L'Osservatore Eretico

The first printed edition of Christ or Chaos hit the presses thirty years ago late next month. The printed journal never had a wide circulation as there were around three hundred subscribers by the time that I took Christ or Chaos online on February 20, 2004. Many of those subscriptions were complimentary, though. The printed journal only survived as long as it did as I had received a grant itfrom a private foundation in 2000 to subsidize its publication. Losing the grant in April of 2003 meant that I had to subsidize the cost of printing and mailing Christ or Chaos with my own meager resources, and it is very well known that my work has never had the support of any Catholics who are millionaires.

However, relying upon Our Lady’s maternal intercession and the help of our Good Saint Joseph, and our Wonder Worker Saint Philomena, my work has continued online now for over twenty-two years. I have never counted the number of articles and reflections that have been published on this site, but I believe the number to be in the thousands.

While it is true that my work has slowed in the past year so, I do try to do what I can as I am physically able to work and I have become more selective about what I choose to write about given the limitations of my time and the lack of having anything “new” to add to what I have written in the past.

Although it would have been useful to categorize my articles, I just don’t have the time to do so, but there are times when certain articles of the past come to mind because of some contemporary development. This is one of those times.

Specifically, a news story I read yesterday about an article in the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that denied the doctrine of Original Sin and the existence of the devil called to mind the following articles I wrote in the second half of the first decade of this current century about the newspaper’s praise of John Calvin,The Beatles, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, Michael Jackson, Karl Marx, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, asand the pro-abortion, pro-population control “journalist” named Walter Cronkite.

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Ever L'Osservatore Di Tutte le Cose Greeze, part 2010 (“The Observer of All Crude things), which was published on this site on October 12, 2010:

There are times when I scratch my head after looking at a news item, saying to myself, "Self, didn't you write on this already?" The answer that I gave when posing this rhetorical question to myself is, of course, "Yes."

Thus it is that the real-life cartoon show called L'Osservatore Romano has reiterated its previous praise of the gross program entitled The Simpsons, claiming that one of the principal characters, Homer Simpson, is a "true Catholic." Isn't this proof enough that the editors of L'Osservatore Romano have lost their minds as well as any semblance of the sensus Catholicus?

Never mind the fact that the false "pontiff," Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, is praised for giving joint "blessings" with a layman by the name of Rowan Williams after daring to enter into a facility that was seized and is still in the hands of heretics and schismatics who dissent from numerous articles in the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church and who promote one abject evil after another, including baby-killing and perversity, as perfectly consonant with being a "true Christian."

Never mind the fact that the false "pontiff," Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, is praised for endorsing the concept of religious liberty, which was termed a heresy by Pope Pius VII in Post Tam Diuturnas, April 29, 1814, and termed as insanity by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, and for endorsing the thesis of the separation of Church and State was termed a "thesis absolutely false" by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906, and has been condemned by true pope after true pope, including by Pope Pius IX in The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864.

Never mind the fact that the editors of L'Osservatore Romano have acted as though Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" represents a means to bridge the language of "preconciliar" church with that of the "Second" Vatican Council and the "magisterium" of the postconciliar "popes" even though the whole concept makes a mockery of the nature of God and His Divine Revelation by advertence to the Modernist formula of the evolution of dogma that was dissected so well by Pope Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907, and by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.

Leaving all of that--and many other proofs of the apostasies of the moment--aside, the fact that men who claim to be Catholic can praise one cultural phenomenon after another that is in diametrical opposition to the honor and glory of the Most Blessed Trinity and thus to the pursuit of our own personal sanctity should be sufficient to raise  some questions in the minds of some of those who are as of yet uncertain about the true state of the Church Militant at this time.

Permit me, therefore, to reprise a few paragraphs from the December 28, 2009, version of this article that dealt with the exact same subject: L'Osservatore Romano and The Simpsons:

It was on November 22, 2008, that L'Osservatore Beatles praised the singers who helped to popularize the smoking of marijuana and rank immorality. (See Yesterday's Evils, Today's Accepted Norm.)

It was on April 29, 2009, that L'Osservatore Obamus breathed an editorial "sigh of relief" that the first one hundred days of the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama had been, according to editor Gian Maria Vian, not as bad as expected. (See Urbanely Accepting Evil.)

It was on May 20, 2009, that L'Osservatore Obamus editor Gian Maria Vian praised Barack Hussein Obama's commenced address at the University of Notre Dame as "very respectful," claiming that Obama is not "a pro-abortion president." (See Respect Those Who Break the First Commandment? Respect Those Who Break the Fifth Commandment.)

It was on June 18, 2009, that L'Osservatore Obamus editor Gian Maria Vian defended in support of the Marxist-trained, pro-abortion Barack Hussein Obama in an interview with a reporter from Inside the Vatican magazine. (See L'Osservatore Del Naturalista.)

It was on June 27, 2009, that L'Osservatore Weirdo praised the bizarre Michael Jackson after his death. (See Big Pharm Trumps the Holy Cross and Vatican-paper-hails-Jackson.)

It was on July 14, 2009, that L'Osservatore Occulto praised the latest Harry Potter motion picture. (See L'Osservatore Occulto,)

It was on July 17, 2009, that L'Osservatore Wilde praised the works of the late Oscar Wilde, a man who is still heralded by the lavender community for his poems in support of indecency even though he made a deathbed conversion to the Catholic Faith. (See Vatican does U-turn to praise Oscar Wilde | Mail Online and Benedict praises perverted archbishop Juliusz Paetz.)

It was on October 22, 2009, that L'Osservatore Marxista offered a measure of praise for the work of the man who gave us the Marxist form of Communism that has wreaked so much murder and mayhem upon the world in the past ninety-two hours. (See L'Osservatore Marxista.)

L'Osservatore Romano under the editorship of Gian Maria Vian has also praised Galileo Galilei and Charles Darwin.

None of this would have been at all thinkable under any of our true popes. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI? Ah, he has not a problem at all with any of the freewheeling editorials and articles that have appeared in L'Osservatore Romano under Gian Maria Vian's direction. He has not offered a word of criticism, as Vian himself pointed out in the interview he gave to Inside the Vatican magazine on June 18, 2009:

Should a reader interpret the editorial line of the newspaper to be also that of the Pope and the Secretariat of State?

Vian: Well, we need to distinguish something here. The paper is not official: it is not the expression, in every single part, of the point of view of the Vatican, that is, of the Secretariat of State. But it is obvious that it is an authoritative point of view of the Holy See, because ours is the only newspaper of the Holy See and has a century and a half of history. We were started during the American Civil War. That finished in 1865 and we were started in 1861. It’s a paper with a very long history and it has always been rightly interpreted as the expression of the thought of the Holy See, without a doubt, but that is not to say that every word that comes out in the paper is exactly the thought of the Pope or the Secretary of State.

But the average reader would assume that he will find in the Vatican’s newspaper an editorial line that is in agreement with the Pope...

Vian: Let’s say that L’Osservatore Romano expresses a line generally in agreement with the Holy See. This is obvious because the paper is owned by the Holy See. My editor, in the Italian sense of the owner of the paper, is the Pope, via the Secretariat of State. I could not possibly create a paper in disagreement with the owner, just like no newspaper director could create a paper in dissension with the owner. If I ran the newspaper like that, I would have already been fired.

Do you receive regular feedback from Cardinal Bertone or the Pope on articles that you publish?

Vian: I am here since the fall of 2007 and I have never had a problem. The Pope and the Secretary of State have so far given me and the newspaper their full confidence.

I know the paper very well: my grandfather wrote for this  paper, my father wrote for this paper, my brother wrote for this paper and I wrote for this paper from 1977 until 1987 and then 20 years later I’ve come back as director. I knew the paper very well, it was the newspaper that arrived at home every day when I was a child.

I did not imagine I would find the autonomy that I have found here. Sure, we have made mistakes. But I jokingly say that it’s my editor, the owner, who is infallible, not me, not us.

We make mistakes, but so far not the Pope, the Secretary of State or anyone in the Secretariat of State has ever said, ‘You’ve made a serious error.’

They are happy that we do our job and we our happy that they do their jobs.

We work in autonomy except in a few areas of particular interest on international questions and then we work in close collaboration with the Secretariat of State. (Latest Newsflash - Inside the Vatican Magazine.)

It is very telling that Gian Maria Vian has been at L'Osservatore Romano for the past two years now and that he has "never had a problem." Why would he have had a problem publishing all of those articles listed above? Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has not said a word of criticism about "Archbishop" Robert Zollitsch's blatant apostasy when the latter denied, on Holy Saturday, April 11, 2009, that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had died in atonement for our sins on the wood of the Holy Cross. The only thing that seems to get Ratzinger/Benedict's attention is when someone puts into the question the nature and extent of the crimes committed by the agents of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich (see Williamson, Bishop Richard). Crimes against the Faith? Ratzinger/Benedict has shown himself to be so very sanguine about theological error, which is why he tolerates the lunacy these days in L'Osservatore Romano.

All right. Enough of the reprise of the material from L'Osservatore Benedetto, which has been reprinted en toto because it is useful once again to review in light of L'Osservatore Di Tutte Cose Grezze's (the observer of all crude things) endorsement of The Simpsons animated television show on the American television network that has championed the cause of popularizing crudities, the FOX network, which is owned by the thirty-third degree Mason and "papal" knight named Rupert Murdoch. Although I have never watched The Simpsons, I have read about the vulgar nature of the program and the influence that the rude, crude behavior of the animated characters has had upon viewers, especially the young.

This is a far cry from the way things ware fifty years ago.

One would have to be living in a cave not to realize that the behavior of many people when out and about in public places today is dramatically different than what it was fifty years ago.

Vulgarities and profanities uttered in public, especially within earshot of the young, were very rare, if almost unheard of in the best of restaurants and supermarkets.

People dressed with pride and dignity.

There were no bare-chested men walking around in parks or tattooed women checking out customers at the Bohack store or the Manhattan Food store on Middle Neck Road in Great Neck, New York.

A father did not have to worry about a patron speaking profanely at Au Petit Moulin restaurant in Great Neck, New York, or Maude Craig's restaurant in Lake Success, New York, or the Villa Victor restaurant n Syosset, New York, or the fabled Milleridge Inn in Jericho, New York.

A patron who spent $3.50 on a box seat at the Polo Grounds or its successor home of the New York Mets, the now demolished William A. Shea Municipal Stadium, wouldn't have to worry about hearing any foul language from other spectators (such language was reserved for the bleachers in the Polo Grounds or the upper reaches of the Upper Level at Shea Stadium).

The residual influences of Christendom were still strong in the 1950s, although the corrosive effects of naturalism were undermining these influences on a gradual basis. Still and all, however, Catholic men were intent, at least for the most part, on being gentleman and Catholic women were intent on acting as ladies, at least in public. Helping to retard the corrosive effects of naturalism was the fact that Catholics still attended Holy Mass in massive numbers and that they were receiving true Sacraments to help them get home to Heaven. While it is true, as I have noted in many other commentaries on this site, that the outlook of many Catholics in the United States of America was thoroughly naturalistic, the sensus Catholicus was maintained in many areas of daily life, especially insofar as one's comportment and dress in public.

The social revolutions of the 1960s were aided and abetted by the conciliar revolution that resulted in the loss of the true Sacraments for the lion's share of baptized Catholics. The Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service celebrated the profanities of popular culture, many of which have been incorporated into that service under the aegis of "inculturation of the Gospel" ("rock" liturgies, "folk" liturgies, "Afro-American" liturgies, "Native American" liturgies, etc.). Novus Ordo presbyters have encouraged their flocks to dress "casually" while attending their profane services that are so offensive to God. Some of the worst aspects of popular culture are glorified from the pulpit.

Indeed, a the late Thomas F. Murphy, who was a presbyter in the Diocese of Rockville Centre said from the pulpit in 1982 (after having viewed the motion picture Gandhi), "You know, I think that Christ was a very Gandhi-like figure." (No, I am not making this up. I heard this with my own ears. Even two students, brother and sister twins, that I was teaching in a religious education program on Monday nights at the time thought the presbyter's comments were blasphemous. The boy, said, "I think that this priest is thinking up his homilies as he's walking across the street from the rectory. He thinks nothing of blaspheming Our Lord.") And, of course, we have seen the sorry spectacle of the conciliar "archbishop" of San Francisco, California, George Niederauer, praising a motion picture, Brokeback Mountain, that glorified perversity. There has also been a presbyter in Waco, Texas, who "blessed" a Hooter's restaurant there three years ago, an establishment where the female servers are not exactly attired in line with Our Lady's Fatima Message (FOXNews.com - Sweet Hooters.)

This descent into madness is the logical end result of pluralism, which winds up corrupting even believing Catholics into accepting quite passively one cultural degradation after another as something beyond or their control or, worse yet, as representing "no big deal" for them or for their children. The true Mass and the true Sacraments served as a bulwark to retard the process of cultural degradation. Once that bulwark was taken away, however, we have seen our own people descend into levels of barbarism that hearken back to most of our families' pre-Christian roots in the Europe of the First Millennium as the Faith was being spread by the Apostles and those who followed them.

Anyone who thinks that a sanguine acceptance of profanity or vulgarity or crudity in the service of the eternal welfare of the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ became Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost and was born for us in Bethlehem so that He could die on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem ought to consider the sanguinity represented by L'Osservatore Romano's celebration of The Simpsons:

VATICAN CITY – To put it as the devout Ned Flanders would, the Vatican's newspaper thinks "The Simpsons" are an okely dokely bunch.

L'Osservatore Romano on Tuesday congratulated the show on its 20th anniversary, praising its philosophical leanings as well as its stinging and often irreverent take on religion.

Without Homer Simpson and the other yellow-skinned characters "many today wouldn't know how to laugh," said the article titled "Aristotle's Virtues and Homer's Doughnut."

The paper credited "The Simpsons" — the longest-running American animated program — with opening up cartoons to an adult audience.

The show is based on "realistic and intelligent writing," it said, though it added there was some reason to criticize its "excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters."

Religion, from the snore-evoking sermons of the Rev. Lovejoy to Homer's face-to-face talks with God, appears so frequently on the show that it could be possible to come up with a "Simpsonian theology," it said.

Homer's religious confusion and ignorance are "a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith," the paper said.

It commented on several religion-themed episodes, including one in which Homer calls for divine intervention by crying: "I'm not normally a religious man, but if you're up there, save me, Superman!"

"Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," L'Osservatore said. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well." (Vatican Paper Says 'The Simpsons' Are Okely Dokely - CBS News.)

Praising The Simpsons for "its stinging and often irreverent take on religion"? To treat religion in a stinging and irreverent manner is something to be praised?

"Many today wouldn't know how to laugh" without Homer Simpson and the other yellow-skinned characters? Human beings don't have the inherent ability given them by God to laugh when faced with the juxtaposition of two unrelated concepts (which is how the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said defined humor)? People needed Homer Simpson to make them laugh? Are these insane morons and idiots and nincompoops serious?

Some reason to criticize "excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters"? Some reason to criticize? Some? What's realistic about popularizing language that would never be used by anyone aspiring to the heights of personal sanctity?

"Simpsonian theology"? Homer's "religious confusion and ignorance are 'a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith'"?

To paraphrase the naturalist named Ronald Wilson Reagan, there they [the conciliarists] go again. Modern man? There is no such thing as "modern man." Yet it is, however, that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has time and time again in his writing over the length of his career referred to the needs of "modern man" and his "search" for God, implying that God Himself had made his Divine Revelation so obscure that it can only be found with difficulty and/or the circumstances of "modern" life have made the "search" for Him more difficult than it has been in the past.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did not make Incarnate in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb to make Himself obscure. His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father in Heaven sent a star to hover over His birthplace in Bethlehem to let the unbelieving Jews know that the Redeemer of the entire human race had been  born. The Jews and their wretched puppet king, Herod the Great, did not believe. Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar saw, and they rejoiced exceedingly:

Who having heard the king, went their way; and behold the star which they had seen in the east, went before them, until it came and stood over where the child was. And seeing the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. (Matthew 2: 9-10.)

Our Lord performed miracles during His Public Ministry and proclaimed Himself to be God in the very Flesh:

Amen, amen I say to you: If any man keep my word, he shall not see death for ever. The Jews therefore said: Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest: If any man keep my word, he shall not taste death for ever. Art thou greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? and the prophets are dead. Whom dost thou make thyself? Jesus answered: If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father that glorifieth me, of whom you say that he is your God. And you have not known him, but I know him. And if I shall say that I know him not, I shall be like to you, a liar. But I do know him, and do keep his word.

Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see my day: he saw it, and was glad. The Jews therefore said to him: Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say to you, before Abraham was made, I am. They took up stones therefore to cast at him. But Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple. (John 8: 51-59.)

"Modern man" does not need a cartoon series featuring crudities and vulgarities to help him "find" God, Who has given us His Catholic Church as the sole means in which can be found His teaching and His means of sanctification. And to assert that "Homer Simpson" and God "know each other well" even though the fictional character makes a "minor mistake" by getting "His name sensationally wrong." How can any man claiming to be a Catholic priest make such an assertion? No one knows God well unless he knows Him as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church. And getting God's Holy Name "sensationally wrong" is not a "minor mistake." Our first Pope, Saint Peter, made this point abundantly clear as is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles:

Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved. (Acts 4: 12.)

While some might protest (yet again) that the views expressed in the new L'Osservatore Romano scandal do not necessarily represent those of the conciliarist-in-chief, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, it must be kept in mind that, as noted in L'Osservatore Benedetto, the false "pontiff" has thus far not said a word in public about the apostasy of his fellow German, "Archbishop" Robert Zollitsch,  261 days ago, that is on April 11, 2009, as the latter denied that Our Lord died on the wood of the Holy Cross in atonement for our sins.

Ratzinger/Benedict also personally endorsed the blasphemous motion picture, The Nativity Story, that portrayed Our Lady as a sulky, moody, rebellious teenager who stormed out of her parents' house when she learned that she had been betrothed to Saint Joseph, a total misrepresentation of truth and a denial of the doctrinal effects of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception as the Mother of God had perfect integrity of body and soul and was not subject to unruly or disorderly passions. If portraying the Mother of God in a blasphemous manner means nothing to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, why should an article in L'Osservatore Di Tutte Le Cose Grezze that praises The Simpsons bother him in the slightest. It won't.

Then again, of course, Ratzinger/Benedict has personally blasphemed the honor and glory and majesty of God by esteeming the symbols of false religions with his own hands and by daring to claim that "peace" is the product of the "coexistence" of the world's religions. He has denied the nature of dogmatic truth itself, thereby attacking the very nature of God and of His Divine Revelation. Praise of The Simpsons in the pages of L'Osservatore Di Tutte Le Cose Grezze is just small potatoes by way of comparison. 

Praise The Simpsons (and I am not referring to anyone who reads this site who has the last name of Simpson, obviously), however, L'Ossevatore Di Tutte Le Cose Grezze continues to do:

We might have understood if the Catholic Church had endorsed Davey. He’s always banging on about God. And his dog talks, which must qualify as a miracle.

Instead, the Church has chosen the path through Springfield, and endorsed the Christian example of Homer Simpson.

“Few people know it, and he does everything he can to hide it, but it is true: Homer J. Simpson is a Catholic,” the Church’s quasi-official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, proclaimed in a weekend piece.

In the slightly tongue-in-cheek piece, the Holy See’s mouthpiece praises the iconoclastic cartoon for remaining “among the few TV programs for children in which the Christian faith, religion, and the question of God are recurring themes.” 

And when you put it like that (minus the “for children” part), it makes good sense. Homer spends most of his time trying to worm out of church, or mocking church, or trying to take advantage of Ned Flanders’ Christian charity.

This has become a bit of a recurring theme for L’Osservatore Romano, which got all Philosophy 101 on us last year by commenting on The Simpsons’ use of Aristotelian and Nietzscheian themes.

Or maybe it’s just a case of stealing Protestant Homer back from Christianity’s rival team. Three years ago, the Church of England said something very similar.

HOMER ON RELIGION

•  “Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else - and it hasn't - it's that girls should stick to girl's sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such.”

•  “I know I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman.”

•  “But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.”

•  Homer: “Your mother has this crazy idea that gambling is wrong. Even though they say it's okay in the Bible.”

Lisa: “Really? Where?”

Homer: “Uh . . . Somewhere in the back.”

“I can’t be a missionary. I don’t even believe in Jebus.”

(Minutes later)

“Save me, Jebus!” (Vatican newspaper praises Homer Simpson.) 

Wait! Hold the presses! The producers of The Simpsons say that Homer Simpson is not a Catholic, that he belongs to the Presbyluterhan congregation in Springfield, wherever that is (Illinois, Massachusetts, Virginia, Ohio, etc.):

Nobody tell the Reverend Lovejoy, but Homer Simpson, the patriarch of the animated clan on Fox’s “The Simpsons,” is Catholic — at least, according to the official newspaper of the Vatican, Reuters reported. In an essay published over the weekend in the newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Luca M. Possati writes: “Few people know it, and he does everything to hide it. But it’s true: Homer J. Simpson is Catholic.” As proof the essay cites a Jesuit priest’s study of the 2005 “Simpsons” episode “The Father, the Son and the Holy Guest Star,” in which Bart attends a Catholic school and Homer tries out the practice of confession. The study concludes that “The Simpsons” is “among the few TV programs for kids in which Christian faith, religion and questions about God are recurrent themes.” (Never mind that Homer has said he is a follower of “that religion with all the well-meaning rules that don’t work out in real life,” which he explains to mean Christianity.)

Al Jean, an executive producer and show runner of “The Simpsons,” advised not to take the Osservatore essay as gospel. In an interview with EW.com, the Web site of Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Jean said the Simpsons family attends the First Church of Springfield, which is “Presbyluterhan,” adding: “We’ve pretty clearly shown that Homer is not Catholic. I really don’t think he could go without eating meat on Fridays—for even an hour.”

Catholicism isn’t the only religion with a soft spot for Homer and his family; the Web site The Homer Calendar uses “Simpsons” characters to illustrate the traditions of Passover and includes many links to discussions about the Jewish content on the show. (Faith of Cartoon Character Is Debated.) 

Although some have contended that the most recent praise of The Simpsons in L'Osservatore Romano was offered on a tongue-in-cheek basis, it is also nevertheless true that Gian Maria Vian, the newspaper's editor, has praised one nefarious figure after another. How can responsible, home-schooling parents who are attempting to preserve their children from the rot of the popular culture answer their children when they point out that the "pope's newspaper" endorses the very things that the parents take great pains not to endorse or patronize in any manner whatsoever?

No, this is more than a perverse joke, my good and extremely few readers.

These little tidbits, surely sensationalized and simplified by secular news outlets for their own purposes, make their way into the consciousness of Catholics and non-Catholics alike just as surely as the photographs displayed in What's The First Commandment Got To Do With Anything? have convinced Catholics that all religions are "good" in the eyes of God and that there is no need to seek with urgency or even to pray for the unconditional conversion of anyone to the Catholic Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. So many people, including some allegedly traditionally-minded Catholics, contend that people should pursue whatever religion they desire if this means bringing them "closer" to God, an absurd, blasphemous contention that flies in the face of the words inspired by God the Holy Ghost in Psalm 95, verse 5: "For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens."

How can parents who understood the harm of television tell their children not to watch it when the "pope's newspaper" says that they will how to be a good Catholic from the likes of Homer Simpson?

How can parents who understand the evils of "rock" "music" tell their children that they must not listen to the devil's noise when the "pope's newspaper" praises The Beatles and The Rolling Stone?

How can parents who understand the evil influences of the Harry Potter books and motion pictures tell their children that they can have nothing to do with the occult when the "pope's newspaper" praises these books and motion pictures?

Then again, of course, the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical travesty is a paean of praise to the world as profane music is played, hands waved and shaken and as those who bother to show up at its services are permitted to speak in audible tones before, during and after the "celebration," dressing in ways that would have put even the pagans of yore to utter shame. Most, although certainly not all, of those who are exposed to the profanity of the Novus Ordo service participate quite merrily in the popular culture without a thought as to whether they are pleasing Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or harming their immortal souls that have been redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

Why should they care when the "pope's newspaper" places its "benediction" upon that which is indeed offensive to God and injurious to their own souls?

Why should they care?

Seeking to avoid immersing ourselves in the popular culture that is so heralded by the conciliarists and incorporated into the profane "liturgy" of their one world religion, may we continue to resist and refuse to recognize the legitimacy of concilairism or its "reconciliation" with the spirit of the world that has been so heralded in the pages of L'Osservatore Di Tutte le Cose Grezze.

Although it is not possible for large numbers of Catholics to do so any longer because of the state of apostasy in which we find ourselves, we should make time in our daily lives to spend in prayer with Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ the King, in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Saint John Cantius did, spending long hours in prayer both before and after he taught his classes, subjecting himself to great bodily mortifications for the love of God and the good of souls. If we want spend all eternity in Heaven, it would be a very wonderful thing to have a foretaste of eternal glories by recollecting ourselves in fervent prayer to Our Eucharistic King in the example of Saint John Cantius as doing so will provide us with infused graces to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith, enabling us to recognize that a land that subordinated itself to the sweet yoke of Christ the King would never permit the public promotion of that which is offensive to Him or harmful to the souls that He redeemed on the wood of the Holy Cross.

We must, of course, pray our Rosaries to console the good God and to seek to make reparation for our sins, including those of any and all casual or active participation in the rot of a "popular culture" that is produced wholly by the devil and is opposed to the holiness with which Our Lady was filled from the very first moment of her Immaculate Conception.

I have copied and pasted this material from my October 20, 2026, to explain that L’Osservatore Romano has been involved in the business of praising cultural, political, or philosophical currents that are offensive to the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity, and injurious to the good of souls by means of blasphemy, the mockery of the horror of sin, and even the promotion of grave sins as a matter of public law and “human rights” for a long time now. (See, for example, L'Osservatore Del Naturalista, L'Osservatore del Calvinista, L'Osservatore Occulto, L'Osservatore Marxista, L'Osservatore Benedetto, L'Osservatore Di Tutte Le Cose Grezze, L'Osservatore Romano Di Infirmita Mentale, and Ever L'Osservatore Di Tutte le Cose Greeze, part 2010.)

L’Osservatore Romano in its conciliar captivity simply reflections the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s rapprochement with the world, and, given the demonic forces that influence worldly currents five centuries after the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King, it was only a matter of time before the Catholic doctrine on Original Sin and of the existence of the devil himself would be denied outright within its corrupted pages:

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — A new essay in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano examining the Book of Genesis argues that the narrative does not deal primarily with the devil and original sin, in contrast with the traditional interpretation.

On July 4, L’Osservatore Romano – the official newspaper of the Holy See – published an article by Italian theologian Marinella Perroni, according to whom in the Genesis narrative there is no trace of either the devil or original sin in the sense in which Christian Tradition has interpreted them. On the contrary, Perroni contends, the original text describes the “relationship between God and humanity” rather than the action of Satan or a doctrine of inherited guilt.

The article begins by examining the opening chapters of Genesis, where God places humanity in the Garden of Eden “to cultivate it and guard it” (Genesis 2:15). Perroni noted that the biblical account presents Eden as a place of “both beauty and danger,” where human beings encounter the limits of their created condition. According to the essay, the central issue of the narrative is humanity’s desire to become “like God” by seeking access to what belongs only to the divine.

The Genesis account identifies three main figures: the serpent, the woman, and the fruit. Perroni says that the text simply refers to a fruit from a garden where all trees were described as pleasing and good for food. The serpent appears as a creature associated with deception, but the article argues that the Genesis passage itself does not identify it with Satan or a supernatural evil power.

“One of antiquity’s most poignant religious myths thus reveals, in just a few lines, both the greatness and the misery of the human being – the most extraordinary of creatures, the one closest to the divine, yet at the same time the only one burdened with the bitter awareness of not being God,” Perroni states.

“The dialogue between the snake and the woman is the first great theological discourse in the Bible,” the theologian continues. “To be like God – that is, to be able to eat from the tree of life.… It is quite beautiful that, in Eden, the woman takes on the role of the one who has the courage to enter into this desire, to claim the right to it and to discuss its limits, to help define that insurmountable boundary that separates humans from God, with no possibility of negotiation whatsoever.”

And again, she adds with great confidence that, “In the ancient biblical myth commonly called the Fall, there is no devil, no divine power to which human beings are subject.” According to Perroni, the account in Genesis 3 speaks only of the “contradiction” whereby “being of God, chosen by God, does not mean being like God. And in this lies the inexhaustible tension between humanity and the divine – there is no sin.”

To support her interpretation, the theologian notes that, “in the Bible – especially in the prophetic writings – sin is mentioned frequently, but always to condemn the people’s turning away from God’s Law, the kings’ warlike choices, the infidelity to the covenant God wished to establish with Israel. Always in relation to historical events, never with reference to Eve’s transgression.”

Anticipating the objection that scriptural books such as Wisdom or, later, the Pauline letters make explicit reference to Original Sin, the Italian theologian turns to the historical‑critical method.

“Quite late – starting around the sixth century BC – the speculation on evil spirits, common to all ancient belief systems, introduced additional elements into Jewish and Christian theology, such as the angels who rebelled against God and were cast into hell, thereby beginning to alter its original features.”

Consequently, according to Perroni, even classical angelology and demonology would be the product of mythologies.

The writer then argues that the Gospels contain mythological distortions: “This idea, however, entered Christian theology very early, as the entire New Testament tradition shows – from the accounts of Jesus’ temptations to the Book of Revelation. And the chief of the fallen angels would take on many names: devil, Satan, dragon, ancient serpent, Beelzebul.”

“Paul, for his part, echoes an interpretation of the story of the woman’s creation that evidently circulated in the Judaism of his time and that established the hierarchy of the sexes as a creaturely law,” the theologian adds. “And later, one of his disciples would intensify it (cf. 1 Timothy 2:13–15). These are the first steps of a mortgage that would weigh heavily on subsequent Christian Tradition.”

“Thanks to a childish catechism and relentless preaching, the idea remains carved in stone that precisely there, in that first transgression – entirely attributed to the woman and her relationship with the demon – lies an original fault, a condemnation from which no human being can ever escape,” Perroni continues, adding that “feminist battles inside and outside the churches have demanded a rethinking of Eve’s role and the liberation of her figure from the burdens of guilt accumulated over millennia.”

Perroni taught New Testament theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum of Sant’Anselmo in Rome, where she served as a professor for many years. Her academic work focuses on the Gospels, Pauline literature, and the presence and role of women in the earliest Christian communities, an area in which she is considered a leading voice.

She is also a founding member and former president (2003–2013) of the Coordination of Italian Theologians, the main association of Italian female theologians, and has published extensively on biblical studies with a feminist focus, and “gender studies” in Scripture. (Vatican newspaper publishes article denying traditional teaching on Satan, sin in Garden of Eden.)

That such abject heresy, based as it is in the author’s own personal beliefs that defy the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture and the dogmatic pronouncements of Holy Mother Church, can be published in the “pope’s” semi-official newspaper should be all the proof that is necessary to demonstrate that the revolutionaries inside the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River have lost all semblance of the Catholic Faith and have thus lost their minds as a consequence.

The Catholic Church’s teaching on Original Sin and man’s Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden was defended dogmatically in the Fifth Session of the Council of Trent, whose Fathers met under the infallible protection and assistance of the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, God the Holy Ghost:

That our Catholic faith, without which it is impossible to please God, may, errors being purged away, continue in its own perfect and spotless integrity, and that the Christian people may not be carried about with every wind of doctrine; whereas that old serpent, the perpetual enemy of mankind, amongst the very many evils with which the Church of God is in these our times troubled, has also stirred up not only new, but even old, dissensions touching original sin, and the remedy thereof; the sacred and holy, ecumenical and general Synod of Trent,–lawfully assembled in the Holy Ghost, the three same legates of the Apostolic See presiding therein,–wishing now to come to the reclaiming of the erring, and the confirming of the wavering,–following the testimonies of the sacred Scriptures, of the holy Fathers, of the most approved councils, and the judgment and consent of the Church itself, ordains, confesses, and declares these things touching the said original sin:

1. If any one does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice wherein he had been constituted; and that he incurred, through the offence of that prevarication, the wrath and indignation of God, and consequently death, with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire Adam, through that offence of prevarication, was changed, in body and soul, for the worse; let him be anathema.

2. If any one asserts, that the prevarication of Adam injured himself alone, and not his posterity; and that the holiness and justice, received of God, which he lost, he lost for himself alone, and not for us also; or that he, being defiled by the sin of disobedience, has only transfused death, and pains of the body, into the whole human race, but not sin also, which is the death of the soul; let him be anathema:–whereas he contradicts the apostle who says; By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.

3. If any one asserts, that this sin of Adam,–which in its origin is one, and being transfused into all by propagation, not by imitation, is in each one as his own, –is taken away either by the powers of human nature, or by any other remedy than the merit of the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath reconciled us to God in his own blood, made unto us justice, santification, and redemption; or if he denies that the said merit of Jesus Christ is applied, both to adults and to infants, by the sacrament of baptism rightly administered in the form of the church; let him be anathema: For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved. Whence that voice; Behold the lamb of God behold him who taketh away the sins of the world; and that other; As many as have been baptized, have put on Christ.

4. If any one denies, that infants, newly born from their mothers’ wombs, even though they be sprung from baptized parents, are to be baptized; or says that they are baptized indeed for the remission of sins, but that they derive nothing of original sin from Adam, which has need of being expiated by the laver of regeneration for the obtaining life everlasting,–whence it follows as a consequence, that in them the form of baptism, for the remission of sins, is understood to be not true, but false, –let him be anathema. For that which the apostle has said, By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned, is not to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church spread everywhere hath always understood it. For, by reason of this rule of faith, from a tradition of the apostles, even infants, who could not as yet commit any sin of themselves, are for this cause truly baptized for the remission of sins, that in them that may be cleansed away by regeneration, which they have contracted by generation. For, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

5. If any one denies, that, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is conferred in baptism, the guilt of original sin is remitted; or even asserts that the whole of that which has the true and proper nature of sin is not taken away; but says that it is only rased, or not imputed; let him be anathema. For, in those who are born again, there is nothing that God hates; because, There is no condemnation to those who are truly buried together with Christ by baptism into death; who walk not according to the flesh, but, putting off the old man, and putting on the new who is created according to God, are made innocent, immaculate, pure, harmless, and beloved of God, heirs indeed of God, but joint heirs with Christ; so that there is nothing whatever to retard their entrance into heaven. But this holy synod confesses and is sensible, that in the baptized there remains concupiscence, or an incentive (to sin); which, whereas it is left for our exercise, cannot injure those who consent not, but resist manfully by the grace of Jesus Christ; yea, he who shall have striven lawfully shall be crowned. This concupiscence, which the apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.

This same holy Synod doth nevertheless declare, that it is not its intention to include in this decree, where original sin is treated of, the blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary, the mother of God; but that the constitutions of Pope Sixtus IV., of happy memory, are to be observed, under the pains contained in the said constitutions, which it renews. (Council of Trent, Fifth Session, June 17, 1566. General Council of Trent: Fifth Session.)

Anyone who does not believe this is a heretic.

Alas, the conciliar revolutionaries have long hinted that they do not believe in Special Creation, Original Sin, Adam and Eve’s Fall from Grace, and thus in the very reason that the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, became Incarnate in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother to win back for us on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday that which was lost for us by Adam and Eve when they succumbed to the devil’s temptation to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from which God Himself had forbidden them to eat.

Here, for example, is what Robert Zollitsch, the conciliar “archbishop” of Freiburg im Bresgau, Germany, from 2003 to 2013, said in 2009 when he was also the president of the German “bishops’” conference:

FREIBURG, Germany April 21, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - According to the chairman of the Catholic bishops' conference of Germany, the death of Jesus Christ was not a redemptive act of God to liberate human beings from the bondage of sin and open the gates of heaven. The Archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, known for his liberal views, publicly denied the fundamental Christian dogma of the sacrificial nature of Christ's death in a recent interview with a German television station.

Zollitsch said that Christ "did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat."

Instead, Jesus had offered only "solidarity" with the poor and suffering. Zollitsch said "that is this great perspective, this tremendous solidarity."

The interviewer asked, "You would now no longer describe it in such a way that God gave his own son, because we humans were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?"

Monsignor Zollitsch responded, "No."

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch was appointed to the See of Freiburg im Breisgau in 2003 under Pope John Paul II. He is he sitting Chairman of the German Episcopal Conference, to which he was elected in 2008 and is regarded as a "liberal" in the German episcopate.

In February 2008 he said that priestly celibacy should be voluntary and that it is not "theologically necessary." Zollitsch has also said he accepts homosexual civil unions by states, but is against same-sex "marriage."

He told Meinhard Schmidt-Degenhard, the program's host, that God gave "his own son in solidarity with us unto this last death agony to show: 'So much are you worth to me, I go with you, and I am totally with you in every situation'."

"He has become involved with me out of solidarity - from free will."

Christ, he said, had "taken up what I have been blamed for, including the evil that I have caused, and also to take it back into the world of God and hence to show me the way out of sin, guilt and from death to life." (Christ did not die for the sins of His people).

This statement was heretical then and it remains so today.

What did Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI do about this?

Nothing.

What did Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI say about this?

Nothing.

Zollitsch continued as the conciliar “archbishop” of Freiburg im Bresgau until he turned seventy-five years of age in 2013, five months after the now deceased Ratzinger/Benedict had resigned from the conciliar seat of apostasy. Not one word of rebuke of him was ever uttered by the “new theologian” who made warfare against the nature of dogmatic truth throughout the course of his priestly life and who personally esteemed the symbols of false religions with his own priestly hands while frequently saying that all “religions” play a role in promoting “peace.”

Why?

Because Pader Ratzinger himself did not believe in the horror of personal sin, which he committed all the time when praising false religions and saying such things as a “Jewish reading of the Bible is possible one”:

In its work, the Biblical Commission could not ignore the contemporary context, where the shock of the Shoah has put the whole question under a new light. Two main problems are posed: Can Christians, after all that has happened, still claim in good conscience to be the legitimate heirs of Israel's Bible? Have they the right to propose a Christian interpretation of this Bible, or should they not instead, respectfully and humbly, renounce any claim that, in the light of what has happened, must look like a usurpation? The second question follows from the first: In its presentation of the Jews and the Jewish people, has not the New Testament itself contributed to creating a hostility towards the Jewish people that provided a support for the ideology of those who wished to destroy Israel? The Commission set about addressing those two questions. It is clear that a Christian rejection of the Old Testament would not only put an end to Christianity itself as indicated above, but, in addition, would prevent the fostering of positive relations between Christians and Jews, precisely because they would lack common ground. In the light of what has happened, what ought to emerge now is a new respect for the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament. On this subject, the Document says two things. First it declares that “the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Scriptures of the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading, which developed in parallel fashion” (no. 22). It adds that Christians can learn a great deal from a Jewish exegesis practised for more than 2000 years; in return, Christians may hope that Jews can profit from Christian exegetical research (ibid.). I think this analysis will prove useful for the pursuit of Judeo-Christian dialogue, as well as for the interior formation of Christian consciousness. (Joseph Ratzinger, Preface to The Jewish People and Their Scriptures in the Christian Bible.) 

The late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI had such little regard for the horror of personal sin that he said in an interview with the Eternally Wishful Television Network (EWTN) in 2000 that he had “nothing against” those who go to what they think is Mass only several times a year:

Joseph Alois “Cardinal” Ratzinger, who said twenty-two that he had “no problem” with those Catholics who only attended what they thought was Holy Mass several times a year:

I have nothing against people who, though they never enter a church during the year, go to Christmas midnight Mass, or go on the occasion of some other celebration, because this is also a way of coming close to the light. Therefore, there must be different forms of involvement and participation. (CARDINAL RATZINGER ON THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY). 

Ratzinger's lack of regard for the Third Commandment was but a logical consequence for the lack of regard that he had for the First and Second Commandments as he had, as Benedict XVI, personally esteemed the symbols of five false religions with his priestly hands and has said that "Christians and Jews pray to the same Lord" and has called mosques and synagogues and even a mountain in Japan, Mount Hiei, atop which the Buddhists worship their devils as "sacred" places.

One who can so flagrantly violate the First and Second Commandments with such utter impunity demonstrates in the objective order of things, leaving aside subjective culpability solely to God Himself, Who alone knows the interior dispositions of souls, that he does not understand Who God is or what He has revealed to us through His true Church. This lack of understanding of the identity of God flowed logically from Ratzinger/Benedict's lack of understanding of the nature of God and His Revelation, believing that the expressions of dogmatic truth are contingent on the historical circumstances in which they were formulated. One who gets such basic things wrong is not going to have much of a real sense of the horror of personal sin and how to respond to it appropriately, something that the deceased “new theologian” had very much in common with his much more vulgar, venal, and profane successor in the conciliar seat of apostasy.

Then again, the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself believed that the term Original Sin was “imprecise” and “misleading":

“In the story that we are considering [Ch. 3 of Genesis], still a further characteristic of sin is described. Sin is not spoken of in general as an abstract possibility but as a deed, as the sin of a particular person, Adam, who stands at the origin of humankind and with whom the history of sin begins. The account tells us that sin begets sin, and that therefore all the sins of history are interlinked. Theology refers to this state of affairs by the certainly misleading and imprecise term ‘original sin’. What does this mean? Nothing seems to us today to be stranger or, indeed, more absurd than to insist upon original sin, since, according to our way of thinking, guilt can only be something very personal, and since God does not run a concentration camp, in which one’s relatives are imprisoned because he is a liberating God of love, who calls each one by name. What does original sin mean, then, when we interpret it correctly?

"Finding an answer to this requires nothing less than trying to understand the human person better. It must once again be stressed that no human being is closed in upon himself or herself and that no one can live of or for himself or herself alone. We receive our life not only at the moment of birth but every day from without – from others who are not ourselves but who nonetheless somehow pertain to us. Human beings have their selves not only in themselves but also outside of themselves: they live in those whom they love and in those who love them and to whom they are ‘present.’ Human beings are relational, and they possess their lives – themselves – only by way of relationship. I alone am not myself, but only in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for. But sin means the damaging or the destruction of relationality. Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god. Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship, and therefore it is not restricted to the individual. When I destroy a relationship, then this event – sin – touches the other person involved in the relationship. Consequently sin is always an offense that touches others, that alters the world and damages it. To the extent that this is true, when the network of human relationships is damaged from the very beginning, then every human being enters into a world that is marked by relational damage. At the very moment that a person begins human existence, which is a good, he or she is confronted by a sin- damaged world. Each of us enters into a situation in which relationality has been hurt. Consequently each person is, from the very start, damaged in relationships and does not engage in them as he or she ought. Sin pursues the human being, and he or she capitulates to it.” (Joseph Ratzinger, Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, pp. 71-73, quoted in the late James Larson's  The Point of Departure. For a different translation of the same text, replete with a superb commentary from authors who understand that Joseph Ratzinger expelled himself from the bosom of Holy Mother Church long, long before his supposed "election" to a Chair that has been empty since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958, is still empty, please see Benedict on Original Sin at Novus Ordo Watch, which was brought to my attention by a reader upon reviewing this revised and republished article. I thank the reader for providing me with this additional and quite valuable information.) 

"Misleading and imprecise" term "original sin"?

One who gets the doctrine of Original Sin wrong, as will be discussed more in a few days, will get the doctrine of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception wrong. Indeed, the late Mr. James Larson, who was opposed to sedevacantism, noted the following about the passages he quoted from Ratzinger's Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall:

First of all, I would suggest that we might search 2,000 years of history and never find another statement so clearly and profoundly heretical made by a member of the Church in as high a position as that occupied by Cardinal Ratzinger. What Cardinal Ratzinger here denies, of course, is the dogma of the faith that original sin is passed down from Adam to all men through generation. Cardinal Ratzinger considers such a view of sin misleading and imprecise and, in fact, ridicules it as stemming from a view of God which sees Him as the Commandant of a Consecration Camp Who imprisons one’s relatives just because of the fact that they share a common descent. In so doing, of course, he is directly contradicting Scripture and the clearly defined teaching of the Church. The following is from the Decree Concerning Original Sin of the Council of Trent:

“For that which the Apostle has said, ‘By one man, sin entered into this world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned.’ (Rom 5:12), is not to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church spread everywhere hath always understood it. For, by reason of this rule of faith, from a tradition of the Apostles, even infants who could not as yet commit any sin of themselves, are for this cause truly baptized for the remission of sins, that in them that may be cleansed away by regeneration which they have contracted by generation. For, ‘unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’” (John 3:5).

Adam’s original sin was, first of all, a denial of the immutable Nature and Being of God. It was a calling into question of His Supreme Being and Authority as expressed in His commandment and prohibition to man. Secondly, it was a repudiation of man’s wholly contingent and dependent nature, as expressed in Satan’s temptation to Eve, ”No, you shall not die the death.” Finally, it culminated in a profound lie concerning the true relationship of man to God: “For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil." Original sin is, in other words, a violation of the truth about nature and being at all levels.

As explored in my article Heart of Betrayal, it is this ontological reality of things which is the object of the war conducted by Modernism against the Faith. Modernism, especially as found in Phenomenalism and Personalism, seeks to make the Faith primarily a matter of an ongoing and developing relationship. Cardinal Ratzinger, in the paragraph quoted above in which he tries to give new meaning to original sin, uses some form of the word relationship 13 times. Not once, however, in all this overdone discussion of “relationality” is there a consideration of man’s relationship to God. The focus is exclusively on our relationship to our fellow man, (James Larson's  The Point of Departure.)

Concentration camp?

May God help us in this time of apostasy and betrayal. May His Most Blessed Mother preserve from believing that the counterfeit church of conciliarism is the same thing as the Catholic Church. 

The Catholic Church's doctrine on Original Sin does not need to be "re-thought" or "reformulated." The term is not "misleading" and "imprecise."

It is very precise.

As noted above, the Fifth Session of the Council of Trent defined it precisely.

Everyone on the face of this earth, whether or not he realizes it, is bound by the dogmatic definition exactly as proclaimed by the Council of Trent, which did, after all, meet and make its pronouncements under the infallible guidance of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. Catholics need to know this dogmatic definition and the effects produced in our souls as a result of the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin (and our own Actual Sins), the darkened intellect and the weakened will. In other words, Catholics need catechesis on the perennial, infallible teaching of the Church, not allocutions that seek to refashion everything about the Faith according to the murkiness of the New Theology so as to attempt, albeit futilely, to make Catholicism of one piece with the errors of Orthodoxy or, worse yet, articles in L'Osservatore Romano denying it outright.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton explained the absolute importance of understanding the doctrine of Original Sin exactly as it is taught by the Catholic Church without any reformulation whatsoever as the principal means to deal with all naturalistic explanations of the problems of men and their societies:

Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole of the high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that lesson was a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That pagan civilisation had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would not weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was the highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered its own permanent political ideals; it has discovered its own clear system of logic and of language. But above all, it had discovered its own mistaken.

That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of it is to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly be called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural mistake. The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea that if man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature, he could come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened and intelligent. We might be so flippant as to say that man was simply to follow his own nose, as long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the strange but certain fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own notion of being natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists never give us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects never take note of the testimony which they bear to the truths of a traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could cite thousands of such things part of the case for Christian morals. And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing that they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence. The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is that people who worship health cannot remain healthy. When Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery of the deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in man like the bias in the bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin. (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, Doubleday and Company, 1954, pp.36-39.)

That is, to get the doctrine of Original Sin wrong is to get everything else about the Faith and about nature itself wrong. One of the reasons that I found myself flushed down the Orwellian memory hole in the middle of a semester twelve years ago was that I began my courses, much to the consternation of anti-Catholic naturalists, with the following explanation to my students:

One cannot understand politics without understanding human nature. One cannot understand human nature without understanding the Special Creation of Adam by God and Adam's Fall from Grace by means of Original Sin. Original Sin--and our own Actual Sins that flow from Original Sin in the souls of the unbaptized or from the vestigial aftereffects of Original Sin in the souls of the baptized--is responsible for all of the problems of world: war, poverty, disease, injustice, New Jersey [this would get a big laugh from New Yorkers when I taught in colleges in the my native state]. There is no natural, secular, philosophical, ideological, religiously indifferentist, interdenominational or nondenominational way to ameliorate the problems caused by Original Sin. The problems caused by Original Sin, in other words by man's fallen human nature, can be ameliorated only by our daily cooperation with the Sanctifying Grace won for us by the shedding of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flows into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces. Catholicism is the one and only means by means human beings can know order in their own lives and in the lives of their nations. It is Catholicism, not liberalism or conservatism or libertarianism or communism or socialism or pragmatism or utilitarianism or relativism or positivism or feminism or environmentalism or any other secular " 'ism," that is the one and only means of human order in this passing, mortal vale of tears and hence the means of eternal happiness in Heaven.

One has to get the doctrine of Original Sin right to understand how view man and the problems that he creates in the world. One has to get the doctrine of Original Sin right in order to avoid becoming a slave of an ideology or a philosophy proposing to "explain" human problems and attempting to provide various paradigms or models for the "just" society absent a conversion of men and their nations to the Social Reign of Christ the King as that Reign must be exercised by the authority of the Catholic Church.

One has to get the doctrine of Original Sin right to avoid falling into the trap of looking at various "trees" (i.e., particular problems or crises that "demand" our attention and that drive otherwise rational people into believing the hype written by professional fund-raisers for various Protestant and/or conciliar "advocacy" groups that we must donate to such and such an organization "immediately" lest a social Armageddon result) rather than to calmly and rationally view the world through the eyes of the true Faith and thus to understand that there is no short-cut to social order absent a conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith.

Such a conversion, as I have noted endlessly, is not a guarantor of social order as human nature remains wounded and men fall into sin even when they believe in the true Faith and have access to the Sacraments. Such a conversion is, however, the necessary precondition for social order. We just have to get the doctrine of Original Sin as taught infallibly and quite precisely by the Catholic Church correct.

Deny the doctrine of Original Sin, you see, and there was no need for Our Lord to become Incarnate to redeem us from a sin that never occurred and thus the path is wide open to declare Sacred Scripture "mythological" and moral theology as "irrelevant" because there is no such thing as sin or a devil to tempt people into commiting sins.

We need to get the doctrine of Original Sin correct in order to understand the truly miraculous nature of this day upon which the fairest flower of our race, the Singular Vessel of Devotion, our Mystical Rose, the Tower of David, our dear Maria Bambina was conceived in the womb of her holy mother, Good Saint Anne, without stain of Original or Actual Sin. Our Lady, the New Eve, the new Mother of all the living who would untie the knot of Eve's prideful disobedience by means of her perfect Fiat to the Will of God the Father at the Annunciation as she agreed to Incarnate His Co-Equal Son by the power of the very breath of the Father and Son's mutual love for reach other, God the Holy Ghost, was preserved from all stain of Adam's sin in order to be the Immaculate tabernacle in which to conceive and to bring to birth God in the very Flesh.

Writing nearly a century before the solemn proclamation issued by Pope Pius IX, Saint Alphonsus de Liguori summarized the conclusions of numerous theologians, most of whom are canonized saints, in his discourse on the subject that is contained in The Glories of Mary:

GREAT indeed was the injury entailed on Adam and all his posterity by his accursed sin; for at the same time that he is thereby, for his own great misfortune, lost grace, he also forfeited all the other precious gifts with which he had originally been enriched, and drew down upon himself and all his descendants the hatred of God and an accumulation of evils. But from this general misfortune God was pleased to exempt that Blessed Virgin whom He had destined to be the Mother of the Second Adam-----Jesus Christ-----Who was to repair the evil done by the first. Now, let us see how becoming it was that God, and all the Three Divine Persons, should thus preserve her from it; that the Father should preserve her as His Daughter, the Son as His Mother, and the Holy Ghost as His Spouse.

First point.-----In the first place it was becoming that the Eternal Father should preserve Mary from the stain of Original Sin, because she was His Daughter, and His first-born daughter, as she herself declares: "I came out of the mouth of the Most High, the first-born before all creatures." [Eccl. 24: 5] For this text is applied to Mary by  sacred interpreters, the holy Fathers, and by the Church on the solemnity of her Conception. For be she the first-born inasmuch as she was predestined in the Divine decrees, together with the Son, before all creatures, according to the Scotists; or be she the first-born of grace as the predestined Mother of the Redeemer, after the prevision of sin, according to the Thomists; nevertheless all agree in calling her the first-born of God. This being the case, it was quite becoming that Mary should never have been the slave of Lucifer, but only and always possessed by her Creator; and this she in reality was, as we are assured by herself: "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways." [Prov. 8: 22] Hence Denis of Alexandria rightly calls Mary 'the one and only daughter of life.' She is the one and only daughter of life, in contradistinction to others who, being born in sin, are daughters of death.

Besides this, it was quite becoming that the Eternal Father should create her in His grace, since He destined her to be the repairer of the lost world, and the mediatress of peace between men and God; and, as such, she is looked upon and spoken of by the holy Fathers, and in particular by Saint John Damascene, who thus addresses her: 'O Blessed Virgin, thou wast born that thou mightest minister to the salvation of the whole world.' For this reason Saint Bernard says, 'that Noah's ark was a type of Mary; for as, by its means, men were preserved from the deluge, so are we all saved by Mary from the shipwreck of sin: but with the difference, that in the ark few were saved, and by Mary the whole human race was rescued from death.' Therefore, in a sermon found amongst the works of Saint Athanasius, she is called 'the new Eve, and the Mother of life;' and not without reason, for the first was the Mother of death, but the most Blessed Virgin was the Mother of true life. Saint Theophanius of Nice, addressing Mary, says, 'Hail, thou who hast taken away Eve's sorrow!' Saint Basil of Seleucia calls her the peacemaker between men and God: 'Hail, thou who art appointed umpire between God and men!' and Saint Ephrem, the pacificator of the whole world: 'Hail, reconciler of the whole world!'

But now, it certainly would not be becoming to choose an enemy to treat of peace with the offended person, and still less an accomplice in the crime itself. Saint Gregory says, 'that an enemy cannot undertake to appease his judge, who is at the same time the injured party; for if he did, instead of appeasing him, he would provoke him to greater wrath.' And therefore, as Mary was to be the mediatress of peace between men and God, it was of the utmost importance that she should not herself appear as a sinner and as an enemy of God, but that she should appear in all things as a friend, and free from every stain.

Still more was it becoming that God should preserve her from Original Sin, for He destined her to crush the head of that infernal serpent, which, by seducing our first parents, entailed death upon all men; and this our Lord foretold: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head." [Gen. 3: 15] But if Mary was to be that valiant woman brought into the world to conquer Lucifer, certainly it was not becoming that he should first conquer her, and make her his slave; but it was reasonable that she should be preserved from all stain, and even momentary subjection to her opponent. The proud spirit endeavoured to infect the most pure soul of this Virgin with his venom, as he had already infected the whole human race. But praised and ever blessed be God, Who, in His infinite goodness, preendowed her for this purpose with such great grace, that, remaining always free from any guilt of sin, she was ever able to beat down and confound his pride, as Saint Augustine, or whoever may be the author of the commentary on Genesis, says: 'Since the devil is the head of Original Sin, this head it was that Mary crushed: for sin never had any entry into the soul of this Blessed Virgin, which was consequently free from all stain.' And Saint Bonaventure more expressly says, 'It was becoming that the Blessed Virgin Mary, by whom our shame was to be blotted out, and by whom the devil was to be conquered, should never, even for a moment, have been under his dominion.'

But, above all, it principally became the Eternal Father to preserve this His daughter unspotted by Adam's sin, as Saint Bernardine of Sienna remarks, because He destined her to be the Mother of His Only-begotten Son: 'Thou wast preordained in the mind of God, before all creatures, that thou mightest beget God Himself as man.' If, then, for no other end, at least for the honour of His Son, Who was God, it was reasonable that the Father should create Mary free from every stain. The angelic Saint Thomas says, that all things that are ordained for God should be holy and free from stain: 'Holiness is to be attributed to those things which are ordained for God.' [1 p. q. xxxvi. art. 1, concl.] Hence when David was planning the temple of Jerusalem, on a scale of magnificence becoming a God, he said, "For a house is prepared not for man, but for God." [1 Paralipom. (Chronicles) 29: 1] How much more reasonable, then, is it not, to suppose that the Sovereign Architect, who destined Mary to be the Mother of His Own Son, adorned her soul with all most precious gifts, that she might be a dwelling worthy of God! Denis the Carthusian says, 'that God, the artificer of all things, when constructing a worthy dwelling for His Son adorned it with all attractive graces.' And the Holy Church herself, in the following prayer, assures us that God prepared the body and soul of the Blessed Virgin, so as to be a worthy dwelling on earth for His Only-begotten Son. 'Almighty and Eternal God Who by the cooperation of the Holy Ghost, didst prepare the body and soul of the glorious Virgin and Mother Mary, that she might become a worthy habitation for Thy Son,'  . . .

We know that a man's highest honour is to be born of noble parents, "And the glory of children are their fathers." [Prov. 17: 6] Hence in the world the reputation of being possessed of only a small fortune, and little learning, is more easily tolerated than that of being of low birth; for, whilst a poor man may become rich by his industry, an ignorant man learned by study, it is very difficult for a person of humble origin to attain the rank of nobility; but, even should he attain it, his birth can always be made a subject of reproach to him. How, then, can we suppose that God, Who could cause His Son to be born of a noble mother by preserving her from sin, would on the contrary permit Him to be born of one infected by it, and thus enable Lucifer always to reproach Him with the shame of having a mother who had once been his slave and the enemy of God? No, certainly, the Eternal Father did not permit this; but He well provided for the honour of His Son by preserving His Mother always Immaculate, that she might be a Mother becoming such a Son. The Greek Church bears witness to this, saying, 'that God, by a singular providence, caused the most Blessed Virgin to be as perfectly pure from the very first moment of her existence, as it was fitting that she should be, who was to be the worthy Mother of Christ.'

It is a common axiom amongst theologians that no gift was ever bestowed on any creature with which the Blessed Virgin was not also enriched. Saint Bernard says on this subject, 'It is certainly not wrong to suppose that that which has evidently been bestowed, even on only a few, was not denied to so great a Virgin.' Saint Thomas of Villanova says, ' Nothing was ever granted to any Saint which did not shine in a much higher degree in Mary from the very first moment of her existence.' And as it is true that 'there is an infinite difference between the Mother of God and the servants of God,' according to the celebrated saying of Saint John Damascene, we must certainly suppose, according to the doctrine of Saint Thomas, that 'God conferred privileges of grace in every way greater on His Mother than on His servants.' [3 p. q. xxvii, art. 1, concl.] And now admitting this, Saint Anselm, the great defender of the Immaculate Mary, takes up the question and says, 'Was the wisdom of God unable to form a pure dwelling, and to remove every stain of human nature from it? Perhaps God could not prepare a clean habitation for His Son by preserving it from the common contagion? 'God,' continues the same Saint, 'could preserve Angels in Heaven spotless, in the midst of the devastation that surrounded them; was He, then, unable to preserve the Mother of His Son and the Queen of Angels from the common fall of men?' And I may here add, that as God could grant Eve the grace to come immaculate into the world, could He not, then, grant the same favour to Mary?

Yes, indeed! God could do it and did it; for on every account 'it was becoming' as the same Saint Anselm says, 'that that Virgin, on whom the Eternal Father intended to bestow His Only-begotten Son, should be adorned with such purity as not only to exceed that of, all men and Angels, but exceeding any purity that can be conceived after that of God.' And Saint John Damascene speaks in still clearer terms; for he says, 'that our Lord had preserved the soul, together with the body of the Blessed Virgin, in that purity which became her who was to receive a God into her womb; for, as He is holy, He only reposes in holy places.'  And thus the Eternal Father could well say to His beloved daughter, 'As the lily among thorns; so is my love among the daughters.' [Cant. 2: 2] My daughter, amongst all my other daughters, thou art as a lily in the midst of thorns; for they are all stained with sin, but thou wast always Immaculate, and always my beloved.

Second point.-----In the second place it was becoming that the Son should preserve Mary from sin, as being His Mother. No man can choose his mother; but should such a thing ever be granted to anyone, who is there who, if able to choose a queen, would wish for a slave? If able to choose a noble lady, would he wish for a servant? Or if able to choose a friend of God, would he wish for His enemy? If, then, the Son of God alone could choose a Mother according to His Own heart, His liking, we must consider, as a matter of course, that He chose one becoming a God. Saint Bernard says, 'that the Creator of men becoming Man, must have selected Himself a Mother whom He knew became Him.'  And as it was becoming that a most pure God should have a Mother pure from all sin, He created her spotless. Saint Bernardine of Sienna, speaking of the different degrees of sanctification, says, that 'the third is that obtained by becoming the Mother of God; and that this sanctification consists in the entire removal of Original Sin. This is what took place in the Blessed Virgin: truly God created Mary such, both as to the eminence of her nature and the perfection of grace with ,which He endowed her, as became Him Who was to be born of her.  Here we may apply the words of the Apostle to the Hebrews: "For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest; holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners." [Heb. 7: 26] A learned author observes that, according to Saint Paul, it was fitting that our Blessed Redeemer should not only be separated from sin, but also from sinners; according to the explanation of Saint Thomas, who says, 'that it was necessary that He, Who came to take away sins, should be separated from sinners, as to the fault under which Adam lay.' [3. p. q. iv. art. 6, ad 2] But how could Jesus Christ be said to be separated from sinners if He had a Mother who was a sinner?

Saint Ambrose says, 'that Christ chose this vessel into which He was about to descend, not of earth, but from Heaven; and He consecrated it a temple of purity.' The Saint alludes to the text of Saint Paul: "The first man was of the earth, earthly: the second man from Heaven, heavenly." [1 Cor. 15: 47] The Saint calls the Divine Mother 'a heavenly vessel,' not because Mary was not earthly by nature, as heretics have dreamt, but because she was heavenly by grace; she was as superior to the Angels of Heaven in sanctity and purity, as it was becoming that she should be, in whose womb a King of Glory was to dwell. This agrees with that which Saint John the Baptist revealed to St. Bridget, saying, 'It was not becoming that the King of Glory should repose otherwise than in a chosen vessel, exceeding all men and Angels in purity.' And to this we may add that which the Eternal Father Himself said to the same Saint: 'Mary was a clean and an unclean vessel: clean, for she was all fair; but unclean, because she was born of sinners; though she was conceived without sin, that My Son might be born of her without sin.' And remark these last words, 'Mary was conceived without sin, that the Divine Son might be born of her without sin.' Not that Jesus Christ could have contracted sin; but that He might not be reproached with even having a Mother infected with it, who would consequently have been the slave of the devil.

The Holy Ghost says that "the glory of a man is from the honour of his father, and a father without honour is the disgrace of the son." [Eccles. 3: 13] 'Therefore it was,' says an ancient writer, 'that Jesus preserved the body of Mary from corruption after death; for it would have redounded to His dishonour, had that virginal flesh with which He had clothed Himself become the food of worms.' 'For,' he adds, 'corruption is a disgrace of human nature; and as Jesus was not subject to it, Mary was also exempted; for the flesh of Jesus is the flesh of Mary.' But since the corruption of her body would have been a disgrace for Jesus Christ, because He was born of her, how much greater would the disgrace have been, had He been born of a mother whose soul was once infected with the corruption of sin! For not only is it true that the flesh of Jesus is the same as that of Mary, 'but,' adds the same author, 'the flesh of our Saviour, even after His resurrection, remained the same that He had taken from His Mother.' 'The flesh of Christ is the flesh of Mary; and though it was glorified by the glory of His resurrection, yet it remains the same that was taken from Mary.' Hence the Abbot Arnold of Chartres says, 'The flesh of Mary and that of Christ are one; and therefore I consider the glory of the Son as being not so much common to, as one with that of His Mother.' And now if this is true, supposing that the Blessed Virgin was conceived in sin, though the Son could not have contracted its stain, nevertheless His having united flesh to Himself which was once infected with sin, a vessel of uncleanness and subject to Lucifer, would always have been a blot.

Mary was not only the Mother, but the worthy Mother of our Saviour. She is called so by all the holy Fathers. Saint Bernard says, 'Thou alone wast found worthy to be chosen as the one in whose virginal womb the King of kings should have His first abode.' Saint. Thomas of Villanova says, 'Before she conceived, she was already fit to be the Mother of God.' The holy Church herself attests that Mary merited to be the Mother of Jesus Christ, saying, 'the Blessed Virgin, who merited to bear in her womb Christ our Lord;' and Saint Thomas Aquinas, explaining these words, says, that 'the Blessed Virgin is said to have merited to bear the Lord of all; not that she merited His Incarnation, but that she merited, by the graces she had received, such a degree of purity and sanctity, that she could becomingly be the Mother of God;' that is to say, Mary could not merit the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, but by Divine grace she merited such a degree of perfection as to render her worthy to be the Mother of a God; according to what Saint Peter Damian also writes: 'Her singular sanctity, the effect of grace, merited that she alone should be judged worthy to receive a God.'

And now, supposing that Mary was worthy to be the Mother of God, 'what excellency and what perfection was there that did not become her?' asks Saint Thomas of Villanova. The angelic Doctor says, 'that when God chooses anyone for a particular dignity, He renders him fit for it;' whence he adds, 'that God, having chosen Mary for His Mother, He also by His grace rendered her worthy of this highest of all dignities.' 'The Blessed Virgin was Divinely chosen to be the Mother of God, and therefore we cannot doubt that God had fitted her by His grace for this dignity; and we are assured of it by the Angel: "For thou hast found grace with God; behold, thou shalt conceive," . . . [3 p. q. xxvii. art. 4, concl.] And thence the Saint argues that 'the Blessed Virgin never committed any actual sin, not even a venial one. Otherwise,' he says, 'she would not have been a Mother worthy of Jesus Christ; for the ignominy of the Mother would also have been that of the Son, for He would have had a sinner for His Mother." [Ibid.] And now if Mary, on account of a single venial sin, which does not deprive a soul of Divine grace, would not have been a Mother worthy of God, how much more unworthy would she have been, had she contracted the guilt of Original Sin, which would have made her an enemy of God and a slave of the devil? And this reflection it was that made Saint Augustine utter those memorable words, that, 'when speaking of Mary for the honour of our Lord,' whom she merited to have for her Son, he would not entertain even the question of sin in her; 'for we know,' he says, 'that through Him, Who it is evident was without sin, and Whom she merited to conceive and bring forth, she received grace to conquer all sin.'

Therefore, as Saint Peter Damian observes, we must consider it as certain 'that the Incarnate Word chose Himself a becoming Mother, and one of whom He would not have to be ashamed.' Saint Proclus also says, 'that He dwelt in a womb which He had created free from all that might be to His dishonour.' It was no shame to Jesus Christ, when He heard Himself contemptuously called by the Jews the Son of Mary, meaning that He was the Son of a poor woman: "Is not His Mother called Mary?" [Matt. 8: 55] for He came into this world to give us an example of humility and patience. But, on the other hand, it would undoubtedly have been a disgrace, could He have heard the devil say, 'Was not His Mother a sinner? Was He not born of a wicked Mother, who was once our slave?' It would even have been unbecoming had Jesus Christ been born of a woman whose body was deformed, or crippled, or possessed by devils: but how much more would it have been so, had He been born of a woman whose soul had been once deformed by sin, and in the possession of Lucifer!

Ah I indeed, God, Who is Wisdom itself, well knew how to prepare Himself a becoming dwelling, in which to reside on earth: "Wisdom hath built herself a house." [Prov. 9: 1] "The Most High hath sanctified His own tabernacle. . . . God will help it in the morning early." [Ps. 14: 5, 6] David says that our Lord sanctified this His dwelling "in the morning early;" that is to say, from the beginning of her life, to render her worthy of Himself; for it was not becoming that a holy God should choose Himself a dwelling that was not holy: "Holiness becometh Thy house." [Ps. 92: 5] And if God declares that He will never enter a malicious soul, or dwell in a body subject to sin, "for wisdom will not enter into a malicious soul, nor dwell in a body subject to sins," [Wisd. 1: 4] how can we ever think that the Son of God chose to dwell in the soul and body of Mary, without having previously sanctified and preserved it from every stain of sin? For, according to the doctrine of Saint Thomas, 'the Eternal Word dwelt not only in the soul of Mary, but even in her womb.' [3 p. q. xxvii. art. 4, concl.] The holy Church sings, 'Thou, O Lord, hast not disdained to dwell in the Virgin's womb.' Yes, for He would have disdained to have taken flesh in the womb of an Agnes, a Gertrude, a Teresa, because these virgins, though holy, were nevertheless for a time stained with Original Sin; but He did not disdain to become man in the womb of Mary, because this beloved Virgin was always pure and free from the least shadow of sin, and was never possessed by the infernal serpent. And therefore Saint Augustine says, 'that the Son of God never made Himself a more worthy dwelling than Mary, who was never possessed by the enemy, or despoiled of her ornaments.'. (Saint Alphonsus de Liguori,  The Glories of Mary)

Our Lady was spotless from the first moment of her Immaculate Conception. She is an archetype, therefore, of our spotless Holy Mother Church. Our Lady was never stained by any sins, by any unruly passions or disorderly inclinations. She personified interiorly and exhibited exteriorly in her words and in her deeds each of the virtues to their penultimate perfections. She gave the Logos, the very Word through Whom all things were made, His earthly dwelling in which He would redeem the human race atop the sinkhole known as Golgotha or Calvary as He hung on the gibbet of the Holy Cross. She made possible, therefore, our very salvation and she made possible the founding of Holy Mother Church and of the countless treasures of grace entrusted to the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ by her Divine Son, Who is His Holy Church's Invisible Head and Mystical Bridegroom.

What is true of the spotless Blessed Mother is, therefore, true of Holy Mother Church. Our Lady was never defiled by sin or disorder or scandal or blasphemy or any indifference to abomination or heresy. Holy Mother Church can never be defiled by promoting liturgies that mock the Faith and profane Our Blessed Lord and Saviour's Sacrifice to the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the Holy Cross. Holy Mother Church can never be defiled by "popes" contradicting the perennial teaching of the Church, including that on Original Sin, as they reject what they call disparagingly "the ecumenism of the return." It is without precedent in the history of the Catholic Church for her officials to sanction "Masses" with clowns, balloons, hideous "music," immodesty, and the incorporation of pagan rituals. Indeed, it is as impossible for the Catholic Church to sanction such things as it was for our Blessed Mother to sin, no less to appoint men as "bishops" who do not believe that sodomy is sinful in any way.

Pope Pius XI, writing in Mortalium Animos, put it this way:

So, Venerable Brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it. During the lapse of centuries, the mystical Spouse of Christ has never been contaminated, nor can she ever in the future be contaminated, as Cyprian bears witness: "The Bride of Christ cannot be made false to her Spouse: she is incorrupt and modest. She knows but one dwelling, she guards the sanctity of the nuptial chamber chastely and modestly." The same holy Martyr with good reason marveled exceedingly that anyone could believe that "this unity in the Church which arises from a divine foundation, and which is knit together by heavenly sacraments, could be rent and torn asunder by the force of contrary wills." For since the mystical body of Christ, in the same manner as His physical body, is one, compacted and fitly joined together, it were foolish and out of place to say that the mystical body is made up of members which are disunited and scattered abroad: whosoever therefore is not united with the body is no member of it, neither is he in communion with Christ its head.

Furthermore, in this one Church of Christ no man can be or remain who does not accept, recognize and obey the authority and supremacy of Peter and his legitimate successors. Did not the ancestors of those who are now entangled in the errors of Photius and the reformers, obey the Bishop of Rome, the chief shepherd of souls? Alas their children left the home of their fathers, but it did not fall to the ground and perish for ever, for it was supported by God. Let them therefore return to their common Father, who, forgetting the insults previously heaped on the Apostolic See, will receive them in the most loving fashion. For if, as they continually state, they long to be united with Us and ours, why do they not hasten to enter the Church, "the Mother and mistress of all Christ's faithful"? Let them hear Lactantius crying out: "The Catholic Church is alone in keeping the true worship. This is the fount of truth, this the house of Faith, this the temple of God: if any man enter not here, or if any man go forth from it, he is a stranger to the hope of life and salvation. Let none delude himself with obstinate wrangling. For life and salvation are here concerned, which will be lost and entirely destroyed, unless their interests are carefully and assiduously kept in mind."

Let, therefore, the separated children draw nigh to the Apostolic See, set up in the City which Peter and Paul, the Princes of the Apostles, consecrated by their blood; to that See, We repeat, which is "the root and womb whence the Church of God springs," not with the intention and the hope that "the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" will cast aside the integrity of the faith and tolerate their errors, but, on the contrary, that they themselves submit to its teaching and government. Would that it were Our happy lot to do that which so many of Our predecessors could not, to embrace with fatherly affection those children, whose unhappy separation from Us We now bewail. Would that God our Savior, "Who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth," would hear us when We humbly beg that He would deign to recall all who stray to the unity of the Church! In this most important undertaking We ask and wish that others should ask the prayers of Blessed Mary the Virgin, Mother of divine grace, victorious over all heresies and Help of Christians, that She may implore for Us the speedy coming of the much hoped-for day, when all men shall hear the voice of Her divine Son, and shall be "careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, January 6, 1928.)

The devil hates the spotless Blessed Virgin Mary who has crushed his head with her heel. He hates the spotless Mystical Bride of Christ, Holy Mother Church, as she, our Mater and Magister, dispenses to us the life-giving treasures of grace so that we, wounded by the effects of Original Sin and by effects of our own many Actual Sins, can crush his influence in our lives as we rely upon Our Lady's maternal intercession, as we consecrate ourselves totally to her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, as we shield ourselves with her Brown Scapular and use the weapon that is her Most Holy Rosary to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world. The devil wants to attack the spotless Mystical Bride of Christ during this era of apostasy and betrayal just as he attacked the spotless, Immaculate Blessed Virgin Mary during the Protestant Revolt, whose evil effects continue to be manifest in the world.

That is, the devil hates Our Lady as she is the Singular Vessel of Devotion in which the One he hates, God, assumed a human nature with the gifts of perfect integrity that was possessed by the first Adam before the Fall without for one second losing His Sacred Divinity. The devil hates Our Lady for her perfect obedience to the will of the Father at the Annunciation. He hates her for giving birth to the New Adam Who would cancel out the debt that had been contracted by Adam when he sinned by disobeying God in the Garden of Eden. The devil hates Our Lady because he knows, as Blessed Louis de Montfort taught, it is necessary to have devotion to her in order to be saved:

The pious and learned Jesuit, Suarez, Justus Lipsius, a devout and erudite theologian of Louvain, and many others have proved incontestably that devotion to our Blessed Lady is necessary to attain salvation. This they show from the teaching of the Fathers, notably St. Augustine, St. Ephrem, deacon of Edessa, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Germanus of Constantinople, St. John Damascene, St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Bernardine, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure. Even according to Oecolampadius and other heretics, lack of esteem and love for the Virgin Mary is an infallible sign of God's disapproval. On the other hand, to be entirely and genuinely devoted to her is a sure sign of God's approval. (Saint Louis de Montfort, True Devotion to Mary.)

Thus it is that the devil has used Protestantism as a special means of "election," shall we say, to denigrate Our Lady and devotion to her. Make no mistake about it, ladies and gentlemen: Protestantism is from the devil, who inspired a prideful, lustful Augustinian monk, steeped in guilt over his sins and despairing of the efficacy of the graces made available to him in the Sacrament of Penance to overcome his sins, to deny that Our Lord had established a visible, hierarchical Church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, that alone was the means by which men are to be instructed in the truths of the Holy Faith and the sole means by which the souls of men are to be sanctified until the end of time. The devil used all of the permutations from have flowed from Father Martin Luther's apostasy to create a veritable cottage industry in the over 33,000 different Protestant sects that have arisen in the past five hundred years to disparage the role Our Lady played in the salvation of mankind and to portray her as nothing other than another "sinner" who had all of the faults and weaknesses of any other human being.

Similarly, the devil has used the condemned errors of Gallicanism concerning the nature of papal infallibility and of the Church herself to convince several generations of traditionally-minded Catholics that is indeed possible for a "pope" to make "unofficial" utterances (those not issued solemnly in an ex cathedradefinition) and that it is possible for the Catholic Church to promulgate a "liturgy" that can give rise to one scandal after another. This false view of the Church contradicts Pope Pius XI's quotation of Saint Cyprian, that Holy Mother Church will be exactly the same in all ages as she has been in the past, that she, like Our Blessed Mother herself, can never be contaminated.

We, who have been so contaminated by our own sins, need to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world by pledging ourselves unreservedly to the very patroness of the United States of America, the Immaculate Conception herself, Our Lady, who appeared to Saint Bernadette Soubirous in the Grotto of Massabielle near Lourdes, France, on March 25, 1858, to say, "I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION," thereby ratifying Pope Pius IX's solemn definition of this doctrine that she, the very Mother of God, proclaimed as such by the Council of Ephesus in the year 431 A.D., was preserved from all stain of that sin which each of us has on our souls before we are baptized, Original Sin. We need to cling to true bishops and true priests who make no concessions to conciliarism at all and who accord no legitimacy to the false shepherds who have done so much to offend God and to blaspheme even His Most Blessed Mother by their words and deeds, including tampering with her Most Holy Rosary itself.

The conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith has been entrusted to Mary our Immaculate Queen, who hates the false ecumenism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. We must pray and make many sacrifices to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the conversion of our own beloved country, the United States of America, so that she will be truly worthy of God's blessings and so that a liberty founded only on the standard of the Holy Cross will flower in the hearts and souls of men who judge the things of time solely by the things of eternity and as they rely upon the ever-powerful intercession of the Mother of God herself. This is not a message that one will hear in too many conciliar churches in the United States of America. It is a message that we, keeping fast to the teaching of the ever spotless Mystical Bride of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, must proclaim by word and by deed as we make our acts of reparation for the sins of Modernity and Modernism.

Here is one recommendation for such an act of reparation, a "Salutation to Mary," written by Saint John Eudes in the Seventeenth Century. A copy of this salutation (which a booklet tells us to "undertake to widely spread and make known this Salutation to the Glory of Mary") was found in a book belonging to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque after her death. As Pere Paul de Moll, O.S.B., wrote:

This salutation is so beautiful! Recite it daily. From her throne in Heaven the Blessed Virgin will bless you, and you must make the Sign of the Cross. You! Yes! If only you could see--Our Lady blesses you. I know it!

Offered for the conversion of a sinner it would be impossible not to be granted.

Here is the Salutation to Mary:

Hail Mary! Daughter of God the Father.

Hail Mary! Mother of God the Son.

Hail Mary! Spouse of God the Holy Ghost.

Hail Mary! Temple of the Most Blessed Trinity.

Hail Mary! Pure Lilly of the Effulgent Trinity. God.

Hail Mary!! Celestial Rose of the ineffable Love of God.

Hail Mary! Virgin pure and humble, of whom the King of Heaven willed to be born and with thy milk to be nourished.

Hail Mary! Virgin of Virgins.

Hail Mary! Queen of Martyrs, whose soul a sword transfixed.

Hail Mary! Lady most blessed: Unto whom all power in Heaven and earth is given.

Hail Mary! My Queen and my Mother! My Life, my sweetness and my Hope.

Hail Mary! Mother most Amiable.

Hail Mary! Mother most Admirable.

Hail Mary! Mother of Divine Love.

Hail Mary! IMMACULATE! Conceived without sin!

Hail Mary Full of Grace. The Lord is with Thee! Blessed art Thou amongst Women and Blessed is the Fruit of Thy Womb, Jesus!

Blessed be thy Spouse, St. Joseph.

Blessed be thy Father, St. Joachim.

Blessed be thy Mother, St. Anne.

Blessed be thy Guardian, St. John.

Blessed be thy Holy Angel, St. Gabriel.

Glory be to God the Father, who chose thee.

Glory be to God the Son, who loved thee.

Glory be to God the Holy Ghost, who espoused thee.

O Glorious Virgin Mary, may all men love and praise thee.

Holy Mary, Mother of God! Pray for us and bless us, now, and at death in the Name of Jesus, thy Divine Son! 

We should pray this Salutation to Our Lady for the conversion of the feminist who wrote the heretical garbage that appeared in L'Osservatore Romano as well as for the conversion of the editors who thought it worth publishing because they knew that Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV would not reprimand them in the slightest for doing so.

Relying ever upon Our Lady's graces to persevere in the true Faith until we die and to always seek out the ineffable mercy of her Divine Son in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, may every Rosary we pray today and every day console the good God for our own many sins as as well as for the sins of those who most people think speak with the approval of Holy Mother Church.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saints Thomas More and John Fisher, pray for us.

Saint Maria Goretti, pray for us.

Saint Veronica Giuliani, pray for us.

The Martyrs of Gorkum, pray for us.