. 312 Ibid. 25. 222 in the midst of a storm”.313 Let us not forget that the Church’s task is often like that of a field hospital. (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Amoris Laetita, March 19, 2016.)

There is no such thing as participating in the life of the Catholic Church in “an incomplete manner,” and no amount of “good” that one does while in a state of Mortal Sin merits anything. Then again, Jorge Mario Bergoglio expressed the following belief at the Casa Santa Marta on May 15, 2013, the Feast of Saint John Baptist de la Salle:

(Vatican Radio) “Doing good” is a principle that unites all humanity, beyond the diversity of ideologies and religions, and creates the “culture of encounter” that is the foundation of peace: this is what Pope said at Mass this morning at the Domus Santae Martae, in the presence of employees of the Governorate of Vatican City. Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, Patriarch of Antioch of the Maronites, concelebrated at the Mass.  

Wednesday’s Gospel speaks to us about the disciples who prevented a person from outside their group from doing good. “They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good.” And Jesus corrects them: “Do not hinder him, he says, let him do good.” The disciples, Pope Francis explains, “were a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea of ​​possessing the truth, convinced that “those who do not have the truth, cannot do good.” “This was wrong . . . Jesus broadens the horizon.” Pope Francis said, “The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation”:   

"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

“Instead,” the Pope continued, “the Lord has created us in His image and likeness, and has given us this commandment in the depths of our heart: do good and do not do evil”:

"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

“Doing good” the Pope explained, is not a matter of faith: “It is a duty, it is an identity card that our Father has given to all of us, because He has made us in His image and likeness. And He does good, always.”

This was the final prayer of Pope Francis:

"Today is [the feast of] Santa Rita, Patron Saint of impossible things – but this seems impossible: let us ask of her this grace, this grace that all, all, all people would do good and that we would encounter one another in this work, which is a work of creation, like the creation of the Father. A work of the family, because we are all children of God, all of us, all of us! And God loves us, all of us! May Santa Rita grant us this grace, which seems almost impossible. Amen.” (Culture of encounter is the foundation of peace.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio never explained where “there” might be, but I can assure him that it will not be Heaven. “Doing good” apart from the Catholic Faith does not merit unto salvation. It is impossible to “participate” in the life of the Catholic Church in an “incomplete manner.”

Bergoglio’s belief system is premised upon the same sin of Presumption as Martin Luther’s revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through the Catholic Church.

To the contrary, Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri explained that confessors must exhort the unrepentant sinner to amend his life, asking “Who has promised you tomorrow?”

Bergoglio, however, without citing a single, solitary sermon or other writing of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, attempted to make it appear as though Patron Saint of Moral Theologians wanted to “accompany” sinners let them continue sinning by listening to “real life” in “rapidly changing society, not some “theoretical notions:

The proclamation of the Gospel in a rapidly changing society demands the courage to listen to reality, to “educate consciences to think in a different way, in contrast to the past” [3].

Every pastoral action has its roots in the salvific encounter with God in life, is born of listening to life, and is nurtured by a theological reflection able to take on board the questions posed by people and to indicate viable paths. Based on the example of Alphonsus, I invite moral theologians, missionaries and confessors to enter into a living relationship with the people of God, and to look at existence from their angle, to understand the real difficulties they encounter and to help heal wounds, because only true fraternity is “capable of seeing the sacred grandeur of our neighbour, of finding God in every human being, of tolerating the nuisances of life in common by clinging to the love of God, of opening the heart to divine love and seeking the happiness of others just as their heavenly Father does” (EG 92).

True to the Gospel, may Christian moral teaching called to proclaim, deepen and teach, always be a response to “the God of love who saves us, to see God in others and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others” (EG 39). Moral theology cannot reflect only on the formulation of principles, of rules, but needs to be proactive about the reality that exceeds any idea (cf. EG 231). This is a priority (cf. EG 34-39), since the mere knowledge of theoretical principles, as Saint Alphonsus himself reminds us, is not enough to accompany and sustain consciences in the discernment of the good that is to be done. It is necessary for knowledge to become practice through listening to and receiving the least, the frail and those regarded as rejects by society. (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Propaganda Adddress to Redemptorists in Conciliar Captivity, March 23, 2021.)

Interjection Number Three

“In contrast to the past”?         

All right, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, behold the past, behold the very words of the Saint you blasphemed so freely on Tuesday in Passion Week, March 23, 2021, as Holy Mother Church’s Doctor of Theology explained why God did not punish sinners immediately after their sins while also showing us that to fail to respond to the promptings of a rightly formed conscience is the path to hell:

St. Gregory relates, that a child of five years, who had arrived at the use of reason, for having uttered a blasphemy, was seized by the devil and carried to hell. The divine mother revealed to that great servant of God, Benedicta of Florence, that a boy of twelve years was damned after the first sin. Another boy of eight years died after his first sin and was lost. You say: I am young: there are many who have committed more sins than I have. But is God on that account obliged to wait for your repentance if you offend him? In the gospel of St. Matthew (xxi. 19) we read, that the Saviour cursed a fig tree the first time he saw it without fruit.” May no fruit grow on thee henceforward forever. And immediately the fig tree withered away." You must, then, tremble at the thought of committing a single mortal sin, particularly if you have already been guilty of mortal sins.

3. “Be not without fear about sins forgiven, and add not sin to sin.” (Eccl. v. 5.) Say not then, O sinner; As God has forgiven me other sins, so he will pardon me this one if I commit it. Say not this; for, if to the sin which has been forgiven you add another, you have reason to fear that this new sin shall be united to your former guilt, and that thus the number will be completed, and that you shall be abandoned. Behold how the Scripture unfolds this truth more clearly in another place. “The Lord patiently expecteth, that when the day of judgment shall come, he may punish them in the fullness of sins.” (2 Mac. vi. 14.) God waits with patience until a certain number of sins is committed, but, when the measure of guilt is filled up, he waits no longer, but chastises the sinner. "Thou hast sealed up my offences as it were in a bag." (Job xiv. 17.) Sinners multiply their sins without keeping any account of them; but God numbers them that, when the harvest is ripe, that is, when the number of sins is completed, he may take vengeance on them. “Put ye in the sickles, for the harvest is ripe.” (Joel iii. 13.)  

4. Of this there are many examples in the Scriptures. Speaking of the Hebrews, the Lord in one place says: “All the men that have tempted me now ten times. . . . shall not see the land.” (Num. xiv. 22, 23.) In another place he says, that he restrained his vengeance against the Amorrhites, because the number of their sins was not completed.” For as yet the iniquities of the Amorrhites are not at the full.” (Gen. xv. 16.) We have again the example of Saul, who, after having disobeyed God a second time, was abandoned. He entreated Samuel to interpose before the Lord in his behalf. “Bear, I beseech thee, my sin, and return with me, that I may adore the Lord,” (1 Kings xv. 25.) But, knowing that God had abandoned Saul, Samuel  answered: “I will not return with thee; because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord hath rejected thee," etc. (v. 26.) Saul, you have abandoned God, and he has abandoned you. We have another example in Balthassar, who, after having profaned the vessels of the temple, saw a hand writing on the wall, "Mane, Thecel, Phares." Daniel was requested to expound the meaning of these words. In explaining the word Thecel, he said to the king: “Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting.” (Dan. v 27.) By this explanation he gave the king to understand that the weight of his sins in the balance of divine justice had made the scale descend.” The same night, Balthassar, the Chaldean king, was killed." (Dan. v. 30.) Oh! how many sinners have met with a similar fate! Continuing to offend God till their sins amounted to a certain number they have been struck dead and sent to hell. “They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment they go down to hell.” (Job xxi. 13.) Tremble, brethren, lest, if you commit another mortal sin, God should cast you into hell.  

5. If God chastised sinners the moment they insult him, we should not see him so much despised. But, because he does not instantly punish their transgressions, and because, through mercy, he restrains his anger and waits for their return, they are encouraged to continue to offend him. “For, because sentence is not speedily pronounced against the evil, the children of men commit evil without any fear.” (Eccles. viii. 11.) But it is necessary to be persuaded that, though God bears with us, he does not wait, nor bear with us forever. Expecting, as on former occasions, to escape from the snares of the Philistines, Samson continued to allow himself to be deluded by Dalila. “I will go out as I did before, and shake myself.” (Judges xvi. 20.) But “the Lord was departed from him.” Samson was at length taken by his enemies, and lost his life. The Lord warns you not to say: I have committed so many sins, and God has not chastised me. Say not: I have sinned, and what harm hath befallen me? For the Most High is a patient rewarder.” (Eccl. v. 4.) God has patience for a certain term, after which he punishes the first and last sins. And the greater has been his patience, the more severe his vengeance.

6. Hence, according to St. Chrysostom, God is more to be feared when he bears with sinners than when he instantly punishes their sins. “Plus timendum est, cum tolerat quam cum festinanter punit.” And why? Because, says St. Gregory, they to whom God has shown most mercy, shall, if they do not cease to offend him, be chastised with the greatest rigour. “Quos diutius expectat durius damnat.” The saint adds that God often punishes such sinners with a sudden death, and does not allow them time for repentance.” Sæpe qui diu tolerati sunt subita morte rapiuntur, ut necflere ante mortem liceat." And the greater the light which God gives to certain sinners for their correction, the greater is their blindness and obstinacy in sin. "For it had been better for them not to have known the way of justice, than, after they had known it, to turn back." (2 Pet. ii. 21.) Miserable the sinners who, after having been enlightened, return to the vomit. St Paul says, that it is morally impossible for them to be again converted. “For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated have tasted also the heavenly gifts, ... and are fallen away, to be renewed again to penance." (Heb. vi. 4, 6.)  

7. Listen, then, sinner, to the admonition of the Lord: “My son, hast thou sinned? Do so no more, but for thy former sins pray that they may be forgiven thee." (Eccl. xxi. 1.) Son, add not sins to those which you have already committed, but be careful to pray for the pardon of your past transgressions; otherwise, if you commit another mortal sin, the gates of the divine mercy may be closed against you, and your soul may be lost forever. When, then, beloved brethren, the devil tempts you again to yield to sin, say to yourself: If God pardons me no more, what shall become of me for all eternity? Should the Devil, in reply, say: “Fear not, God is merciful ;" answer him by saying: What certainty or what probability have I, that, if I return again to sin, God will show me mercy or grant me pardon? Because the threat of the Lord against all who despise his calls: "Behold I have called and you refused. . . I also will laugh in your destruction, and will mock when that shall come to you which you feared." (Prov. i. 24, 26.) Mark the words I also; they mean that, as you have mocked the Lord by betraying him again after your confession and promises of amendment, so he will mock you at the hour of death. “I will laugh and will mock. But God is not mocked.” (Gal. vi. 7.) “As a dog,” says the Wise Man, “that returneth to his vomit, so is the fool that repeateth his folly.” (Prov. xxvi. 11.) B. Denis the Carthusian gives an excellent exposition of this text. He says that, as a dog that eats what he has just vomited, is an object of disgust and abomination, so the sinner who returns to the sins which he has detested and confessed, becomes hateful in the sight of God.” Sicut id quod per vomitum est rejectum, resumere est valide abominabile ac turpe sic peccata deleta reiterari."  

8. O folly of sinners! If you purchase a house, you spare no pains to get all the securities necessary to guard against the loss of your money; if you take medicine, you are careful to assure yourself that it cannot injure you; if you pass over a river, you cautiously avoid all danger of falling into it; and for a transitory enjoyment, for the gratification of revenge, for a beastly pleasure, which lasts but a moment, you risk your eternal salvation, saying: "I will go to confession after I commit this sin." And when, I ask, are you to go to confession? You say: “On tomorrow." But who promises you tomorrow? Who assures you that you shall have time for confession, and that God will not deprive you of life, as he has deprived so many others, in the act of sin? “Diem tenes,” says St. Augustine, “qui horam non tenes.” You cannot be certain of living for another hour, and you say: “I will go to confession tomorrow.” Listen to the words of St. Gregory: “He who has promised pardon to penitents, has not promised tomorrow to sinners.” (Hom. xii. in Evan). God has promised pardon to all who repent; but he has not promised to wait till tomorrow for those who insult him. Perhaps God will give you time for repentance, perhaps he will not. But, should he not give it, what shall become of your soul? In the meantime, for the sake of a miserable pleasure, you lose the grace of God, and expose yourself to the danger of being lost for ever.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio preaches the exact opposite of this. He has done so throughout the course of his entire adult life since the time of his presbyteral installation on December 13, 1969, the Feast of Saint Lucy. Bergoglio does not believe that those in public life who persist in sins of adultery, fornication, bigamy, sodomy and/or support the destruction of the innocent preborn under cover of the civil law, promote the sodomite agenda with ready abandon and now, being open vocal in support of euthanasia and eugenics will go to hell. Indeed, he says not a word of criticism about them as most of these reprobates support the “poor” and want to “save the planet,” which was created by God for man to populate so as to give Him honor and glory in this life and then enjoy the ineffable glory of His Beatific Vision after a living and then dying in a state of Sanctifying Grace as a member of the Catholic Church.

Here is also a little something that Jorge Mario Bergoglio does not believe:

9. Would you, for such transient enjoyments, risk your money, your honour, your possessions, your liberty, and your life? No, you would not. How then does it happen that, for a miserable gratification, you lose your soul, heaven, and God? Tell me: do you believe that heaven, hell, eternity, are truths of faith? Do you believe that, if you die in sin, you are lost for ever? Oh! what temerity, what folly is it, to condemn yourself voluntarily to an eternity of torments with the hope of afterwards reversing the sentence of your condemnation! "Nemo," says St. Augustine, “sub spe salutis vultæ grotare.” No one can be found so foolish as to take poison with the hope of preventing its deadly effects by adopting the ordinary remedies. And you will condemn yourself to hell, saying that you expect to be afterwards preserved from it. Folly! which, in conformity with the divine threats, has brought, and brings every day, so many to hell. “Thou hast trusted in thy wickedness, and evil shall come upon thee, and thou shalt not know the rising thereof.” (Isa. xlvii. 10, 11.) You have sinned, trusting rashly in the divine mercy: the punishment of your guilt shall fall suddenly upon you, and you shall not know from whence it comes. What do you say? What resolution do you make? If, after this sermon, you do not firmly resolve to give yourself to God, I weep over you, and regard you as lost.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio has never spoken this way at any time in his presbyteral life because he does believe that any single word of what Saint Alphonsus de Liguori wrote in the latter part of the Seventeenth Century expresses eternally binding truths that do not depend upon human acceptance for their validity or their binding force.

Ah, but this is the nub of the entire Bergoglio approach to moral theology as, without using the words “moral relativism,” believes that moral “standards” are determined by what the people do, not by expecting the faithful to confirm their lives to what he believes are “unattainable ideals.” The entire thrust of the concluding part of the antipope’s address to the Alphonsianum on Tuesday, March 23, 2021, was a plea on behalf of “mature consciences for an adult Church,” a slogan is but a poorly disguised euphemism for moral relativism (or situation ethics):

Mature consciences for an adult Church

Following the example of Saint Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori, renewer of moral theology, [4] it becomes desirable and therefore necessary to walk alongside, accompany and support those most deprived of spiritual aid on the path towards redemption. Evangelical radicalism should not be set against human weakness. It is always necessary to find a way that does not distance but rather brings hearts closer to God, as Alphonsus did with his spiritual and moral teaching. This is because “the great majority of the poor have a special openness to the faith; they need God and we must not fail to offer them his friendship, his blessing, his word, the celebration of the sacraments and a journey of growth and maturity in the faith. Our preferential option for the poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care” (EG 200).

Like Saint Alphonsus, we are called to go towards the people as an apostolic community that follows the Redeemer among the abandoned. This reaching out to those without spiritual aid helps to overcome the individualistic ethos and to promote a moral maturity capable of choosing the true good. By forming responsible and merciful consciences we will have an adult Church capable of responding constructively to social fragilities, in view of the kingdom of heaven.

Reaching out towards the most fragile makes it possible to combat “the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest" in which “human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded", giving rise to the “throwaway culture". (cf. EG 53).

In these times, society is facing countless challenges: the pandemic and work in the post-Covid world, the care that is to be guaranteed to all, the defence of life, input from artificial intelligence, the protection of creation, the anti-democratic threat, and the urgency of brotherhood. Woe to us if, in this evangelising effort, we were to separate “the cry of the poor” [5] from “the cry of the earth” [6].

Alphonsus de’ Liguori, master and patron of confessors and moralists, offered constructive answers to the challenges of the society of his time, through popular evangelisation, indicating a style of moral theology capable of holding together the need for the Gospel and human fragility.

I invite you to follow the example of the Holy Doctor and to approach seriously, at the level of moral theology, “the cry of God who asks us all: ‘Where is your brother?’ (Gen 4: 9). Where is your brother or sister who is enslaved? Where is the brother and sister who you are killing each day in clandestine warehouses, in rings of prostitution, in children used for begging, in exploiting undocumented labour?” (EG 211).

Faced with epochal changes such as the present one, there is a real risk of making the rights of the strong dominant, forgetting those most in need.

The formation of consciences for good seems to be an indispensable goal for every Christian. Giving space to consciences - the place where God's voice resounds - so that they can carry out their personal discernment in the reality of life (cf. AL 37) is a formative task to which we must remain faithful. The attitude of the Samaritan (Lk 10:33-35), as I have indicated in Fratelli tutti, spurs us in this direction.

Moral theology must not be afraid to take up the cry of the least of the earth and make it its own. The dignity of the fragile is a moral duty that cannot be evaded or postponed. It is necessary to testify that right always means solidarity.

I invite you, as Saint Alphonsus did, to go towards the fragile brothers and sisters of our society. This entails the development of a moral theological reflection and pastoral action, capable of being committed to the common good, which has its root in the proclamation of the kerygma, which has a decisive role in the defence of life, towards creation and brotherhood.

On this special occasion I encourage the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer and the Pontifical Alphonsianum Academy, as its expression and centre of high theological and apostolic formation, to enter into constructive dialogue with all the demands of every culture [7], to seek apostolic, moral and spiritual answers in favour of human fragility, in the knowledge that dialogue is marturya.

May Saint Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori and Our Lady of Perpetual Help always be your travelling companions.

Rome, Saint John Lateran, 23 March 2021. (Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Propaganda Adddress to Redemptorists in Conciliar Captivity, March 23, 2021.)

Not one word of this has anything to do with the actual beliefs, writings, or pastoral work of Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, who would be among the first to condemn Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a insidious, pestilential figure of Antichrist and thus an enemy of God and of the souls for whom His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died to redeem on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. 

Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s address to the Alphonsianum on March 23, 2021, was an exercise in manipulative mind control, of spin doctoring, if you will. It was a brazenly bold and notoriously blasphemous attempt to make the Patron of Moral Theologians and Doctor of Holy Mother Churth appear to be a supporter of Bergoglio’s own “live and let live” attitude towards those cannot be expected to live up to those “unattainable ideals.”

Quite in contrary to the naturalist Bergoglio, Pope Pius XII exhorted Italian midwives in 1951 to teach mothers to think supernaturally. Our last true pontiff explained that God’s grace is sufficient and efficacious in cases wherein a married couple had to refrain from that which is proper to the married state because of a legitimate, diagnosed health threat to the mother, something that applies as well in cases of women who become pregnant in the presence of health risks:

Perhaps you will now press the point, however, observing that in the exercise of your profession you find yourselves sometimes faced with delicate cases, in which, that is, there cannot be a demand that the risk of maternity be run, a risk which in certain cases must be absolutely avoided, and in which as well the observance of the agenesic periods either does not give sufficient security, or must be rejected for other reasons. Now, you ask, how can one still speak of an apostolate in the service of maternity?

If, in your sure and experienced judgment, the circumstances require an absolute "no," that is to say, the exclusion of motherhood, it would be a mistake and a wrong to impose or advise a "yes." Here it is a question of basic facts and therefore not a theological but a medical question; and thus it is in your competence. However, in such cases, the married couple does not desire a medical answer, of necessity a negative one, but seeks an approval of a "technique" of conjugal activity which will not give rise to maternity. And so you are again called to exercise your apostolate inasmuch as you leave no doubt whatsoever that even in these extreme cases every preventive practice and every direct attack upon the life and the development of the seed is, in conscience, forbidden and excluded, and that there is only one way open, namely, to abstain from every complete performance of the natural faculty. Your apostolate in this matter requires that you have a clear and certain judgment and a calm firmness.

It will be objected that such an abstention is impossible, that such a heroism is asking too much. You will hear this objection raised; you will read it everywhere. Even those who should be in a position to judge very differently, either by reason of their duties or qualifications, are ever ready to bring forward the following argument: "No one is obliged to do what is impossible, and it may be presumed that no reasonable legislator can will his law to oblige to the point of impossibility. But for husbands and wives long periods of abstention are impossible. Therefore they are not obliged to abstain; divine law cannot have this meaning."

In such a manner, from partially true premises, one arrives at a false conclusion. To convince oneself of this it suffices to invert the terms of the argument: "God does not oblige anyone to do what is impossible. But God obliges husband and wife to abstinence if their union cannot be completed according to the laws of nature. Therefore in this case abstinence is possible." To confirm this argument, there can be brought forward the doctrine of the Council of Trent, which, in the chapter on the observance necessary and possible of referring to a passage of St. Augustine, teaches: "God does not command the impossible but while He commands, He warns you to do what you can and to ask for the grace for what you cannot do and He helps you so that you may be able".

Do not be disturbed, therefore, in the practice of your profession and apostolate, by this great talk of impossibility. Do not be disturbed in your internal judgment nor in your external conduct. Never lend yourselves to anything which is contrary to the law of God and to your Christian conscience! It would be a wrong towards men and women of our age to judge them incapable of continuous heroism. Nowadays, for many a reason,—perhaps constrained by dire necessity or even at times oppressed by injustice—heroism is exercised to a degree and to an extent that in the past would have been thought impossible. Why, then, if circumstances truly demand it, should this heroism stop at the limits prescribed by the passions and the inclinations of nature? It is clear: he who does not want to master himself is not able to do so, and he who wishes to master himself relying only upon his own powers, without sincerely and perseveringly seeking  divine help, will be miserably deceived. (Pope Pius XII, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951.)

There you have it.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio does not believe that sinners can master themselves nor does he think that it is even necessary for them to do so. Even a pagan inscription on the top of wall of what used to be called the Sioux City [Iowa] Municipal Auditorium, which was built in 1938, “There Is No Greater Conquest Than That of Self.”

Obviously, as Pope Pius XII pointed out in 1951, “he who wishes to master himself relying only upon his own powers, without sincerely and perseveringly seeking divine help, will be miserably deceived. Bergoglio, in essence, is at one with Martin Luther in believing the Ten Commandments provide an ethereal ideal that is unattainable and that sinners can thus keep sinning as it is impossible to meet such an “unrealistic” ideal.

God does not command the impossible, and it is possible to quit one’s sins, avoid the near occasions of sin and to grow in personal sanctity if one decides to do so in cooperation with the graces won for us by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

This gold nugget of a quotation of Pope Pius XII’s address to the Thirtieth General Convention of the Society of Jesus in 1957 was contained in article on Catholic college education authored by the late Monsignor George A. Kelly, Ph.D:

The more serious cause, however, was the movement in high Jesuit circles to modernize the understanding of the magisterium by enlarging the freedom of Catholics, especially scholars, to dispute its claims and assertions. Jesuit scholars had already made up their minds that the Catholic creeds and moral norms needed nuance and correction. It was for this incipient dissent that the late Pius XII chastised the Jesuits’ 30th General Congregation one year before he died (1957). What concerned Pius XII most in that admonition was the doctrinal orthodoxy of Jesuits. Information had reached him that the Society’s academics (in France and Germany) were bootlegging heterodox ideas. He had long been aware of contemporary theologians who tried “to withdraw themselves from the Sacred Teaching authority and are accordingly in danger of gradually departing from revealed truth and of drawing others along with them in error” (Humani generis).

In view of what has gone on recently in Catholic higher education, Pius XII’s warnings to Jesuits have a prophetic ring to them. He spoke then of a “proud spirit of free inquiry more proper to a heterodox mentality than to a Catholic one”; he demanded that Jesuits not “tolerate complicity with people who would draw norms for action for eternal salvation from what is actually done, rather than from what should be done.” He continued, “It should be necessary to cut off as soon as possible from the body of your Society” such “unworthy and unfaithful sons.” Pius obviously was alarmed at the rise of heterodox thinking, worldly living, and just plain disobedience in Jesuit ranks, especially at attempts to place Jesuits on a par with their Superiors in those matters which pertained to Faith or Church order (The Pope Speaks, Spring 1958, pp. 447-453). (Monsignor George A. Kelly, Ph.D.,The Catholic College: Death, Judgment, Resurrection. See also the full Latin text of Pope Pius XII's address to the thirtieth general congregation of the Society of Jesus at page 806 of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis for 1957: AAS 49 [1957]. One will have to scroll down to page 806.)

Although the late Monsignor Kelly, whom I knew and consulted on occasion in the 1980s and 1990s, tried to “save” that which was beyond saving because it was in the hands of apostates, the history he provided should illustrate the fact that not all was well in the 1950s, the supposed “golden era” of Catholicism in the United States of America. All manner of revolutionaries, including those within the Society of Jesus, got imprimaturs from like-minded Americanist bishops, men such as John Dearden, Francis Spellman, Richard Cushing, Albert Meyer, et al., to push the envelope, especially in the field of moral theology, as far as they could during the waning years of the pontificate of our last true pope thus far, Pope Pius XII.

Pope Pius XII, however, knew of the “proud spirit of free inquiry more proper to a heterodox mentality than to a Catholic one.” His demand that the Jesuits not “tolerate complicity with people who would draw norms for action for eternal salvation from what is actually done, rather than from what should be done” applies to a certain man named Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina. The stage for the conciliar revolution was pretty well set by the time of the death of Pope Pius XII, who demanded that the likes of those “educating” Bergoglio “be cut off as soon as possible from the body of” the Society of Jesus as they were “unworthy sons.”

Bergoglio’s use of the very heretical moral theology that is based on what people actually do rather than what they ought to do is the reason that he twisted himself into all sorts of contortions to make it appear that Saint Alphonsus de Liguori was a veritable prophet of his own moral relativism. Senor Jorge ought to read Saint Alphonsus de Liguori’s sermon on “The Death of Sinners,” appended below, as heresy and blasphemy are damnable Mortal Sins that, if unrepented, will send him all his brother revolutionaries within into the deepest pits of hell reserved for enemies of Christ the King, His Holy Church, and for the proper formation of the souls for whom He died on Good Friday.

We should make our own the prayer to Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, who was so tenderly devoted to Our Lady, that was composed by Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., and used at the end of his reflection of our Saint’s life in The Liturgical Year:

Long before thy birth, a great Pope had said that it belongs to Doctors to enlighten the Church, to adorn her with virtues, to form her manners; by them, he added, she shines in the midst of darkness as a morning star; their word, made fruitful from on high, solves the enigmas of the Scriptures, unravels difficulties, clears obscurities, interprets what is doubtful; their profound works, beautified by eloquence of speech, are so many priceless pearls which ennoble no less than adorn the House of God. Thus did Boniface VIII speak in the thirteenth century, when he was raising to the rank of doubles (Second and Third Class) the feasts of the Apostles and Evangelists, and of the four then recognized Doctors, St. Gregory, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and St. Jerome. But is it not a description, striking as a prophecy, faithful as a portrait, of all that that thou wert?

Glory then be to thee, who in our days of decadence renewest the youth of the Church, and through whom justice and peace once more embrace one another at the meeting of mercy and truth. For this object thou didst literally give unreservedly thy time and thy strength. “The love of God,” says St. Gregory, “is never idle: where it exists it does great things: if it refuses to act, it is not love.” What fidelity was thine in accomplishing that awful vow, whereby thou didst deny thyself the possibility of even a moment’s relaxation. When suffering intolerable pain, which would appear to anyone else to justify, if not to command, some rest, thou wouldst hold to thy forehead with one hand a piece of marble, which seemed to give some slight relief, and with the other wouldst continue thy precious writings.

But still greater was the example God set before the world, when in thine old age he suffered thee, through the treason of one of thine own sons, to be disgraced by that Apostolic See, for which thou hadst worn away thy life, and which in return withdrew thee, as unworthy, from the very institute thou hadst founded! Then hell was permitted to join its stripes with those of heaven; and thou, the Doctor of peace, didst endure terrible temptations against faith and holy hope. Thus was thy work made perfect in that weakness which is stronger than strength; and thus didst thou merit for troubled souls the support of the virtue of Christ. Nevertheless, having become a child once more in the blind obedience required under such painful trials, thou wast near at once to the kingdom of heaven and to the Crib, which thou didst celebrate in such sweet accents. And the virtue which the Man-God felt going out from him during his mortal life escaped from thee too, in such abundance that the little sick children presented by their mothers for thy blessing were all healed.

Now that thy tears and thy toils are over, watch over us evermore. Preserve in the Church the fruits of thy labors. The religious family begotten by thee has not degenerated; more than once, in the persecutions of the last two centuries, the enemy has honored it with special tokens of his hatred; already too has the aureola of the blessed passed from the father to his sons; may they ever cherish these noble traditions! May the Eternal Father, who in Baptism made us all worthy to be partakers of the lot of the saints in light, lead us all happily by thy example and teachings (from the Collect of the Mass) in the footsteps of our Most Holy Redeemer into the kingdom of this Son of his love. (Dom Prosper Gueranger. O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri, August 2.)

Unfortunately, the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, has degenerated into the depths of conciliarism and the rot of moral relativism, something that Dom Prosper Gueranger could not have foreseen one hundred fifty years ago.  Nevertheless, however, the true Redemptorist spirit is one of helping sinners to convert and to reform their lives, and it is this thoroughly Catholic spirit was fostered by Saint Alphonsus de Liguori’s own devotion to Our Lady, especially through her Most Holy Rosary, and by his Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, which became the foremost promoter of devotion to Our Lady under the title of Our Mother of Perpetual Help (Our Lady of Perpetual Help).

Begging Our Lady of Perpetual Help as we pray the Glorious Mysteries of her Most Holy Rosary during this Easter Octave, may we make it our goal to do acts of penance—yes, penance is in season at all times—for our own sins and for the sins of the blaspheming Jorge Mario Bergoglio. We must good use of Our Lady’s perpetual help lest we find ourselves condemned by the words contained in Saint Alphonsus de Liguori’s sermon appended just below.

A true pope may not be restored to the Throne of Saint Peter in our lifetimes, but we can certainly plant some seeds for such a restoration, particularly by our devotion to Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary so that we might merit to be considered as belonging her when the battle of life is over and the Particular Judgment has been rendered upon our soul by her Divine Son, Christ the King.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

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.

Appendix

Saint Alphonsus de Liguori on the Death of Sinners

SERMON XXXVIII. NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST. - ON THE DEATH OF THE SINNER.

"Thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee." LUKE xix. 43.

SEEING from a distance the city of Jerusalem, in which the Jews were soon to put him to death, Jesus Christ wept over it. "Videns civitatern flevit super illam." Our merciful Redeemer wept at the consideration of the chastisement which was soon to be inflicted on the city, and which he foretold to her inhabitants. ”Thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee. ” Unhappy city! thou shalt one day see thyself encompassed by enemies, who shall beat thee flat to the ground, and thy children in thee, and shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone. Most beloved brethren, this unhappy city is a figure of the soul of a sinner, who, at the hour of death, shall find himself surrounded by his enemies first, by remorse of conscience; secondly, by the assaults of the devils; and thirdly, by the fears of eternal death.

First Point. The sinner at death shall be tortured by remorses of conscience.
1. "Their soul shall die in a storm." (Job xxxvi. 14.) The unhappy sinners who remain in sin die in a tempest, with which God has beforehand threatened them. ”A tempest shall break out and come upon the head of the wicked." (Jer. xxiii. 19.) At the commencement of his illness the sinner is not troubled by remorse or fear; because his relatives, friends, physicians, and all tell him that his sickness is not dangerous; thus he is deceived and hopes to recover. But when his illness increases, and malignant symptoms, the harbingers of approaching death, begin to appear, then the storm with which the Lord has threatened the wicked shall commence. "When sudden calamity shall fall on you, and destruction as a tempest shall be at hand." (Prov. i. 27.) This tempest shall be formed as well by the pains of sickness as by the fear of being obliged to depart from this earth, and to leave all things; but still more by the remorses of conscience, which shall place before his eyes all the irregularities of his past life. ”They shall come with fear at the thought of their sins, and their iniquities shall stand against them to convict them." (Wis. iv. 20.) Then shall his sins rush upon his mind, and fill him with terror. His iniquities shall stand against him to convict him, and, without the aid of other testimony, shall assail him, and prove that he deserves hell.

2. The dying sinner will confess his sins; but, according to St. Augustine, ”The repentance which is sought from a sick man is infirm." (Serm, xxxvii., de Temp.) And St. Jerome says, that of a hundred thousand sinners who continue till death in the state of sin, scarcely one shall be saved. ”Vix de centum milibus, quorum mala vita fuit, meretur in morte a Deo indulgentiam, unus." (Epis. de Mort. Eus.) St. Vincent Ferrer writes, that it is a greater miracle to save such sinners, than to raise the dead to life. ”Majus miraculum est, quod male viventes faciant bonum finem, quam suscitare mortuos." (Serm. i., de Nativ. Virgin.) They shall feel convinced of the evil they have done; they will wish, but shall not be able, to detest it. Antiochus understood the malice of his sins when he said: ”Now I remember the evils that I have done in Jerusalem." (1 Mach. vi. 12.) He remembered his sins, but did not detest them. He died in despair and oppressed with great sadness, saying: "Behold, I perish with great grief in a strange land" (v. 13). According to St. Fulgentius, the same happened to Saul at the hour of death: he remembered his sins; he dreaded the punishment which they deserved; but he did not detest them. “Non odit quid fecerat, sed timuit quod nolebat."

3. Oh! how difficult is it for a sinner, who has slept many years in sin, to repent sincerely at the hour of death, when his mind is darkened, and his heart hardened!”His heart shall be as hard as a stone, and as firm as a smiths anvil." (Job xli. 15.) During life, instead of yielding to the graces and calls of God, he became more obdurate, as the anvil is hardened by repeated strokes of the hammer. ”A hard heart shall fare evil at the last." (Eccl. iii. 27.) By loving sin till death, he has loved the danger of his damnation, and therefore God will justly permit him to perish in the danger in which he wished to live till death.

4. St. Augustine says, that he who is abandoned by sin before he abandons it, will scarcely detest it as he ought at the hour of death; for he will then detest it, not through a hatred of sin, but through necessity. ”Qui prius a peccato relinquitur, quam ipse relinquat, non libere, sed quasi ex necessitate condemnat." But how shall he be able to hate from his heart the sins which he has loved till death? He must love the enemy whom till then he has hated, and he must hate the person whom he has till that moment loved. Oh! what mountains must he pass! He shall probably meet with a fate similar to that of a certain person, who kept in confinement a great number of wild beasts in order to let them loose on the enemies who might assail him. But the wild beasts, as soon as he unchained them, instead of attacking his enemies, devoured himself. When the sinner will wish to drive away his iniquities, they shall cause his destruction, either by complacency in objects till then loved, or by despair of pardon at the sight of their numbers and enormity. "Evils shall catch the unjust man unto destruction." (Ps. cxxxix. 12.) St. Bernard says, that at death the sinner shall see himself chained and bound by his sins. ”We are your works; we will not desert you." We will not leave you; we will accompany you to judgment, and will be your companions for all eternity in hell.
Second Point. The dying sinner shall be tortured by the assaults of the devils.

5. ”The devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time." (Apoc. xii. 12.) At death the devil exerts all his powers to secure the soul that is about to leave this world; for he knows, from the symptoms of the disease, that he has but little time to gain her for eternity. The Council of Trent teaches that Jesus Christ has left us the sacrament of Extreme Unction as a most powerful defence against the temptations of the devil at the hour of death. “Extremæ Unctionis sacramento finem vitæ tanquam firmissimo quodam præsidio munivit." And the holy council adds, that there is no time in which the enemy combats against us with so much violence in order to effect our damnation, and to make us despair of the divine mercy, as at the end of life. ”N ullum tempus est, quo vehementius ille omnes suæ versutiæ nervos intendat at perendos, nos penitus, et a fiducia, etiam, si possit, divinæ misericordiæ deturbandos, quam cum impendere nobis exitum vitæ perspicet." (Sess. 14, cap. ix. Doctr. de Sacr. Extr. Unct.)

6. Oh! how terrible are the assaults and snares of the devil against the souls of dying persons, even though they have led a holy life! After his recovery from a most severe illness, the holy king Eleazar said, that the temptations by which the devil assails men at death, can be conceived only by him who has felt them. We read in the life of St. Andrew Avelliuo, that in his agony he had so fierce a combat with hell, that all the religious present were seized with trembling. They perceived that, in consequence of the agitation, his face swelled, and became black, all his members trembled, and a flood of tears gushed from his eyes. All began to weep through compassion, and were rilled with terror at the sight of a saint dying in such a manner. But they were afterwards consoled, when they saw that as soon as an image of most holy Mary was held before him, he became perfectly calm, and breathed forth his blessed soul with great joy.

7. Now, if this happens to the saints, what shall become of poor sinners, who have lived in sin till death? At that awful moment the devil does not come alone to tempt them in a thousand ways, in order to bring them to eternal perdition, but he calls companions to his assistance. "Their house shall be filled with serpents." (Isa. xiii. 21.) When a Christian is about to leave this world, his house is filled with devils, who unite together in order to effect his ruin. "All her persecutors have taken her in the midst of straits." (Lamen. i. 3.) All his enemies will encompass him in the straits of death. One shall say: Be not afraid; you shall not die of this sickness! Another will say: You have been for so many years deaf to the calls of God, and can you now expect that he will save you? Another will ask: How can you repair the frauds of your past life, and the injuries you have done to your neighbour in his property and character? Another shall ask: What hope can there be for you? Do you not see that all your confessions have been null that they have been made without true sorrow, and without a firm purpose of amendment? How can you repair them with this heart, which you feel so hard? Do you not see that you are lost? And in the midst of these straits and attacks of despair, the dying sinner, full of agitation and confusion, must pass into eternity. ”The people shall be troubled and they shall pass." (Job xxxiv 20.)

Third Point. The dying sinner shall be tortured by the fears of eternal death.

8. Miserable the sick man who takes to his bed in the state of mortal sin! He that lives in sin till death shall die in sin. "You shall die in your sin." (John viii. 21.) It is true that, in whatsoever hour the sinner is converted, God promises to pardon him; but to no sinner has God promised the grace of conversion at the hour of death. ”Seek the Lord while he may be found." (Isa. iv. 6.) Then, there is for some sinners a time when they shall seek God and shall not find him. “You shall seek me, and shall not find me." (John vii. 34.) The unhappy beings will go to confession at the hour of death; they will promise and weep, and ask mercy of God, but without knowing what they do. A man who sees himself under the feet of a foe pointing a dagger to his throat, will shed tears, ask pardon, and promise to serve his enemy as a slave during the remainder of his life. But, will the enemy believe him? No; he will feel convinced that his words are not sincere that his object is to escape from his hands, and that, should he be pardoned, he will become more hostile than ever. In like manner, how can God pardon the dying sinner, when he sees that all his acts of sorrow, and all his promises, proceed not from the heart, but from a dread of death and of approaching damnation.

9. In the recommendation of the departing soul, the assisting priest prays to the Lord, saying: ”Recognize, O Lord, thy creature." But God answers: I know that he is my creature; but, instead of regarding me as his Creator, he has treated me as an enemy. The priest continues his prayer, and says: ”Remember not his past iniquities. ” I would, replies the Lord, pardon all the past sins of his youth; but he has continued to despise me till this moment the very hour of his death. ”They have turned their back upon me, and not their face: and, in the time of affliction, they will say: Arise, and deliver us. Where are the gods which thou hast made thee? let them rise and deliver thee." (Jer. ii. 27, 28.) You, says the Lord, have turned your back upon me till death; "and do you now want me to deliver you from vengeance? Invoke your own gods the creatures, the riches, the friends you loved more than you loved me. Call them now to come to your assistance, and to save you from hell, which is open to receive you. It now justly belongs to me to take vengeance on the insults you have offered me. You have despised my threats against obstinate sinners, and have paid no regard to them. ”Revenge is mine, and I will repay them in due time, that their foot may slide." (Deut. xxxii. 35.) The time of my vengeance is now arrived; it is but just to execute it. This is precisely what happened to a certain person in Madrid, who led a wicked life, but, at the sight of the unhappy death of a companion, went to confession, and resolved to enter a strict religious order. But, in consequence of having neglected to put his resolution into immediate execution, he relapsed into his former irregularities. Being reduced to great want, he wandered about the world, and fell sick at Lima. From the hospital in which he took refuge he sent for a confessor, and promised again to change his life, and to enter religion. But, having recovered from his illness, he returned to his wickedness; and, behold! the vengeance of God fell upon him. One day, his confessor, who was a missionary, in passing over a mountain, heard a noise, which appeared to be the howling of a wild beast. He drew near the place from which the noise proceeded, and saw a dying man, half rotten, and howling through despair. He addressed to him some words of consolation. The sick man, opening his eyes, recognized the missionary, and said: Have you, too, come to he a witness of the justice of God? I am the man who made my confession in the hospital of Lima. I then promised to change my life, but have not done so; and now I die in despair. And thus the miserable man, amid these acts of despair, breathed forth his unhappy soul. These facts are related by Father Charles Bovio (part iii., example 9).

10. Let us conclude the discourse. Tell me, brethren, were a person in sin seized with apoplexy, and instantly deprived of his senses, what sentiments of pity would you feel at seeing him die in this state; without the sacraments, and without signs of repentance! Is not he a fool, who, when he has time to be reconciled with God, continues in sin, or returns to his sins, and thus exposes himself to the danger of dying suddenly, and of dying in sin? "At what hour you think not," says Jesus Christ, "the Son of Man will come," (Luke xiii. 40.) An unprovided death, which has happened to so many, may also happen to each of us. And it is necessary to understand, that all who lead a bad life, meet with an unprovided death, though their last illness may allow them some time to prepare for eternity; for the days of that mortal illness are days of darkness days of confusion, in which it is difficult, and even morally impossible, to adjust a conscience burdened with many sins. Tell me, brethren, if you were now at the point of death, given over by physicians, and in the last agony, how ardently would you desire another month, or another week, to settle the accounts you must render to God! And God gives you this time. He calls you, and warns you of the danger of damnation to which you are exposed. Give yourself, then, instantly to God. What do you wait for? Will you wait till he sends you to hell?”Walk whilst you have light." (John xii. 35.) Avail yourselves of this time and this light, which God gives you at this moment, and now, while it is in your power, repent of all your past sins; for, a time shall come when you will be no longer able to avert the punishment which they deserve.

[I entreat my reader to read Sermon xliv., or the Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, on the practical death, or that which practically happens at the death of men of the world. I know by experience that though it does not contain Latin texts, whenever I preached that sermon, it produced a great impression, and left the audience full of terror. A greater impression is made by practical than by speculative truths.] (Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year by St Alphonsus Liguori in .pdf format.)