Jorge Mario Bergoglio: The Most Ideologically Rigid Man Alive

Jorge Mario Bergoglio hardly ever misses an opportunity to demonstrate that is little else than a rigid Modernist ideologue, an octogenarian Montinian revolutionary whose “formation,” if you want to call it that, was fixed by the time of those early, giddy postconciliar years of the late-1960s and the entire 1970’s when one true bishop and priest after another began to deliver “homilies” filled with hate-filled condemnations of all that preceded the “enlightenment” of the “Second” Vatican Council and with platitudinal elegies of praise on behalf of all that is “new” and “better.” Although there might be some younger traditional Catholics who did not sit through these ideological harangues and know little about them, those of us who are old enough and who did suffer through them find Jorge Mario Bergoglio to be nothing other than an elderly revolutionary bore who has never said anything original in his life, which is why I, for one, am rarely shocked by anything he has said in the past nine years, one months, nine days.

Indeed, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is so redundant and is such an egotist that he cannot help but repeat himself over and over and over again that he believes that he is the model of what he thinks is the Catholic priesthood. As is the case every Maundy Thursday, Jorge Mario Bergoglio used his “homily” for the Novus Ordo Chrism Mass to posit his own ideological predilections as the foundation for priestly life:

“Fixing our eyes on Jesus” is a grace that we, as priests, need to cultivate. At the end of the day, we do well to gaze upon the Lord, and to let him gaze upon our hearts and the hearts of all those whom we have encountered. Not as an accounting of our sins, but as a loving act of contemplation, in which we review our day with the eyes of Jesus, seeing its graces and gifts, and giving thanks for all that he has done for us. But also to set before him our temptations, so as to acknowledge them and reject them. As we can see, this requires knowing what is pleasing to the Lord and what it is that he is asking of us here and now, at this point in our lives. (Chrism "Mass" 2022.)

Interjection Number One:

“Not as an accounting of our sins”?

Each of us will have to make an accounting of our lives when we die. The Divine Tribunal will be erected and the demons who tempted us into sin will be our accusers. However, the severity of one’s Particular Judgment increases according to the gifts and the responsibilities he has been given, but the most severe and exacting judgment is reserved for bishops and priests, which is why they must show forth their love for the Divine Master Whom they serve as alter Christi by reflecting upon their sins and seeking to root them out from their hearts.

Writing principally with the Holy Priesthood in mind, Dom Jean Baptiste Chautard wrote about the necessity of mortification in the life of a priesthood, yes,  the sort of mortification that Jorge Mario Bergoglio always mocks as beneath human dignity:

My God, You are Holiness itself, and here on earth You only admit a soul to intimacy with You in the measure in which it applies itself to destroy or to avoid everything that can soil or stain it in any way.

And yet I can find myself SWARMING LIKE AN ANT-HILL WITH VENIAL SINS or deliberate imperfections, which deprive my soul of all the abounding graces which You held in store for me from all eternity. Consider a few of these sins — like the failure through

spiritual laziness, to raise up my soul to God; an inordinate love of creatures; hasty temper and impatience; nursing a grudge; being capricious and changeable; getting soft, loving whatever is easy and gives pleasure; always talking without any cause about the faults of other people; dissipation, and a lot of curiosity about things that have nothing whatever to do with the glory of God; spreading scandal, gossiping, and making rash and stupid judgments of others; vain self-complacency; contempt of others, and constant criticism of their conduct; always looking for admiration and praise, and doing things with these in view; showing off anything that is to my credit; presumption, stubbornness, jealousy, lack of respect for superiors, murmuring; no mortification in eating, drinking, and so on.

Can my mental prayer and my liturgical life be any good if they do not bring me, bit by bit, to such a state of recollection that my soul will be wakeful against even faults of plain weakness; if they do not help me to pick myself up again right away as soon as my will begins to give in; and even if they do not, in certain cases, lead me to impose certain sanctions upon myself?

What a thought, Dear Lord! If I do not watch myself, I can paralyze Your activity in me!

Masses, Communions, Confessions, my other pious exercises, the special protection of Divine Providence with my eternal salvation in view, the tender concern of my Guardian Angel, and, worse still, even your motherly watchfulness over me, Sweet Immaculate Mother, all this can be paralyzed, cancelled out, by my fault! (Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, p. 130.)

Significantly, Dom Chautard noted in a well-known passage that priestly sanctity, which, of course, received not a mention in Bergoglio’s “Chrism Mass” on Thursday, April 14, 2022, determines whether the faithful in his parish will strive for holiness:

But is there not another cause to be traced to the fact that we priests and educators, because we lack an intense inner life, are unable to beget in souls anything more than asurface piety, without any powerful ideals or strong convictions? Those of us who are professors: have we not, perhaps, been more ambitious for the distinction of degrees and for the reputation of our colleges than to impart a solid religious instruction to souls? Have we not worn ourselves out on less important things than forming of wills, and imprinting on well-tried characters the stamp of Jesus Christ? And has not the most frequent cause of this mediocrity been the common banality of our inner life?

If the priest is a saint (the saying goes), the people will be fervent; if the priest is fervent, the people will be pious; if the priest is pious, the people will at least be decent. But if the priest is only decent, the people will be godless. The spiritual generation is always one degree less intense in its life than those who beget it in Christ.

We would not go so far as to accept this proposition, but we consider that the following words of St. Alphonsus sufficiently well express the came to which we may attribute the responsibility for our present situation:

“The good morals and die salvation of the people depend on good pastors. If there is a good priest in charge of the parish, you will soon see devotion flourishing, people frequenting

the Sacraments, and honouring the practice of mental prayer. Hence the proverb: like pastor, like parish: Qualis pastor, talis parochia. According to this word of Ecclesiasticus (x:2) ‘Those who dwell in the state, take after their ruler’: Qualis est rector civitatis tales et inhabitantes in ea.” (Homo Apost., vii: 16.) (Dom Jean Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, p. 26.)

The man who esteems real, genuine idols of false religions, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, believes that personal sanctity of the sort described by Dom Chautard is an “idol” that detracts from a priest’s “true” work, namely, serving as a naturalistic hand-holder to the so-called “marginalized” and to be with the poor. “Pope Francis” does not believe that men he believes to be priests have any obligation to sanctify their own souls nor that principal mission as priests is glorify the Most Blessed Trinity in the Sacred Liturgy and to advance the sanctification and salvation of the souls entrusted to their pastoral care:

And perhaps, if we meet his gracious gaze, he will also help us to show him our idols. The idols that, like Rachel, we have hidden under the folds of our cloak (cf. Gen 31: 34-35). Allowing the Lord to see those hidden idols - we all have them; all of us! - and to strengthens us against them and takes away their power.

The Lord’s gaze makes us see that, through them we are really glorifying ourselves [2], for there, in those spaces we mark out as exclusively ours, the devil insinuates himself with his poison. He not only makes us self-complacent, giving free rein to one passion or nurturing another, but he also leads us to replace with those idols the presence of the divine Persons, the Father, the Son and the Spirit who dwell within us. This happens. Even though we might tell ourselves that we know perfectly well the difference between God and an idol, in practice we take space away from the Trinity in order to give it to the devil, in a kind of oblique worship. The worship of one who quietly yet constantly listens to his talk and consumes his products, so that in the end not even a little corner remains for God. He is like that, he works quietly and slowly. In another context I spoke about “educated” demons, those that Jesus said are worse than the one who was cast out. They are “polite”, they ring the bell, they enter and gradually take over the house. We must be careful, these are our idols.

There is something about idols that is personal. When we fail to unmask them, when we do not let Jesus show us that in them we are wrongly and unnecessarily seeking ourselves, we make room for the Evil One. We need to remember that the devil demands that we do his will and that we serve him, but he does not always ask us to serve him and worship him constantly; but beware, he is a great diplomat. Receiving our worship from time to time is enough for him to prove that he is our real master and that he can feel like a god in our life and in our heart.

Having said that, in this Chrism Mass, I want to share with you three spaces of hidden idolatry in which the Evil One uses our idols to weaken us in our vocation as shepherds and, little by little, separate us from the benevolent and loving presence of Jesus, the Spirit and the Father.

One space of hidden idolatry opens up wherever there is spiritual worldliness, which is “a proposal of life, a culture, a culture of the ephemeral, of appearances, of the cosmetic”. [3] Its criterion is triumphalism, a triumphalism without the cross. Jesus prayed that the Father would defend us against this culture of worldliness. This temptation of glory without the cross runs contrary to the very person of the Lord, it runs contrary to Jesus, who humbled himself in the incarnation and, as a sign of contradiction, is our sole remedy against every idol. Being poor with Christ who was poor and “chose to be poor”: this is the mindset of Love; nothing else. In today’s Gospel, we see how the Lord chose a simple synagogue in the small village where he spent most of his life, to proclaim the same message he will proclaim at the end of time, when he will come in his glory, surrounded by angels. Our eyes must be fixed on Christ, on the concrete reality of his history with me, now, even as they will be then. The worldly attitude of seeking our own glory robs us of the presence of Jesus, humble and humiliated, the Lord who draws near to everyone, the Christ who suffers with all who suffer, who is worshiped by our people, who know who his true friends are. A worldly priest is nothing more than a clericalized pagan. (Chrism "Mass" 2022.)

Interjection Number Two:

As is very well known by now, Bergoglio’s use of the word “triumphalism” is a slam against not only the Immemorial Mass of Tradition but against everything that emphasizes the priest’s role as a sacerdos—the one who offers sacrifice—acting in persona Christi as an alter Christus, especially at an altar of sacrifice during Holy Mass, which is the unblood re-presentation of Our Lord’s bloody Sacrifice of Himself to His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal God the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. The Argentine Apostate does not consider a priest’s liturgical duties to be paramount in his priestly ministry.

What is paramount in the mind of this truly rigid, inflexible Jacobin/Bolshevik conciliar revolutionary is social work. Bergoglio scoffs at liturgical “functionaries” and believes that the men he considers to be priests within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism who spend time in prayer before what they think is the Blessed Sacrament are “worldly” as they are “seeking themselves” and “hiding” from the sheep. The man has contempt for all traditional priestly piety as described at length by Pope Pius XI in Ad Catholici Sacerdotii, December 20, 1935:

Nevertheless, it is quite true that so holy an office demands holiness in him who holds it. A priest should have a loftiness of spirit, a purity of heart and a sanctity of life befitting the solemnity and holiness of the office he holds. For this, as We have said, makes the priest a mediator between God and man; a mediator in the place, and by the command of Him who is "the one mediator of God and men, the man Jesus Christ." The priest must, therefore, approach as close as possible to the perfection of Him whose vicar he is, and render himself ever more and more pleasing to God, by the sanctity of his life and of his deeds; because more than the scent of incense, or the beauty of churches and altars, God loves and accepts holiness. "They who are the intermediaries between God and His people," says St. Thomas, "must bear a good conscience before God, and a good name among men." On the contrary, whosoever handles and administers holy things, while blameworthy in his life, profanes them and is guilty of sacrilege: "They who are not holy ought not to handle holy things."

34. For this reason even in the Old Testament God commanded His priests and levites: "Let them therefore be holy because I am also holy: the Lord who sanctify them." In his canticle for the dedication of the temple, Solomon the Wise made this same request to the Lord in favor of the sons of Aaron: "Let Thy priests be clothed with justice: and let Thy saints rejoice." So, Venerable Brethren, may we not ask with St. Robert Bellarmine: "If so great uprightness, holiness and lively devotion was required of priests who offered sheep and oxen, and praised God for the moral blessings; what, I ask, is required of those priests who sacrifice the Divine Lamb and give thanks for eternal blessings?" "A great dignity," exclaims St. Lawrence Justinian, "but great too is the responsibility; placed high in the eyes of men they must also be lifted up to the peak of virtue before the eye of Him who seeth all; otherwise their elevation will be not to their merit but to their damnation."

35. And surely every reason We have urged in showing the dignity of the Catholic priesthood does but reinforce its obligation of singular holiness; for as the Angelic Doctor teaches: "To fulfill the duties of Holy Orders, common goodness does not suffice; but excelling goodness is required; that they who receive Orders and are thereby higher in rank than the people, may also be higher in holiness." The Eucharistic Sacrifice in which the Immaculate Victim who taketh away the sins of the world is immolated, requires in a special way that the priest, by a holy and spotless life, should make himself as far as he can, less unworthy of God, to whom he daily offers that adorable Victim, the very Word of God incarnate for love of us. Agnoscite quod agitis, imitamini quod tractatis, "realize what you are doing, and imitate what you handle," says the Church through the Bishop to the deacons as they are about to be consecrated priests. The priest is also the almoner of God's graces of which the Sacraments are the channels; how grave a reproach would it be, for one who dispenses these most precious graces were he himself without them, or were he even to esteem them lightly and guard them with little care.

36. Moreover, the priest must teach the truths of faith; but the truths of religion are never so worthily and effectively taught as when taught by virtue; because in the common saying: "Deeds speak louder than words." The priest must preach the law of the Gospel; but for that preaching to be effective, the most obvious and, by the Grace of God, the most persuasive argument, is to see the actual practice of the law in him who preaches it. St. Gregory the Great gives the reason: "The voice which penetrates the hearts of the hearers, is the voice commended by the speaker's own life; because what his word enjoins, his example helps to bring about." This exactly is what Holy Scripture says of our Divine Savior: He "began to do and to teach." And the crowds hailed Him, not so much because "never did man speak like this man," but rather because "He hath done all things well." On the other hand, they who "say and do not," practicing not what they preach, become like the scribes and Pharisees. And Our Lord's rebuke to the other hand, they who "say and do not," practicing not what they preach, the word of God, was yet administered publicly, in the presence of the listening crowd: "The Scribes and Pharisees have sitten on the chair of Moses. All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you observe and do: but according to their work do ye not." A preacher who does not try to ratify by his life's example the truth he preaches, only pulls down with one hand what he builds up with the other. On the contrary, God greatly blesses the labor of those heralds of the gospel who attend first to their own holiness; they see their apostolate flourishing and fruitful, and in the day of the harvest, "coming they shall come with joyfulness carrying in their sheaves."

37. It would be a grave error fraught with many dangers should the priest, carried away by false zeal, neglect his own sanctification, and become over immersed in the external works, however holy, of the priestly ministry. Thereby, he would run a double risk. In the first place he endangers his own salvation, as the great Apostle of the Gentiles feared for himself: "But I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway." In the second place he might lose, if not divine grace, certainly that unction of the Holy Spirit which gives such a marvelous force and efficacy to the external apostolate.

38. Now to all Christians in general it has been said: "Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect"; how much more then should the priest consider these words of the Divine Master as spoken to himself, called as he is by a special vocation to follow Christ more closely. Hence the Church publicly urges on all her clerics this most grave duty, placing it in the code of her laws: "Clerics must lead a life, both interior and exterior, more holy than the laity, and be an example to them by excelling in virtue and good works." And since the priest is an ambassador for Christ, he should so live as to be able with truth to make his own the words of the Apostle: "Be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ"; he ought to live as another Christ who by the splendor of His virtue enlightened and still enlightens the world.

39. It is plain, then, that all Christian virtues should flourish in the soul of the priest. Yet there are some virtues which in a very particular manner attach themselves to the priest as most befitting and necessary to him. Of these the first is piety, or godliness, according to the exhortation of the Apostle to his beloved Timothy: Exerce . . .teipsum ad pietatem, "exercise thyself unto godliness." Indeed the priest's relations with God are so intimate, so delicate and so frequent, that clearly they should ever be graced by the sweet odor of piety; if "godliness is profitable to all things," it is especially profitable to a right exercise of the priestly charge. Without piety the holiest practices, the most solemn rites of the sacred ministry, will be performed mechanically and out of habit; they will be devoid of spirit, unction and life. But remark, Venerable Brethren, the piety of which We speak is not that shallow and superficial piety which attracts but does not nourish, is busy but does not sanctify. We mean that solid piety which is not dependent upon changing mood or feeling. It is based upon principles of sound doctrine; it is ruled by staunch convictions; and so it resists the assaults and the illusions of temptation. This piety should primarily be directed towards God our Father in Heaven; yet it should be extended also to the Mother of God. The priest even more than the faithful should have devotion to Our Lady, for the relation of the priest to Christ is more deeply and truly like that which Mary bears to her Divine Son. (Pope Pius XI, Ad Catholici Sacerdotii, December 20, 1935.)

Senor Jorge has never spoken about priestly sanctity in this manner as, unlike Pope Pius XI, he possesseth not the Catholic Faith, which is why he must denounce as “triumphalistic” any emphasis on traditional priestly piety as the prerequisite for letting the graces within a priest’s soul by virtue of his ordination bear fruitfulness in the elevation of the pious among the faithful  to real sanctity, of exhorting sinners to repent and convert, and of seeking out non-Catholics within his parish boundaries to invite them into the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

The next strawman “idol” that the false “pontiff” denounced in his “Chrism Mass” was what he called “pragmatism,” which is a figment of his fertile Modernist imagination that he defined as
“appealing” to the “majority” as the definitive criterion for discernment.”

Now, “discernment” for a Modernist such as Bergoglio means dismissing defined doctrines of the Catholic Church as in need of “adjustment” in light of allegedly “changing” pastoral needs and the “changed” ways in which people decide to live in what he calls an “imperfect” manner according to the demands of the “law.”

Here is what Bergoglio said about “pragmatism”:

A second space of hidden idolatry opens up with the kind of pragmatism where numbers become the most important thing. Those who cherish this hidden idol can be recognized by their love for statistics, numbers that can depersonalize every discussion and appeal to the majority as the definitive criterion for discernment; this is not good. This cannot be the sole method or criterion for the Church of Christ. Persons cannot be “numbered”, and God does not “measure out” his gift of the Spirit (cf. Jn 3:34). In this fascination with and love of numbers, we are really seeking ourselves, pleased with the control offered us by this way of thinking, unconcerned with individual faces and far from love. One feature of the great saints is that they know how to step back in order to leave room completely for God. This stepping back, this forgetting of ourselves and wanting to be forgotten by everyone else, is the mark of the Spirit, who is in some sense “faceless”, - the Spirit is “faceless” - simply because he is completely Love, illuminating the image of the Son and, in him, that of the Father. The idolatry of numbers tries to replace the person of the Holy Spirit, who loves to keep hidden - because he is “faceless” - it tries to make everything “apparent”, albeit in a way abstract and reduced to numbers, without a real incarnation. (Chrism "Mass" 2022.)

Interjection Number Three:

These “idols” are categories that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has made up. They have no relationship to real pastoral live even within the structures of his conciliar sect.

In truth, you see, the true God of Divine Revelation cares very much about numbers, which a few passages from the New Testament alone will illustrate:

“After these things Jesus went over the sea of Galilee, which is that of Tiberias. And a great multitude followed Him, because they saw the miracles which He did on them that were diseased.

“Jesus therefore went up into a mountain, and there he sat with His disciples. Now the pasch, the festival day of the Jews, was near at hand. When Jesus therefore had lifted up His eyes, and seen that a very great multitude cometh to Him, He said to Philip: ‘Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?’ And this He said to try him; for He himself knew what He would do.

“Philip answered him: ‘Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may take a little.’

“One of His disciples, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, saith to him: ‘There is a boy here that hath five barley loaves, and two fishes; but what are these among so many?’

“Then Jesus said: ‘Make the men sit down. Now there was much grass in the place. The men therefore sat down, in number about five thousand.” (Jn. 6:1-10)

Yes, a number: five thousand. God cares about numbers. The miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in each of the four Gospels (Mt. 14:13-21; Mk. 6:41-44; Lk. 9:12-16).

Saint John records the exact number of fish, a simile for souls, as Our Lord manifested Himself to the Eleven after His Resurrection:

“Jesus saith to them: ‘Bring hither of the fishes which you have now caught.’ Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of great fishes, one hundred and fifty-three. And although there were so many, the net was not broken.” (Jn. 21:10-11)

Consider the account of the conversion of men on Pentecost Sunday following the first Papal address in the history of the Church:

“But Peter said to them: ‘Do penance, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins: and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all that are far off, whomsoever the Lord our God shall call.’

“And with very many other words did he testify and exhort them, saying: ‘Save yourselves from this perverse generation.'

“They therefore that received his word, were baptized; and there were added in that day about three thousand souls.” (Acts 2:38-41)

Three thousand souls. God cares about numbers. Otherwise, you see, His book, the Bible, would not be full of numbers. The examples from the Old Testament are just too numerous to review in this brief reflection. God made the world in six days, resting on the seventh. Noah spent forty days and forty nights in the ark. The Hebrews were enslaved to the Egyptians for 440 years. The Jews spent forty years wandering in the desert. The thousands slain by Saul, the tens of thousands slain by David. And one of the books of the Pentateuch happens to be called The Book of Numbers. Yes, numbers are important to God.

Holy Mother Church teaches us that God cares about numbers, which are indeed something of an indicator of the health of the Church Militant here on earth.

Over 10,000 people who had gone over to the Albigensians came back to the Faith after Saint Dominic de Guzman was given the Rosary by Our Lady.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, O.P., brought over 25,000 souls, among them Jews and Mohammedans, into the Holy Faith by means of his preaching in southern France and on the Iberian Peninsula.

Saint Peter Claver, S.J., baptized over 300,000 people, mostly Africans headed for chattel slavery in what is now the country of Colombia, in his missionary work in New Spain.

Saint Francis Xavier, S.J., destroyed over 40,000 pagan idols (many of which have made their way into antipapal events these days) baptized over 3,000,0000 people. That’s right, three million.

And, quite importantly, over nine million indigenous peoples of the Americas were converted to the true Faith in a short space of time following Our Lady’s apparition to Juan Diego at Guadalupe on December 9, 1531, almost person for the person the number of people lost to the Church in Europe as a result of the Protestant Revolt.

The conciliar “popes” have talked endlessly about a “qualitative” renewal of what they assert is the Catholic Church. All that talk, however, has been, is now and will continue be nothing other than exercises in spin doctoring that fly in the face of God’s Word and of the authentic patrimony of the Catholic Church.

The wreckage caused by the “Second” Vatican Council and the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical travesty is vast. The decline in the numbers of Catholic attending the Novus Ordo service, of those who believe in the articles contained in the Deposit of Faith, of the numbers of presbyters and consecrated religious has not occurred because of the conciliar sect’s false doctrines and liturgical rites and its institutional refusal to seek converts.   This decline in numbers has occurred precisely because the leaders of the counterfeit church of conciliar have rejected

Catholicism, expressed their contempt for the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, and treated actual schismatics and heretics and pagans and infidels with great solicitude while those who have held to the Faith our fathers have been dealt heavy and severe blows.

To be sure, most of those who had followed Our Lord prior to the Eucharistic discourse left Him when He said that they would not have any life in them unless they ate of His Body and drank of His Blood. Turning to the Apostles, Our Lord asked:

“ ‘Will you also go away?’

“And Simon Peter answered Him: ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known, that thou art the Christ, the Son of God.’” (Jn. 6:68-70)

Thus, it would not matter if our numbers were few because of Holy Mother Church’s unceasing preaching of all that is contained in the Deposit of Faith.

The counterfeit church of conciliarism’s numbers are low because believing Catholics have been chased away and her leaders have refused to convert non-Catholics, which is an actual abandonment of the commission Our Lord gave to the Eleven before He ascended to the Father’s right hand in glory on Ascension Thursday.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had something to say about those who refuse to bear fruit for the sake of the Kingdom:

“He also spoke this parable: “A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it, and found none. And he said to the dresser of the vineyard: “Behold, for these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down therefore: why cumbereth it to the ground?” But he answer, said to him: “Lord, let it alone this year also, until I dig about it, and dung it. And if happily it bear fruit: but if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.”’” (Lk. 13:6-9)

If anyone is preaching to the “majority” to tickle the itching ears of the multitudes, it is Jorge Mario Bergoglio and many of his “bishops,” especially those in the Federal Republic of Germany and those such as Joseph Tobin (Newark, New Jersey), Blase Cupich (Chicago, Illinois), John Stowe (Lexington, Kentucky), and Wilton Gregory (Washington, District of Columbia).

In truth, however, Jorge Mario Bergoglio Bergoglio’s dismissal of the importance of numbers simply provides yet another proof that he cares not for the sanctification and salvation of souls as it is the will of God that everyone on the face of the earth belong to the Catholic Church and believe in all He has revealed to her and teaches infallibly in His Holy Name.

Contrast Bergoglio’s using the Novus Ordo “Chrism Mass” to discuss various idols of his own making, including “functionalism,” which has long been one of his favorite strawmen:

A third space of hidden idolatry, related to the second, comes from functionalism. This can be alluring; many people “are more enthusiastic about the roadmap than about the road”. The functionalist mindset has short shrift for mystery; it aims at efficiency. Little by little, this idol replaces the Father’s presence within us. The first idol replaces the Son's presence, the second one the Spirit's, and the third one the Father's. Our Father is the creator, but not simply a creator who makes things “function”. He “creates” us, as our Father, with tender love, caring for his creatures and working to make men and women ever more free. “Functionaries” take no delight in the graces that the Spirit pours out on his people, from which they too can “be nourished” like the worker who earns his wage. The priest with a functionalist mindset has his own nourishment, which is his ego. In functionalism, we set aside the worship of the Father in the small and great matters of our life and take pleasure in the efficiency of our own programmes. As David did when, tempted by Satan, he insisted on carrying out the census (cf. 1 Chron 21:1). These are the lovers of the route plan and the itinerary, and not of the journey itself. (Chrism "Mass" 2022.)

This is nothing new for Jorge Mario Bergoglio as he spoke about “functionalism” when he was Jorge Mario “Cardinal” Bergoglio, the conciliar “archbishop” of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The interview with him is double-indented and my own contemporaneous comments are single indented:

Q. Is this what you would have said at the Consistory?

BERGOGLIO: Yes. I would have spoken about these three key points.

Q. Nothing else?

BERGOGLIO: Nothing else… No, perhaps I would have mentioned two things of which there is need in this moment, there is more need: mercy, mercy and apostolic courage.

Q. What do they mean to you?

BERGOGLIO: To me apostolic courage is disseminating. Disseminating the Word. Giving it to that man and to that woman for whom it was bestowed. Giving them the beauty of the Gospel, the amazement of the encounter with Jesus… and leaving it to the Holy Spirit to do the rest. It is the Lord, says the Gospel, who makes the seed spring and bear fruit.

Q. In short, it is the Holy Spirit who performs the mission.

BERGOGLIO: The early theologians said: the soul is a kind of sailing boat, the Holy Spirit is the wind that blows in the sail, to send it on its way, the impulses and the force of the wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Without His drive, without His grace, we don’t go ahead. The Holy Spirit lets us enter the mystery of God and saves us from the danger of a gnostic Church and from the danger of a self-referential Church, leading us to the mission.

That means also overthrowing all your functionalist solutions, your consolidated plans and pastoral systems …

BERGOGLIO: I didn’t say that pastoral systems are useless. On the contrary. In itself everything that leads by the paths of God is good. I have told my priests: «Do everything you should, you know your duties as ministers, take your responsibilities and then leave the door open». Our sociologists of religion tell us that the influence of a parish has a radius of six hundred meters. In Buenos Aires there are about two thousand meters between one parish and the next. So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God.

This is valid also for lay people…  (30Giorni | What I would have said at the Consistory (Interview with Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio by Sefania Falasca)

Brief Comment:

The danger of a self-referential Church?

Overthrowing all your functionalist solutions, your consolidated pastoral systems?

Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one's own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God?

How is this not identical to what Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger, evoking the spirit of Hans Urs von Balthasar, wrote in Principles of Catholic Theology in 1982?

Does this mean that the Council should be revoked? Certainly not. It means only that the real reception of the Council has not yet even begun. What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council but the refusal to accept it. This becomes clear precisely in the history of the influence of Gaudium et spes. What was identified with the Council was, for the most part, the expression of an attitude that did not coincide with the statements to be found in the text itself, although it is recognizable as a tendency in its development and in some of its individual formulations. The task is not, therefore, to suppress the Council but to discover the real Council and to deepen its true intention in the light of the present experience. That means that there can be no return to the Syllabus, which may have marked the first stage in the confrontation with liberalism and a newly conceived Marxism but cannot be the last stage. In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world. The fact is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out as early as 1952, that the "demolition of the bastions" is a long-overdue task. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 391.)

Pope Pius VIII, writing in his one and only encyclical letter, Traditi Humilitate Nostrae, May 24, 1829, during his very brief pontificate warned us about those such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, men who have sought to "raze" the foundations of the Church:

Although God may console Us with you, We are nonetheless sad. This is due to the numberless errors and the teachings of perverse doctrines which, no longer secretly and clandestinely but openly and vigorously, attack the Catholic faith. You know how evil men have raised the standard of revolt against religion through philosophy (of which they proclaim themselves doctors) and through empty fallacies devised according to natural reason. In the first place, the Roman See is assailed and the bonds of unity are, every day, being severed. The authority of the Church is weakened and the protectors of things sacred are snatched away and held in contempt. The holy precepts are despised, the celebration of divine offices is ridiculed, and the worship of God is cursed by the sinner. All things which concern religion are relegated to the fables of old women and the superstitions of priests. Truly lions have roared in Israel. With tears We say: "Truly they have conspired against the Lord and against His Christ." Truly the impious have said: "Raze it, raze it down to its foundations." (Pope Pius VIII, Traditi Humilitate Nostrae, May 24, 1829.)

Francis the Talking Apostate is busted. Unfortunately for him, though, he does not realize this.

Excerpt Three:

Q, What should one do?

BERGOGLIO: Look at our people not for what it should be but for what it is and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and recipes but with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God spoke. Allowing the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest with the words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of interest. The apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who has loved us from the beginning.

Q. For you, then, what is the worst thing that can happen in the Church?

BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls «spiritual worldliness». It is the greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. «It is worse», says De Lubac, «more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes». Spiritual worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw going on among the Pharisees: «… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory to yourselves, the ones to the others».  (30Giorni | What I would have said at the Consistory (Interview with Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio by Sefania Falasca).)

Brief Comment:

Generous openness to what? The devil, that's what.

Quoting De Lubac on spiritual worldliness, which means ridding the Catholic Church of the belief that she alone possesses truth and has the sole right from God to teach, govern and sanctify men?

Apostasy.

Simple apostasy.

You want another example?

Sure, below you will find an an excerpt from an speech Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave upon the release of Father Luis Guissani's The Attraction of Jesus that was republished in yet another Communion and Liberation magazine, Traces, which is based in Argentina:

The book presented today, El atractivo de Jesucristo, is not a theological treatise, it is a dialogue of friendship; these are table conversations between Father Guissani and his disciples. It is not a book for intellectuals, but for people who are men and women. It is the description of that initial experience, which I shall refer to later on, of wonder which arises in dialogue about daily experience that is provoked and fascinated by the exceptionally human and divine presence and gaze of Jesus Christ. It is the story of a personal relationship–intense, mysterious, and concrete at the same time–of an impassioned and intelligent affection for the person of Jesus, and this enables Fr. Giussani to come to the threshold, as it were, of Mystery, to speak familiarly and intimately with Mystery.

Everything in our life, today just as in Jesus’ time, begins with an encounter. An encounter with this Man, the carpenter of Nazareth, a man like all men and yet different. The first ones, John, Andrew, and Simon, felt themselves to be looked at into their very depths, read in their innermost being, and in them sprang forth a surprise, a wonder that instantly made them feel bound to Him, made them feel different.

When Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love Me?”, “his ‘Yes’ was not the result of an effort of will, it was not the fruit of a ‘decision’ made by the young man Simon: it was the emergence, the coming to the surface of an entire vein of tenderness and adherence that made sense because of the esteem he had for Him–therefore an act of reason;” it was a reasonable act, “which is why he couldn’t not say ‘Yes.’”

We cannot understand this dynamic of encounter which brings forth wonder and adherence if it has not been triggered–forgive me the use of this word–by mercy. Only someone who has encountered mercy, who has been caressed by the tenderness of mercy, is happy and comfortable with the Lord. I beg the theologians who are present not to turn me in to the Sant’Uffizio or to the Inquisition; however, forcing things a bit, I dare to say that the privileged locus of the encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ on my sin.

In front of this merciful embrace–and I continue along the lines of Giussani’s thought–we feel a real desire to respond, to change, to correspond; a new morality arises. We posit the ethical problem, an ethics which is born of the encounter, of this encounter which we have described up to now. Christian morality is not a titanic effort of the will, the effort of someone who decides to be consistent and succeeds, a solitary challenge in the face of the world. No. Christian morality is simply a response. It is the heartfelt response to a surprising, unforeseeable, “unjust” mercy (I shall return to this adjective). The surprising, unforeseeable, “unjust” mercy, using purely human criteria, of one who knows me, knows my betrayals and loves me just the same, appreciates me, embraces me, calls me again, hopes in me, and expects from me. This is why the Christian conception of morality is a revolution; it is not a never falling down but an always getting up again. (The Attraction of the Cardinal.)

This is quintessentially Modernist as the Modernists taught that man's belief in God and His Divine Son spring forth from an inner impulse and not by virtue of having had the supernatural virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity infused into his soul in the Sacrament of Baptism. Pope Saint Pius X dissected this heresy very well in Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907:

7. However, this Agnosticism is only the negative part of the system of the Modernists: the positive part consists in what they call vital immanence. Thus they advance from one to the other. Religion, whether natural or supernatural, must, like every other fact, admit of some explanation. But when natural theology has been destroyed, and the road to revelation closed by the rejection of the arguments of credibility, and all external revelation absolutely denied, it is clear that this explanation will be sought in vain outside of man himself. It must, therefore, be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. In this way is formulated the principle of religious immanence. Moreover, the first actuation, so to speak, of every vital phenomenon -- and religion, as noted above, belongs to this category -- is due to a certain need or impulsion; but speaking more particularly of life, it has its origin in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sense. Therefore, as God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and foundation of all religion, must consist in a certain interior sense, originating in a need of the divine. This need of the divine, which is experienced only in special and favorable circumstances. cannot of itself appertain to the domain of consciousness, but is first latent beneath consciousness, or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconsciousness, where also its root lies hidden and undetected.

It may perhaps be asked how it is that this need of the divine which man experiences within himself resolves itself into religion? To this question the Modernist reply would be as follows: Science and history are confined within two boundaries, the one external, namely, the visible world, the other internal, which is consciousness. When one or other of these limits has been reached, there can be no further progress, for beyond is the unknowable. In presence of this unknowable, whether it is outside man and beyond the visible world of nature, or lies hidden within the subconsciousness, the need of the divine in a soul which is prone to religion excites -- according to the principles of Fideism, without any previous advertence of the mind -- a certain special sense, and this sense possesses, implied within itself both as its own object and as its intrinsic cause, the divine reality itself, and in a way unites man with God. It is this sense to which Modernists give the name of faith, and this is what they hold to be the beginning of religion.

8. But we have not yet reached the end of their philosophizing, or, to speak more accurately, of their folly. Modernists find in this sense not only faith, but in and with faith, as they understand it, they affirm that there is also to be found revelation. For, indeed, what more is needed to constitute a revelation? Is not that religious sense which is perceptible in the conscience, revelation, or at least the beginning of revelation? Nay, is it not God Himself manifesting Himself, indistinctly, it is true, in this same religious sense, to the soul? And they add: Since God is both the object and the cause of faith, this revelation is at the same time of God and from God, that is to say, God is both the Revealer and the Revealed. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

This is not a minor point at all. It is quite essential to the entire belief system of concilairism. Luis Mario Bergoglio was only repeating what he had been taught by the late Father Luigi Guissani, a belief about man's "inner sense" and "relation to God" that has been propagated throughout the Joseph Ratzinger's entire priesthood.

The only substantive difference between Bergoglio and Ratzinger is that the latter attempted, at least sometimes, to put a sober face on his staging of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service. Bergoglio is a full-fledged child of the "papal" extravaganza "Masses" staged by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. Just take a little look see at this: Conga Liturgy in Argentina. For the inspiration of this so-called liturgy, please see Origin of the Conga Liturgy.

Bergoglio repeated this again when he addressed the Coordinating Committee of “Episcopal” Conferences of Latin America (CELAM) in Rio di Janeiro, Brazil, on Sunday, July 28, 2013:

2. Functionalism. Its effect on the Church is paralyzing. More than being interested in the road itself, it is concerned with fixing holes in the road. A functionalist approach has no room for mystery; it aims at efficiency. It reduces the reality of the Church to the structure of an NGO. What counts are quantifiable results and statistics. The Church ends up being run like any other business organization. It applies a sort of “theology of prosperity” to the organization of pastoral work.

3. Clericalism is also a temptation very present in Latin America. Curiously, in the majority of cases, it has to do with a sinful complicity: the priest clericalizes the lay person and the lay person kindly asks to be clericalized, because deep down it is easier. The phenomenon of clericalism explains, in great part, the lack of maturity and Christian freedom in some of the Latin American laity. Either they simply do not grow (the majority), or else they take refuge in forms of ideology like those we have just seen, or in partial and limited ways of belonging. Yet in our countries there does exist a form of freedom of the laity which finds expression in communal experiences: Catholic as community. Here one sees a greater autonomy, which on the whole is a healthy thing, basically expressed through popular piety. The chapter of the Aparecida document on popular piety describes this dimension in detail. The spread of bible study groups, of ecclesial basic communities and of Pastoral Councils is in fact helping to overcome clericalism and to increase lay responsibility.

We could continue by describing other temptations against missionary discipleship, but I consider these to be the most important and influential at present for Latin America and the Caribbean. (Meeting with the Coordinating Committee of CELAM at the Sumaré Study Center (Rio de Janeiro, 28 July 2013).)

The false “pontiff” returned to the theme when he listed various “diseases” that he believed infected what he contends is the Catholic Church as he gave his annual address to the conciliar curia on December 22, 2014. Here are some excerpts accompanied by my contemporaneous commentary. (Bergoglio’s remarks are double indented):

1. The disease of thinking we are “immortal”, “immune” or downright “indispensable”, neglecting the need for regular check-ups. A Curia which is not self-critical, which does not keep up with things, which does not seek to be more fit, is a sick body. A simple visit to the cemetery might help us see the names of many people who thought they were immortal, immune and indispensable! It is the disease of the rich fool in the Gospel, who thought he would live forever (cf. Lk 12:13-21), but also of those who turn into lords and masters, and think of themselves as above others and not at their service. It is often an effect of the pathology of power, from a superiority complex, from a narcissism which passionately gazes at its own image and does not see the image of God on the face of others, especially the weakest and those most in need.[8] The antidote to this plague is the grace of realizing that we are sinners and able to say heartily: “We are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty” (Lk 17:10).

2. Another disease is the “Martha complex”, excessive busy-ness. It is found in those who immerse themselves in work and inevitably neglect “the better part”: sitting at the feet of Jesus (cf. Lk 10:38-42). Jesus called his disciples to “rest a while” (cf. Mk 6:31) for a reason, because neglecting needed rest leads to stress and agitation. A time of rest, for those who have completed their work, is necessary, obligatory and should be taken seriously: by spending time with one’s family and respecting holidays as moments of spiritual and physical recharging. We need to learn from Qohelet that “for everything there is a season” (3:1-15).

3. Then too there is the disease of mental and spiritual “petrification”. It is found in those who have a heart of stone, the “stiff-necked” (Acts 7:51-60), in those who in the course of time lose their interior serenity, alertness and daring, and hide under a pile of papers, turning into paper pushers and not men of God (cf. Heb 3:12). It is dangerous to lose the human sensitivity that enables us to weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice! This is the disease of those who lose “the sentiments of Jesus” (cf. Phil 2:5-11), because as time goes on their hearts grow hard and become incapable of loving unconditionally the Father and our neighbour (cf. Mt 22:34-35). Being a Christian means “having the same sentiments that were in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5), sentiments of humility and unselfishness, of detachment and generosity.[9]

4. The disease of excessive planning and of functionalism. When the apostle plans everything down to the last detail and believes that with perfect planning things will fall into place, he becomes an accountant or an office manager. Things need to be prepared well, but without ever falling into the temptation of trying to contain and direct the freedom of the Holy Spirit, which is always greater and more flexible than any human planning (cf. Jn 3:8). We contract this disease because “it is always more easy and comfortable to settle in our own sedentary and unchanging ways. In truth, the Church shows her fidelity to the Holy Spirit to the extent that she does not try to control or tame him… to tame the Holy Spirit! … He is freshness, imagination, and newness”.[10] (To the Roman Curia on the occasion of the presentation of Christmas greetings, 22 December 2014) 

Brief Comment:

Well, to paraphrase Ronald Wilson Reagan’s famous line uttered during his debate with President James Earl Carter, Jr., on Tuesday, October 28, 1980, in Cleveland, Ohio, “There he goes again.”

Yes, the whole point of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s curial address of six days ago was to associate the “illnesses” that afflict those who work in the conciliar curia as stemming from a desire to “control” or “tame” the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, Who is said to be “freshness, imagination, and newness.” In other words, God the Holy Ghost is “full of surprises” and loves “innovation.”

All of Bergoglio’s talk about “illnesses” in the curia was a smokescreen for him to mask his deeply-held desire to eradicate every known vestige of Catholicism that remains in his false church. His sanctimony is as insidious as his instructions are hypocritical.

For the sake of emphasis, especially for those accessing this site for the first time, God the Holy Ghost is immutable. He is opposed to all innovation and novelty:

These firings, therefore, with all diligence and care having been formulated by us, we define that it be permitted to no one to bring forward, or to write, or to compose, or to think, or to teach a different faith. Whosoever shall presume to compose a different faith, or to propose, or teach, or hand to those wishing to be converted to the knowledge of the truth, from the Gentiles or Jews, or from any heresy, any different Creed; or to introduce a new voice or invention of speech to subvert these things which now have been determined by us, all these, if they be Bishops or clerics let them be deposed, the Bishops from the Episcopate, the clerics from the clergy; but if they be monks or laymen: let them be anathematized. (Constantinople III).

These and many other serious things, which at present would take too long to list, but which you know well, cause Our intense grief. It is not enough for Us to deplore these innumerable evils unless We strive to uproot them. We take refuge in your faith and call upon your concern for the salvation of the Catholic flock. Your singular prudence and diligent spirit give Us courage and console Us, afflicted as We are with so many trials. We must raise Our voice and attempt all things lest a wild boar from the woods should destroy the vineyard or wolves kill the flock. It is Our duty to lead the flock only to the food which is healthful. In these evil and dangerous times, the shepherds must never neglect their duty; they must never be so overcome by fear that they abandon the sheep. Let them never neglect the flock and become sluggish from idleness and apathy. Therefore, united in spirit, let us promote our common cause, or more truly the cause of God; let our vigilance be one and our effort united against the common enemies.

Indeed you will accomplish this perfectly if, as the duty of your office demands, you attend to yourselves and to doctrine and meditate on these words: "the universal Church is affected by any and every novelty" and the admonition of Pope Agatho: "nothing of the things appointed ought to be diminished; nothing changed; nothing added; but they must be preserved both as regards expression and meaning." Therefore may the unity which is built upon the See of Peter as on a sure foundation stand firm. May it be for all a wall and a security, a safe port, and a treasury of countless blessings. To check the audacity of those who attempt to infringe upon the rights of this Holy See or to sever the union of the churches with the See of Peter, instill in your people a zealous confidence in the papacy and sincere veneration for it. As St. Cyprian wrote: "He who abandons the See of Peter on which the Church was founded, falsely believes himself to be a part of the Church . . . .

But for the other painful causes We are concerned about, you should recall that certain societies and assemblages seem to draw up a battle line together with the followers of every false religion and cult. They feign piety for religion; but they are driven by a passion for promoting novelties and sedition everywhere. They preach liberty of every sort; they stir up disturbances in sacred and civil affairs, and pluck authority to pieces. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

As for the rest, We greatly deplore the fact that, where the ravings of human reason extend, there is somebody who studies new things and strives to know more than is necessary, against the advice of the apostle. There you will find someone who is overconfident in seeking the truth outside the Catholic Church, in which it can be found without even a light tarnish of error. Therefore, the Church is called, and is indeed, a pillar and foundation of truth. You correctly understand, venerable brothers, that We speak here also of that erroneous philosophical system which was recently brought in and is clearly to be condemned. This system, which comes from the contemptible and unrestrained desire for innovation, does not seek truth where it stands in the received and holy apostolic inheritance. Rather, other empty doctrines, futile and uncertain doctrines not approved by the Church, are adopted. Only the most conceited men wrongly think that these teachings can sustain and support that truth. (Pope Gregory XVI, Singulari Nos, May 25, 1834.)

• For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward
  
  • not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence,
  • but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated.
• Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.

God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth.

The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either: the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.

Therefore we define that every assertion contrary to the truth of enlightened faith is totally false. . . .

3. If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.

And so in the performance of our supreme pastoral office, we beseech for the love of Jesus Christ and we command, by the authority of him who is also our God and saviour, all faithful Christians, especially those in authority or who have the duty of teaching, that they contribute their zeal and labour to the warding off and elimination of these errors from the church and to the spreading of the light of the pure faith.

But since it is not enough to avoid the contamination of heresy unless those errors are carefully shunned which approach it in greater or less degree, we warn all of their duty to observe the constitutions and decrees in which such wrong opinions, though not expressly mentioned in this document, have been banned and forbidden by this holy see. (Pope Pius IX, Vatican Council, Session III, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Chapter 4, On Faith and Reason, April 24, 1870. SESSION 3 : 24 April 1870.)

Hence it is quite impossible [the Modernists assert] to maintain that they [dogmatic statements] absolutely contain the truth: for, in so far as they are symbols, they are the images of truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sense in its relation to man; and as instruments, they are the vehicles of truth, and must therefore in their turn be adapted to man in his relation to the religious sense. But the object of the religious sense, as something contained in the absolute, possesses an infinite variety of aspects, of which now one, now another, may present itself. In like manner he who believes can avail himself of varying conditions. Consequently, the formulas which we call dogma must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. Here we have an immense structure of sophisms which ruin and wreck all religion. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes in a false god who is "full of surprises." It is very curious, of course, that his own well-known revolutionary prejudices and publicly proclaimed heresies and scandalously blasphemous acts of apostasy are synonomous with what he calls "God's surprises."

Other salient passages from Bergoglio’s address include the following:

6. There is also a “spiritual Alzheimer’s disease”. It consists in losing the memory of our personal “salvation history”, our past history with the Lord and our “first love” (Rev 2:4). It involves a progressive decline in the spiritual faculties which in the long or short run greatly handicaps a person by making him incapable of doing anything on his own, living in a state of absolute dependence on his often imaginary perceptions. We see it in those who have lost the memory of their encounter with the Lord; in those who no longer see life’s meaning in “deuteronomic” terms; in those who are completely caught up in the present moment, in their passions, whims and obsessions; in those who build walls and routines around themselves, and thus become more and more the slaves of idols carved by their own hands. (To the Roman Curia on the occasion of the presentation of Christmas greetings, 22 December 2014)

Brief Comment:

This is pure Modernism, which teaches that one can only “know” Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by “encountering” Him on a “personal” basis, unfettered by the supposed preconceptions of various dogmas that do not speak to the human heart on a “personal” basis. Such “narrow-minded” people cannot understand who cannot understand those who do not see the word in terms of the Ten Commandments.

Bergoglio’s condemnation of those members of the curia who are caught up in their “own imaginary perceptions” is an attack on anyone who believes that Catholic dogma is fixed and incapable of change or modification in order to “meet the needs” of those who find it “cold” and “unresponsive” to their own particular circumstances.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the one who is stuck in his own imaginary world as the "god" he professes is nonexistent. He has the greatest illness of all, heresy, which the true God of Divine Revelation hates.

The next two sections take swipes at those who lead lives of “quietism,” meaning those who spend “excessive” time in prayer and contemplation while ignoring the “action” that awaits them in the “streets,” and those who strive for academic honors, meaning those who want to further their studies, such as they are in the conciliar church, while working in Rome. Bergoglio is truly an anti-intellectual as much as he is a figure of Antichrist:

7. The disease of rivalry and vainglory.[11] When appearances, the colour of our clothes and our titles of honour become the primary object in life, we forget the words of Saint Paul: “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil 2:3-4). This is a disease which leads us to be men and woman of deceit, and to live a false “mysticism” and a false “quietism”. Saint Paul himself defines such persons as “enemies of the cross of Christ” because “they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things” (Phil 3:19).

8. The disease of existential schizophrenia. This is the disease of those who live a double life, the fruit of that hypocrisy typical of the mediocre and of a progressive spiritual emptiness which no doctorates or academic titles can fill. It is a disease which often strikes those who abandon pastoral service and restrict themselves to bureaucratic matters, thus losing contact with reality, with concrete people. In this way they create their own parallel world, where they set aside all that they teach with severity to others and begin to live a hidden and often dissolute life. For this most serious disease conversion is most urgent and indeed indispensable (cf. Lk 15:11-32).

Brief Comment:

Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes those conciliar clerics who adhere to even a semblance of Catholic doctrine have lost “contact with reality,” with “concrete people,” choosing to live in a “parallel world” as they persist in a teaching that is “severe” and “out-of-touch.” It is such putative clerics who are said to lead “dissolute” lives, not truly corrupt men such as his own hand-picked selection to head the Institute of Religious Works, the Vatican Bank, “Monsignor” Battista Ricca.

Forever condemning “gossip” while remaining silent about such evils as the Belgian Parliament’s approval of euthanizing children earlier this year, Bergoglio’s “solution” to all of the illnesses is to associate his own work of spiritual destruction with that of the “Holy Spirit”:

We need to be clear that it is only the Holy Spirit who can heal all our infirmities. He is the soul of the Mystical Body of Christ; as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed says: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life”. It is the Holy Spirit who sustains every sincere effort at purification and in every effort at conversion. It is he who makes us realize that every member participates in the sanctification of the Body and its weakening. He is the promoter of harmony:[18] Ipse harmonia est”, as Saint Basil says. Saint Augustine tells us that “as long as a member is still part of the body, its healing can be hoped for. But once it is removed, it can be neither cured nor healed”.[19]

Healing also comes about through an awareness of our sickness and of a personal and communal decision to be cured by patiently and perseveringly accepting the remedy.[20] (To the Roman Curia on the occasion of the presentation of Christmas greetings, 22 December 2014)

Brief Comment:

Yes, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has a “remedy,” and he was warning the members of the conciliar that they had better accept it as coming from the “Holy Spirit.” He even blasphemously invoked the Blessed Mother herself to effect this end!

Pope Saint Pius X, writing in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin ary, explained Bergoglio's agenda very well, which is why the Argentine Apostate's agenda is no surprise whatsoever:

38. 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 he 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?

39. It may, perhaps, seem to some, Venerable Brethren, that We have dealt at too great length on this exposition of the doctrines of the Modernists. But it was necessary that We should do so, both in order to meet their customary charge that We do not understand their ideas, and to show that their system does not consist in scattered and unconnected theories, but, as it were, in a closely connected whole, so that it is not possible to admit one without admitting all. For this reason, too, We have had to give to this exposition a somewhat didactic form, and not to shrink from employing certain unwonted terms which the Modernists have brought into use. And now with Our eyes fixed upon the whole system, no one will be surprised that We should define it to be the synthesis of all heresies. Undoubtedly, were anyone to attempt the task of collecting together all the errors that have been broached against the faith and to concentrate into one the sap and substance of them all, he could not succeed in doing so better than the Modernists have done. Nay, they have gone farther than this, for, as We have already intimated, their system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion. Hence the rationalists are not wanting in their applause, and the most frank and sincere among them congratulate themselves on having found in the Modernists the most valuable of all allies. (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Behold the synthesis of all Modernists, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Concluding Comments:

First, it is necessary to make an overall observation about Bergoglio’s list of “illnesses.”

As a consummate demagogue, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s whole aim in his address of six days ago was to portray the current state of the conciliar curia in broad strokes so as to prepare the way for radical changes in its structure and operation next year, 2015.

Second, to this end, the false “pontiff” used the pitfalls that exist inherently in an ecclesiastical bureaucracy as something that he can “cure” by means of structural reform and an “adjustment” in the behavior of those who work within it. This naïve belief shows Bergoglio’s intellectual debt to both John Locke, the father of modern liberalism, and to Karl Marx, whose revolution sought to repair the social flaws that the structural reforms of liberals made worse over time. Bergoglio really believes in structural reform as the means to change human behavior. This is why he is such a supporter of structural reform in the civil realm and it is why he assembled his Commissars back in 2013.

Ever the hypocrite, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has refined the art of denouncing believing Catholics to a level unsurpassed even by the caesars of the past and those of the present.

We are living among figures of Antichrist, men and women who are intent on “converting” us.

The lords of Modernity seek to do this by enslaving to a regime of laws that countenance licentiousness while proscribing any and all condemnation of it as even the public proclamation of Holy Name of Christ the King is considered a thought crime of “insensitivity” to the beliefs of others. The lords of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism do this by enabling the Herods of Modernity and by denouncing those who are attached to "outdated" beliefs and "archaic" liturgies. The celebration of sin is "in" both in the world and its enabler, the counterfeit church of conciliarism. The celebration of sin is "in" in the world in the name of "diversity" and it is "in" in the conciliar church in the name of a false "mercy."

Our remedy, of course, is to remain steadfast in the true Catholic Faith with the help of the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

It was just three months, eighteen days ago that Jorge Mario Bergoglio raised his strawman of “functionalism” during his “homily” on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, January 6, 2022:

Brothers and sisters, as it was for the Magi, so it is for us.  The journey of life and faith demands a deep desire and inner zeal.  Sometimes we live in a spirit of a “parking lot”; we stay parked, without the impulse of desire that carries us forward.  We do well to ask: where are we on our journey of faith?  Have we been stuck all too long, nestled inside a conventional, external and formal religiosity that no longer warms our hearts and changes our lives?  Do our words and our liturgies ignite in people’s hearts a desire to move towards God, or are they a “dead language” that speaks only of itself and to itself?  It is sad when a community of believers loses its desire and is content with “maintenance” rather than allowing itself to be startled by Jesus and by the explosive and unsettling joy of the Gospel.  It is sad when a priest has closed the door of desire, sad to fall into clerical functionalism, very sad.

Interjection Number One:

Unlike the priests described by “Father X” in his Latin Mass Magazine article of twenty-eight years ago, Jorge Mario Bergoglio burns that which he has never adored. Indeed, he is filled with seething hatred for anything to do with what he considers to be the “past,” for which he is constantly apologizing to various and sundry groups of fellow schismatics and heretics. He is thus compelled to caricature those he hates even though he does not realizing that he is blaspheming God the Holy Ghost, Who inspired countless saints in the “past” to the performance of the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy that were motivated solely by their burning love of God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church and for the zealous love of souls for whom His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem.

Bergoglio lives in a completely imaginary world of self-made demons, whom he must villainize at all times in such a relentless manner as would be considered psychotic by any right-thinking Catholic. This wretched revolutionary is driven by emotion and by own his pantheistic proclivity to make of God a projection of his own warped and entirely self-referential, closed-in-on-itself imaginings. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a poster boy for the following description of Modernists found in Pope Saint Pius X’s Pascendi Domini Gregis, September 8, 1907:

You know it from your own dealings with souls, and especially with souls in whom sentiment predominates; you know it also from your reading of works of ascetical theology — works for which the Modernists have but little esteem, but which testify to a science and a solidity far greater than theirs, and to a refinement and subtlety of observation far beyond any which the Modernists take credit to themselves for possessing. It seems to Us nothing short of madness, or at the least consummate temerity to accept for true, and without investigation, these incomplete experiences which are the vaunt of the Modernist. Let Us for a moment put the question: If experiences have so much force and value in their estimation, why do they not attach equal weight to the experience that so many thousands of Catholics have that the Modernists are on the wrong path? Is it that the Catholic experiences are the only ones which are false and deceptive? The vast majority of mankind holds and always will hold firmly that sense and experience alone, when not enlightened and guided by reason, cannot reach to the knowledge of God. What, then, remains but atheism and the absence of all religion? Certainly it is not the doctrine of symbolism that will save us from this. For if all the intellectual elements, as they call them, of religion are nothing more than mere symbols of God, will not the very name of God or of divine personality be also a symbol, and if this be admitted, the personality of God will become a matter of doubt and the gate will be opened to pantheism? And to pantheism pure and simple that other doctrine of the divine immanence leads directly. For this is the question which We ask: Does or does not this immanence leave God distinct from man? If it does, in what does it differ from the Catholic doctrine, and why does it reject the doctrine of external revelation? If it does not, it is pantheism. Now the doctrine of immanence in the Modernist acceptation holds and professes that every phenomenon of conscience proceeds from man as man. The rigorous conclusion from this is the identity of man with God, which means pantheism. The distinction which Modernists make between science and faith leads to the same conclusion. The object of science, they say, is the reality of the knowable; the object of faith, on the contrary, is the reality of the unknowable. Now, what makes the unknowable unknowable is the fact that there is no proportion between its object and the intellect — a defect of proportion which nothing whatever, even in the doctrine of the Modernist, can suppress. Hence the unknowable remains and will eternally remain unknowable to the believer as well as to the philosopher. Therefore if any religion at all is possible, it can only be the religion of an unknowable reality. And why this might not be that soul of the universe, of which certain rationalists speak, is something which certainly does not seem to Us apparent. These reasons suffice to show superabundantly by how many roads Modernism leads to atheism and to the annihilation of all religion. The error of Protestantism made the first step on this path; that of Modernism makes the second; atheism makes the next.

40. To penetrate still deeper into the meaning of Modernism and to find a suitable remedy for so deep a sore, it behooves Us, Venerable Brethren, to investigate the causes which have engendered it and which foster its growth. That the proximate and immediate cause consists in an error of the mind cannot be open to doubt. We recognize that the remote causes may be reduced to two: curiosity and pride. Curiosity by itself, if not prudently regulated, suffices to account for all errors. Such is the opinion of Our predecessor, Gregory XVI, who wrote: “A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty, when against the warning of the Apostle it seeks to know beyond what it is meant to know, and when relying too much on itself it thinks it can find the truth outside the Catholic Church wherein truth is found without the slightest shadow of error.” (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Bergoglio hates the “old” as “fixed” and “rigid” even though Holy Mother Church, guided infallibly by God the Holy Ghost, has raised up to her altars men and women of every rank and from every nation who understood that Divine Revelation closed with the death of Saint John the Evangelist around 125 A.D. and that it is not an “ongoing” process subject to human perfection or the processes of a nonexistent theological “evolutionism.” The Argentine Apostate believes it is impossible to “reach” God when one worships in a “dead language” and is not open to God’s supposed “surprises” even though the doctrine of Faith is certain and is thus incapable of anything that can contradict itself or, worse yet, is premised a seething hatred of all that passed before the dawning of the age of Aquarius, excuse, me, conciliarism.

This is a very long way of saying that Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s “Chrism Mass” of April 14, 2022, contained nothing new as he has never had an original thought in his life. Everything he believes was condemned by our true popes between 1794 (Pope Pius VI’s Auctorem Fidei) and 1957 (Pope Pius XII’s address to the Thirtieth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus) with lots of documents in between.

A lengthy excerpt from Pope Pius XI’s Ad Catholici Sacerdotii, found in Appendix B below, provides a superb definition of the priestly life that contrasts sharply with the Modernist ideology that passes for “deep” pastoral theology in the warped mind of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Pope Pius XI discussed the sacramental ministry of the ordained priest; Jorge Mario Bergoglio spoke of strawmen that implied the administration of the sacraments was secondary to active work on behalf of the poor and to reaffirm hardened sinners in their lives of perdition in the name of a “false mercy” that can wind up sending those sinners and those who reaffirm them straight to hell upon their deaths.

How will Holy Mother Church be restored in the midst of this fast-breaking events?

Miraculously, something that a reader noted in an e-mail to me ninety-seven months ago:

"St. Peter then chose the new pope. The Church was again organized..."

"... the sky was covered with clouds so dense and dismal that it was impossible to look at them without dismay... the avenging arm of God will strike the wicked, and in his mighty power he will punish their pride and presumption. God will employ the powers of hell for the extermination of these impious and heretical persons who desire to overthrow the Church and destroy its foundation. .... Innumerable legions of demons shall overrun the earth and shall execute the orders of Divine Justice... Nothing on the earth shall be spared. After this frightful punishment I saw the heavens opening, and St. Peter coming down again upon earth; he was vested in his pontifical robes, and surrounded by a great number of angels, who were chanting hymns in his honor, and they proclaimed him as sovereign of the earth. I saw also St. Paul descending upon the earth. By God's command, he traversed the earth and chained the demons, whom he brought before St. Peter, who commanded them to return into hell, whence they had come.

"Then a great light appeared upon the earth which was the sign of the reconciliation of God with man. The angels conducted before the throne of the prince of the Apostles the small flock that had remained faithful to Jesus Christ. These good and zealous Christians testified to him the most profound respect, praising God and thanking the Apostles for having delivered them from the common destruction, and for having protected the Church of Jesus Christ by not permitting her to be infected with the false maxims of the world. St. Peter then chose the new pope. The Church was again organized..." (Prophecy of Ven. Elizabeth Canori-Mora (d. 1825) as recorded in Fr. Culleton's book The Prophets and Our Times, 1941 A.D. Imprimatur)

"After the three days of darkness, St. Peter and St. Paul, having come down from Heaven, will preach in the whole world and designate a new Pope. A great light will flash from their bodies and will settle upon the cardinal who is to become Pope. Christianity, then, will spread throughout the world. He is the Holy Pontiff, chosen by God to withstand the storm. At the end, he will have the gift of miracles, and his name shall be praised over the whole earth. Whole nations will come back to the Church and the face of the earth will be renewed. Russia, England, and China will come into the Church." (Prophecy of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, 1769-1837 A.D., who was Beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.)

Our days are indeed short. We do not know the day or the hour of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour's Coming for us at the end of our lives. To prepare for this terrible moment of our Particular Judgment is never easy. It is even more difficult in these days of apostasy and betrayal, which is why we must flee from any association with the counterfeit church of conciliarism

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ gave us His Most Blessed Mother to be our Mother as she stood so valiantly by the foot of His Most Holy Cross as He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem us. He has instructed her to give Saint Simon Stock the Brown Scapular, which was worn with such great priestly dignity by Saint John of the Cross, a true son of Carmel, and to give Saint Dominic de Guzman her Most Holy Rosary and to give Saint Catherine Laboure the Miraculous Medal. He has let His Most Blessed Mother teach us through her apparition to Juan Diego that He wants the entirety of the Americas converted to His Social Kingship as she is honored publicly by men and their nations, and He has warned us through her apparition at La Salette in France of impending doom in the Church and the world as a result of the sins of men. And He has told His Most Blessed Mother to console us with her Fatima Message, which is why we really should be earnest in praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.

Remember, every Ave Maria we pray helps us to prepare for the hour of our deaths as we seek to repair the damage caused by our sins and those of the whole world. May we be generous in praying our Rosaries as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, remembering, as true Charity demands, to pray fervently for the conversion of the conciliar revolutionaries before they die. We must never be unbent in our own sins, and we must never be unaware of how we must give God the honor and glory that are His due as members of the Catholic Church who have fled to the catacombs to seek to sanctify and thus save our immortal souls.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon! 

Low Sunday, 2022

Today, Sunday, April 24, 2022, is  Low Sunday, wherein we read the Gospel account of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s institution of the Sacrament of Penance and of Saint Thomas the Apostle’s unbelief after he, who was absent in the Upper Room when Our Lord appeared to the Eleven, had learned of the appearance:

Now when it was late that same day, the first of the week, and the doors were shut, where the disciples were gathered together, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them: Peace be to you. (John 20: 19.) 

Saint Thomas was not present, protesting that he would not believe the account of his brother bishops until he had placed his fingers in the nail prints in Our Lord's hands and feet and had placed his hand in Our Lord's wounded side:

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, who is called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him: We have seen the Lord. But he said to them: Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. (John 20: 24-25.) 

Our Lord did appear to Saint Thomas and the other ten Apostles one week later, on Low Sunday. Saint Thomas saw and believed:

And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said: Peace be to you. Then he saith to Thomas: Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing. Thomas answered, and said to him: My Lord, and my God. Jesus saith to him: Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed. (John 20: 26-29.) 

Saint Thomas believed because he saw Our Lord after His Bodily Resurrection from the dead.

We believe although we have not seen Our Lord Bodily risen from the dead with our own eyes. We believe because of the testimony given to us by the first Pope, Saint Peter, and the other Apostles, including the "doubting" Saint Thomas, each of whom was blessed with the personal charism of infallibility, a charism transmitted only to the true, legitimate Successors of Saint Peter thereafter, as they proclaimed with boldness and with a true love for the eternal welfare of souls the Gospel of their Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. They preached the Gospel to Jew and Gentile, Saint Thomas himself going to India to do so. Fear of offending no man restrained them from being faithful to the mission that had been given to them by the Divine Redeemer by He Ascended to the Father's right hand in glory on Ascension Thursday. Fear of offending no man restrained the true popes of the Catholic Church, such as Saint Pius X with Theodore Herzl, from fulfilling that mission in their own days.

We must fear to offend no man as we lift high the Cross of the Divine Redeemer, making sure to do so in a spirit of gratitude for the gift of the true Faith and to bear with those whom God's Providence has placed in our paths with kindliness and patience, praying to God the Holy Ghost to give us the prudence to know what to say and how and when to say it as we seek the eternal good of others. Our proclamation of the true Faith might be as simple as handing out a Green Scapular to someone we meet (as my wife does every day, receiving warm expressions of gratitude from those to whom she has given the Green Scapular when and if we see that person again), praying "Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and at the hour our death" for each person to whom we give it.

We might have the opportunity on other occasions to give a fallen away Catholic a blessed Rosary and an instruction booklet as to how to pray it in the event that they had never learned (or have forgotten over the years) to do so. There are any number of ways that we can bear witness to the Faith, including by means of our performing the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy, undergirding each of our efforts as the consecrated slaves of Jesus through Mary by a life of fervent prayer, especially before the Blessed Sacrament, and to the Mother of God, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, and by our regular and sincere use of the Sacrament of Penance. And each of our homes should be enthroned to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, thereby helping us to establish and to maintain a Christendom in miniature as our families attempt to avoid the allure of the world and to read more about the lives of the saints so that we can attempt to imitate their virtues more readily and more perfectly on a daily basis.

Saint Thomas disbelieved the news of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. He believed after he had seen Our Lord on Low Sunday a week later. The gifts and fruits of God the Holy Ghost empowered him to become a fervent defender of the Faith to the point of shedding his blood in India even after he had placed a post or a stick in the ground at the entrance to a church he built in Madras (now Chennai), India, and promised the faithful that the nearby waters would never rise above that stick. The floodwaters from the tsunami of over eighteen years ago now stopped right at that stick. We ask Saint Thomas the Apostle, therefore, to make sure that our own Faith is never swept away by the floodwaters of conciliarism, that it always remains strong with the help of Our Lady's loving prayers and of his own Apostolic intercession from Heaven.

Faith is indeed a gift. It can be lost. We must nurture the Faith every day of our lives, holding fast to the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church as we cling to true bishops and true priests in the catacombs who make no concessions at all to conciliarism or to the nonexistent legitimacy of its false shepherds. The counterfeit religion of conciliarism dispenses with the necessity of seeking with urgency the conversion of all men to the true Church. The true religion has never done so it can never do so.

Asking Our Lady to keep our Faith strong in the midst of apostasy and betrayal, may we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, thereby helping to plant the seeds for the conversion of more and more people, including Jews, to the true Faith, and making it more possible, please God and by the intercession of His Most Blessed Mother, where there will be a world in which everyone will exclaim with joy:

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, 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.

Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, O.F.M., Cap., pray for us.

Appendix A

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., on Low Sunday

Our Risen Jesus gave an additional proof of His wishing the Sunday to be, henceforth, the privileged day. He reserved the second visit He intended to pay to all His disciples for this the eighth day since His Resurrection. During the previous days, He has left Thomas a prey to doubt; but, to-day He shows Himself to this Apostle, as well as to the others, and obliges Him, by irresistible evidence, to lay aside His incredulity. Thus does our Saviour again honour the Sunday. The Holy Ghost will come down from heaven upon this same day of the week, making it the commencement of the Christian Church: Pentecost will complete the glory of this favoured day.

Jesus’ apparition to the Eleven, and the victory He gains over the incredulous Thomas, — these are the special subjects the Church brings before us today. By this apparition, which is the seventh since His Resurrection, our Saviour wins the perfect faith of His disciples. It was impossible not to recognise God, in the patience, the majesty, and the charity of Him who showed Himself to them. Here again, our human thoughts are disconcerted; we should have thought this delay excessive; it would have seemed to us, that our Lord ought to have, at once, either removed the sinful doubt from Thomas’ mind, or punished him for his disbelief. But no: Jesus is infinite wisdom, and infinite goodness. In His wisdom, He makes this tardy acknowledgment of Thomas become a new argument of the truth of the Resurrection; in His goodness, He brings the heart of the incredulous disciple to repentance, humility, and love, yea, to a fervent and solemn retractation of all his disbelief. We will not here attempt to describe this admirable scene, which holy Church is about to bring before us. We will select, for our today’s instruction, the important lesson given by Jesus to His disciple, and, through him, to us all. It is the leading instruction of the Sunday, the Octave of the Pasch, and it behooves us not to pass it by, for, more than any other, it tells us the leading characteristic of a Christian, shows us the cause of our being so listless in God’s service, and points out to us the remedy for our spiritual ailments.

Jesus says to Thomas: “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed!” Such is the great truth, spoken by the lips of the God-Man: it is a most important counsel, given, not only to Thomas, but to all who would serve God and secure their salvation. What is it that Jesus asks of His disciple ? Has He not heard him make profession that now, at last, he firmly believes? After all, was there any great fault in Thomas’ insisting on having experimental evidence before believing in so extraordinary a miracle as the Resurrection? Was he obliged to trust to the testimony of Peter and the others, under penalty of offending his divine Master? Did he not evince his prudence, by withholding his assent until he had additional proofs of the truth of what his Brethren told him? Yes, Thomas was a circumspect and prudent man, and one that was slow to believe what he had heard; he was worthy to be taken as a model by those Christians, who reason and sit in judgment upon matters of faith. And yet, listen to the reproach made him by Jesus. It is merciful, and, withal, so severe! This Jesus has so far condescended to the weakness of His disciple, as to accept the condition, on which alone he declares that he will believe: now that the disciple stands trembling before his Risen Lord, and exclaims, in the earnestness of faith: “My Lord! and my God!” oh! see how Jesus chides him! This stubbornness, this incredulity, deserves a punishment: — the punishment is, to have these words said to him: “Thomas! thou hast believed, because thou hast seen!”

Then, was Thomas obliged to believe before having seen? Yes, undoubtedly. Not only Thomas, but all the Apostles were in duty bound to believe the Resurrection of Jesus, even before He showed himself to them. Had they not lived three years with Him? Had they not seen Him prove himself to be the Messias and Son of God by the most undeniable miracles? Had He not foretold them, that He would rise again on the third day? As to the humiliations and cruelties of His Passion, had He not told them, a short time previous to it, that He was to be seized by the Jews, in Jerusalem, and be delivered to the Gentiles? that He was to be scourged, spit upon, and put to death? (Luke 18:32-33)

After all this, they ought to have believed in His triumphant Resurrection, the very first moment they heard of His Body having disappeared. As soon as John had entered the sepulchre, and seen the winding sheet, he at once ceased to doubt, he believed. But, it is seldom that man is so honest as this; he hesitates, and God must make still further advances, if He would have us give our faith! Jesus condescended even to this: He made further advances. He showed Himself to Magdalene and her companions, who were not incredulous, but only carried away by natural feeling, though the feeling was one of love for their Master. When the Apostles heard their account of what had happened, they were treated as women, whose imagination had got the better of their judgment. Jesus had to come in person: He showed Himself to these obstinate men, whose pride made them forget all that He had said and done, and which ought to have been sufficient to make them believe in His Resurrection. Yes, it was pride, for faith has no other obstacle than this. If man were humble, he would have faith enough to move mountains.

To return to our Apostle — Thomas had heard Magdalene, and he despised her testimony; he had heard Peter, and he objected to his authority; he had heard the rest of his fellow-Apostles and the two disciples of Emmaus, and no, he would not give up his own opinion. How many there are among us, who are like him in this! We never think of doubting what is told us by a truthful and disinterested witness, unless the subject touch upon the supernatural; and then, we have a hundred difficulties. It is one of the sad consequences left in us by original sin. Like Thomas, we would see the thing ourselves: that alone is enough to keep us from the fullness of the truth. We comfort ourselves with the reflection that, after all, we are Disciples of Christ; as did Thomas, who kept in union with his brother-Apostles, only he shared not their happiness. He saw their happiness, but he considered it to be a weakness of mind, and was glad that he was free from it!

How like this is to our modern rationalistic Catholic! He believes, but it is because his reason almost forces him to believe; he believes with his mind, rather than from his heart. His faith is a scientific deduction, and not a generous longing after God and supernatural truth. Hence, how cold and powerless is this faith! how cramped and ashamed! how afraid of believing too much! Unlike the generous unstinted faith of the saints, it is satisfied with fragments of truth, with what the Scripture terms diminished truths. (Psalm 11:2) It seems ashamed of itself. It speaks in a whisper, lest it should be criticised; and when it does venture to make itself heard, it adopts a phraseology, which may take off the sound of the divine. As to those miracles which it wishes had never taken place, and which it would have advised God not to work, they are a forbidden subject. The very mention of a miracle, particularly if it have happened in our own times, puts it into a state of nervousness. The lives of the saints, their heroic virtues, their sublime sacrifices — it has a repugnance to the whole thing! It talks gravely about those who are not of the true religion being unjustly dealt with by the Church in Catholic countries: it asserts that the same liberty ought to be granted to error as to truth: it has very serious doubts whether the world has been a great loser by the secularization of society.

Now, it was the for the instruction of persons of this class that our Lord spoke those words to Thomas: Blessed are they who have not seen, and have believed. Thomas sinned in not having the readiness of mind to believe. Like him, we also are in danger of sinning, unless our faith have a certain expansiveness, which makes us see everything with the eye of faith, and gives our faith that progress which God recompenses with a superabundance of light and joy. Yes, having once become members of the Church, it is our duty to look upon all things from a supernatural point of view. There is no danger of going too far, for we have the teachings of an infallible authority to guide us. The just man liveth by faith. Faith is his daily bread. His mere natural life becomes transformed for good and all, if only he be faithful to his Baptism. Could we suppose that the Church, after all her instructions to her neophytes, and after all those sacred rites of their Baptism which are so expressive of the supernatural life, would be satisfied to see them straightaway adopt that dangerous system which drives faith into a nook of the heart and understanding and conduct, leaving all the rest to natural principles or instinct? No, it could not be so. Let us, therefore, imitate St. Thomas in his confession, and acknowledge that, hitherto, our faith has not been perfect. Let us go to our Jesus, and say to him: “Thou art my Lord and my God! But, alas! I have many times thought and acted as though Thou wert my Lord and my God in some things, and not in others. Henceforth, I will believe without seeing; for I would be of the number of those whom Thou callest blessed!”

We have said enough about St. Thomas’ incredulity; let us now admire his faith. His fault has taught us to examine and condemn our own want of faith; let us learn from his repentance how to become true believers. Our Lord, who had chosen him as one of the pillars of His Church, has been obliged to treat him with an exceptional familiarity: Thomas avails himself of Jesus’ permission, puts his finger into the sacred wound, and immediately he sees the sinfulness of his past incredulity. He would make atonement, by a solemn act of faith, for the sin he has committed in priding himself on being wise and discreet: he cries out, and with all the fervor of faith: My Lord and my God! Observe, he not only says that Jesus is his Lord, his Master, the same who chose him as one of His disciples: this would not have been faith, for there is no faith where we can see and touch. Had Thomas believed what his brother Apostles had told him, he would have had faith in the Resurrection; but now he sees, he has experimental knowledge of the great fact; and yet, as our Lord says of him, he has faith. In what? In this, that his Master is God. he sees but the Humanity of Jesus, and he at once confesses Him to be God. From what is visible, his soul, now generous and repentant, rises to the invisible: “Thou art my God!” Now, O Thomas! thou art full of faith! The Church proposes thee to us, on thy Feast, as an example of faith. The confession thou didst make on this day is worthy to be compared with that which Peter made, when he said, “Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God!” By this profession, which neither flesh nor blood had revealed to him, Peter merited to be made the Rock whereon Christ built His Church: thine did more than compensate thy former disbelief; it gave thee, for the time, a superiority over the rest of the Apostles who, so far at least, were more taken up with the visible glory than with the invisible Divinity of their risen Lord.The Offertory gives us another text of the Gospel, relative to the Resurrection. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Low Sunday.)

Appendix B

Excerpts from Pope Pius XI’s Ad Catholici Sacerdotii, December 20, 1935

10. The priest, according to the magnificent definition given by St. Paul is indeed a man Ex hominibus assumptus, "taken from amongst men," yet pro hominibus constituitur in his quae sunt ad Deum, "ordained for men in the things that appertain to God": his office is not for human things, and things that pass away, however lofty and valuable these may seem; but for things divine and enduring. These eternal things may, perhaps, through ignorance, be scorned and contemned, or even attacked with diabolical fury and malice, as sad experience has often proved, and proves even today; but they always continue to hold the first place in the aspirations, individual and social, of humanity, because the human heart feels irresistibly it is made for God and is restless till it rests in Him.

11. The Old Law, inspired by God and promulgated by Moses, set up a priesthood, which was, in this manner, of divine institution; and determined for it every detail of its duty, residence and rite. It would seem that God, in His great care for them, wished to impress upon the still primitive mind of the Jewish people one great central idea. This idea throughout the history of the chosen people, was to shed its light over all events, laws, ranks and offices: the idea of sacrifice and priesthood. These were to become, through faith in the future Messias, a source of hope, glory, power and spiritual liberation. The temple of Solomon, astonishing in richness and splendor, was still more wonderful in its rites and ordinances. Erected to the one true God as a tabernacle of the divine Majesty upon earth, it was also a sublime poem sung to that sacrifice and that priesthood, which, though type and symbol, was still so august, that the sacred figure of its High Priest moved the conqueror Alexander the Great, to bow in reverence; and God Himself visited His wrath upon the impious king Balthasar because he made revel with the sacred vessels of the temple. Yet that ancient priesthood derived its greatest majesty and glory from being a foretype of the Christian priesthood; the priesthood of the New and eternal Covenant sealed with the Blood of the Redeemer of the world, Jesus Christ, true God and true Man.

12. The Apostle of the Gentiles thus perfectly sums up what may be said of the greatness, the dignity and the duty of the Christian priesthood: Sic nos existimet homo Ut ministros Christi et dispensatores mysteriorum Dei - "Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and the dispensers of the mysteries of God." The priest is the minister of Christ, an instrument, that is to say, in the hands of the Divine Redeemer. He continues the work of the redemption in all its world-embracing universality and divine efficacy, that work that wrought so marvelous a transformation in the world. Thus the priest, as is said with good reason, is indeed "another Christ"; for, in some way, he is himself a continuation of Christ. "As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you," is spoken to the priest, and hence the priest, like Christ, continues to give "glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will."

13. For, in the first place, as the Council of Trent teaches, Jesus Christ at the Last Supper instituted the sacrifice and the priesthood of the New Covenant: "our Lord and God, although once and for all, by means of His death on the altar of the cross, He was to offer Himself to God the Father, that thereon He might accomplish eternal Redemption; yet because death was not to put an end to his priesthood, at the Last Supper, the same night in which He was betrayed in order to leave to His beloved spouse the Church, a sacrifice which should be visible (as the nature of man requires), which should represent that bloody sacrifice, once and for all to be completed on the cross, which should perpetuate His memory to the end of time, and which should apply its saving power unto the remission of sins we daily commit, showing Himself made a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech, offered to God the Father, under the appearance of bread and wine, His Body and Blood, giving them to the apostles (whom He was then making priests of the New Covenant) to be consumed under the signs of these same things, and commanded the Apostles and their successors in the priesthood to offer them, by the words 'Do this in commemoration of Me.' "

14. And thenceforth, the Apostles, and their successors in the priesthood, began to lift to heaven that "clean oblation" foretold by Malachy, through which the name of God is great among the gentiles. And now, that same oblation in every part of the world and at every hour of the day and night, is offered and will continue to be offered without interruption till the end of time: a true sacrificial act, not merely symbolical, which has a real efficacy unto the reconciliation of sinners with the Divine Majesty.

15. "Appeased by this oblation, the Lord grants grace and the gift of repentance, and forgives iniquities and sins, however great." The reason of this is given by the same Council in these words: "For there is one and the same Victim, there is present the same Christ who once offered Himself upon the Cross, who now offers Himself by the ministry of priests, only the manner of the offering being different."

16. And thus the ineffable greatness of the human priest stands forth in all its splendor; for he has power over the very Body of Jesus Christ, and makes It present upon our altars. In the name of Christ Himself he offers It a victim infinitely pleasing to the Divine Majesty. "Wondrous things are these," justly exclaims St. John Chrysostom, "so wonderful, they surpass wonder."

17. Besides this power over the real Body of Christ, the priest has received other powers, august and sublime, over His Mystical Body of Christ, a doctrine so dear to St. Paul; this beautiful doctrine that shows us the Person of the Word-made-Flesh in union with all His brethren. For from Him to them comes a supernatural influence, so that they, with Him as Head, form a single Body of which they are the members. Now a priest is the appointed "dispenser of the mysteries of God," for the benefit of the members of the mystical Body of Christ; since he is the ordinary minister of nearly all the Sacraments, - those channels through which the grace of the Savior flows for the good of humanity. The Christian, at almost every important stage of his mortal career, finds at his side the priest with power received from God, in the act of communicating or increasing that grace which is the supernatural life of his soul.

18. Scarcely is he born before the priest baptizing him, brings him by a new birth to a more noble and precious life, a supernatural life, and makes him a son of God and of the Church of Jesus Christ. To strengthen him to fight bravely in spiritual combats, a priest invested with special dignity makes him a soldier of Christ by holy chrism. Then, as soon as he is able to recognize and value the Bread of Angels, the priest gives It to him, the living and life-giving Food come down from Heaven. If he fall, the priest raises him up again in the name of God, and reconciles him to God with the Sacrament of Penance. Again, if he is called by God to found a family and to collaborate with Him in the transmission of human life throughout the world, thus increasing the number of the faithful on earth and, thereafter, the ranks of the elect in Heaven, the priest is there to bless his espousals and unblemished love; and when, finally, arrived at the portals of eternity, the Christian feels the need of strength and courage before presenting himself at the tribunal of the Divine Judge, the priest with the holy oils anoints the failing members of the sick or dying Christian, and reconsecrates and comforts him.

19. Thus the priest accompanies the Christian throughout the pilgrimage of this life to the gates of Heaven. He accompanies the body to its resting place in the grave with rites and prayers of immortal hope. And even beyond the threshold of eternity he follows the soul to aid it with Christian suffrages, if need there be of further purification and alleviation. Thus, from the cradle to the grave the priest is ever beside the faithful, a guide, a solace, a minister of salvation and dispenser of grace and blessing.

20. But among all these powers of the priest over the Mystical Body of Christ for the benefit of the faithful, there is one of which the simple mention made above will not content Us. This is that power which, as St. John Chrysostom says: "God gave neither to Angels nor Archangels" - the power to remit sins. "Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them: and whose sins you shall retain they are retained"; a tremendous power, so peculiar to God that even human pride could not make the mind conceive that it could be given to man. "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" And, when we see it exercised by a mere man there is reason to ask ourselves, not, indeed, with pharisaical scandal, but with reverent surprise at such a dignity: "Who is this that forgiveth sins also?" But it is so: the God-Man who possessed the "power on earth to forgive sins" willed to hand it on to His priests; to relieve, in His divine generosity and mercy, the need of moral purification which is rooted in the human heart.

21. What a comfort to the guilty, when, stung with remorse and repenting of his sins, he hears the word of the priest who says to him in God's name: "I absolve thee from thy sins!" These words fall, it is true, from the lips of one who, in his turn, must needs beg the same absolution from another priest. This does not debase the merciful gift; but makes it, rather, appear greater; since beyond the weak creature is seen more clearly the hand of God through whose power is wrought this wonder. As an illustrious layman has written, treating with rare competence of spiritual things: ". . . when a priest, groaning in spirit at his own unworthiness and at the loftiness of his office, places his consecrated hands upon our heads; when, humiliated at finding himself the dispenser of the Blood of the Covenant; each time amazed as he pronounces the words that give life; when a sinner has absolved a sinner; we, who rise from our knees before him, feel we have done nothing debasing. . . We have been at the feet of a man who represented Jesus Christ, . . . we have been there to receive the dignity of free men and of sons of God."

22. These august powers are conferred upon the priest in a special Sacrament designed to this end: they are not merely passing or temporary in the priest, but are stable and perpetual, united as they are with the indelible character imprinted on his soul whereby he becomes "a priest forever"; whereby he becomes like unto Him in whose eternal priesthood he has been made a sharer. Even the most lamentable downfall, which, through human frailty, is possible to a priest, can never blot out from his soul the priestly character. But along with this character and these powers, the priest through the Sacrament of Orders receives new and special grace with special helps. Thereby, if only he will loyally further, by his free and personal cooperation, the divinely powerful action of the grace itself, he will be able worthily to fulfill all the duties, however arduous, of his lofty calling. He will not be overborne, but will be able to bear the tremendous responsibilities inherent to his priestly duty; responsibilities which have made fearful even the stoutest champions of the Christian priesthood, men like St. John Chrysostom, St. Ambose, St. Gregory the Great, St. Charles and many others.

23. The Catholic priest is minister of Christ and dispenser of the mysteries of God in another way, that is, by his words. The "ministry of the word" is a right which is inalienable; it is a duty which cannot be disallowed; for it is imposed by Jesus Christ Himself: "Going, therefore, teach ye all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." The Church of Christ, depository and infallible guardian of divine revelation, by means of her priests, pours out the treasures of heavenly truth; she preaches Him who is "the true Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world"; she sows with divine bounty that seed which is small and worthless to the profane eyes of the world, but which is like the mustard seed of the Gospel. For it has within itself power to strike strong deep roots in souls which are sincere and thirsting for the truth, and make them like sturdy trees able to withstand the wildest storms.

24. Amidst all the aberrations of human thought, infatuated by a false emancipation from every law and curb; and amidst the awful corruptions of human malice, the Church rises up like a bright lighthouse warning by the clearness of its beam every deviation to right or left from the way of truth, and pointing out to one and all the right course that they should follow. Woe if ever this beacon should be - We do not say extinguished, for that is impossible owing to the unfailing promises on which it is founded - but if it should be hindered from shedding far and wide its beneficent light! We see already with Our own eyes whither the world has been brought by its arrogant rejection of divine revelation, and its pursuit of false philosophical and moral theories that bear the specious name of "science." That it has not fallen still lower down the slope of error and vice is due to the guidance of the light of Christian truth that always shines in the world. Now the Church exercises her "ministry of the word" through her priests of every grade of the Hierarchy, in which each has his wisely allotted place. These she sends everywhere as unwearied heralds of the good tidings which alone can save and advance true civilization and culture, or help them to rise again. The word of the priest enters the soul and brings light and power; the voice of the priest rises calmly above the storms of passion, fearlessly to proclaim the truth, and exhort to the good; that truth which elucidates and solves the gravest problems of human life; that good which no misfortune can take from us, which death but secures and renders immortal.

25. Consider the truths themselves which the priest if faithful to his ministry, must frequently inculcate. Ponder them one by one and dwell upon their inner power; for they make plain the influence of the priest, and how strong and beneficent it can be for the moral education, social concord and peaceful development of peoples. He brings home to young and old the fleeting nature of the present life; the perishableness of earthly goods; the value of spiritual goods and of the immortal soul; the severity of divine judgment; the spotless holiness of the divine gaze that reads the hearts of all; the justice of God, which "will render to every man according to his works." These and similar lessons the priest teaches; a teaching fitted indeed to moderate the feverish search for pleasure, and the uncontrolled greed for worldly goods, that debase so much of modern life, and spur on the different classes of society to fight one another like enemies, instead of helping one another like friends. In this clash of selfish interest, and unleashed hate, and dark plans of revenge, nothing could be better or more powerful to help, than loudly to proclaim the "new commandment" of Christ. That commandment enjoins a love which extends to all, knows no barriers nor national boundaries, excludes no race, excepts not even its own enemies.

26. The experience of twenty centuries fully and gloriously reveals the power for good of the word of the priest. Being the faithful echo and reecho of the "word of God," which "is living and effectual and more piercing than any two-edged sword,' it too reaches "unto the division of the soul and spirit"; it awakens heroism of every kind, in every class and place, and inspires the self forgetting deeds of the most generous hearts. All the good that Christian civilization has brought into the world is due, at least radically, to the word and works of the Catholic priesthood. Such a past might, to itself, serve as sufficient guarantee for the future; but we have a still more secure guarantee, "a more firm prophetical word" in the infallible promises of Christ. (Pope Pius XI, Ad Catholici Sacerdotii, December 20, 1935.)