Our Lord Uses Human Injustices as Instruments of His Mercy and Divine Justice

The police state thugs operating with the complete direction and active participation of the Biden Family Crime Syndicate that has made lots of money from Red Chinese “investors," who, it should be pointed out, are getting their money’s worth from the current occupants of the White House and the Executive Branch, are in the process of trying former President Donald John Trump on dead misdemeanor charges that were brought back to life after their statute of limitations had expired and turned into thirty-seven "felony" counts of violating an as yet unspecified law that were brought by New York County District Attorney Alvin “See No Violent Crime, Prosecute No Violent Crime” Bragg. This commentary will not descend into any of the salacious details that the prosecution has seen fit to bring forth during the trial thus far to blow smoke in the face of jurors to try to convince them that "crimes" were committed when even the prosecution cannot identify the underlying statute associated with the crime.

Attorney Jonathan Turley assessed this case as follows in an opinion column:

On Tuesday, the prosecution surprised many by suddenly announcing that it would rest its case against former President Donald Trump with the completion of testimony by Michael Cohen.

It was surprising because the prosecution never clearly stated the crime that it was proving, the elements of that crime, or even why denoting payments related to Stormy Daniels were not properly recorded as legal expenses.

Indeed, the only thing the prosecutors proved was that, in the pantheon of dishonesty, there are liars, pathological liars … and Michael Cohen.

Cohen spent the last two days insisting that he used to be a liar but lied only to help Trump. If that is the thrust of his testimony, it is just the latest lie told by Cohen under oath.

Cohen has lied to Congress, courts, special counsels, the IRS, banks, and virtually every creature that walks or crawls on the face of the Earth.

Notably, his past conviction for business and tax fraud was not taken in the interests of Trump but himself.

When he admitted on the stand that he lied during his prior plea agreement, that was not to assist Trump, whom he had already denounced. It was to advance his own interests.

There is every indication that Cohen is still lying.

Take, for example, his testimony on his unethical decision to secretly record a Sept. 6, 2016, telephone call with Trump.

It was a breathtaking betrayal that most lawyers would not contemplate, let alone carry out.

When asked by the prosecutors about that act, Cohen bizarrely claimed that he did so to guarantee that David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, would “remain loyal to Mr. Trump.”

No one seriously believes that this is true. It does not even make sense. Pecker was speaking to Trump about the payments and even met with him at the White House.

Playing for him a call with Trump would produce nothing but confusion rather than pressure for Pecker.

Moreover, why would Cohen tape the call without letting Trump know? The obvious motive was to squirrel away material to use against Trump if he ever needed a little leverage.

Again, it was for Cohen.

Cohen’s testimony showed that he has consistently acted solely in his interest.

After portraying his sudden cooperation with prosecutors as a type of “road to Damascus,” jurors learned that all roads lead back to Cohen and his bank accounts.

After telling the jury that he has dedicated his life to righting the wrongs of Trump and holding him accountable, he admitted that he repeatedly acted to undermine the prosecution in order to make a buck.

Told by prosecutors to stop doing public interviews, Cohen did not care. He did roughly two dozen television appearances and recorded hundreds of podcast episodes.

He admitted that Trump is mentioned in virtually every episode, of which he did roughly four a week.

He recounted how he raked in hundreds of millions on books, including one titled “Revenge.” He admitted that he is selling items like a $32 shirt with a photo of Trump in a jumpsuit behind bars and a coffee mug with the phrase “Send him to the big house, not the White House.”

He is also peddling a reality show called “The Fixer,” in which he promises viewers, “I am your fixer.”

After just a few hours of cross-examination, it was clear that Cohen is the same grifter saving himself — one Venmo at a time.

Yet Cohen continued to reframe reality in his own self-constructed image.

When asked about his TikTok antics, he portrayed his postings as a type of sleep deprivation therapy, explaining that “having a difficult time sleeping and [he] found an out.”

No sane prosecutor would rely on Cohen, let alone make him the entirety of their case.

The prosecutors did not even bother to show that Trump was responsible or knew about how the payments were recorded on ledgers and business records.

They also just shrugged away the need to show why denoting these payments as “legal expenses” was fraudulent — or what the correct description might be.

Those details might be demanded in any other courtroom, but this is New York and the defendant is Donald Trump.

For Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his team, it is all about what they can get out of this case despite the law.

In that sense, they found a kindred spirit in their star witness, and Michael Cohen has finally found a place that values what he calls on his reality show promo his “particular set of skills.” (Michael Cohen's testimony proves he's the King of Liars.)

Alvin Bragg's team of prosecutors includes one Matthew Colangelo, who just happened to resign his position in Merrick Garland's Minsitry of Injustice to prosecute former Donald John Trump for breaking a law that not even he, Colangelo, can name as the "crime" Trump for which the former president must be sent to jail is his having defeated Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton on November 8, 2016, which prompted the Russia Collusion Hoax, which itself followed upon the concerted efforts by Barack Hussein Obama's Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency to prevent Trump's election in the first place.

Mind you, Donald John Trump has always been and will probably ever be is his own worst enemy and did things, for example, on January 6, 2021, that, although not criminal, were imprudent and morally inadvisable given the fact that there no chance that the electoral vote counting on that day would result in the disqualification of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.'s electors in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona that served to give current group of Bolsheviks a lot of ammunition to use their form of lawfare against him. However, Trump's actions on January 6, 2021, were a reaction to how the forces of the national security state sought to prevent his election in 2016 and then worked around the clock to undermine his administration and to prevent his re-election in 2020. The current trial is simply yet another effort to send Donald John Trump to the gulag for having defeated Madame Defarge eight years ago and to keep the mentally decrepit, morally corrupt, and criminally mendacious Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and his team of puppeteers in office for another four years now.

Now, before I proceed to discuss how this is all meant by the adversary to be a gigantic distraction to convince us to suspend our rationality as we prepare for Pentecost Sunday on May 19, 2024, and then the great feasts of Corpus Christi on Thursday, May 30, 2024, and of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Friday, there are several goals that I believe the totalitarians who seek to enslave by rooting out and eradicating all opposition to their ever-evolving “woke,” environmentalist, and globalist wish to achieve by using the bloated Alvin Bragg as a point man in a case that is being heard by an anti-Trump judge, Juan Merchan, by an anti-Trump jury in an anti-Trump city where Trump was in 1946 and spent most of his life until a few years ago.

First, the administration of Red China Joe Biden has been orchestraing each of the four cases (two Federal, two state) against the forty-fifth president of the United States of America so that one of these cases, starting with the one taking place currently, will tar Trump as a convicted felon who will be facing a prison term during the remaining six months of the 2024 presidential election campaign. The current corrupt regime of grifters and censors who scoff at Federal laws making it a crime to enter the United States of America illegally helped to engineer the charges against Trump last year so that Republican voters would rally around him, which they did, in the belief that Trump was the easiest candidate for their decrepit octogenarian to run against this year. Although the polls show that Trump is leading Biden in swing states currently, "guilty" verdicts in the Bragg case, no matter how unjust, would some effect on the farce known as an election, which is being rigged again as it was in the past.

Second, administration personnel and their supporters in the mainslime media  are relising in Donald John Trump's humiliation and thus keep the headlines focused on “Trump, Trump, Trump” rather than on their refusal to enforce existing immigration laws, the disaster that is an American economy that have wrecked by design, a refusal to confront Xi Jinping and his murderous thugs by a continued policy of silent and active appeasement, the endless armament of Ukraine in a battle that will only end in that country’s obliteration on the Western altar of “regime change,” rising fuel prices, endless executive orders seeking to shut down petroleum and natural gas drilling, coal mines, and to impose a “woke” policy that pits race against race and normal, rational human beings against the perverted who are so mentally ill as to think that it is a human “right” to have one’s body mutilated in the ontologically impossible effort to change one’s gender.

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

Fourth, it has come to light recently that, all of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.'s., protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the current President in Name Only and those in his administration sought to use the National Archive and Records Administration as the means to charge Donald John Trump with retaining "top secret" and "confidential" files that, as it turns out, a prosecutor on the team of illegally-appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith admits were doctored and placed out of order:

Top Biden administration officials worked with the National Archives to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material, according to recently unsealed court documents in the case pending in southern Florida.

More than 300 pages of newly unredacted exhibits, containing emails and other correspondence related to the early stages of the hunt for presidential papers, challenge public statements by Joe Biden about what he knew and when he knew it regarding the case against his political rival.

The new disclosures indicate the Department of Justice was in touch with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) during much of 2021, undermining the DOJ’s claims that it became involved in the matter only after the Archives sent it a criminal referral on February 9, 2022, based on the findings of records with “classified markings” in 15 boxes of materials Trump gave to the Archives a month prior.

The court exhibits, which were compiled by Trump’s defense lawyers and kept under seal until last week, also show that Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su regularly communicated with Archive officials.

Although Biden himself is not mentioned in the exhibits, the active participation of Su and other high-ranking White House officials raises questions about whether Biden was forthright when he told “60 Minutes” he wasn’t involved in the investigation.

“I have not asked for the specifics of those documents,” Biden told Scott Pelley in the Sept. 17 broadcast, “because I don't want to get myself in the middle of whether or not the Justice Department should move or not move on certain actions they could take. I agreed I would not tell them what to do and not, in fact, engage in telling them how to prosecute or not.”

Trump’s lawyers first filed the heavily redacted material in a January motion, under a standing protective order issued by the court to initially conceal potentially sensitive information. His team then asked U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the matter in southern Florida, to remove many of those redactions based on her review. A protracted battle ensued as Smith fought to keep large portions of the motion and accompanying exhibits from the public. Smith told Cannon that disclosing the material would jeopardize the investigation and expose potential witnesses and government employees to "significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment."

But Cannon, arguing the need for public transparency, authorized the unsealing of the files, which were posted in mostly unredacted form on April 22. A comparison of the redacted and unredacted material shows the Archives acted in concert with several Biden administration agencies to build the case -- coordination that included the DOJ, the Biden White House, and the intelligence community.

The Trump case prompted revelations that both Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence had also retained classified documents – in Biden’s case for decades, stretching back to his time in the Senate. But while the Archives’ outreach to Biden and Pence consisted of requests, the agency took a more assertive stance with Trump. 

Within weeks of Trump’s leaving office in 2021, employees with Biden’s Office of Records Management and the Archives began coordinated demands to Trump’s transition team, including former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Gary Stern, the Archives general counsel, noting “several conversations” with records office employees to discuss “concerns” about material in Trump’s possession, emailed Trump’s team in May 2021 and asked them to account for “roughly two dozen boxes of original Presidential records [that] have not been transferred to NARA.”

Stern did not specify the files the Archives wanted beyond “original correspondence between President Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jung-un” and “the letter that President Obama left for President Trump on his first day in office.” An unsealed FBI report indicated the Archives also sought the so-called “Sharpiegate” map of Hurricane Dorian that the former president used during a 2018 televised briefing on the track of the storm.

Despite Trump’s cooperation, David Ferriero, the national archivist appointed by Barack Obama in 2009, warned the transition team a month later in June 2021 that he was running “out of patience.”

By August 2021, Ferriero and Stern were in contact with DOJ officials and at least one White House attorney to develop what initially appeared to be a records destruction case against Trump. According to White House visitor logs, Stern met with Su on August 12 at the White House.

From that point on, the collaboration between the White House and Archives accelerated. On Aug. 30, 2021, Ferriero, making unfounded accusations that 24 boxes of materials were missing, warned Trump’s team, “At this point, I am assuming [the boxes] have been destroyed. In which case, I am obligated to report it to the Hill, the DOJ, and the White House.”

A Trump staffer whose name remains redacted responded, “To my knowledge, nothing has been destroyed.”

The archives, with apparent guidance from top White House lawyers, pressed forward. On Sept. 1, Stern sent an email to Ferriero and deputy archivist Debra Wall with the subject line, “Draft Letter to AG re Missing Trump Records.” In the Sept. 1, 2021 email, Stern disclosed that he already had “reached out to DOJ counsel about this issue,” and that “WH Counsel is now aware of the issue.”

An attachment to the email included a draft letter from Ferriero to Attorney General Merrick Garland to notify him that presidential records “may have been unlawfully removed from U.S. government custody or possibly destroyed.”

On Sept. 2, presumably with the draft letter in hand, Ferriero met with White House Counsel Dana Remus in her office, according to visitor logs. The draft letter was not sent as the Archives and White House continued to advance the case behind the scenes.

On Sept. 9, 2021, both Ferriero and Stern met again with Remus and possibly White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain. (A Sept. 8, 2021, email from Stern referred to a meeting beforehand with “Ron and Dana,” possibly referencing Klain.) The same email indicated plans to also meet with Su.

An Oct. 2021 letter to Ferriero from Remus referred to a “notification on September 8” related to the January 6 Select Committee’s request for Trump’s records. In the letter, Remus denied Trump’s claims of privilege in preventing the committee from early access to his papers.

But the email chains do not reflect any mention of the January 6 Committee’s demands; to the contrary, emails between the White House and Archives repeatedly reference the “Trump boxes.”

In fact, a Sept. 15 email disclosed that Stern spoke to Su to “get him up to speed on the issue and the dispute whether there are 12 or 24 missing boxes.” A few weeks later, Stern told his colleagues that “WHCO [White House counsel] is ready to set up a call to discuss the Trump boxes.”

On Jan. 18, 2022, following roughly seven months of negotiations, Trump’s team delivered 15 boxes to the Archives. In a matter of hours, the Archives’ White House liaison director said he conducted what he described in an email to Ferriero, Wall, and three undisclosed recipients as a “high level overview” of the contents.

While admitting that most of the material consisted of “newspapers, magazines, and printed news articles,” the official claimed the boxes contained “lots of classified records.”

That assessment triggered deeper involvement by the DOJ. An unsealed FBI interview with an Archives official indicated that on Jan. 22 Su directed Stern to contact the office of Lisa Monaco, the current deputy attorney general and a longtime former adviser to Obama, to lay the groundwork for a criminal referral. It would represent the first time the Archives had ever sent a referral to the DOJ asking for an investigation into the retention of classified records.

Two days later, Monaco’s office “instructed” Stern on how to proceed. For guidance as to how a criminal investigation would proceed, two Monaco associates told Stern to notify the inspectors general for both the Archives and the intelligence community as well as DOJ National Security Division Chief Jay Bratt, now the lead prosecutor for Jack Smith in the classified documents case, and the chief of the DOJ’s public integrity unit.

According to the unredacted defense motion, Stern followed the DOJ’s guidance and sent information about the 15 boxes to the Archives’ inspector general, who then notified the intelligence community’s inspector general about a “very high level potential spillage and records management issue.”

The email chain then made its way to Thomas Windom, a prosecutor now tasked to Smith’s team on the Jan. 6 case against Trump, on Feb. 1. A criminal referral was officially sent to the DOJ on Feb. 9.

Two months after the archives received Trump’s boxes, which he produced voluntarily, the FBI opened on March 30, 2022, what it named the “Plasmic Echo” investigation, according to an unsealed FBI document. The probe centered on the “mishandling of classified or national defense information.”

A grand jury and the FBI summoned Mar-a-Lago employees to testify. In May 2022, at the same time Biden officials were scouring Biden-related locations including the Penn-Biden Center in Washington for classified documents in advance of a potential GOP investigation into the same matter if Republicans won the House, the DOJ issued a subpoena for more classified records.

Not satisfied with the result – that Trump’s lawyers produced 38 more files to investigators in June 2022 – Garland authorized and the FBI executed a nine-hour raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. After seizing more than 13,000 pieces of evidence, prosecutors claimed agents found another 102 records with classified markings.

In June 2023, Smith, appointed in November 2022 to take over the existing investigation, charged Trump with 32 counts of “willfully” retaining national defense information, representing a shift from the premise of the original investigation into more serious Espionage Act crimes. (Visitor logs show that Stern met with Biden’s special counsel Richard Sauber at the White House the day before Smith announced the indictment.)

Smith has also indicted Waltine Nauta, Trump’s personal aide, with obstruction, for moving boxes within Mar-a-Lago in an alleged attempt to conceal materials from investigators, and another Mar-a-Lago employee, Carlos DeOlivera, for allegedly attempting to erase security video at the property. All have pleaded not guilty.

Another Special Counsel, Robert Hur, was subsequently named to investigate Biden’s retention of classified material, dating as far back as 1977. Although Hur reported that Biden had willfully retained state secrets in unsecured locations and illegally shared them with a ghostwriter, he concluded that Biden should not be prosecuted for these violations.

Trump and his co-defendants have filed motions to dismiss based on selective and vindictive prosecution; Cannon has not yet ruled on those motions.

A May 2024 trial date in Florida has been postponed in light of Trump’s other legal entanglements, which the former president has described as a partisan witch hunt to interfere in the 2024 election. (Unredactions Reveal Early White House Involvement in Trump Documents Case.)

It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles.

A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office.

Included as a government exhibit to oppose Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to vet the 13,000 items taken from his residence, the crime scene pic immediately went viral—just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended. 

At the time, even regime-friendly mouthpieces questioned the need and optics of the raid; the photo helped juice the DOJ’s justification for the storming of Trump’s castle.

“[The] question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively,” Washington Post resident fact checker Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022.

Some of Bump’s colleagues were more hyperbolic. An ex-CIA officer told ABC News the cover sheets indicated the highest level of secrecy, which in the wrong hands could have resulted in murder. “People's lives are truly at stake. Without being melodramatic, anything that helps an adversary identify a human source means life and death," intelligence expert Douglas London melodramatically warned in reaction to the photo.

The New York Times insisted the photo was consistent with how the FBI handles criminal investigations. “[It] is standard practice for the F.B.I. to take evidentiary pictures of materials recovered in a search to ensure that items are properly cataloged and accounted for. Files or documents are not tossed around randomly, even though they might appear that way; they are usually splayed out so they can be separately identified by their markings,” reporters Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman wrote on August 31, 2022.

Except…that is not what happened.

A Stunt with Potentially Case-Killing Consequences for DOJ

New court filings in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage and obstruction case against Trump and two co-defendants conclusively demonstrate that the government used the cover sheets to deceive the public as well as the court. The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case.

Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:

“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”

The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents.  

Here is Bratt’s new version of the story, where he finally admits a critical detail that he failed to disclose in his August 2022 filing:

“[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.”

But before the official cover sheets were used as placeholder, agents apparently used them as props. FBI agents took it upon themselves to paperclip the sheets to documents—something evident given the uniform nature of how each cover sheet is clipped to each file in the photo—laid them on the floor, and snapped a picture for political posterity.

That raises many troubling questions, to say the least, about the FBI’s handling of the alleged incriminating documents.

For example, who made the on-site determination as to the classification level appropriate for each document? Did agents have security clearance and expertise related to classification? Did the agents know whether the document had been declassified by Trump while still in office?

The hasty assessment also appears to contradict Bratt’s statements in court about the classification status of the seized documents. Bratt told Judge Aileen Cannon during a hearing last year that the records were undergoing a classification review, presumably conducted by the intelligence community, to determine the correct level of secrecy. 

Did the final analysis confirm or dispute the assessments by the field FBI agents who conducted the raid?

Missing Paper Trial and Messy Boxes

But Jack Smith might have bigger problems. During the raid, agents took a box in its entirety if it contained papers with classified markings; the box usually contained other items, which is how the FBI ended up with so many of Trump’s personal belongings.

So, in order to flag the location of the alleged classified record in the box, agents, as Bratt noted, used the cover sheets as placeholders. (The classified records were then placed in a separate secure file.)

But now defense attorneys claim, and the special counsel concedes, that some placeholders do not match the relevant document. “Following defense counsel’s review of the physical boxes…and the documents produced in classified discovery, defense counsel has learned that the cross-reference provided by the Special Counsel’s Office does not contain accurate information,” attorneys representing Trump’s co-defendant Waltine Nauta wrote in a May 1 motion.

The motion forced the special counsel to admit the error. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Bratt wrote.

In other words, in their zeal to stage a phony photo using official classified cover sheets, FBI agents might have failed to accurately match the placeholder sheet with the appropriate document. This is a potentially case-blowing mistake, particularly if the document in question is one of the 34 records that represents the basis of espionage charges against Trump.

And there is another issue in connection with the cover sheets. Defense attorneys also noted that in at least one instance, the location of the cover sheet in the physical box didn’t match the FBI’s accounting. “[The] sheet…does not appear for several hundreds of pages later than the FBI Index indicated it would. Defense counsel’s review of these materials calls into question the likelihood that the contents of the physical boxes remains (sic) the same as when they were seized by the FBI on August 8, 2022.”

Which Bratt also admitted is an issue. After the boxes were transported from Florida to the hopelessly corrupt Washington FBI field office (another scandalous aspect of the case since the investigation should have been conducted in southern Florida not in another jurisdiction), a private company took scans of the inside of the boxes. But according to the defense team, the current condition of the boxes does not match the scans taken in August 2022. 

Bratt explained that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” He then offered a list of excuses including how some “boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.”

It is safe to assume Judge Cannon will not take these new revelations lightly--particularly since Bratt also had to admit in the same filing that he did not tell her the truth when she asked about the condition of the boxes during a hearing last month. On April 12, Cannon directly asked Bratt, “are the boxes in their original, intact form as seized?” Bratt replied yes, but “with one exception, and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents [place.]”

Oof.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Jack Smith’s team might need several thousand words to weasel their way out of this mess. (The DOJ's Doctored Crime Scene Photo of Mar-a-Lago Raid.)

In a stunning admission, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team is admitting that key evidence in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents criminal case was altered or manipulated since it was seized by the FBI, and that prosecutors misled the court about it for a period of time.

Legal experts told Just the News the revelation could prove to be a serious problem for prosecutors and a violation of court rules to preserve evidence in the state it was seized.

In a new filing Friday, Smith’s team said that the order of documents in some of the boxes of memos that were seized by the FBI from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was altered or jumbled, leaving two different chronologies: one that was digitally scanned and another the physical order in the boxes.

nce the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants' review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote in a new court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.

“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the prosecutors wrote.

Smith’s team in a footnote also conceded it had misled the court about the problem by previously declaring that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized. 

“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.

You can read the filing here: gov.uscourts.flsd_.648653.522.0.pdf

The organization of the documents in storage boxes at Mar-a-Lago is likely to be an important part of Trump‘s defense. His team is expected to argue the documents were stored in the White House in chronological order on the days that Trump received them, and that staff simply boxed them up and sent them to his home without him accessing them or knowing they contained classified information. 

Smith’s team tried to downplay the problem and argued it’s not a reason for a delay in Trump’s case.

But several legal experts told Just the News the court filing essentially is an admission of evidence tampering, and could be problematic.  

“Prosecutors and investigators should never tamper with or alter evidence in their possession, including the order of documents in a box because one never knows what may become relevant or crucial to a court or jury later in a case,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said. 

Prominent defense attorney Tim Parlatore, who worked on Trump’s team earlier in the classified documents case but no longer is involved, said ”this admission is stunning on multiple levels.”

He said the revelation “reinforces the incompetence” of prosecutors “in conducting basic criminal investigations and prosecutions that I observed when I was on the team. 

“But at a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he added. “I went through all of the boxes at NARA and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House.

“For prosecutors who are trying to prove that the defendants knowingly possessed these documents to then destroy the evidence that would undermine that claim is a very serious violation,” he added.

Smith’s team tried to downplay the problem, offering several explanations for how the documents and their order could’ve been scrambled since the government took possession of the boxes.

“There are several possible explanations, including the above-described instances in which the boxes were accessed, as well as the size and shape of certain items in the boxes possibly leading to movement of items,” the prosecutors wrote. “For example, the boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.”

The alteration of evidence has been an issue in earlier political scandals and prosecutions in Washington.

Erasure of an 18 1/2 minute segment of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes became a very important aspect of the Watergate scandal.

The Iran-Contra scandal exploded during the Reagan years with the revelation that documents were shredded before they could be obtained by investigators.

The Hillary Clinton classified email scandal became more complicated in 2015 with the revelation that her team used a "Bleach Bit" program to erase emails on her secret computer server, and had email devices destroyed. (Trump Whodunnit: Prosecutors admit key evidence in document case has been tampered with.)

The adminstration of Chief Grifter Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., has been imposing a police state tyrrany over political dissents, including bringing various Federal charges against another one thousand people who were either in the United States Capitol building or on its grounds for "parading without a permit" (Team Biden’s charging 1,000 more with Jan. 6 crimes to perpetuate a fake political emergency).

We must also remember that Merrick Garland's Ministry of Injustice persecuted a pro-life Catholic, Mark Houck, for getting between a pro-abortion bully outside of a killing factory near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to prevent the bully from spewing his profanities at his son, and that the same Ministry of Injustice has sought and obtained "terrorist" sentences on pro-life Americans who have participated in rescues in violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) to protect an abomination that the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Missisippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women's Organization, June 24, 2022, is not a constitutionally guaranteed "right." (See, for example, Fear Not Those Who Can Destroy the Body, Fear Not the Likes of Merrick Garland, "To Resist is a Duty, To Obey a Crime", and  Forgetful Biden Never Forgets to Use Demagoguery, part one.)

This is a banana republic!

This is the Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, and Red China all rolled into one!

This is what must happen over the course of time when men and their nations do not subordinate themselves to Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.

Although the way the monies paid by Michael Cohen to Stephanie Clifford on the part of Donald John Trump were listed as "legal expenses" is not legal and considered as such by the Federal Election Commission as late as 2023, readers of this website are called to think in supernatural, not natural terms. The fact that the nondisclosure agreements into which Donald John Trump has entered with various people for various reasons throughout his career are very common and perfectly legal, we should rememember that the mere legality of an action in human trms can never indemnify Donald John Trump’s life as a serial adulterer nor his authorizing his then close friend and consigliere turned avid Trump hater, Michael Cohen, to pay Stephanie Clifford hush money in 2016. Trump, who is a full supporter of the homosexual agenda, of course, has no regard for the following words of Holy Writ as he has probably never them nor would think that they apply to him:

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, yes, witnesses claimed that he was trying to protect his third wife, Melania Knaus Trump. However, she has said on several occasions that she knew who she had married, and she was a fool to believe that Donald John Trump, who is bereft of the Catholic Faith, would be able to be faithful to her after a lifetime of promiscuity and infidelity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this a criminal offense worthy of prosecution.

Of course not.

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

All well and good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course not.

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

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

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

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

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

On the Octave Day of the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ

Today, Thursday, May 16, 2024, is the Octave Day of the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the Commemoration of Saint Ubaldus (and, in some places, the Commemorations of Saint John Nepomucene and of Saint Brendan the Navigator). 

Dom Prosper Gueranger's reflection on the Octave Day of the Ascension is directly relevant to the blindness in which most men, including Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Donald John Trump, live their lives in a world that does not know the sweet yoke of Christ the King nor the motherly protection of His Most Blessed Mother:

O King of glory, Lord of hosts, Who didst this day ascend in triumph above all the heavens! leave us not orphans, but send upon us the Spirit of truth, promised by the Father, alleluia.

We have already seen how the Ascension of our Emmanuel won him the empire over our understanding:—it was the triumph of Faith. The same mystery gave him a second victory—the victory of Love, which makes him reign in our hearts. For eighteen hundred years, in whom have men believed, firmly and universally, except in Jesus? In what else have men agreed, except in the dogmas of Faith? What countless errors has not this divine torch dispelled? What light has it not given to the nations that received it? and in what darkness has it not left those which rejected it after having once received it?

In like manner, no one has been loved as our Jesus has been, ever since the day of his Ascension: no one is so loved now or ever will be, as He. But, that he might thus win our love, he had to leave us, just as he had to do in order to secure oru Faith. Let us return to our text, that we may get deeper into the beautiful mystery. It is expedient for you that I go! Before the Ascension, the Disciples were as inconstant in the love as they were in their faith. Jesus could not trust them. But, no sooner had he left them, than they became warmly devoted to him. Instead of complaining at their bereavement, they returned full of joy to Jerusalem. The thought of their Master’s triumph made them forget their own loss, and they hastened, as he bade them, to the Cenacle, where they were to be endued with Power from on high. Watch these men during the subsequent years; examine what their conduct was from that time to the day of their death; count, if you can, their acts of devotedness in the arduous labor of preaching the Gospel; and say, if any other motive than love for their Master could have enabled them to do what they did? With what cheerfulness did they not drink his Chalice? With what rapture did they not hail his Cross, when they saw it being prepared for themselves?

But let us not stop at these first witnesses; they had seen Jesus and heard him, and touched him:—let us turn to those who came after them, and knew him by faith only: let us see if the love which burned in the hearts of the Apostles has been kept up by the Christians of the past eighteen centuries. First of all, there is the contest of Martyrdom, which has never been altogether interrupted since the Gospel began to be preached. The opening campaign lasted three hundred years. What was it that induced so many millions to suffer, not only patiently, but gladly, every torture that cruelty could devise? Was it not their ambition to testify how much they loved their Jesus? Let us not forget how these frightful ordeals were cheerfully gone through, not only by men hardened to suffering, but also by delicate women, by young girls, yea even by little children. Let us call to mind the sublime answers they gave to their persecutors, whereby they evinced their generous ardor to repay the death of Jesus by their own. The Martyrs of our own times, in China, Japan, the Corea, and elsewhere, have repeated, without knowing it, the very same words to their judges and executioners as were addressed to the Proconsuls of the third and fourth centuries by the Martyrs of those days.

Yes, our divine King who has ascended into heaven is loved as no other ever was or could be. Think of those millions of generous souls who, that they might be exclusively his, have despised all earthly affections, and would know no other love than his. Every age—even our own, in spite of all its miseries—;has produced souls of this stamp, and only God knows how many.

Our Emmanuel has been, and to the end of time, will ever be loved on this earth. Have we not reason to say so when we consider how many there have always been, even among the wealthiest ones of the world, who, in order that they might bear a resemblance to the Babe of Bethlehem, have given up everythng they possessed? What an irresistible proof of the same truth have we not in the countless sacrifices of self-love and pride, made with a view to imitate the Obedience of the God-Man on earth? And what else but an ardent love of Jesus could have prompted those heroic acts of mortification and penance, whereby the Sufferings of his Passion have been emulated and, as the Apostle says, filled up?

But grand as all this is, it was not enough to satisfy man’s devoted love of his absent Lord. Jesus had said, at least implicitly: Whatsoever you do to the least of your brethren, you do it to me. Love is ever quick at catching the meaning of our Redeemer’s words. It took advantage of these, and saw in them another means for reaching its Jesus—reaching him through the Poor. And as the worst of poverties is the ignorance of divine truths, because it would make a man poor and miserable for eternity—therefore have there risen up, in every age, zealous apostles who, bidding farewell to home and fatherland, have carried the light of the Gospel to them that sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. They heeded not the fatigues or the perils of such a mission: what cared they for all these things if they could but make Jesus known and honored, and loved, by one poor savage or Hindoo?

But what of those other poor ones—the sick—in whom Jesus suffers? Fear not: he is too much loved to be forgotten there. Once let the Church be free enough to develop her plans of charity, and there will be an Institute of relief for every class of sufferers. The poor, the sick—all will be cared for and comforted. There will be vocations to Charity, to meet every want; and women too, urged by the love of their Divine Lord, will deem it an honor to be the nurses and attendants of a suffering or dying Lazarus. The world itself is in admiration at their heroism; and though it knows not the divine principle which originates these charitable Institutions, yet is it obliged to acknowledge the extraordinary good they effect.

But man’s observation can only reach the exterior; the interior is the far grander reality, and it is beyond his notice. What we have said so far is, therefore, but a very feeble description of the ardor wherewith our Lord Jesus Christ has been, and still is, loved on this earth. Let us picture to ourselves the millions of Christians who have lived since the first foundations of the Church. Many, it is true, have had the misfortune to be unfaithful to the object of their existence; but what an immense number have loved Jesus with all their heart, and soul, and strength? Some have never flagged in their love; others have needed a conversion from vice or tepidity, returned to him, and slept in the kiss of peace. Count, if you can, the virtuous actions, the heroic sacrifices, of those countless devoted servants of his, who are to be arrayed before him in the Valley of Josaphat. His memory alone can hold and tell the stupendous total of what has been done. This well-nigh infinite aggregate of holy deeds and thoughts—from the seraphic ardor of the greatest Saint, down to the cup of cold water given in the name of the Redeemer, what is it all but the ceaseless hymn of our earth to its beloved Absent One, its never-forgotten Jesus? Who is the man, how dear soever his memory may be, for whom we would be devoted, or sacrifice our interests, or lay down our lives, especially if he had been ten or twenty ages gone from us? Who is that great Dead, the sound of whose name can make the hearts of men vibrate with love, in every country and in every generation? It is Jesus, who died, who rose again, who ascended into heaven.

But we humbly confess, O Jesus, that it was necessary for us that thou shouldst go from us in order that our faith might soar up to thee in heaven, and that our hearts, being thus enlightened, might burn with thy love. Enjoy thine Ascension, O thou King of Angels and men! We, in our exile, will feast on the fruits of the great mystery, waiting for it to be fulfilled in ourselves. Enlighten those poor blind infidels, whose pride will not permit them to recognize thee, notwithstanding these most evident proofs. They continue in their errors concerning thee, though they have such superabundant testimony of thy Divinity, in the faith and love thou hast received in every age. The homage offered thee by the universe represented, as it has ever been, by the chief nations of the earth, and by the most virtuous and learned men of each generation—all this is, to these unbelievers, as though it had never happened. Who are they to be compared with such a cloud of faithful witnesses? Have mercy on them, O Lord! save them from their pride; then will they unite with us in saying: “It was indeed expedient for this world to lose thy visible presence, O Jesus! for never were thy greatness, thy power, and thy Divinity, so recognized and loved as when thou didst depart from us. Glory, then, be to the mystery of thine Ascension, whereby, as the Psalmist prophesied, thou receivedst gifts, that thou mightest bestow them upon men!” (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Octave Day of the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.)

It is thus essential to remember that we cannot permit ourselves to stuck in the muck of Modernity nor of Modernism. We must elevate our hearts, minds, and souls to Heaven with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as they must be to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as we to pray to Our Lady, especially through her Most Holy Rosary for the conversion of all men and nations to the Catholic Church and thus of the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us! 

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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

Saint Ubaldus, pray for us.

Saint John Nepomucene, pray for us.

Saint Brendan the Navigator, pray for us.

Appendix A

On the Feast of Saint Ubaldus

Given the fact that so many people globally, including here in the United States of America, are in the abject grip of the enemy of man, the author of lies and the prince of darkness, and are thus perpetually prone to anger and rage as, without knowing it, are at war with God and with their own nature, which is made to know, love, and to serve God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church, it is very Providential that today, Thursday, May 16, 2024, is the Commemorated Feast of Saint Ubaldus, Bishop of Gubbio, Italy, who had a particular charism of driving out the devil from the souls of those enslaved to him.

Here is Dom Prosper Gueranger’s hagiography of Saint Ubaldus:

In order to honor her Eternal High Priest, the Church presents to him this day the merits of a Pontiff who, after his mortal career, was admitted into a happy Immortality. Ubaldus, here on earth, was the image of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like his Divine Master, he received the holy Anointing of Priesthood; he was a Mediator between God and man; he was the Shepherd of a flock; and now, he is united with our Risen Jesus—the great Anointed, the Mediator, the Shepherd. In proof of his influence in heaven, our Ubaldus has had given to him a special power against the wicked Spirits, who lay snares for our perdition. It has frequently happened that the simple invocation of his name has sufficed to foil their machinations. It is with the view of encouraging the Faithful to have recourse to his protection that the Church has fixed this day as his feast. (Dom Prosper Gureanger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Saint Ubaldus, May 16.)

Ubaldus was born at Gubbio in Umbria, of a noble family. He was, from childhood, formed, in the most admirable way, to piety and learning. When grown up, he was frequently urged to marry; but nothing could shake his resolution of leading a life of celibacy. On being ordained Priest, he divided his fortune between the poor and the Churches, and entered among the Canons Regular of the Order of St. Augustine. He established that Institute in his own country, and was for some time a most fervent observer of all its regulations. The fame of his virtue spread far and wide. Pope Honorius the Second compelled him to accept the charge of the Church of Gubbio; and, accordingly, he was consecrated Bishop.

Having taken possession of his See, he changed little or nothing of his mode of life; but he began to apply himself more than ever to the practice of every virtue, in order that he might the more effectually, both by word and example, procure the salvation of souls, for he was a pattern of the flock in all earnestness. His food was scanty, his dress unpretending, his bed hard and most poor. While always bearing about, in his body, the mortification of the Cross, he every day refreshed his spirit with prayer, in which he seemed insatiable. The result of such life was meekness of so admirable a nature, that he not only bore the worst injuries and insults with patience, but he even treated his persecutors with surprising affection, and showed them all possible kindness.

During the last two years of his life, he suffered much from sickness. In the midst of the most acute pains, whereby he was made pure as gold that is cleansed in the furnace, he ceased not to give thanks to God. Finally, on the holy Feast of Pentecost, after governing for many years, and in a most laudable manner, the Diocese that had been entrusted to him, he slept in peace, venerated for his holy life and miracles. He was canonized by Pope Celestine the Third. God has given him a special power for driving away unclean spirits. His body, which has remained incorrupt for several centuries, is honored with much devotion, by the Faithful of the city of Gubbio, which he has more than once rescued from the calamities that threatened it. (Matins, The Divine Office, Feast of Saint Ubaldus, May 16.)

O blessed Pontiff! be thou our protector against the spirits of hell. They are devoured by envy at seeing how Man, that lowly and feeble creature, has become the object of God’s predilection. The Incarnation of the Son of God, his Death on the Cross, his glorious Resurrection, the Sacraments which give us the life of Grace—all these sublime means, whereby the infinite goodness of God has restored us to our lost dignity, have excited the rage of the old enemy, and he seeks revenge by insulting, in us, the Image of our Creator. At times, he attacks man with all the frenzy of angry jealousy. To mimic the operations of Sanctifying Grace—which, so to speak, makes us the instruments of God’s good pleasure—Satan sometimes takes possession of our fellow creatures, and makes them his slaves. Thy power, O Ubaldus, has often manifested itself by rescuing these unhappy victims of the devil’s jealousy; and holy Church, on this day, celebrates the special prerogative conferred on thee by our Heavenly Father. Relent not in the exercise of thy charitable office. And yet, O holy Pontiff, thou knowest that the snares of the wicked spirits are more injurious to the souls than to the bodies of men. Have pity, then, on the unhappy slaves of sin, who, though the divine Sun of the Pasch has risen upon them, are still in the darkness of guilt. Pray for them, that they may become, once more, Children of the Light, and share in the Easter Resurrection which Jesus offers to all. (Dom Prosper Gureanger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Feast of Saint Ubaldus, May 16.)

Saint Ubaldus can help us drive out the devil’s many influences in our own lives, including to temptation to see “victory” where no true victory is to be had and to let down our guard when an apparent “victory” causes men to forget that the legal enshrinement of grave evils can never be any kind of “victory” at all.

The grave evils associated with state-sanctioned crimes against the Ten Commandments—including but not limited to the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth—will last until such time as the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is made manifest. Although the hour is very late, so late in fact that we may never live to see the restoration of all things in Christ the King during our lifetimes, we must continue, despite our own sins and failings, to plant the seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to Him and his true Catholic Church, which is not and can never be the heresy riddled conciliar sect that is replete with a so-called “pope” and “bishops” who celebrate the sins du jour with as much ready abandon as do the lords of the world and those whose itching ears they always stand so ready to tickle.

We have been given the weapon of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and the shield of her Brown Scapular.

Conscious of our need to make reparation for our own many sins and to live in the world but without being of the world, we take seriously this instruction that Our Lady gave to the Venerable Mary of Agreda about the public manifestation of her Divine Son to Saint John the Baptist, His cousin, herald and precursor, at the Jordan River prior to embarking upon His Public Ministry to accept the sufferings of this time as redeemed creatures eager to make satisfaction in this life for how our sins have offended Divine Justice and thus worsened the state of the Church Militant and of the world-at-large:

272. My daughter, since in relating to thee the works of my most holy Son I so often remind thee how gratefully I appreciated them, thou must understand how pleasing to the Most High is the most faithful care and correspondence on thy part, and the hidden and great blessings enclosed within it. Thou art poor in the house of the Lord, a sinner, insignificant and useless as dust; yet I ask thee to assume the duty of rendering ceaseless gratitude for all the incarnate Word has done for the sons of Adam, and for establishing the holy and immaculate, the powerful and perfect law for their salvation. Especially must thou be grateful for the institution of Baptism by which He frees men from the tyranny of the devil, regenerates them as his children (Jn. 3:5), fills them with grace, clothes them with justice, and assists them to sin no more. This is indeed a duty incumbent upon all men in common, but since creatures neglect it almost entirely I enjoin thee to give thanks for all of them as if thou alone wert responsible for them. Thou art bound to special gratitude to the Lord for other things as well because He has shown Himself so generous to no one among other nations as He has with thee. In the foundation of his holy law and of his Sacraments thou wert present in his memory; He called and chose thee as a daughter of his Church, proposing to nourish thee by his own blood with infinite love.

 273. And if the Author of grace, my most holy Son, as a prudent and wise Artificer, in order to found his evangelical Church and lay its first foundations in the sacrament of Baptism, humiliated Himself, prayed, and fulfilled all justice, acknowledging the inferiority of his human nature, and if, though at the same time God and man, He hesitated not to lower Himself to the nothingness of which his purest soul was created and his human being formed, how much must thou humiliate thyself, who hast committed sins and art less than the dust and despicable ashes? Confess that in justice thou dost merit only punishment, the persecution and wrath of all the creatures, and that none of the mortals who has offended his Creator and Redeemer can say in truth that any injustice or offense is done to them if all the tribulations and afflictions of the world from its beginning to its end were to fall upon them. Since all sinned in Adam (I Cor. 15:22), how deeply should they humiliate themselves when the hand of the Lord visits them (Job 19:21)? If thou dost suffer all the afflictions of men with the utmost resignation, and at the same time fulfill all that I enjoin upon thee by my teachings and exhortations with the greatest fidelity, thou nevertheless must esteem thyself as a useless and unprofitable servant (Lk. 17:10). How much then must thou humiliate thyself when thou dost fail in thy duty and in the return due to all the blessings received from God? Since I desire thee to make a proper return both for thyself and for others, think well how much thou art obliged to annihilate thyself to the very dust, not offering any resistance, nor ever being satisfied until the Most High receives thee as his daughter and accepts thee as such in his own presence and in the celestial vision of the triumphant Jerusalem. (New English Edition of The Mystical City of God: Book Five, The Transfixion, Chapter XXIV)

The Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph in the end, and it will be upon this triumph that the words Our Lord spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque will be fulfilled:

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

Any questions?

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.