Just Another Excuse to Keep Catholics Distracted, Angry, and Agitated During Lent

The police state thugs operating with the gracious indult and chortling satisfaction of the Biden Family Crime Syndicate that has made lots of money from Red Chinese “investors, who, it should be pointed out, are getting their money’s worth from the current occupants of the White House and the Executive Branch, are prepared to arrest former President Donald John Trump on charges being brought by New York County District Attorney Alvin “See No Violent Crime. Prosecute No Violent Crime” Bragg that the former president had a criminal intent when he authorized former consigliere turned archenemy Michael Cohen to distribute $130,000 to a woman, Stephanie Clifford (who is known unprofessionally as “Stormy Daniels), as hush money late in the 2016 general election campaign for the presidency.

Attorney Jonathan Turley assessed this case as follows in an opinion column published in the left-reading Hill online publication:

“The moment that we are waiting for, we made it to the finale together” — those familiar words from “America’s Got Talent” — could well be the opening line for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg next week, when he is expected to unveil an indictment of former President Trump. With Trump’s reported announcement that he expects to be arrested on Tuesday, it would be a fitting curtain raiser for a case that has developed more like a television production than a criminal prosecution. Indeed, this indictment was repeatedly rejected only to be brought back by popular demand.

Trump faces serious legal threats in the ongoing Mar-a-Lago investigation. But the New York case would be easily dismissed outside of a jurisdiction like New York, where Bragg can count on highly motivated judges and jurors.

Although it may be politically popular, the case is legally pathetic. Bragg is struggling to twist state laws to effectively prosecute a federal case long ago rejected by the Justice Department against Trump over his payment of “hush money” to former stripper Stormy Daniels. In 2018 (yes, that is how long this theory has been around), I wrote how difficult such a federal case would be under existing election laws. Now, six years later, the same theory may be shoehorned into a state claim.

It is extremely difficult to show that paying money to cover up an embarrassing affair was done for election purposes as opposed to an array of obvious other reasons, from protecting a celebrity’s reputation to preserving a marriage. That was demonstrated by the failed federal prosecution of former presidential candidate John Edwards on a much stronger charge of using campaign funds to cover up an affair.

In this case, Trump reportedly paid Daniels $130,000 in the fall of 2016 to cut off or at least reduce any public scandal. The Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office had no love lost for Trump, pursuing him and his associates in myriad investigations, but it ultimately rejected a prosecution based on the election law violations. It was not alone: The Federal Election Commission (FEC) chair also expressed doubts about the theory.

Prosecutors working under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., also reportedly rejected the viability of using a New York law to effectively charge a federal offense.

More importantly, Bragg himself previously expressed doubts about the case, effectively shutting it down soon after he took office. The two lead prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, resigned in protest. Pomerantz launched a very public campaign against Bragg’s decision, including commenting on a still-pending investigation. He made it clear that Trump was guilty in his mind, even though his former office was still undecided and the grand jury investigation was ongoing.

Pomerantz then did something that shocked many of us as highly unprofessional and improper: Over Bragg’s objection that he was undermining any possible prosecution, Pomerantz published a book detailing the case against an individual who was not charged, let alone convicted.

He was, of course, an instant success in the media that have spent years highlighting a dozen different criminal theories that were never charged against Trump. Pomerantz followed the time-tested combination for success — link Donald Trump to any alleged crime and convey absolute certainty of guilt. For cable TV shows, it was like a heroin hit for an audience in a long agonizing withdrawal.

And the campaign worked. Bragg caved, and “America’s Got Trump” apparently will air after all.

However, before 12 jurors can vote, Bragg still has to get beyond a series of glaring problems which could raise serious appellate challenges later.

While we still do not know the specific state charges in the anticipated indictment, the most-discussed would fall under Section 175 for falsifying business records, based on the claim that Trump used legal expenses to conceal the alleged hush-payments that were supposedly used to violate federal election laws. While some legal experts have insisted such concealment is clearly a criminal matter that must be charged, they were conspicuously silent when Hillary Clinton faced a not-dissimilar campaign-finance allegation.

Last year, the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign for funding the Steele dossier as a legal expense. The campaign had previously denied funding the dossier, which was used to push false Russia collusion claims against Trump in 2016, and it buried the funding in the campaign’s legal budget. Yet, there was no hue and cry for this type of prosecution in Washington or New York.

A Section 175 charge would normally be a misdemeanor. The only way to convert it into a Class E felony requires a showing that the “intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” That other crime would appear to be the federal election violations which the Justice Department previously declined to charge.

The linkage to a federal offense is critical for another reason: Bragg’s office ran out of time to prosecute this as a misdemeanor years ago; the statute of limitations is two years. Even if he shows this is a viable felony charge, the longer five-year limitation could be hard to establish.

Of course, none of these legalistic problems will be relevant in the coming frenzy. It will be a case that is nothing if not entertaining, one to which you can bring your popcorn — so long as you leave your principles behind. (Get ready for Manhattan DA’s made-for-TV Trump prosecution: high on ratings, but short on the law.)

Although Alvin “Turn ‘Em Loose to Kill Again” Bragg is making his chief patron, George Soros, and the leftist claque associated with him very happy, he is far from acting alone in this matter as the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy (R-California), has directed all relevant House committees to discover if Federal taxpayer funds have been used to advance a New York County case against Trump that the United States Ministry of Injustice did not seek to pursue itself. The case is indeed flimsy and, as so many have noted, it is redolent of political adversaries have been with by banana republics, Nazi Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Red China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, to name just a few authoritarian/totalitarian regimes.

Now, before I proceed to discuss how this is all meant by the adversary to be a gigantic distraction during the final three weeks of Lent, wherein we should be spending less time concerned about worldly events and more time meditating on the Sacred Mysteries of our Redemption that has been purchased for us at so great a price, that of shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the very Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made man by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, in Our Lady’s Virginal and mmaculate Womb at her Annunciation, there are several goals that I believe the totalitarians who seek to enslave by rooting out and eradicating all opposition to their ever-evolving “woke,” environmentalist, and globalist wish to achieve by using the bloated Alvin Bragg as a point man in a case that will be heard by an anti-Trump judge and decided by an anti-Trump jury in an anti-Trump city where was in 1946 and spent most of his life until a few years ago.

First, the administration of Red China Joe Biden very much wants to solidify the Republican base around former President Trump as those within this corrupt regime of grifters and censors who scoff at Federal laws making it a crime to enter the United States of America illegally believe that Trump is the easiest candidate for their decrepit octogenarian to run against in 2024.

Second, administration personnel and their supporters in the mainslime media believe that it is important to have Trump charged with something now so they can blitzkrieg news of a probable indictment in the State of Georgia on the former president’s very misplaced and imprudent efforts to seek some way to have him declared the winner of the state’s presidential electors in 2020 and thus keep the headlines focused on “Trump, Trump, Trump” rather than on their refusal to enforce existing immigration laws, the disaster that is an American economy that have wrecked by design, a refusal to confront Xi Jinping and his murderous thugs by a continued policy of silent and active appeasement, the endless armament of Ukraine in a battle that will only end in that country’s obliteration on the Western altar of “regime change,” rising fuel prices, endless executive orders seeking to shut down petroleum and natural gas drilling, coal mines, and to impose a “woke” policy that pits race against race and normal, rational human beings against the perverted who are so mentally ill as to think that it is a human “right” to have one’s body mutilated in the ontologically impossible effort to change one’s gender.

Third, the case that will be brought by Alvin Bragg, as well as the one that is likely to be brought in Georgia, perhaps as early as Holy Week, are meant also, as I see it, to buy time for the “impartial” special prosecutor, Jack Smith, to complete his investigation so that Federal indictments can be brought against Donald John Trump in the classified documents case (while Biden will escape any penalties at all, of course) and in the so-called “insurrection” on January 6, 2021. All this would tie up Trump, who would not end his presidential campaign, in the courts and make it difficult for him to campaign in the general election if he wins the nomination of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right” next year.

Fourth, not to be overlooked is the fact that that those who truly hate the forty-fifth president of the United States of America (and who hate everyone who voted for him as well as to castigate, demonize and caricature anyone and everyone else who dares to call into question their “received truths” from which no one is free to dissent) want to bankrupt the former president and his family. They want to see him sell Mar-A-Lago, his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, and any of his remaining golf courses so that the proceeds may be used to pay judge-imposed penalties. They want to despoil and ruin the Trumps personally, politically, socially, and professionally.

Fifth, ever succumbing to the inner forces that make Donald John Trump his own worst enemy, the message he put on social media on Saturday, March 18, 2023, the Feast of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and the Commemoration of Saturday in the Third Week of Lent, calling his supporters to protest and to “take back” the country can easily be turned into an excuse by the American Bolsheviks to consider anyone who posts anything derogatory about the upcoming series of indictments as a potential “terrorist” who must be monitored, if not questioned by Federal agents and/or audited by the increased work force of the Internal Revenue Services of the United States Department of the Treasury (a department that has its hand full at the moment trying save “woke” and “environmentally conscious” banks run by ideologues who know nothing about banking, finance, or commerce.)

Sixth, Alvin "What Violent Crime? What Shoplifting Crisis" Bragg is also running interference for the Biden Family Crime Syndicate as he knows that all a Trump indictment, arrest, arraingment, and trial will consume "all the oxygen in the room," so to speak, thereby eclipsing whatever news that United States Representative James Comer continues to make concerning the aforesaid crime syndicate's deals with Red Chinese oligarchs and how this continues to shape the current administration's appeasement of Xi Jinping.

After all, the adminstration of Chief Grifter Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is bringing various Federal charges against another one thousand people who were either in the United States Capitol building or on its grounds for "parading without a permit" (Team Biden’s charging 1,000 more with Jan. 6 crimes to perpetuate a fake political emergency). This is a banana republic!This is the Soviet Union, East German, Cuba, and Red China all rolled into one! This is what must happen over the course of time when men and their nations do not subordinate themselves to Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls

None of this, however, is meant to indemnify Donald John Trump’s life as a serial adulterer nor his authorizing his then close friend and consigliere turned avid Trump hater, Michael Cohen, to pay Stephanie Clifford hush money in 2016. Trump, who is a full supporter of the homosexual agenda, of course, has no regard for the following words of Holy Writ as he has probably never read them nor would think that they apply to him:

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Romans 1: 18-32.)

[9] Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, [10] Nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God. (1 Cor. 6: 9)

[6] And the angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved under darkness in everlasting chains, unto the judgment of the great day. [7] As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. [8] In like manner these men also defile the flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty. [9] When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee. [10] But these men blaspheme whatever things they know not: and what things soever they naturally know, like dumb beasts, in these they are corrupted.  (Jude 1 6-10.)

Look, Michael Cohen did not sneeze unless Donald John Trump took snuff when he, Cohen, was Trump’s fixer. No otherwise rational, sane human being can believe that Trump did not authorize Cohen to pay off Stephanie Clifford. The truly baffling part of this is that Trump’s infidelities in each of his three civil marriages have been quite a matter of the public record. Why didn’t Trump just tell Stephanie Clifford to go public with the information? After all, most of the American public did not seem to mind it when all of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton’s scandalous behavior became firmly ingrained in the national consciousness.

Why did Trump care about Stephanie Clifford’s claims about him?

Trump’s supporters knew all about him back in 2016. That this self-seeking narcissist who can never admit that he is wrong about anything felt compelled to make such an unforced error speaks volumes about what happens to men when they do not have belief in and access to the healing balm of Our Lord’s absolution administered by a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and when they are not tenderly devoted to and utterly reliant upon the Mother of God, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary. It takes humility to accept the following words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and then to act in accordance with them:

He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained. (John 20: 21-23.)

To exhort others to quit their lives of unrepentant sin is not to assert that we are sinless. A sinner, indeed, a terrible sinner who is ashamed of his sins, writes these words. It is to attempt to make some small degree of reparation for these terrible sins to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary that exhortations are made to denounce the public promotion and celebration of sin by those who are persisting in it unrepentantly. Our Lord desires us to help effect the conversion of our fellow sinners, as He explained in the Book of Ezechiel:

And if the watchman see the sword coming, and sound not the trumpet: and the people look not to themselves, and the sword come, and cut off a soul from among them: he indeed is taken away in his iniquity, but I will require his blood at the hand of the watchman. So thou, O son of man, I have made thee a watchman to the house of Israel: therefore thou shalt hear the word from my mouth, and shalt tell it them from me. When I say to the wicked: O wicked man, thou shalt surely die: if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked man from his way: that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but I will require his blood at thy hand. But if thou tell the wicked man, that he may be converted from his ways, and he be not converted from his way: he shall die in his iniquity: but thou hast delivered thy soul. Thou therefore, O son of man, say to the house of Israel: Thus you have spoken, saying: Our iniquities, and our sins are upon us, and we pine away in them: how then can we live?

Say to them: As I live, saith the Lord God, I desire not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way, and live. Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways: and why will you die, O house of Israel? Thou therefore, O son of man, say to the children of thy people: The justice of the just shall not deliver him, in what day soever he shall sin: and the wickedness of the wicked shall not hurt him, in what day soever he shall turn from his wickedness: and the just shall not be able to live in his justice, in what day soever he shall sin. Yea, if I shall say to the just that he shall surely live, and he, trusting in his justice, commit iniquity: all his justices shall be forgotten, and in his iniquity, which he hath committed, in the same shall he die. And if I shall say to the wicked: Thou shalt surely die: and he do penance for his sin, and do judgment and justice, And if that wicked man restore the pledge, and render what he had robbed, and walk in the commandments of life, and do no unjust thing: he shall surely live, and shall not die.

None of his sins, which he hath committed, shall be imputed to him: he hath done judgment and justice, he shall surely live. (Ezechiel 33: 6-16.)

Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evil of your devices from my eyes: cease to do perversely, Learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge for the fatherless, defend the widow. And then come, and accuse me, saith the Lord: if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow: and if they be red as crimson, they shall be white as wool. If you be willing, and will hearken to me, you shall eat the good things of the land. But if you will not, and will provoke me to wrath: the sword shall devour you because the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. (Isaias 1: 16-20.) 

I do not want to go to Hell for all eternity, although I recognize that my sins could very well place me there, which is why I must beg God for His Mercy every day of my life and seek to live more penitentially as I implore His Most Blessed Mother in each Ave Maria to pray for me "nunc et in hora mortis nostrae." Our Lady told Jacinta and Francisco Marto and Lucia dos Santos that her Divine Son wanted her to institute devotion to her Immaculate Heart to save sinners from Hell. We must pray many Rosaries to help save poor sinners, starting with ourselves, from Hell. Saint Paul really meant it when he wrote the following in his Epistle to the Hebrews:

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10: 31) 

It is no act of condemnation or of being judgmental to warn others about how their lives of unrepentant Mortal Sin offend God and wound their own immortal souls, thereby disordering the world in which we live. God does not "accept us as we are" when we are in states of Mortal Sin. God wants us to reform our lives.

We must pray for the conversion of sinners as we work to denounce the public promotion and celebration sins, especially those that cry out to Heaven for vengeance (willful murder, the sin of Sodom, withholding the wages of the day laborer, defrauding widows). And we must never be intimidated by those who do not understand the horror of what each of our sins, including our "least" Venial Sin, caused Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother to suffer during the events of the Paschal Triduum.

No matter what names we are called and what degree of suffering we must endure for defending the truths of the Faith in the midst of the public promotion and celebration of sinful behavior, whether such vice is perverse or natural, we must beseech Our Lady to help us to reform our own lives on a daily basis as we live out in Fatima Message in our own homes, which we should seek to have enthroned to her Divine Son's Most Sacred Heart and her own Immaculate Heart if they have not been so enthroned already. It looks good on our "resume" when we help our fellow sinners to reform. It does not look good on our "resume" when we turn aside from opportunities to help others, even if only by giving them a Green Scapular and resolving to pray "Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of our death" for that person for the rest of our lives, who are steeped in lives of unrepentant Mortal Sin.

What former President Donald John Trump does not realize is that even though Alvin “In the Soros Bag” Bragg is indeed subjecting him to an injustice in the human order of things now as he has been subjected to in the past and will be once again in the immediate future, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is using these injustices to humiliate and chastise him so that he might be emptied of his overweening pride, of his absolute lack of self-awareness, of his penchant to call for “action” when doing so plays into the hands his committed and unreconstructed enemies. Our Lord wants Donald John Trump to save his immortal soul for which He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem. One’s life of unrepentant sin must be punished, and the same is even truer for those who are so proud as to be entirely unaware of the fact that they have sinned grievously and are in need of repenting, converting to the true Faith if not a Catholic, confessing one sins to a true priest, have a firm purpose of amendment seek to avoid the near occasions of sin.

Most men alive today, however, prefer to wallow in their pleasures and to accumulate wealth and “toys” as they waste their time on vain amusements. They are as immune to the warning signs of a decaying society today as were the men at the time of the Flood and destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha.

Father Henry James Coleridge explained in a sermon delivered one hundred forty years ago  that those who ignore God’s warnings, including those given by His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, bring themselves and their nations to destruction:

With regard to the antediluvian world, there is this feature besides, that God undoubtedly warned the race of mankind that His judgments were about to come on them. It appears from the Scripture account that the ark took a hundred years to build, and that during that time Noe was a preacher of repentance. We know but little indeed of those marvellous days, when human life, as the Scripture tells us, was so long, but if that were so, it would be quite enough to account for the forgetfulness of the things of God and of the soul, and for the extreme profligacy of which we also read of the anteldiluvian. Alas! So it is. If life in our days could be prolonged for twice or thrice its ordinary span, it would more probably be for the greater misery that for the greater happiness of mankind. And when we are told, as we are times told in Scriptures, that God has shortened the days of the ordinary human lifetime, it is certain that He has done so in pity rather than in anger. Then also, the antediluvians seem to have dwelt in the very fairest region of the earth, they seem to have been more full of natural knowledge and of acquired skill in the use of the resources of enjoyment and physical wellbeing that those who came after them, and it is very likely indeed that their numbers were not such as to cause that struggle for existence which is now the lot of the populations of so many countries of the world, in which the great enjoyment of the good things of the earth is not yet the free inheritance of the many. At all events, they were so fearfully and outrageously corrupt, morally and socially, that the sacred writer tells us that their wickedness was so great, that it made God repent in His heart that He had created them. Such was the population of the earth, or of those parts of it then inhabited by man, on whom the great destruction of the Flood came like a thief in the night.

As to the other period and generation of which our Lord speaks, and to which, in its heedlessness and unwatchfulness, He compares the men of the last days, why need I speak? Sodom and Gomorrha, the Cities of the Plain – the very name is synonymous with everything that is most foul and licentious, even to the degradation of our human nature. The land in which they dwelt was one of unexampled beauty and fertility. We are told in the book of Genesis, that “the country about Jordan was watered throughout before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrha, as the paradise of the Lord, and like Egypt as when one comes to Segur.” (Gen. Xiii. 10)  And as the Flood had been brought on by list, so also was it with the destruction of these fair cities and their wicked inhabitants. Here, then, we find also these two features, immense material enjoyment and the most intense moral degradation. We are not told that the people of these cities were directly warned of the chastisement which they were bringing on themselves, but, at all events, they had had for some time resident among them a chosen servant of God Lot, the sister's son of Abraham, of whom St. Peter speaks as if he had been a witness to virtue and morality, “oppressed by the injustice and lewd conversation of the wicked, for in sight and hearing he was just, dwelling among them, who day by day vexed the just soul with ungodly works.” (2 St. Peter ii 7, 8.)  So that if they had not a direct warning, they had the witness of a holy life among them to reproach them for their profound foulness of lust. And we may daily suppose that if they were not warned by any more direct signs or predictions of their coming destruction, it was because they were so deeply engrossed in their sensuality as not to be capable of conversation, or of arousing, by any such means, as it is indeed the characteristic of men who are given to those enormous sins of lust, to be incapable of compunction, and beyond the reach of the most startling warnings of Providence.   (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 77-91. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

We have arrived at the days of the sort that Father Coleridge did not believe existed in his time. Indeed, we have exceeded the lusts of the pagan Romans and the statism of its ceasars, and we are making Sodom and Gomorrha look like the Victorian England in which Father Coleridge lived all but the first fifteen years of his life.

The excerpt from Father Coleridge’s sermon above describes most men alive today, including most who adhere to the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left,” including most such true deplorables in the two houses of Congress, and many within the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right,” including former President Trump himself, who is without remorse for any of notoriously scandalous personal behavior and his entirely unbothered about the fact that he has undercut his own credibility by saying different things at different times, including his denial that he knew of consigliere Cohen’s arrangement to pay hush money to Stephanie Clifford, which shifted to a narrative that there was nothing illegal about it, which is true enough. Why, then, lie about the matter to begin with and thus hand one’s vengeful political opponents and special counsel intent on removing him from office?

Is this a criminal offense worthy of prosecution.

Of course not.

However, such behavior is imputable to one’s immortal soul, and we should pray that the former president meets someone who can help him to convert to the Faith sooner rather than later, and it should be pointed out that Alvin Bragg and his associates, both overt and covert, in the injustice he is visiting upon a former president of the United States of America for purely partisan gain are going to have to answer to Christ the King for their own crimes against Him and men in the administration of injustice after injustice under the cover of the civil law and with the full support of the “people” who elected them.

All well and good.

However, we must remember that it is Lent and that our focus is not to be on the distractions of this passing world but on how our sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and how they plunged those Swords of Sorrow deep into the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she who is our Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate. We must not let the adversary steal our Lent, which is why this will the first and only commentary about the pending indictment against the former president until the case is disposed of one way or another. We do not need to have our heads in the sewer of this impurity and indecency committed by the former president nor in the sewer of lawlnessness of overstuffed buffoons such as Alvin Bragg. 

Those who wantonly defy the immutable laws of the good God and regularly and unrepentantly offend against holy purity and honest speech are to be found on the “left” and on the “right” and everywhere else in-between in our topsy-turvy world of relativism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, ecumenism, statism, collectivism, globalism and just plain Machiavellianism.

A sermon by Father Henry James Coleridge sermon, which must have been riveting to hear in person, elaborated on how Our Lord’s warnings applied to his own time over one hundred forty years ago now:

Now I have already said that the direct point of the comparison between the days of which we are speaking, and the days at the end of the world, which is drawn by our Lord, lies in the unexpectedness of the destruction which fell upon them, and which will fall on the men of the last days. But our Lord's description points also to the resemblance in moral and social matters which shall be found between these periods. For He describes them in His own merciful way, as eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, that is, as being occupied in the ordinary enjoyments and rejoicing of this world, without a fear of the coming judgment. And we know from experience that, when men do these things which our Lord names without any thoughts of God, and of His laws, they indulge in every sensual pleasure and lust without remorse or fear. And what is required to make any period of the world's history like, in this respect, to the two periods her named by our Lord, is not so much necessarily that it shall be a period of loathsome sensuality, as that it should be a period in which the common goods and enjoyments of life are so engrossing to the majority of the population, as to make them entirely heedless of Divine warnings and utterly unprepared for a doom which is hanging over them.

And now, my brethren, let us look around us, and we shall certainly find features in our own times, which may at least prepare us for the state of things of which our Lord speaks. I am not about to say whether or not the men of our time are equal to the antediluvians and to the men of Sodom and Gomorrha in the extent of their unbridled licentiousness. That may or may not be the case, thought if it were true that we at approached to the excesses of those days, it would be one of the most disgraceful charges that could be fixed upon us. For we live in the light of the pure doctrine of our Lord; we live when the work of the Church has been upon the world for centuries; we live with the example and character of Jesus and Mary before us, reflected to us from the lives of thousands and thousands of saints, men and women like ourselves. What is quite certain is, that we are far more luxurious than our forefathers, and that the possibility of an almost boundless luxury is far more nearly within the reach of the generality of men, that ever before since the introduction of the religion of our Lord into the world. This is, in great measure, due to the advance of our knowledge of the physical world and of the treasures which it concealed from those who went before us. If we ask ourselves in what chiefly has the progress of physical knowledge marked itself on the history of the human race, we are obliged to answer, in two things chiefly – in the multiplication of the powers of men to destroy one another, and in the multiplication and generation of the means of enjoyment. These are the chief uses which we make of the revelation of the resources with which God has provided the world in which we live. We apply our knowledge to the comforts and pleasures of life. The treasures of the earth's surface the stores of metals and minerals, and the other gifts of nature to the several climates and countries of the globe, are at our command to a degree hitherto unknown. Earth and air and water contribute now to our enjoyments far more than ever before. Consider in a great city like this, how every portion of the world send its contribution to furnish our tables or to adorn our dwellings – fruits, dainties, rarities, what can we not have, almost for the asking? The old satirists of Rome are full of the way in which the tables of the great gluttons of those times were supplied from every country known to the masters of the world, but we have a far greater command than they of the resources on which their luxury fattened. And, my brethren, I do not think that any Roman or Egyptian glutton in palace or villa the most luxurious of those days, gave himself more entirely to his enjoyment of what he had, in the spirit of those words quoted by St. Paul, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” than do men and women in the midst of Christian England or Catholic France or civilized America. And if a creed such as that of which I have had to speak takes possession of men who can command so many of the gifts of nature of which their ancestors were ignorant, what can we possible expect but that they will give themselves body and soul to sensual enjoyments, it may perhaps be with less brutality and grossness as to outward appearance than those of old giants of sensuality, but still with the same entire absence of all check and control except that of what is possible to them and what is not? And in our case there is this difference between the sensualists of the day and that of the old Roman Empire, that in those days the extravagance of indulgence was confined to the few, while the tendency of modern times is to open the door of physical enjoyments far wider than it has ever before been opened, and whole classes can now indulge themselves where before only a few here and there could do so. The decay of religion and the growth of the creed which tells men they have no God and no responsibility, go hand in hand with the growth of the facilities of gross enjoyment for the great mass of mankind in many countries of the world.

And here also, my brethren, we have an evil or a feature which is not likely in the course of time, taking into consideration the natural and probable course of events, to grow less prominent, but rather more so. The popularization of physical enjoyments and luxuries by means of the progress of the age is a thing of which we are more likely to see rapid strides in advance than any retrogression. The advance has a natural cause which cannot be changed or checked, and which has its root in the increased knowledge of mankind of the gifts of nature and the powers of nature, all of which can be made to become the vassals of man in the enjoyment of his brief span of life. And all this is simultaneous with the rise in so many countries of vast and crowded cities such as our ancestors never dreamed of, cities at once the centres of commerce and so of luxury, and also, alas! The seats of the deepest moral corruption. We shudder at the thought of what that corruption was which brought on the Cities of the Plain the vengeance of God, but comparing the probable population of those cities with what we know of the hundreds of thousands that are to be found either in or around a few great centres of modern life, such as London, or Paris, or New York, it is hard to think that in any of those great cities there is, day by day, and night by night, much less of foul offence to the Divine Majesty in the violation of the moral law which He has written in the heart of every child of Adam, than what would equal the accumulation of sin which brought on the Deluge, or devoted the Cities of the Plain to the fire which came down from Heaven.

Now it is well for a moment to have dwelt on such a feature as this of the last days, and of our own days as well as of those. It is well, because here is a point as to which we may all contribute to the balance on the side of good or on the side of evil. The men and women from whom we inherit the faith and religion of our Lord were men and women in few things more superior to those who have come after them than in the severity, the simplicity, the manliness and virtuous dignity of their lives. They rose early and ate and drank simply and sparingly, and were not afraid of heat or cold, they could brave the weather and live in the open air, and their houses and their chambers knew nothing of the thousand so-called necessities of the men and women of our time. Their amusements were manly and vigorous, their table was plain, their dress inexpensive, they could dance without danger to modesty, they conversed together without the chance of shameful anecdotes or inuendoes. When they were children they obeyed their parents, and did not expect to be petted and indulged in every whim and fancy, and when they became parents they watched over the purity and the piety of their children. I need not draw the other side of the picture, for it is but too plain how we have degenerated from them. But I say, here is a matter not for the priest alone, or the religious alone, it is a matter for laymen and gentlemen and fathers and mothers of families, as they vale their own souls, and the souls of their children, and as they will give an account of their responsibilities to the great Judge at the end of their time. Then they will be asked what they have done towards staying the plague of luxury and licence of manners, or whether they have been on the side of the increase of that licence and of the gradual declension of virtue and morality in a land which still calls itself Christian. It matters comparatively nothing how far the world may at this moment be from the final victory of licence and this immorality. What does matter to us, now and here, is this – that we should stand up in our generation for ancient purity, for frugality, and temperance, and virtue, for the holy discipline of the Christian home, for the manly severity of life, which made those who are gone before us able to resist as they did the tyranny of the State and the civil and social proscription under which they suffered, in order to hand on to us the treasures and traditions of old Catholic manners. If we throw these to the winds for the sake of the pleasures and effeminacies of modern life, how far more guilty shall we be, how far more severely punished, than those around us, who have lived like animals and no more bound than they to deny themselves any satisfaction – ignorant of God, ignorant of Jesus Christ, without the faith and the hope which might have been enough to give them courage to despise the things which are seen for the sake of the the things which are not seen, to forego the momentary enjoyments of earth for the sake of Heaven and of eternity!  (Father Henry James Coleridge, S.J.. Discourses on the Latter Days, 1883, pp. 77-91. Published by St. Pius X Press.)

We have arrived at the days of the sort that Father Coleridge did not believe existed in his time. Indeed, we have exceeded the lusts of the pagan Romans and the statism of its ceasars, and we are making Sodom and Gomorrha look like the Victorian England in which Father Coleridge lived all but the first fifteen years of his life. We have indeed arrived at a time when most men submit themselves to the tyranny of the civil state that has been coming upon us in incremental terms since July 4, 1776, a date that was but the inevitable result of the revolution begun on the continent of Europe by Martin Luther on October 31, 1517, and in England by King Henry VIII in 1534.

This concluding excerpt from Father Coleridge’s sermon above describes most men alive today, including most who adhere to the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left,” including most such true deplorables in the two houses of Congress, and many within the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right,” including President Trump himself, who is without remorse for any of notoriously scandalous personal behavior and his entirely unbothered about the fact that he has undercut his own credibility by saying different things at different times, including his denial that he knew of consigliere Cohen’s arrangement to pay hush money to Stephanie Clifford, which shifted to a narrative that there was nothing illegal about it, which is true enough. Why, then, lie about the matter to begin with and thus hand one’s vengeful political opponents and special counsel intent on removing him from office?

Those who wantonly defy the immutable laws of the good God and regularly and unrepentantly offend against holy purity and honest speech are to be found on the “left” and on the “right” and everywhere else in-between in our topsy-turvy world of relativism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, ecumenism, statism, collectivism, globalism and just plain Machiavellianism.

Father Coleridge’s sermon described the trajectory of a world steeped in naturalism in his own day. He saw clearly where this would lead, and it is tragic that so many believing Catholics believe that the United States of America will be made “great again” when its current path of destruction and decay was charted by the rationalists, freethinkers, deists, Freemasons who celebrated religious indifferentism, religious liberty, unfettered freedom of speech and of the press as the nation’s very foundation.

Is it possible for men and their nations to pursue the common temporal good without submitting to the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by His Holy Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls?

Is it possible for men to withstand the gates of hell in their own personal lives and in their nations when they sin unrepentantly and, worse yet, enshrine their sins in public laws as “human rights” and then celebrate then in all aspects of popular culture?

Is it possible for men to maintain virtue personally or to establish “civic virtue” in public life without repenting of their sins and seeking to do penance for them by a belief in and firm reliance upon the graces won for them by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour’s Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into their souls and hearts through the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces?

Of course not.

Let me turn once more the following words of Pope Pius XI in Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937:

And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today -- prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God -- the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.  (Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, March 17, 1937.)

We live a very erratic world, one awash with violence against the innocent and hatred for the true Faith that is now fully out in the open for all to behold. That is, such violence and hatred is out in the happen for those who have the eyes of the Holy Faith to see.

As has been noted so frequently on this site, however, the lords of conciliarism have made their “official reconciliation” with the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity and have reaffirmed unsuspecting Catholics in their desires as fallen creatures to be like the rest of men in the unlimited enjoyment of the pleasures of this world. It is thus for most men alive today, including most Catholics, to realize that the party is over, and the agitation engendered by the constant conflicts between two sets of naturalists who disagree on some things but are united in their rejection of the necessity of adhering to Catholic truth and of cooperating with Sanctifying and Actual Grace as the means to personal and social order to see that there will no party for anyone in eternity who persists in grievous sin until the time of his death. There is no naturalistic means to stem the tide of evil that has overtaken us as surely as the Flood overtook the men of Noe’s time.

On Laetare Sunday, March 19, 2023

Today is Laetare Sunday, a day of rejoicing as Our Blessed Lord and Saviour’s Easter victory over the power of sin and eternal death is made manifest to the world yet again. The Gospel passage that is read at Holy Mass today provides us with Saint John the Evangelist’s account of Our Lord’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes, which is a prefiguring of the miracle of Transubstantiation that takes place every time the ineffable Sacrifice of the Cross is offered at the hands of a true priest.

Saint Augustine of Hippo’s reflection on this miracle is contained in a set of readings read at Matins in today’s Divine Office:

The miracles which our Lord Jesus Christ did were the very works of God, and they enlighten the mind of man by mean of things which are seen, that he may know more of God. God is Himself of such a Substance as eye cannot see, and the miracles, by the which He ruleth the whole world continually, and satisfieth the need of everything that He hath made, are by use become so common, that scarce any will vouchsafe to see that there are wonderful and amazing works of God in every grain of seed of grass. According to His mercy He kept some works to be done in their due season, but out of the common course and order of nature, that men might see them and be astonished, not because they are greater, but because they are rarer than those which they lightly esteem, since they see them day by day.

Or it is a greater miracle to govern the whole universe, than to satisfy five thousand men with five loaves of bread; and yet no man marvelleth at it. At the feeding of the five thousand, men marvel, not because it is a greater miracle than the other, but because it is rarer. For Who is He Who now feedeth the whole world, but He Who, from a little grain that is sown, maketh the fulness of the harvest? God worketh in both cases in one and the same manner. He Who of the sowing maketh to come the harvest, is He Who of the five barley loaves in His Hands made bread to feed five thousand men; for Christ's are the Hands which are able to do both the one and the other. He Who multiplieth the grains of corn multiplied the loaves, only not by committing them to the earth whereof He is the Maker.

This miracle, then, is brought to bear upon our bodies, that our souls may thereby be quickened; shown to our eyes, to give food to our understanding; that, through His works which we see, we may marvel at that God Whom we cannot see, and, being roused up to believe, and purified by believing, we may long to see Him, yea, may know by things which are seen Him Who is Unseen. Nor yet sufficeth it for us to see only this meaning in Christ's miracles. Let us ask of the miracles themselves what they have to tell us concerning Christ for, soothly, they have a tongue of their own, if only we will understand it. For, because Christ is the Word of God, therefore the work of the Word is a Word for us. (Saint Augustine of Hippo, as found in Matins, Divine Office, Laetare Sunday.)

Dom Prosper Gueranger’s reflection on this Laetare Sunday also emphasized the fact that the Divine Redeemer, Who has died for our sins and has risen from the dead, now feeds the whole world with Himself, the true Manna come down from Heaven:

We are now come to the explanation of another name given to the fourth Sunday of Lent, which was suggested by the Gospel of the day. We find this Sunday called in several ancient documents, the Sunday of the five loaves. The miracle alluded to in this title not only forms an essential portion of the Church’s instruction during Lent, but it is also an additional element of to-day’s joy. We forget for an instant the coming Passion of the Son of God, to give our attention to the greatest of the benefits He has bestowed upon us; for under the figure of these loaves multiplied by the power of Jesus, our faith sees that Bread which came down from heaven, and giveth life to the world. ‘The Pasch,’ says our Evangelist, ‘was near at hand’; and, in a few days, Our Lord will say to us: ‘With desire I have desired to at this Pasch with you.’ Before leaving this world to go to His Father, Jesus desires to feed the multitude that follows Him; and in order to [do] this, He displays His omnipotence. Well may we admire that creative power, which feeds five thousand men with five loaves and two fishes, and in such wise that even after all have partaken of the feast as much as they would, there remain fragments enough to fill twelve baskets. Such a miracle is, indeed, an evident proof of Jesus’ mission; but He intends it as a preparation for something more wonderful; He intends it as a figure and a pledge of what He is soon to do, not merely once or twice, but every day, even to the end of time; not only for five thousand men, but for the countless multitude of believers. Think of the millions, who, this very year, are to partake of the banquet of the Pasch; and yet, He whom we have seen born in Bethlehem (the house of bread) is to be the nourishment of all these guests; neither will the divine Bread fail. We are to feast as did our fathers before us; and the generations that are to follow us, shall be invited, as we now are, to come and taste how sweet is the Lord.

But observe, it is in a desert place, as we learn from St. Matthew, that Jesus feeds these men, who represent us as Christians. They have quitted the bustle and noise of cities in order to follow Him. So anxious are they to hear His words, that they neither hunger nor fatigue; and their courage is rewarded. A little recompense will crown our labours, our fasting and abstinence, which are now half over. Let us, then, rejoice, and spend this day with the light-heartedness of the pilgrims whoa re near the end of their journey. The happy moment is advancing, when our soul, united and filled with her God, will look back with pleasure on the fatigues of the body, which, together with our heart’s compunction, have merited for her a place at the divine banquet.

The primitive Church proposed this miracle of the multiplication of the loaves as a symbol of the Eucharist, the Bread that never fails. We find it frequently represented in the paintings of the catacombs and on the bas-reliefs of the ancient Christian tombs. The fishes, too, were given together with the loaves, are represented on these venerable monuments of our faith; for the early Christians considered the fish to be the symbol of Christ, because the word ‘fish’ in Greek is made up of five letters, which are the initials of these words: Jesus Christ, Son (of) God, Saviour.

In the Greek Church this is the last day of the week called, as we have already noticed, Mesonestios. Breaking though her rule of never admitting a saint’s feast during Lent, she keeps this mid-Lent Sunday in honour of the celebrated abbot of the monastery of Mount Sinai, St. John Climacus, who lived in the sixth century. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B,, The Liturgical Year: Volume V--Lent, pp. 316-318.)

Yes, this is a day of moderate rejoicing, which is noted as follows by the Abbot of Solesmes in the prayer he composed for this day:

Let us, then, rejoice! We are children, not of Sina, but of Jersualem. Our mother, the holy Church, is not a bond-woman, but free; and it is unto freedom that she has brought us up. Israel served God in fear; his heart was ever tending to idolatry, and could be kept to duty only by the heavy yoke of chastisement. More happy than he, we serve God through love; our yoke is sweet, and our burden light! We are not citizens of the earth; we are but pilgrims passing through it to our true country, the Jerusalem which is above. We leave the earthly Jerusalem to the Jew, who minds only terrestrial things, is disappointed with Jesus, and is plotting how to crucify Him. We also have too long been groveling in the goods of the world; we have been slaves to sin; and he more the chains of our bondage weighed upon us, the more the chains of our bondage weighed upon us, the more we talked our being free. Now is the favourable time; now are the days of salvation; we have obeyed the Church’s call, and have entered into the practice and spirit of Lent. Sin seems to us now, to be the heaviest of yokes; the flesh, a dangerous burden; the world, a merciless tyrant. We begin to breathe the fresh air of holy liberty, and the hope of our speedy deliverance fills us with transports of joy. Let us, with all possible affection, thank our divine Liberator, who delivers us from the bondage of Agar, emancipates us from the law of fear, and making us His new people, opens to us the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem, at the price of His Blood.

The Gradual expresses the joy felt by the Gentiles, when invited to enter the house of the Lord, which has now become their own. The Tract shows God protected His Church, the new Jerusalem, which is not to be conquered and destroyed as was that first one. This holy city communicates her own stability and security to them that are in her, for the Lord watches over both the mother and the children. Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B,, The Liturgical Year: Volume V--Lent, pp. 320-321.)

Yes, the Old Covenant has been superseded by the New and Eternal Covenant that our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ instituted at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday and ratified by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. Agar and her son, Ishmael, have been sent away. Holy Mother Church is the one and only true means of salvation, and she is blameless in the sight of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head and Mystical Bridegroom. She provides her children with security and stability, not confusion and ceaseless change, something that should prove to anyone who has the gift of intellectual dispassion to admit once and for all that the counterfeit church of conciliarism is not and can never be the spotless mystical bride of Christ the King, the Catholic Church.

May Our Lady of Sorrows guide and protect us during the remaining three weeks as we meditate upon the Sorrowful Mysteries her Most Holy Rosary, and may we always, always, always invoke the power intercession of Saint Joseph. 

The Feast of Saint Joseph is transferred from today to tomorrow because of the Fourth Sunday of Lent, and it is thus that we must remember that he is always first after Our Lady to whom we must fly as he is the one chosen by God from all eternity to protect the Holy Family with whom we seek to be united by virtue of Our Lord’s Easter victory over the power of sin and death after He had walked the Via Crucis—the Via Dolorosa—and died for us on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Our Lady of Sorrows, 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.