Put Not Your Trust in Princes: In The Children of Men, In Whom There is No Salvation

This website does not exist to current favor with men. It exists to attempt, imperfectly as its author is most imperfect, to cast the events of our times, including those that occur within the counterfeit church of conciliarism, into the light of the true Faith. Although there are many who prefer to believe in “conspiracy” websites run by non-Catholic naturalists who do see everything that happens as either unreal or part of government planned and executed “psychological operations,” we must be able as Catholics to sort out truth from falsehood and never to project our own fondest desires for our nation onto the heart, soul, and mind of any secular leader.

Thus, one of the most fundamental mistakes that has been made by so many people, including Catholics all up and down and across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide during this time of apostasy and betrayal, in the past five years is to believe that the “salvation” of the United States of America rested upon a man who does not understand root causes and tends to believe in his own infallibility to the point of becoming enraged whenever even those favorably disposed to him personally and his overall agenda make justifiable criticisms. We have not been baptized and confirmed to bear witness to Donald John Trump, who believes in many things, starting with his love of all things Zionist and his complete support for sodomy as a legitimate expression of “love,” that are inimical to the good of souls and thus to the true of his nation. A civil leader should be given credit when he is correct and advances sound policies that are, at the very least, unopposed to the laws of God and permitted by the provisions of the constitution of his country and within the boundaries of just statutory provisions. On the other hand, a civil leader must be criticized when does or says things are opposed to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and Natural Law and/or opposed to the just laws of men. No secular leader is immune from criticism, but this is something that Donald John Trump can never accept as he has said on numerous occasions that he has never done anything for which he has had to apologize.

No Rational Foundation for All the Agitation

It will be the goal of this commentary, therefore, to explain that while, yes, the 2020 presidential election was rigged against the re-election of President Trump even more than it had been in 2016, the president was wrong to raise the hopes of his voters to believe that the Congress of the United States of America was actually going to vote to reject the certified electors of the states where fraud and various irregularities occurred, especially since the United States House of Representatives is controlled by the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist left, the Democratic Party.

What otherwise rational, sane human being could have believed that any of those House Democrats would have voted to reject the state-certified slates of electors from the states where the irregularities occurred?

What otherwise rational, sane human being could have believed that there were even enough Republicans in the United States Senate to have voted in favor of rejecting electors from any of the four or five states whose election results have been under scrutiny?

How can anyone possessed with even a modicum of common sense could have believed that United States Senators Willard Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Benjamin Eric Sasse (R-Nebraska), Addison Mitchell McConnell (R-Kentucky), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), John Thune (R-South Dakota), Patrick Joseph Twomey, Jr. (R-Pennyslvania) would have voted to reject the state-certified electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin?

Donald John Trump misled his supporters into believing that it was even remotely possible for the for results of the December 14, 2020, electoral college votes to be reversed. He kept them agitated for no good reason, thus obscuring the joy of Christmas and the sacredness of the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The Contested Election of 1876 and the Electoral Count Act of 1887

Central to the agitation was the president’s reliance upon the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that permits at least one member of the United States House of Representatives and at least one member of the United States Senate to raise objections to a particular state’s electoral votes when they are counted by the Vice President of the United States of America acting in his capacity as the President of the United States Senate. To understand this act and its unconstitutionality, however, it is necessary to review the facts of 1876 presidential election of 1876 between Rutherford Birchwood Hayes of Fremont, Ohio, and Samuel J. Tilden, Governor of the State of New York.  The nominee of the Greenback Party was Peter Cooper.

The United States of America had been rent asunder in 1861 when President Abraham Lincoln decided to keep the country together by force after shots had been fired upon Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12-13, 1861, which came in the aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln as president on November 6, 1860, with only forty percent of the popular vote but a majority of electoral college vote. (The Democratic Party vote was split among United States Senator Stephen Douglas, the official Democratic Party nominee, Vice President John Breckenridge, the nominee of the Southern Democratic Party, and John C. Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union.) Seven southern states seceded from the Union between the time of the election and February 1, 1861, and military forces in South Carolina seized all Federal government property in Charleston, South Carolina in early 1861. The War between the States was not inevitable, but Lincoln, having decided to keep the Union together by force, engaged in an exercise of American fratricide that reduced the eleven Southern states of the Confederacy to vassals of the Federal government during the horrific period of “Reconstruction” that was nothing other than an effort to punish the Southern states and to exploit the newly freed slaves to the monetary and political advantage of the northern carpetbaggers who followed in the wake of the end of a war wherein the northern forces used wholesale terror (the burning of Atlanta and then William Tecumseh Sherman’s “march to the sea”).

Mind you, chattel slavery was wrong. Several popes condemned the slave trade, which ended in the United States of America in 1808 under terms of Article I, Section 10, and slavery as an institution. Here are some examples of papal condemnations of both slavery as an institution and the slave trade:

Eugene IV: Sicut Dudum, 1435

On January 13, 1435, Eugene IV issued from Florence the bull Sicut Dudum. Sent to Bishop Ferdinand, located at Rubicon on the island of Lanzarote, this bull condemned the enslavement of the black natives of the newly colonized Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The Pope stated that after being converted to the faith or promised baptism, many of the inhabitants were taken from their homes and enslaved:

"They have deprived the natives of their property or turned it to their own use, and have subjected some of the inhabitants of said islands to perpetual slavery (subdiderunt perpetuae servituti), sold them to other persons and committed other various illicit and evil deeds against them.... Therefore We ... exhort, through the sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ shed for their sins, one and all, temporal princes, lords, captains, armed men, barons, soldiers, nobles, communities and all others of every kind among the Christian faithful of whatever state, grade or condition, that they themselves desist from the aforementioned deeds, cause those subject to them to desist from them, and restrain them rigorously. And no less do We order and command all and each of the faithful of each sex that, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their pristine liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands ... who have been made subject to slavery (servituti subicere). These people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money."

The date of this Bull, 1435, is very significant. Nearly 60 years before the Europeans were to find the New World, we already had the papal condemnation of slavery as soon as this crime was discovered in one of the first of the Portuguese geographical discoveries.

Eugene IV was clear in his intentions both to condemn the enslavement of the residents of the Canary Islands, and to demand correction of the injustice within 15 days. Those who did not restore the enslaved to their liberty in that time were to incur the sentence of excommunication ipso facto.

With Sicut Dudum, Eugene was clearly intending to condemn the enslavement of the people of the Canaries and, in no uncertain terms, to inform the faithful that what was being condemned was what we would classify as gravely wrong. Thus, the unjust slavery that had begun in the newly found territories was condemned, condemned as soon as it was discovered, and condemned in the strongest of terms.

Paul III: Sublimis Deus, 1537

The pontifical decree known as "The Sublime God" has indeed had an exalted role in the cause of social justice in the New World. Recently, authors such as Gustavo Gutierrez have noted this fact: 'The bull of Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus (June 2, 1537), is regarded as the most important papal pronouncement on the human condition of the Indians." It is, moreover, addressed to all of the Christian faithful in the world, and not to a particular bishop in one area, thereby not limiting its significance, but universalizing it.

Sublimis Deus was intended to be issued as the central pedagogical work against slavery. Two other bulls would be published to implement the teaching of Sublimis, one to impose penalties on those who fail to abide by the teaching against slavery, and a second to specify the sacramental consequences of the teaching that the Indians are true men.

The first central teaching of this beautiful work is the universality of the call to receive the Faith and salvation:

"And since mankind, according to the witness of Sacred Scripture, was created for eternal life and happiness, and since no one is able to attain this eternal life and happiness except through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, it is necessary to confess that man is of such a nature and condition that he is capable to receive faith in Christ and that everyone who possesses human nature is apt for receiving such faith . . . Therefore the Truth Himself Who can neither deceive nor be deceived, when He destined the preachers of the faith to the office of preaching, is known to have said: 'Going, make disciples of all nations.' 'All,' he said, without any exception, since all are capable of the discipline of the faith."

The teaching of Sublimis continued:

"Seeing this and envying it, the enemy of the human race, who always opposes all good men so that the race may perish, has thought up a way, unheard of before now, by which he might impede the saving word of God from being preached to the nations. He has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the Indians of the West and the South who have come to our notice in these times be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the pretext that they are lacking the Catholic Faith. And they reduce them to slavery (Et eos in servitutem redigunt), treating them with afflictions they would scarcely use with brute animals."

The common pretext of the allies of "the enemy of the human race," i.e. Satan, for enslaving the Indians was that they lacked the Faith. Some of the Europeans used the reasoning that converting the Indians should be accomplished by any means necessary, thus making the Faith an excuse for war and enslavement. Paul III stated that the practice of this form of servitude was "unheard of before now." This clearly indicates that the practice of enslaving an entire ethnic group of people—the Indians of South America—for no morally justifiable reason was indeed different from anything previously encountered.

The second core teaching of Sublimis Deus which follows from this is the necessity of restoring and maintaining the liberty of the Indians:

"Therefore, We, . . . noting that the Indians themselves indeed are true men and are not only capable of the Christian faith, but, as has been made known to us, promptly hasten to the faith' and wishing to provide suitable remedies for them, by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—even though they are outside the faith—who shall hereafter come to the knowledge of Christians have not been deprived or should not be deprived of their liberty or of their possessions. Rather they are to be able to use and enjoy this liberty and this ownership of property freely and licitly, and are not to be reduced to slavery, and that whatever happens to the contrary is to be considered null and void. These same Indians and other peoples are to be invited to the said faith in Christ by preaching and the example of a good life."

Thus, we see that Eugene IV and Paul III did not hesitate to condemn the forced servitude of Blacks and Indians, and they did so once such practices became known to the Holy See. Their teaching was continued by Gregory XIV in 1591 and by Urban VIII in 1639. Indeed Urban, in his document Commissum Nobis, appealed to the teaching of his predecessors, particularly Paul III. The pontifical teaching was continued by the response of the Holy Office on March 20, 1686, under Innocent XI, and by the encyclical of Benedict XIV, Immensa Pastorum, on December 20, 1741. This work was followed by the efforts of Pius VII at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to have the victors over Napoleon outlaw slavery.

Gregory XVI: In Supremo, 1839

The 1839 Constitution In Supremo by Gregory XVI continued the antislavery teaching of his predecessors, and was in the same manner not accepted by many of those bishops, priests and laity for whom it was written. As we will see, even today many authors do not have an accurate understanding of this work. First, however, let us consider the content of In Supremo itself.

The introduction of In Supremo tells us that it was written to turn Christians away from the practice of enslaving blacks and other peoples. In it, Gregory first mentioned the efforts of the Apostles and other early Christians to alleviate out of the motive of Christian charity the suffering of those held in servitude, and that they encouraged the practice of emancipating deserving slaves. At the same time, he noted that:

"There were to be found subsequently among the faithful some who, shamefully blinded by the desire of sordid gain, in lonely and distant countries did not hesitate to reduce to slavery (in servitutem redigere) Indians, Blacks and other unfortunate peoples, or else, by instituting or expanding the trade in those who had been made slaves by others, aided the crime of others. Certainly many Roman Pontiffs of glorious memory, Our Predecessors, did not fail, according to the duties of their office, to blame severely this way of acting as dangerous for the spiritual welfare of those who did such things and a shame to the Christian name."

Gregory then cited the various predecessors and their antislavery teachings, even recalling the familiar phrase in servitutem redigere contained in the work of Paul III and his successors. He mentioned the efforts of Clement I, Pius II, Paul III, Benedict XIV, Urban VIII and Pius VII, before concluding this historical summary:

"Indeed these sanctions and this concern of Our Predecessors availed in no small measure, with the help of God, to protect the Indians and the other peoples mentioned from the cruelties of the invaders and from the greed of Christian traders."

However Gregory was well aware that there was still much work to be done:

"The slave trade, although it has been somewhat diminished, is still carried on by numerous Christians. Therefore, desiring to remove such a great shame from all Christian peoples ... and walking in the footsteps of Our Predecessors, We, by apostolic authority, warn and strongly exhort in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to bother unjustly, despoil of their possessions, or reduce to slavery (“in servitutem redigere”) Indians, Blacks or other such peoples. Nor are they to lend aid and favor to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not humans but rather mere animals, having been brought into slavery in no matter what way, are, without any distinction and contrary to the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold and sometimes given over to the hardest labor."

Thus, the historical papal teaching against unjust servitude and the slave trade was upheld, and in 1839 was once again presented to the Christian faithful for their adherence.

In Gregory's time, as with the previous papal efforts, there was obviously widespread non-acceptance on the part of Catholic clergy and laity. Thus, In Supremo also contains a closing prohibition against clerics as well as laity who were attempting to defend slavery or the slave trade:

"We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this trade in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in these Apostolic Letters."

The primary area of contention with In Supremo lies in determining what was actually being condemned by Gregory. The text of the Papal Constitution itself clearly condemned both the slave trade and slavery, as is apparent from the preceding paragraph citations. Both of the above citations prohibit the slave trade. Likewise, in the first paragraph we read that slavery itself is also condemned: "... no one in the future dare to ... reduce to slavery (“in servitutem redigere”) Indians, Blacks or other such peoples." In the second paragraph, the prohibition of "opinions contrary to what We have set forth in these Apostolic Letters" indicates that no one may hold that slavery itself is somehow not condemned. (As quoted in Father Joel Panzer, The Popes and Slavery. The text of three of these encyclicals is appended below).

As the United States of America is founded on a welter of Calvinist and Judeo-Masonic errors, there was widespread acceptance of chattel slavery among Catholics in the South and a studied ambiguity on the part of the American bishops about the “applicability” of Pope Gregory XVI’s In Supremo, which was described quite correctly by one scholar as Americanized Gallicanism, thereby furthering the Americanist notion that would be expressed by Archbishop John Ireland and James Cardinal Gibbons in the Nineteenth Century and by Monsignor Francis Duffy in the article he ghostwrote for New York Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith in 1927 that the papal condemnations of the separation of Church and State do not apply to the United States of America:

he prevalent attitude of the American hierarchy, with some notable exceptions in both directions, was that many aspects of slavery were evil, but that to change the law would be, practically speaking, a greater evil.

Some put forth strong arguments in favor of the institution of slavery, such as Bishop John England of Charleston, who believed it to be among the accepted practices of the early Church: "The right of the master, the duty of the slave, the lawfulness of continuing the relations, and the benevolence of religion in mitigating the sufferings ... are the results exhibited by our view of the laws and facts during the first four centuries of Christianity."

Answering the charge that Catholics were widely supporting the abolitionist movement—which sadly was far from accurate—England noted that Gregory XVI was condemning only the slave trade and not slavery itself, especially as it existed in the United States.

To prove his opinion, England had In Supremo translated and published in his diocesan newspaper, The United States Catholic Miscellany, and even went so far as to write a series of 18 extensive letters to John Forsyth, the Secretary of State under President Martin Van Buren, to explain how he and most of the other American bishops interpreted In Supremo.

In one of these letters we learn of the events of the 1840 Council of Baltimore, where the bishops read and discussed this apostolic letter:

"Thus, if this document condemned our domestic slavery as an unlawful and consequently immoral practice, the bishops could not have accepted it without being bound to refuse the sacraments to all who were slave holders unless they manumitted their slaves; yet, if you look to the prelates who accepted the document, for the acceptation was immediate and unanimous: you will find, 1st the Archbishop of Baltimore ...2d, the Bishop of Bardstown ... 3d, the Bishop of Charleston: ... 4th, the Bishop of St. Louis ... 5th, the Bishop of Mobile ... 6th, the Bishop of New Orleans ...and 7th, the Bishop of Nashville ... they all regarded the letter as treating of the 'slave-trade,' and not as touching 'domestic slavery.' I believe, sir, we may consider this to be pretty conclusive evidence as to the light in which that document is viewed by the Roman Catholic Church."

Amazingly, it was decided that papal pronouncements against slavery, particularly Gregory XVI's In Supremo, did not apply to the institution as it existed in the United States, thus yielding on this issue a sort of Americanized Gallicanism.

However, it is clear that Gregory wrote In Supremo to condemn precisely what was occurring in the United States, namely the enslavement of blacks:

"We, by apostolic authority, warn and strongly exhort in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to bother unjustly, despoil of their possessions, or reduce to slavery (in servitutem redigere) Indians, Blacks or other such peoples."

England evidently felt justification for this dissent lay in the episcopal (mis)interpretation of In Supremo.

These arguments are not dissimilar to the widespread dissent from the Church's teachings against slavery by bishops, priests and laity that was common from the 17th to 19th centuries. For the Catholics of the United States—as for Catholics everywhere—there was the consistent, historical teaching of the Church, as presented through Eugene IV. Pius II, Paul III, Gregory XIV, Urban VIII, Innocent XI, Benedict XIV, Pius VII and others.

For the early 19th century, in the midst of the volatile decades before the Civil War, Gregory XVI issued In Supremo, with its clear condemnation of both the slave trade and slavery itself.

Since that Constitution mentioned the documents of the previous pontiffs, it is hard to understand how the American hierarchy was not aware of the consistency of the teaching and its nature.

All of these teachings, nonetheless, went unknown to the Catholic faithful of the U.S., perhaps through willful ignorance, or were explained away by many of the American bishops and clergy. Thus, we can look to the practice of dissent from the teachings of the Papal Magisterium as a key reason why slavery was not directly opposed by the Church in the United States. (Father Joel Panzer, The Popes and Slavery.)

Although not the principal focus of this commentary, it is useful to note that the Americanist bishops of the Nineteenth Century saw the proclamation of papal teaching as a “greater evil” than institutionalized chattel slavery, something that, as noted above, they would do in refusing to admit the universality of the teaching contained Pope Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, Pope Pius IX’s The Syllabus of Errors and Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864, and Pope Leo XIII’s Diuturnum Illud, June 29, 1881, Humanum Genus (which condemned Freemasonry and the spirit of Freemasonic naturalism despite the contentions of many Americanist Catholics that “Freemasonry in the United States is ‘different’ than in Europe’), April 20, 1884, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888, Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, Tametsi Futura Prospiscentibus, November 1, 1900, and Pope Pius XI’s Quas Primas, December 11, 1925. We can see the tragic results of the Americanism upon the miseducation of generations of Catholics in the United States of America to the point that many of them have fallen into one ideological camp of naturalism or another and have come to belief, at least inchoately, in the illusion of secular salvation and the equally delusional belief that there is some kind of nondenominational, interdenominational, secular, politically ecumenical, constitutional, legal or political solution to social divisions that have their proximate root causes in the Protestant revolution of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century and the subsequent rise of the anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist, pluralistic and naturalistic Calvinist/Judeo-Masonic civil state of Modernity.

Thus, the divisions that beset the United States of America in the decades before and after the War between the States were but a prelude to contemporary divisions as error divides but only Catholicism can unite men around a common purpose, a common language, a mutual concord of belief that recognizes fallen human nature as the remote cause of all social problems and our own Actual Sins as the contributing factors to worsen the state of our nations. Social order depends upon the right ordering of the souls of men in cooperation with the ineffable graces won for us by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by means of the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Pope Leo XIII put the matter this way in A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902:

Just as Christianity cannot penetrate into the soul without making it better, so it cannot enter into public life without establishing order. With the idea of a God Who governs all, Who is infinitely Wise, Good, and Just, the idea of duty seizes upon the consciences of men. It assuages sorrow, it calms hatred, it engenders heroes. If it has transformed pagan society--and that transformation was a veritable resurrection--for barbarism disappeared in proportion as Christianity extended its sway, so, after the terrible shocks which unbelief has given to the world in our days, it will be able to put that world again on the true road, and bring back to order the States and peoples of modern times. But the return of Christianity will not be efficacious and complete if it does not restore the world to a sincere love of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In the Catholic Church Christianity is Incarnate. It identifies Itself with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society, which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for Its visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles. It is the continuation of the mission of the Savior, the daughter and the heiress of His Redemption. It has preached the Gospel, and has defended it at the price of Its blood, and strong in the Divine assistance and of that immortality which has been promised it, It makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which it has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect it in its inviolable integrity. Legitimate dispenser of the teachings of the Gospel it does not reveal itself only as the consoler and Redeemer of souls, but It is still more the internal source of justice and charity, and the propagator as well as the guardian of true liberty, and of that equality which alone is possible here below. In applying the doctrine of its Divine Founder, It maintains a wise equilibrium and marks the true limits between the rights and privileges of society. The equality which it proclaims does not destroy the distinction between the different social classes. It keeps them intact, as nature itself demands, in order to oppose the anarchy of reason emancipated from Faith, and abandoned to its own devices. The liberty which it gives in no wise conflicts with the rights of truth, because those rights are superior to the demands of liberty. Not does it infringe upon the rights of justice, because those rights are superior to the claims of mere numbers or power. Nor does it assail the rights of God because they are superior to the rights of humanity. (Pope Leo XIII, A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902.)

It's Catholicism or the abyss. Behold the abyss.

Look, how can anyone think that we can “save America” when men do not even know how to save their immortal souls and/or presume to believe that they can do anything they want and be “saved” as long as they “don’t hurt anyone else” and profess belief in the “Lord” with their lips and in their hearts?

Pope Pius XI reminded us that the right ordering of souls depends upon the sanctifying offices of Holy Mother Church, and those who believe that those steeped in agitation can do anything other  than contribute to the furthering of agitation is sadly mistaken:

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.)

In other words, order in the world is premised upon order in the souls of men, who need Sanctifying Grace to overcome their sins and to make reparation for them while seeking to pursue the heights of personal sanctification. Catholic sanctity built and maintained Western civilization for nearly a thousand years, not the pursuit of “dreams” and “destinies” according to the dictates of Judeo-Masonic religious indifferentism.

Catholicism teaches us, therefore, that no number of Judeo-Masonic speeches, including those expressing a commendable commitment to defend national borders and the inviolability of innocent human life, can stop the inevitable rise of the monster state, which must be swallowed up in its own turn by the ultimate triumph of Judeo-Masonry, namely, One World Governance, wherein the elected officials of nation-states become mere instruments to carry out the budgetary decisions made by unelected caesars and caesarettes in order to protect the banking and financial establishment's control over individual lives. Individual citizens in such a perverse scheme become the slaves of these institutions of global governance, being reduced to a cruel slavery by means of usury and other unjust practices that humans never faced in the era of Christendom. Remember, the serfs in the feudal system were permitted to keep a certain amount of what they grew for their lords and vassals. The civil state today has such complete control of individual lives today that those who farm the land to feed their families find themselves being highly regulated by the civil state, whose minions are eager to do the bidding of Big Agribusinsses and the various genetic companies that have altered seeds so as to experiment on crops and thus on us all.

Antichrist's One World Governance is here. The Constitution is as much a plaything of those who hold power at any particular time as the interpretation of the Bible is in the hands of Protestants. Without the Catholic Church, of course, there is no sure, infallible guidance to men on matters of Faith and Morals. All must indeed fall apart in the souls of men and their nations as a result.

This is a very long way of saying that the presidential election of 1876 was the consequence of the gradual descent in the abyss caused by the errors of one hundred years before that were ingrained into the consciousness of most Americans and thus the idolatry of the founding principles. The War between the States was in large measure the consequence of the founders’ rejection of Catholic truth, including papal teachings against slavery, as the foundation of social order and, quite indeed, their hubristic belief that men can create social order by the use of their own unaided powers. Behold the mess that has occurred because of those Pelagian suppositions to which so many Catholic clergy and laity subscribed from the earliest days of the republic’s history.

As had happened in 1824 and would happen again in 1888, 2000 and 2016, the candidate who won the popular national vote total in 1876, New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden, was not elected as president because representatives from South Carolina and Florida agreed to throw their support to Ohio Governor Rutherford Birchwood Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of the northern occupation of the eleven states of the Confederacy and an end to the oppressive policies of the Reconstruction. Tilden needed one electoral vote to win, Hayes needed twenty. An Electoral Commission was created on January 29, 1877, to decide the matter, and its composition of eight Republican members and seven Democrats put Hayes in the presidency, to which office he began on March 4, 1877 (March 4 was the date of presidential inauguration until the Twentieth Amendment, ratified in 1933, changed the date to January 20):

The 1876 presidential campaign between Samuel Tilden, the Democratic Party nominee, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, was hard-fought. After Election Day on November 7, 1876, Tilden was one electoral vote short of winning the election and well ahead in the popular vote.

However, four states—Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon—had problems with their slates of electoral votes, which were yet to be included in the results. In the three southern states, there were legal actions taken after Republican-controlled canvassing boards disqualified Democratic voters.

In Florida, the state canvassing board threw out about 2,000 votes, leaving Hayes with a lead of 924 votes. The Democrats convened their own electoral college vote, sent a second Florida election certificate to Congress signed by the state attorney general, and sued the Republicans in state court. Similar conflicts arose in South Carolina and Louisiana.

In Oregon, its governor, La Fayette Grover, wanted to disqualify a Republican electoral college member, John W. Watts. Grover believed Watts’ appointment as an assistant postmaster conflicted with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution that required that no “Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States shall be appointed an Elector.” Grover wanted a Democrat to replace Watts, which would give the presidential election to Tilden. The three southern states represented 19 electoral votes. If they were counted for Hayes, along with Oregon’s contested vote, then Hayes won the election.

Congress faced a clear conflict considering the electoral votes from those four states since it had received multiple slates of electors from each state signed by state officials. Under the Constitution, Congress had an obligation to count all the electoral votes, but no mechanism to decide between competing votes sent from states. As tempers flared, there was also a clear danger of public violence, with calls from Tilden supporters to mobilize the National Guard and the Republicans to use federal troops to keep the peace.

On January 29, 1877, Congress passed and President Grant signed the Electoral Commission Act to break the impasse. The House and Senate named five members each to serve on the commission, and the Supreme Court named five associate justices to serve. The commission would decide “the true and lawful electoral vote of such State” if a state sent multiple electoral slates to Congress. The key vote would fall to one of the named justices, Justice David Davis, an independent. However, Davis decided to accept a Senate seat in Illinois. His replacement, Justice Joseph Bradley, was a Republican.

The commission met on February 1, 1877, to settle the dispute in Florida, which had sent three certificates to Congress. After extensive arguments, the commission ruled on February 9, 1877, in an 8-7 vote in favor of Hayes, with Justice Bradley joining the Republicans. On February 12, 1887, the commission took up the question of Louisiana, which also sent three certificates to Congress. Five days later, the commission decided for Hayes in Louisiana.

The crucial question of Oregon was next for the commission on February 21, 1877, with objections raised about Watts’ position as a postmaster on the day electoral votes were counted in Oregon. In a 1969 academic paper, Philip W. Kennedy described the critical question at stake. “The central issue was whether the commission had the authority to investigate electoral returns,” Kennedy said, or in other words, “go behind” the Democrats’ electoral certificate to investigate wrongdoing (including an alleged bribe paid by the Tilden campaign).

On February 23, 1877, the commission heard that one of its members, Democratic senator Alan G. Thurman, was too ill to vote on the Oregon matter. Instead, the commission moved the vote to Thurman’s house. A unanimous commission rejected a rival Oregon slate with three Democrats submitted to Congress, and it then approved Watts as Oregon’s third elector in an 8-7 vote. The majority said Watts’ position of postmaster was immaterial, since he resigned after the election, resigned as an elector, and then was reappointed as elector before he cast his electoral vote.

The South Carolina dispute also went in favor of the Republicans on February 27, 1877, leaving about a week for Congress to handle the final matter of the presidential election. The Democrats threatened to filibuster and delay proceedings as a protest about the election results. Violence was again possible among the Tilden supporters. That week, members of both parties’ leadership reportedly met at Washington’s Wormley Hotel to finalize an agreement. The Southern Democrats would accept Hayes as president and Republicans would agree to effectively end Reconstruction by removing federal troops from the South, along with other concessions.

On March 2, 1877, at 4:11 a.m., a joint session of Congress declared Rutherford B. Hayes as the next president of the United States. During deliberations that started the previous day, House Speaker Samuel Randall, a Tilden supporter, defeated filibuster efforts from his fellow Democrats. At one point during vocal protests on the House floor, Randall admonished the protesting Democrats. “If gentlemen forget themselves, it is the duty of the Chair to remind them that they are members of the American Congress,” Randall said.

Chief Justice Morrison Waite swore in Hayes the next day in private at the White House, since inauguration day fell on a Sunday that year. The public inauguration was on March 5, 1877. Tilden’s supporters called Hayes “Rutherfraud” after the election, but Tilden had accepted the election results.

A decade later, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to deal with some of the open questions faced by the Electoral Commission. There were still concerns about the Electoral Commission’s inclusion of the Supreme Court justices as election arbiters. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 left the decision solely in the hands of Congress.

The 1887 act’s wordy language provides for methods of handling competing slate electors without needing to convene another Electoral Commission. The act also defines a process about objections to electoral votes in the joint meeting of Congress to tally electoral votes and confirm a presidential election.

While some modern scholars question the clarity of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, it has remained in place as a detailed response to the 1876 presidential election, one of the greatest constitutional challenges faced by Congress in its history.

Senator John J. Ingalls voiced the frustration of many during the debates over the Electoral Count Act of 1887. “The Electoral Commission of 1877 was a contrivance that will never be repeated in our politics. It was a device that was favored by each party in the belief that it would cheat the other, and it resulted, as I once before said, in defrauding both.” (The Electoral Commission of 1877.)

It is not for nothing that President Rutherford Birchwood Hayes was referred to by Democrats and by Democratic Party-affiliated newspapers as “His Fraudulency,” and there is a very important lesson to be applied to our own circumstances today by the grace with which Governor Samuel J. Tilden dealt with his unjust defeat while The New York Tribune later accused him of trying to buy votes in South Carolina and Florida:

Upon his defeat by Hayes, Tilden said, "I can retire to public life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office."

After losing the presidency to Hayes, Tilden counseled his followers to abide quietly by the result, but he declined renomination in 1880 and 1884. The remainder of his life was spent in retirement at his country home, Greystone, near Yonkers, New York. He died a bachelor in 1886. He confided to a friend that he had never slept with a woman in his life.

Of his fortune (estimated at $5,000,000) approximately $4,000,000 was bequeathed for the establishment and maintenance of a free public library and reading-room in the City of New York; but, as the will was successfully contested by relatives, only about $2,000,000 of the bequest was applied to its original purpose; in 1895, the Tilden Trust was combined with the Astor and Lenox libraries to found the New York Public Library, whose building bears his name on its front.

In 1878, the Republican New York Tribune published a series of telegraphic dispatches in cipher, accompanied by translations, by which it attempted to prove that during the crisis following the 1876 election, Tilden had been negotiating for the purchase of the electoral votes of South Carolina and Florida. Tilden denied emphatically all knowledge of such dispatches, and appeared voluntarily before a Congressional sub-committee in New York City to clear himself of the charge. The attempts to implicate him in corrupt transactions were not successful; but his political opponents endeavoured to make capital in subsequent campaigns, out of the so-called 'Cipher Dispatches'. (The Election of 1876.)

“Twitter” and email now, the “cipher dispatches” one hundred forty-four years (and forty-one presidential elections) ago. Things have changed far less than one is led to believe in the middle of the current agitation, which has been at the heart of American politics and governance since July 4, 1776.

What happened in 1877 was so patently unconstitutional that I consistently told my college students that the so-called Electoral Commission had no basis in the Constitution of the United States of America whatsoever. The 1877 Electoral Commission had no foundation in the Constitution of the United States of America and was an ad hoc creation to solve a difficult national crisis that flew in the face of the intentions of the Constitution’s framers, who used the Twelfth Amendment to modify the election a president the unexpected electoral vote tie between Thomas Jefferson and his vice presidential running mate, Aaron Burr, that occurred when Article II provided that the electors from the various states vote for two persons for president and that the one with the second highest vote total to the one who garnered a majority of electoral vote would serve as vice president. As Jefferson and Burr were tied with eighty-three electoral votes apiece, the United States House of Representatives elected Jefferson as president and the United States Senate elected Burr as vice president.

The framers did not anticipate the rise of political parties, but they arose out of disputes within the administration of President George Washington between Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who believed in strong, centralized government, and the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who believed in states’ rights and limited government. Washington, who had warned against factions such as political parties, was helpless to see their formation. The unforeseen, extra-constitutional (not unconstitutional) rise of political parties complicated the presidential election process, which the Constitution’s framers believed would always be deadlocked and that the president would be elected by the House of Representatives every four years as they could not believe that anyone after Washington would be able to win a majority of electoral votes. The framers envisioned that each state legislature would nominate a favorite son of their state, thus resulting in a further check on the excesses of popular sovereignty and majority rule.

The rise of the political parties, however, and the electoral deadlock in 1800 resulted in the proposal and subsequent ratification in 1804 of the Twelfth Amendment, whose provisions read as follows:

The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate; -- The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; -- The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.-- The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

The Congress of the United States of America has no constitutional authority to add provisions to the method of electing a president and vice president as spelled out in the Twelfth Amendment as the only way to change anything contained in the Twelfth Amendment is to amend the Constitution.

To illustrate this fact, it is perhaps useful to explain to readers that the Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison, 1803, revolved around the demand of William Marbury, who had been appointed by outgoing President John Adams to a Federal judgeship in the waning hours of his presidency on March 3, 1801, for  the Court to issue a writ of mandamus instructing Secretary of State James Madison in the administration of President Thomas Jefferson to deliver his certificate of appointment to him so that he could take his seat on the Federal judiciary that Jefferson had denied him upon taking office on March 4, 1801. Jefferson scoffed at the “Midnight Appointments” of his fellow anti-Catholic and then-former friend turned political adversary, John Adams and had instructed Madison not to deliver any of the certificates of appointment to Adams’s appointees.

Crucial to the case of Marbury v. Madison, February 24, 1803, was a provision in the United States Judiciary Act of 1790 that gave the Supreme Court of the United States original jurisdiction to issue writs of mandamus, which Chief Justice John Marshall, who had been Adams’s Secretary of State prior to being nominated and confirmed to serve as chief justice, concluded was unconstitutional as Congress had no power to add to the Court’s original jurisdiction that was specifically given to it in Article III of the Constitution of the United States of America. Marshall explained that, yes, William Marbury was entitled to his writ of mandamus, but that Congress had erred in its effort to give original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court to do so. Marshall thus struck down the provision in the United States Judiciary Act of 1790, making the case the first use of judicial review to strike down a provision of Federal law as unconstitutional. (The first discussion of the power of judicial review by the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America came in the case of Hayburn’s Case, August 11, 1792, but the first actual application of judicial review, which had been explained by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist, Number 78, to uphold a Congressional enactment occurred in the case of Hylton v. United States, March 8, 1796, as the Supreme Court of the United States of America upheld a Congressional tax on carriages as constitutional. The use of judicial review in the Hylton case was made as a matter course. Chief Justice John Marshall, who would have found himself in political difficulty with the Jeffersonians had he decided in Marbury’s favor and might have been impeached if he had done so, went to great lengths in Marbury v. Madison to defend the theory of judicial review as part of the Court’s constitutional powers according to the intentions of the Constitution’s framers even though the phrase appears nowhere in Article III. Marshall, who served as Chief Justice from February 4, 1801, to July 6, 1835, thus concluded that while Marbury was entitled to the commission, which he himself had signed while serving as United States Secretary of State and as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America during a twenty-eight day period in the final month of the John Adams administration, but that the Supreme Court had been given the power to issue a writ of mandamus to command his successor as Secretary of State, James Madison, to do so because  Congress had erred in giving to the Court a power that did not exist in Article III  and could only be added by constitutional amendment.)

This is a very, very long way of saying that one has to really, really stretch to think that the Vice President of the United States of America has the power in his capacity as President of the United States Senate to reject the electoral votes certified by a state governor. The Twelfth Amendment gives the President of the Senate only the power to open the envelopes containing the state-certified electoral votes, and, as explained by professor just below, the Electoral Vote Count Act of 1887 is unconstitutional not because of the Twelfth Amendment but because it intrudes on a Federal function. The article quoted below explains that President Trump’s legal team was inept and thus was, much like Trump himself, it should be noted, its own worst enemy at finding the proper constitutional and legal foundation for their litigation:

As I point out in a recent interview, the failure of the Trump legal team and its allies to understand the Constitution’s rules on presidential elections has cost them dearly. They have evidence of fraud and other election irregularities. But they have not used that evidence well.

The Constitution says that the Vice-President, as President of the Senate, is the presiding officer when a joint session of Congress oversees the counting of president electors. Some of the president’s advocates claim that gives Vice President Mike Pence unlimited discretion over the counting. They say that when the joint session meets on January 6, Pence may unilaterally decide between rival slates of electors.

In pursuance of this theory, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R.-Tex) has sued the vice president. Gohmert asserts that the federal laws on elector-counting are unconstitutional because they are inconsistent with the 12th amendment. He claims the vice president “may exercise the exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State.” He argues that Pence should appoint a Republican slate for Arizona.

The trial and appeals courts have dismissed the case for lack of standing. But if the plaintiffs had standing, their case still would be very weak. Here’s why:

* As the vice president observes, he is not a proper defendant. He has done nothing that makes him the bad guy here.

* The  Gohmert complaint points out that state legislatures can choose electors, but it fails to mention that the constitutionally-authorized deadline for doing so (December 14) passed without the Arizona legislature reversing the result certified under procedures fixed by the legislature.

* Instead, the complaint says that “members of the Arizona Legislature” selected the GOP slate. But it also failed to mention that these members were only a minority of the legislature, acting on their own.

* It is highly unlikely the 12th Amendment gives one person uncontrolled discretion over the presidential and vice presidential electoral counting. This is particularly so when that person is the vice president—someone who may be (as in this election) one of the candidates himself.

* A legal principle says that when a result seems unlikely, you don’t assume it is correct unless the governing law clearly compels it.  But the 12th amendment does not clearly determine that the vice president has exclusive authority to count the ballots. Quite the contrary. It says only that “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” It gives the Veep authority to open the ballots, but does not specify who counts them.

* When the Constitution or law is silent, normal parliamentary procedure is to proceed according to the rules specified by the parliamentary body. That means rules adopted by the joint session of Congress, not by the presiding officer.

* Congress has set forth those rules in federal statutes. The plaintiffs claim the statutes (which they wrongly attribute to a single enactment) are unconstitutional.  However, once again their lack of constitutional understanding caused them to lose an opportunity: The statute is not unconstitutional, because it contradicts the 12th amendment—which it doesn’t. The statute may be unconstitutional because it intrudes on a federal function.

To explain: When Congress comes into joint counting session, it is not acting as the federal legislature. It is acting as an assembly exercising a function directly mandated by the Constitution. Federal functions usually are exempt from statutory regulation.

On the other hand, the joint session may—expressly or impliedly—agree voluntarily to follow the statutory procedures. If the joint session does not object to using established legal procedures, then it is deemed to accept them. Dyer v. Blair, 390 F. Supp. 1291 (N.D. Ill. 1975) (Justice John Paul Stevens).

But that is surely the joint session’s decision, not the decision of the presiding officer. (Vice President Pence Cannot Replace Electors On His Own.)

In other words, President Donald John Trump gave his millions of millions of his voters false hope that it was possible, if not probable, that Vice President Michael Richard Pence could have arbitrarily rejected state-certified slates of electors and sent the matters back to the states for consideration. The “Save America Rally” that was held on the Ellipse near the south lawn of the White House on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord, was a needless exercise in mass self-delusion, to say nothing of a massive and, pardon me, diabolically inspired distraction from the feast of manifestation of Our Lord to the Gentiles.

Although the matter is one of constitutional debate and interpretation, it was unreasonable to be point of being reprehensible for the president to publicly lambaste a man, Michael Richard Pence, who just wanted to do his duty in accord with the dictates of the Constitution. The rally, which was organized by the conspiracy advocate Alex Jones, who has gone so far as to assert that no one was killed in the attack by Adam at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Town of Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, December 14, 2011, even though the town, where we lived between January 14, 2010, and February 6, 2011, was devastated by the attack and the documented loss of life. That anyone would follow a thing that anti-Catholic bigot named Alex Jones says or who would march to his orders is very mistaken.

No Vice President has ever decided to reject state-certified electors, noting that President Pro Tempore James Mason decided to accept the Wisconsin slate of electors even though a snowstorm had delayed those electors from making their way to Madison, Wisconsin, by one day in December of 1856. Mason, who served the constitutional role of Vice President William King, who had died in office, decided to accept Wisconsin’s votes when the electoral votes were counted before a joint session of Congress on February 11, 1857. To this date, however, no Vice President or President Pro Tempore has ever rejected a slate of state-certified electors. Ever.

One can be assured, however, that even though, as I had told you weeks in advance, that there was no chance the Supreme Court of the United States of America would have agreed to hear the fully justified challenges to the way in which the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court amended the commonwealth’s constituted by judicial fit to make it possible for absentee ballots to be received after election day, the Court probably would have accepted a challenge raised by the legal team of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., after the challenge became ripe for review following expedited adjudication at the district court level to strike down the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to be unconstitutional. Even if Pence had done which no other vice president had ever done—namely, throw out slates of electors in one or more states, he would have been overturned by Federal courts in short order.

In other words, everyone should have been home and meditating upon the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, instead of being led to believe that it was at all even remotely possible for the election results in the states where fraud and irregularities occurred to be overturned so that Donald John Trump could win a second term in office. The hope was misplaced, and the agitation was needless. Donald John Trump now has the rest of his life (he will turn seventy-five years of age later this year) to consider his role in encouraging his supporters to travel to Washington, District of Columbia, in the belief that a great show of support from peaceful Americans would put any kind of pressure on Vice President Pence and the members of the two Houses of Congress that would result in the defeat of the Red Chinese stooge and renegade Catholic named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. People were gathered together needlessly, and five people are now dead because a relatively small number of well-organized and well-armed followers of the QAnon idiocy and other such websites left the rally early to carry out their pre-planned attacks in the delusion belief that the use of force could somehow rout the legislators and “save the day” for their secular savior, Trump.

Scores of just regular, unarmed saps who had no knowledge of the pre-planned violence and did not participate in it got caught up in the agitation of the moment and entered the Capitol building, thus undermining the credibility of the effort that had commenced to present evidence of election fraud and irregularities in the States of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Everyone should have been at home on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The old adage “There is no place home” was never truer than on January 6, 2021, as President Trump had called on his supporters to Washington, District of Columbia, under false, self-delusional premises and had given them “hope” where there was none to be had.

Sober up.

The Tragic Events of January 6, 2020, and Their Altogether Predictable Aftermath

Although I had no intention of paying any attention whatsoever to the “Save America” rally on the Ellipse near the South Lawn of the White House on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord, Wednesday, January 6, 2021, nor to the deliberations in the joint meeting of Congress until word reached me that a group of Trump supporters, termed “patriots” by many, stormed into the Capitol building after the president, Rudolph William Giuliani, and Donald John Trump, Jr., had spoken.

A review of the transcript of President Trump’s remarks will reveal that he said nothing substantially different than what he would have said at one of campaign rallies with the singular exception of lambasting his loyal, subservient, and theretofore most obsequious vice president, Michael Richard Pence, for “lacking the courage” to reject the state-certified electors in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This was reprehensible and a reckless use of rhetoric against a man who had bent over backwards to please President Trump, who would, according to multiple accounts, disparage Pence behind his back for his homespun ways and for the Catholic apostate’s Pentecostalist tendencies to pray “over” those who visited his office. This behavior revealed one of the president’s most fatal personality flaws, namely, that he has no ability to accept the judgments and conclusions reached by even his loyal political allies that are contrary to his own and that, quite obviously, he considers disagreement to be cause for public mockery, ridicule, and ostracism.

In plain English, therefore, President Donald John Trump has never been taught anything about the necessity of carrying one’s crosses with love, gratitude, and joy while at the same time praying for his persecutors and recognizing in them very means by which the good God seeks to chastise him for his own sins and thus to call him to conversion to the true Faith and to repent of those sins so that he can “go, and sin no more” and start the process of making reparation for them. The president hates criticism, a characteristic that he shares, ironically, with a number of his predecessors, including the notoriously thin-skinned Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, who—along with his race-baiting Attorney General, Eric Himpton Holder—was ever ready to use the race card against critics. President Trump also hates to lose and refuses to recognize that, even acknowledging vote count fraud and other irregularities, he did NOT win any kind of landslide as it is just not true that the 7,058,935 vote margin by which he lost to the world-class reprobate Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., was produced by electoral fraud. (See National Popular Vote Tracker" for the final state-by-state and aggregate national popular vote counts.)

This is not so, and it is simply false and bordering on, if not actually, blasphemous to refer to his imaginary victory as part of a “sacred landslide” as he did late in the day on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, several hours after siege of the Capitol had begun. No election victory is “sacred.” “Democracy” is not “sacred.” The Capitol building is not “sacred.” That which is truly sacred belongs to the Blessed Trinity and Holy Mother Church, including her veneration of Our Lady and the other saints. The use of the “sacred” by Trump to refer to his completely imaginary landslide and by the members of the organized crime party of the naturalist “left” to refer to the Capitol building is arrogating unto things and places that a hallowed character that belongs to God and His true Church alone. Words matter, and the misuse of words to make that which is profane appear to be “sacred” to divinize the secular and to profane the truly sacred.

Once again, the fundamental mistake that the president made before some of his hundreds of thousands of supporters present on the Ellipse marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol building even before his remarks had concluded was to encourage his supporters to spend their time and their money to travel to Washington in the first place. Although many of those intent on making trouble would have gone to Washington, District of Columbia, even without a rally, the president was vain and foolhardy to think that public pressure would work on Vice President Pence or on a majority in either or both Houses of Congress to reject the state-certified electors in the states where election challenges had been planned by United States Representative Morris “Mo” Jackson Brooks, Jr. (R-Alabama) and United States Senators Raphael Edward “Ted” Cruz (R-Texas) and Joshua David Hawley (R-Missouri) planned to object in accord with the provisions of the aforementioned Electoral Vote Count Act of 1887. Trump was a knucklehead to believe that public pressure would work to achieve his end. Then again, those who have never anything about or dismiss the importance of the following words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ are knuckleheads to beat all knuckleheads:

Then Jesus said to his disciples: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. [25] For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it. (Matthew 16: 24-25.)

President Donald John Trump is his own worst enemy. He was his own worst enemy in appointing men and women to serve in the White House, the Executive Office of the President, the Cabinet and the sub-Cabinet whom he praised upon appointment even though he had not known them and then later lambasted them, usually via “twitter,” when he fired them as he claimed he knew never or liked them. His pattern in this regard has head-spinning no matter and an incentive for rolling one’s eyeballs. The president is seemingly incapable of admitting errors in judgment or making mistakes.

Indeed, attentive readers of this site may remember what Trump told Abraham Foxman of the so-called “Anti-Defamation League” after Foxman had called him anti-Semitic for wanting nothing but wealthy Jews as part of a housing project in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1994:

“Mr. Foxman, Trump never apologizes.”  (The Complex History of Trump and the Jews.)

No, “Trump never apologizes,” and it is because he is incapable of error and has basked in the cult of hero worship that he has enjoyed for five and one-half years now that he was slow to react and to denounce the rampage that was taking on the grounds and then inside the Capitol building as his supporters, not members of “antifa,” stormed the building and engaged in acts of vandalism at the very moment that Representative Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) had started to present evidence of the fraud and irregularities that took place of the Grand Canyon State. Various published reports indicate that the president “pushed back” against the idea of making any kind of statement while the siege was taking place and that he seemed to be enjoying watching the mayhem as it was being televised:

Post-riot accounts from last Wednesday reveal that not only did President Trump egg on supporters who wreaked havoc in the Capitol – but he was glued to the television as the events unfolded, incapable of responding to desperate pleas to use influence to stop it and enjoying seeing it unfold.

There were two major areas where the president fell dramatically short of what was being asked of him: using his personal popularity with his followers to urge them to vacate the Capitol immediately; and using the vast powers of his office to try to speed a federal response. 

But when key current and former aides and family members tried to reach him, he was 'busy enjoying the spectacle,' according to a Washington Post account.

As the historic mob invasion of the U.S. seat of legislative government unfolded, a variety of people with influence over Trump sought to get to him to urge action.

The routes they took were typical of the loosely organized web of influence within the Trump White House. 

Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham – who only after the riot firmly declared Joe Biden the winner of the election – reached out to the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump. 

'It took him a while to appreciate the gravity of the situation,' Graham told the Post. 'The president saw these people as his allies in his journey and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen,' Graham said of the rioters who took the Capitol. 

House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who Trump believes is so much under his wing that he has publicly called him 'My Kevin,' was pleading for action. 

McCarthy phoned Trump directly to try to plead for assistance – but also called the president's son in law, Jared Kushner, who was returning form a trip to the Middle East.

Former counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, who doesn't even work for Trump anymore, tried to get through to him to urge action. She phoned an aide she knew was in close proximity to Trump. 

The office of the Mayor of Washington, desperate to get more National Guard forces amid logistical and jurisdictional hurdles, also reached out to Conway.

Chief of staff Mark Meadows urged Trump to speak out after an aide told him: 'They are going to kill people,' in reference to the rioters. 

A primary area of the pleas related to something Trump was capable of doing on his own without engaging with the bureaucracy: issuing simple Twitter or video pleas for protesters to get out of the Capitol.

The appeals he finally made either lacked a direct call to fall back, or sprinkled in approving language even as the riot that would become deadly unfolded.

At 2:30 pm, about half an hour after the Capitol breach, Trump told his supporters to 'Please support our Capitol Police' and to 'Stay peaceful!' 

His next message was more explicit, writing 'No violence!' – but claimed 'WE are the Party of Law & Order.'

After he finally put out a video at about 4 pm, Trump finally told his backers to 'go home.' But he also called them 'very special,' called the election 'fraudulent,' and said: 'You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.'

Trump himself had egged on his supporters with demands that they 'fight,' calling the election fraudulent, and putting pressure on Vice President Mike Pence, whose only role was ceremonial and involved opening and reading from envelopes containing electoral votes.

Trump was glued to the television as the storming of the Capitol was broadcast. 

Prior reporting has revealed that the Washington D.C. government had requested a National Guard presence, but Guard were assigned to traffic and other assistance and weren't issued ammo or riot gear. 

The now resigned chief of Capitol Police says he wanted more Guard support in advance of Wednesday but had been told by superiors to ask for it informally. The governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, says there were delays getting approval to send Guard forces from the Pentagon.

But it wasn't mere distraction that kept Trump from springing into action. It's not that he was too busy because he was so consumed, which he was,' the New York Times reported.

'He was pleased because it was people fighting on his behalf. He was pleased because he liked the scene. And he was pleased because it was delaying the certification of the Electoral College vote,' the New York Times reported. 'He knew what was happening... He just didn't want to do anything.'

Although McCarthy told colleagues on a call Monday Trump had accepted 'some responsibility' for the riot, on Tuesday the president was back to his defiant posture familiar from impeachment and the Russia probe. He said a second impeachment Democrats are lining up is a 'continuation of the greatest witch hunt in the history of politics.'  (Trump enjoyed the spectacle of the Capitol Hill Riots.)

To be sure, Donald John Trump has suffered injustice after injustice in the past five and one-half years even before former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) opened up a “counter-intelligence” operation into then candidate Trump’s nonexistent ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin that relied largely, although not exclusively, upon the discredited “Steele Dossier” and upon the deliberate lie contained in a surveillance application to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court that Carter Page had not been an operations contact for the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) when in fact he was one (see FBI’s Lies About Carter Page ). One lie after another was told about the president and various actors and so-called “comedians” made numerous comments fantasizing about his assassination. None of the accusations made against him true. None.

Indeed, United States Senator Lindsay Graham (R-North Carolina) has just released documentation of the collusion of senior Federal Bureau of Investigation and intelligence community officials against President Donald John Trump as they acted as a Praetorian Guard to keep someone they despised out of the White House and thus having supervisory authority over them and their constant misuse of surveillance against perceived “political enemies”:

EXCLUSIVE: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham on Friday released a slew of additional documents and transcripts related to his panel’s investigation into the origins and aftermath of the Trump-Russia probe, calling the original probe "one of the most incompetent and corrupt investigations in the history of the FBI and DOJ."

The first investigation – which looked into whether members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russians to influence the election – was called "Crossfire Hurricane" Graham, the senior Republican senator from South Carolina, released transcripts of interviews with FBI and Justice Department officials conducted by the committee, between March 3, 2020 and October 29, 2020.

"I consider the Crossfire Hurricane investigation a massive system failure by senior leadership, but not representative of the dedicated, hardworking patriots who protect our nation every day at Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice," Graham said in a statement Friday, saying his committee has released "as much material as possible," but noted that "some classified material has still been withheld."

Calling the "Crossfire Hurricane" operation "one of the most incompetent and corrupt investigations in the history of the FBI and DOJ," Graham also said he "appreciates all those who participated in the depositions and their candor. "They have charted a path to allow us to reform the system."

"The FISA court was lied to. Exculpatory information was withheld on those being investigated. The investigators, with some notable exceptions, were incredibly biased and used the powers of law enforcement for political purposes," Graham said. "The subjects of the investigation had their lives turned upside down. It is my hope that counterintelligence investigations will be reined in and this never happens again in America."

Graham slammed the leadership of the FBI under former Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, saying it was "either grossly incompetent" or said  "they knowingly allowed tremendous misdeeds."

"There was a blind eye turned toward any explanation other than the Trump campaign was colluding with foreign powers," he continued. "At every turn the FBI and DOJ ran stop signs that were in abundance regarding exculpatory information."

Also receiving the ire of the four-term senator was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which issued warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Graham called that acting "a travesty" and noted that former DOJ officials who signed those warrants, such former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, "have acknowledged that if they knew then what they know now, they would not have signed it."

Ultimately Graham said of Crossfire Hurricane, "There was no ‘there’ there," and contends that the "investigation was pushed when it should have been stopped and the only logical explanation is that the investigators wanted an outcome because of their bias." 

Graham said he would continue to pursue reforms of counterintelligence investigations and warrant applications, and said he hopes his "Democratic and Republican colleagues can find common ground on these matters," while also urging FBI Director Wray to "continue the reforms he has started."

"It is hard to believe that something like Crossfire Hurricane could have happened in America," Graham said. "The bottom line is that going forward we must have more checks and balances when it comes to political investigations. We must have more meaningful sign-offs on warrant applications, and we need to restore the trust to the American people in this system."

Meanwhile, former Attorney General Bill Barr tapped U.S. Attorney from Connecticut John Durham as special counsel to ensure he could continue his investigation into the origins of the Russia probe through the Biden administration. 

Durham was appointed by Barr last year to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller completed his yearlong investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Mueller’s investigation yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 election. (Graham Releases Documents to Show Russian Probe as One of the Most Incompetent and Corrupt in FBI and Department of Justice. Isn’t this a little late, Senator Graham?)

Unfortunately for the president, he is his own worst enemy and his belief that the state-certified results of the November 3, 2020, presidential election had any possibility of being reversed deluded his followers into thinking that the improbable was possible and thus, without desiring the mayhem that followed, played directly into his enemies’ hands, providing them with the opportunity to be rid of him once again. The statement that he issued on “twitter” as the siege had gone on for several hours was tepid, halfhearted, and mentioned nothing about the violence that was taking place, and the one he issued several hours after the first statement was even worse:

“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Mr. Trump tweeted Wednesday evening, after spending much of the afternoon in the Oval Office watching footage of escalating violence unfolding on Capitol Hill. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” (Trump’s Video Urging Protestors to Go Home Several Hours after Capitol Hill Siege Began.)

As mentioned previously in this commentary, President Trump did not win any kind of “landslide victory,” and it is obscene to call such a victory “sacred” even if what he said had been true, which it was not, and I am afraid his call to “Remember this day forever!” will used against him for the rest of his life, providing his enemies with all the ammunition they will ever need to prosecute and persecute him until the moment of his Particular Judgment.

Have I mentioned the fact that Donald John Trump is his own worst enemy?

To continue to be defiant in the face of what happened on January 6, 2021, and five days after having conceded the election and condemning the violence that had taken place the day before is reprehensible. Humility and contrition are called for now, not more defiance, anger, and hubris.

Sober up.

Once again, we have not been baptized and confirmed to bear witness to Donald John Trump and it is impossible to save any country, including the United States of America, where most people are steeped in mass of unrepented sins (contraception, blasphemy, vulgarity of the sort used by Donald John Trump, Jr., in his own speech to the crowd on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, immodesty, impurity, gluttony, anger, pride, materialism, religious indifferentism, etc.) that cause disorder in nations and thus makes the triumph of totalitarianism inevitable.

Perhaps it is apropos to invoke the wisdom of Pope Leo XIII as found in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, yet again:

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

So great is this struggle of the passions and so serious the dangers involved, that we must either anticipate ultimate ruin or seek for an efficient remedy. It is of course both right and necessary to punish malefactors, to educate the masses, and by legislation to prevent crime in every possible way: but all this is by no means sufficient. The salvation of the nations must be looked for higher. A power greater than human must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty, and make them better. This is the power which once before saved the world from destruction when groaning under much more terrible evils. Once remove all impediments and allow the Christian spirit to revive and grow strong in a nation, and that nation will be healed. The strife between the classes and the masses will die away; mutual rights will be respected. If Christ be listened to, both rich and poor will do their duty. The former will realise that they must observe justice and charity, the latter self-restraint and moderation, if both are to be saved. Domestic life will be firmly established (by the salutary fear of God as the Lawgiver. In the same way the precepts of the natural law, which dictates respect for lawful authority and obedience to the laws, will exercise their influence over the people. Seditions and conspiracies will cease. Wherever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result. The common welfare, then, urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray; to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,-and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole. We must restore Christ to this His own rightful possession. All elements of the national life must be made to drink in the Life which proceedeth from Him- legislation, political institutions, education, marriage and family life, capital and labour. Everyone must see that the very growth of civilisation which is so ardently desired depends greatly upon this, since it is fed and grows not so much by material wealth and prosperity, as by the spiritual qualities of morality and virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.) 

Men ignore those words at their own peril, and the leaders of nations who do so put their nations in peril of extinction.

Disordered and Deluded Souls

Although the hypocrisy of the organized crime family of the “left” will be pointed out later in this commentary as efforts will be made to highlight those in that crime family who justified the wholesale burning of cities, the rampant destruction of property, violent attacks upon innocent human beings, the seizure of entire city blocks to establish “autonomous zones,” the burning of police precinct stations, attacks upon police officers that were sponsored in many instances by the Marxist, pro-sodomite “black lives matter” network of violent agitators, the purpose of this part of the commentary is to demonstrate that the cult of President Donald John Trump caused many otherwise normal citizens to lose their minds and to do things that they had never done in their lives before now and will have a lifetime to reconsider after all the criminal penalties are imposed upon them that those who engaged in the wanton violence in some of our major cities continue to evade. It would behoove the president to rethink his long silence after the siege had begun. Instead, however, the president let the demagogic, race-baiting, money-grubbing leech on the public dole and shill for Red China, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., claim the high ground even though he himself was mostly silent as American cities burned. This is truly shameful. Lives could have been saved if the president had spoken out sooner. To let Biden take the “high ground” was an exercise in utter political stupidity and moral obtuseness.

While it is true that the president did issue a statement on Thursday, January 7, 2021, that denounced the violence as he more or less conceded the election with using the actual word concede, the time for him to have acted was immediately after the siege of the Capitol had begun. Although the president has taken no responsibility for the level of agitation that he helped to perpetuate in the two months after the election on November 3, 2020, and has thus far shown no sign of public remorse over anything he has said and done, we must pray to Our Lady that he can given the moral courage to reflect on the fact that the one person who killed, Ashli Babbitt (see An Excessive Force Investigation into the Shooting Death of Ashli Babbitt Has Been Opened), and the three others who died on Janary 6, 2021, because of cardiac arrests or being trampled to death had been placed in harm’s way because President Trump permitted himself to be used by the adversary to make a mockery of the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord. No, Trump himself did not realize it was the Feast of the Epiphany. However, the adversary knew it, and he played Trump perfect to be a participant in his political downfall. Pride always goeth before a fall. Always.

The other two deaths of Jaunary 6, 2021, were only peripherally related to the events of that day. Captial Police Office Brian Sicknick died of natural caues and was not bludgeoned to death by a fire-extinguisher wield Trump supporter and Capitol Police office Howard Liebengood, committed suicide on Sunday, January 10, 2021, the Feast of the Holy Family, in the aftermath of the rampage. Left unaswered, however, is the why the pro-abortion, pro-perversity nogoodnick named Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, who is most regrettably the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, had not provided for more security on January 6, 2021, although that answer might very well be found in the fact that she, knowing the man she hated, Donald John Trump, wanted to set a trap for his supporters and thus took no extra precautions for the electoral vote count on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

So many people today, lacking the Supernatural Virtue of Hope and heedless that everything that happens is within the Providence of God, Who always provides us with the graces sufficient enough for the moment, are either committing suicide or living lives of utter despair as they look to drugs, alcohol or politics for the “solutions” to the problems in the world that caused by fallen human nature and our own Actual Sins.

As always, it is necessary to point out that a nation founded on one anti-Incarnational error after another will wind up disintegrating into rival camps whose members believe in their “path” to secular “salvation.” The members of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” believe in totalitarianism and repression of dissent; the members of the false opposite of the naturalist “right” believe in “civil liberty” as an end unto itself and thus do not see the fact that there is are distinctions between having the raw physical ability to commit various acts and moral freedom to do so. No one is morally free to do anything contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and no one is “free” to ignore the teaching and sanctifying offices of Holy Mother Church without suffering the consequences of such mistaken concepts of ‘freedom” that frees them from the Holy Cross, which is the only true standard of genuine human liberty.

While noting that most of the hundreds of thousands of people who were gathered together needlessly in Washington, District of Columbia, on January 6, 2021, were peaceful and did not participate in the mayhem in and around the United States Capitol building, many who took part in the mayhem acted on impulse, perhaps prompted by antifa agitators/infiltrators even though this is denied by the authorities, for whatever that is worth, while others were armed and ready to do violence to members of Congress and, reports indicate, are also ready to engage in acts of violence in the days leading up to the inauguration of the reprobate from Delaware named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

It is beyond my comprehension to figure out what those who took place in the invasion and riot of the United States Capitol building hoped to accomplish.

What they did manage to accomplish was contrary to their stated purpose of “helping” President Donald John Trump as they interrupted and then discredited the effort on the part of House Republicans and Senators Hawley and Cruz to present the evidence of election irregularities and fraud and thus prompt the hypocrites in the organized crime family of the naturalist “left” and their enablers in the organized crime family of the naturalist “right” to proceed with a second impeachment of the president. That is what these mindless people, agitated for no good reason and without a clue as to the power of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary to convert enemies and to bring a peace that can never be had when men are divided so fundamentally about First and Last Things, managed to accomplish, and none of it was good. Indeed, all of it was quite bad, entirely unnecessary, and completely preventable if they had not been called to Washington, District of Columbia, in the first place.

Most of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were ordinary Americans. They were, of course, angered and frustrated by four years of injustice perpetrated against President Trump and, in their view, the country and fell into the American penchant to “do” something to “save” a country whose national debt clock to the true God of Divine Revelation began ticking on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was promulgated, something that those who answered their president’s call to travel to Washington, District of Columbia, eight days ago do not understand and about which most of them would prefer to live in absolute denial of the truth.

As has been noted on this site so many times before and in my Conversion in Reverse: How Americanism Converted Catholics and Contributed to the Rise of Conciliarism, one of the chief motivating factors that resulted in the break from Great Britain was anti-Catholicism.

Robert Leckie described the flames of hatred that were fanned by anti-Catholic propagandists in the colonies in the immediate aftermath of the Quebec Act: 

This piece of legislation had not only confirmed the French in the free exercise of their religion and the practice of their native law, it had also granted the Quebec government those lands in the west which the English colonies claimed. Now, the colonists fancied themselves surrounded by French-speaking Catholics, the old enemy of former years, and their rage was so unbounded that on October 21, 1774, the [First] Continental Congress addressed a letter to the British people admonishing them for tolerating in America a religion which “has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.”  

One again, it was popular to quote Samuel Adams, who had said six years earlier [that is, in 1768]: “I did verily believe, as I do still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of popery in America, than from the Stamp Act or any other acts destructive of civil rights. . . .” Once again, the popular press picked up the old anti-Catholic cudgels, and one journal went so far as to predict: “We may live to see our churches converted into mass houses and our lands plundered by tythes for the support of the Popish clergy. The Inquisition may erect her standard in Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia may yet experience the carnage of St. Bartholomew’s Day.” Others, misrepresenting the truth of the Quebec Act, insisted that it actually established Romanism as an official religion, and warned: ‘If Gallic Papists have a right To worship their own way Then farewell to the liberties Of poor America.’  

Ministers, of course, were in full voice once more, but so also were John Adams, apparently recovered from his momentary lapse into tolerance, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, the inevitable Samuel Adams, and none other than Washington’s protégé and confidante, Alexander Hamilton, who thundered: “If [Parliament] had any regard to the freedom and happiness of mankind they would not have done it. If they had been friends to the Protestant cause, they would never have provided such a nursery for its greatest enemy . . . They may as well establish Popery in New York and the other colonies as they did in Canada!”  

More than the Stamp Act, perhaps more than any other act by Parliament or any British minister, the Quebec Act was a direct cause of the American Revolution. It so inflamed colonial hatred of the mother country that even that staunch and solid Protestant, King George III, was accused of being a Jesuit in disguise, and his statues, from which the rebels later were to melt so many serviceable bullets, were adored with mocking rosaries.

Meanwhile, patriots such as Paul Revere did a brisk business in scurrilous engravings which depicted His Majesty and his Ministers clothed in the livery of the Pope of Rome. To the Catholics of colonial America–who actually represented no more than 1 per cent of the total population of three million persons–it appeared that it was time to pull tight the shutters again, and it was this furor of anti-Catholic sentiment that rose about the ears of Father John Carroll when he returned to his native Maryland in 1774. (Robert Leckie, American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 45-47.)

Look at those names. John Adams. Samuel Adams. Alexander Hamilton. Paul Revere. These are not men to admire. They hated Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His true Church, she that is the one and only means of personal salvation and social order.  

They had little to fear, however. Eager to be accepted by their fellow colonists, the leading Catholics of the colonies did not want to convert them to Catholicism. They simply desired the “freedom” to practice their Faith without persecution which is the only thing that the Quebec Act had guaranteed French Catholics in Quebec. Indeed, one could say that the Quebec Act was an incubator of the heresy of “religious liberty” just as much as had been the approach taken by the first Catholics who had arrived in Maryland in 1634 and the pragmatic tack taken by William Penn, who was no friend of Catholicism, in the Colony of Pennsylvania.  

It is futile to “save” that which is founded on false premises and is now clearly manifesting the perfect of the inherent degeneracy of those false premises, although it is not futile to pray for the conversion of the United States of America, something that is far more possible than it is to believe some kind of “show of force” to “make our voices” heard or that the use of actual violence is going to save that which was bound to degenerate to the point of totalitarianism that has now arrived and will be enforced with great glee by the masters of hypocrisy and deceit in the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left.”

One man who entered the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, said very explicitly that he was trying to “save” a country where most people are not at all interested in saving the lives of over 3,000 innocent babies killed by surgical means and the countless of thousands upon thousands of others killed by chemical abortifacients every day. The belief that the United States of America could have been“saved” by entering the Capitol is delusional:

A Georgia lawyer who was among the first rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol now claims the mob acted “heroically” — and were like “tourists” who looked at, but didn’t disturb the property.

Self-described “Anti-Communist Counter-Revolutionary” McCall Calhoun, a lawyer for three decades, also excused his retweet of a death threat against President-elect Biden, saying Trump supporters are just naturally “ornery.”

Calhoun made the abhorrent claims in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

When asked about his sharing of a doctored photo of Joe Biden that referenced hanging the president-elect, Calhoun told the outlet, “Trump voters say that all the time,” he said. “We’re just ornery.”

Calhoun even claimed that the violent uprising that left five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer, was a peaceful event.

In fact, rioters left feces, urine, trash, busted windows and vandalized offices in their wake.

“The people who went in there, what they did was heroic. It was very patriotic,” he told AJC. “I’m not saying it was the ideal thing to do. I am saying at that time and place those people felt like that was their only hope. They don’t want to lose their democratic republic.”

Calhoun said the worst criminal act he committed was “trespassing,” which he did for the “love of his country.”

Georgia State University law professor Clark Cunningham shared a more realistic legal definition with the newspaper.

“I would say what he did – I would say what all of them did that entered the Capitol —is the serious federal felony of sedition. It’s the domestic equivalent of treason,” he said.

“It wasn’t a sit-in. They knew the Congress was convened to do perhaps the most important thing a Congress can do: preside over the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another.”

Sedition is punishable by 20 years in prison. (Georgia Lawyer Among First to be Charged in Capitol Rioters as he calls rioters tourists.)

The situation has become so farcical that many of those who entered the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, took something called “selfies” while inside the building and others did not realize—or did not care—that they could be easily identified, including a former Olympian medalist who wore an United States of America Olympic team jacket, something that reminds me of the adoptive brother of a former student of mine from nearly forty years ago who broke into a neighbor’s home to steal property he could pawn for drug money and was seen by neighbors after he had committed the burglary wearing a football jersey with his last name on the back:

Former U.S. Olympic gold medalist Klete Keller is facing criminal charges Wednesday after law enforcement officers identified him as one of the people who illegally entered the U.S. Capitol during a riot last week.

According to court documents filed Wednesday, the 38-year-old Keller is facing charges of obstructing law enforcement, knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

An investigator wrote in a criminal complaint that he was able to identify Keller, a three-time Olympic swimmer, in part due to the Team USA jacket he wore during the rio

"PERSON 1 can be seen standing in the Rotunda still wearing the dark colored USA jacket, which also appears to bear a Nike logo on the front right side and a red and white Olympic patch on the front left side," the investigator wrote in the criminal complaint. (Olympic Gold Medal Swimmer Klete Keller Charged Charge in Connection with US Capitol Riot.)

There is also the case of the newly-elected member of the West Virginia House of Delegates who boasted about making his way inside the Capitol building:

“He’s a fine man.”

West Virginia Delegate Derrick Evans’ grandmother said this to me as her grandson was taken into federal custody.

He’s charged with breaching the U.S. Capitol Wednesday. 

A West Virginia state delegate has been charged after being at the Wednesday raid of the U.S. Capitol Building, in which Trump supporters rushed into the premises.

Derrick Evans, the Republican West Virginia state legislator who posted a video of himself shouting “We’re in! We’re in baby!” while storming the Capitol, has been charged with entering a restricted area, federal prosecutors say.— Daniel Dale 

The arrest of Derrick Evans was caught on video by WSAZ reporter Chad Hedrick.

“He’s a fine man,” said a woman who identified herself as Evans’ grandmother. She had been asked if she had anything to say on his behalf. The woman, apparently exasperated by what was unfolding at the residence, then appeared to sarcastically thank President Donald Trump for “inviting a riot.”

As seen on video, Evans, a Republican lawmaker for the state’s 19th District in the House of Delegates, narrated as he was in a crowd that rushed the Capitol. He and other Trump supporters were there to oppose the U.S. Congress’ certification of the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. At the rally, Trump repeated the completely baseless and false claim that the election was stolen from him.

“The door’s cracked,” Evans said in exuberant narration. “Yes. We’re going in. They’re in, they’re in, they’re in.”

Derrick Evans, a newly elected lawmaker from West Virginia, livestreamed video showing him and a mob of rioters forcing their way into the U.S. Capitol.

Evans later deleted the video, but a version of it was shared by West Virginia Democrat Paula Jean Swearengin 

In a livestream reported by NBC, he was outside the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon when he said, “Bring the tear gas. We don’t care. We’re taking this country back whether you like it or not. Today’s a test run. We’re taking this country back.”

Attorney John Bryan did not discuss the specific criminal claim against his client, telling Law&Crime in an email Friday afternoon that he has not seen the complaint.

Up to this point, his position is that Evans did not break any law. In a letter published on Thursday, Bryan wrote that his client would not resign from office. He asserted the lawmaker, who he described as also being an independent activist and journalist, was not involved with “the group of violent and destructive protestors” elsewhere at the Capitol. Bryan drew a distinction between the East side of the Capitol (where he placed Evans) and the West side (where he placed the main body of the mob).

From the letter:

…at the entrance through where Mr. Evans entered the Capitol, there had been no physical destruction, nor forced entry, of the door or windows by the crowd. Instead, the doors were physically opened – either by Capitol Police, or by other protestors who were already inside. At that point, the group surged in.  

From Mr. Evans point of view in the crowd, it appeared that the crowd was being allowed by law enforcement into the Capitol. He was not at the front of the group. Given the sheer size of the group walking in, Mr. Evans had no choice but to enter. Evans continued to film once inside. His footage shows that members of the public were already inside the Capitol by the time he entered. Evans’ footage shows no riotous behavior taking place at that time. Protesters can be observed calmly walking around. Upon entering, Evans observed a police officer to his right, who was calmly standing watch inside the doorway through which he entered.

The Capitol police’s “complacent” response to the insurrection is an ongoing controversy, with even one Trump supporter saying some cops at the scene were “on our side.”

In Bryan’s statement, he said that “no members of the protests were assaulting or resisting the officer in any way,” and the officer did not ask them to leave.

“Instead, the officer gave Evans a ‘fist-bump’ which can be observed on the video footage,” he said. “This is consistent with Evans obviously having a belief that the crowd was being allowed into this public area of the Capitol at that time. Again, he had no knowledge of what had already occurred on the other side of the Capitol grounds.” (Exasperated Grandmother of Arrested West Virginia Republican Lawmaker was upset about fallout from the Capitol riots.)

Young Derrick Evans’s political career has ended. It is over. He did resign from the legislative seat to which he had only recently inaugurated, and he will now be a marked man for the rest of his life.

Obviously, there are questions why some of the Capitol Police seemed to be complacent during the siege and were actually friendly with some of the people who entered. It is outside the purview of this commentary to explore whether this was a trap or represented support for the protests by a few or the officers as the focus here is on demonstrating that the people who entered should not have been called there by President Trump. Indeed, we know of several people around the country who are still praying that the president, who has just been impeached for a second time by the United States House of Representatives as these words are being written on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, is sworn in to a second term at noon, Eastern Standard Time, on Wednesday, January 20, 2021, the Feast of Saints Fabian and Sebastian. Such is the fantasy world in which the mania around all things Trump has created.

Some of those entered the Capitol building were not, as Derrick Evans claimed, “pushed in” by others in the crowd. Some stole property, including a lectern that belongs to the pro-abortion, pro-perversity statist, demagogue. and perpetually angry Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi (D-Sodom by the Bay, People’s Republic of California), who is also in an ignoramus of truth and facts of legendary proportions, and waved as a photograph was taken of him as he walked out with his trophy, which is now exhibit one in the criminal case that has been brought against him:

The lawyer for a Florida man pictured last week inside the U.S. Capitol carrying the lectern of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as rioters stormed the building told reporters Monday that the photo may be problematic for his client’s defense and acknowledged that he is "not a magician."

Attorneys Dan Eckhart and David Bigney appeared outside a Tampa courthouse on Monday with their client, 36-year-old Adam Christian Johnson. Eckhart gave reporters a frank assessment of the case.

Johnson, of Parrish, Fla., was identified from a viral photo that shows him smiling and waving as he carried the lectern inside the Capitol after a pro-Trump mob stormed the building as Congress was counting electoral votes Wednesday.

Johnson was arrested Friday and charged with "one count of knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; one count of theft of government property; and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds," the Justice Department said Saturday in a statement.

The 36-year-old stay-at-home father of five was released from custody on Monday.

Judge Christopher Tuite ordered Johnson to wear a tracking device and restricted him from traveling outside the Middle District of Florida while the case is pending, WTSP-TV reported. He is allowed to travel to Washington, D.C., for court appearances.

Johnson’s next court date is set for Jan. 19 in the nation’s capital – just one day before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

"I can assure you he is not going to be attending the inauguration," Eckhart told the court, according to the Tampa Bay Times. (Lawyer for Florida Man With Pelosi’s Says the case is problematic.)

Mindless.

Needless.

Stupid.

Idiotic.

Idiocy, mindlessness, stupidity, and needless agitation must be the order of the day when men do not see themselves or the world through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith.

Even otherwise intelligent and financially successful people permitted themselves to be caught up in the passions of the moment on Wednesday, January 6, 2021.

As to the others who entered the Capitol following the “Save America” rally, a simple look at their stories will reveal that these people are not terrorists but ordinary Americans who lost their minds over the farce of American electoral politics without understanding that the country was set on this trajectory from July 4, 1776, and that it is impossible for there to be order in world when the souls of men are so disordered as to take leave of their senses and lose whatever ability they had on the natural level to use simple common sense to see the world as it is and not as they want us to be.

A chief executive officer of a company named Cogensia, which is based near Chicago, Illinois, that entering the Capitol building was the single worst decision of his entire life:

The head of a marketing firm outside Chicago who was arrested during the Capitol siege says storming the building was the “single worst decision” of his life.

Bradley Rukstales, the 52-year-old CEO and president of Cogensia, confirmed his arrest by Capitol Police for unlawful entry in Washington on Wednesday to WBEZ.

The campaign contributor to President Trump said the first arrest of his life was the result of “extremely poor judgment” as he followed hundreds of others through an open set of doors to invade the Capitol — which resulted in one woman being fatally shot, three others dying from medical emergencies and a Capitol Police officer succumbing to injuries.

“My decision to enter the Capitol was wrong, and I am deeply regretful to have done so,” Rukstales said in a statement. “Without qualification and as a peaceful and law-abiding citizen, I condemn the violence and destruction that took place in Washington.”

Rukstales also apologized to his family, colleagues and “fellow countrymen” for his actions.

“It was the single worst personal decision of my life,” the exec’s statement continued. “I have no excuse for my actions and wish that I could take them back.”

Rukstales’ employer, meanwhile, announced on Twitter late Thursday that he had been placed on leave as it assesses the incident, saying he was acting on his own behalf while participating in the riots.

A CBS Chicago reporter also caught up with Rukstales at his Inverness home, where he briefly recalled what he saw before cutting the interview short.

“I mean, it was great to see a whole bunch of people together in the morning, and hear the speeches, but, uh, yeah, it turned into chaos,” he recalled late Thursday.

“I had nothing to do with charging anybody or anything or any of that — I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I regret my part in that. And that’s all I’m comfortable saying.”

Rukstales had previously donated more than $28,000 to Republicans, including $12,000 to Trump via various committees, according to campaign contributions obtained by the station. (CEO says breaching Capitol was single worst decision of his life.)

Mr. Bradley Rukstales made a mistake that has changed his life forever and about which he will haunted until he dies by the thought police of the “left” who will track down his every move and threaten anyone who dares to employ him in the future if he is dismissed by his current employer. Getting caught up in the passion of the moment can lead to lifetime consequences for those steeped in the agitation of the competition of the false opposites of the naturalist “left” and right,” but those consequences are proportionally greater and longer lasting for “offenders” in the “right” than in the “left” because the very people who do not believe in any kind of objective truth that exists in the very nature of things and/or has been revealed positively by the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, and thus does not depend upon human acceptance for its validity and its binding force believe themselves to be the arbiters of all truth from which no one can dissent even peacefully without being guilty of a “hate crime” and “canceled” out from society.

Another remarkable case involves a successful real estate agent from Frisco, Texas, which is about thirty miles of downtown Dallas, Texas, who chartered a private jet to take a group of friends to Washington, District of Columbia, because she wanted to “storm the Capitol”:

A real estate broker from Frisco, Texas, flew on a private jet to Washington, DC, along with friends to “storm the Capitol” on Wednesday.

Jenna Ryan, who is also a radio host, flew from US Trinity Aviation in Denton, Texas, all they way to the nation’s Capitol — where she had “one of the best days of my life.”

“Hopping on a plane heading to DC #MarchToSaveAmerica #stopthesteal,” she wrote in the caption of a photo on the tarmac.

The Trump supporter was also tagged in multiple photos on Facebook, where she is seen holding her luggage with a big grin on her face. 

Ryan tweeted a photo with her pals aboard the jet.

“We’re gonna go down and storm the Capitol. They’re down there right now and that’s why we came,” the Texan said in a video clip. 

The morning of the riots, Ryan livestreamed the walk to Capitol Hill, saying, “All these working class people taking the week off … We flew here for freedom. They want to steal the election, they want to steal everything.”

She continued to ramble, “We the people are [upset] … We flew by a private jet, God wanted us here today. Trump is my president.”

“This is a prelude going to war,” exclaimed Ryan.

As widespread damage and carnage ensued, Ryan posed in front of a broken window at the Capitol, smiling, with the caption: “Window at The capital. And if the news doesn’t stop lying about us we’re going to come after their studios next.”

Then they accomplished their mission.

“We just stormed the capital. It was one of the best days of my life,” she tweeted at the end of one of the darkest days in American history that left one woman fatally shot and four more dead.

Metropolitan Police did not immediately respond to a request about whether Ryan was a person of interest in the riot on Capitol Hill.

Ryan did not respond to The Post for a comment.  (Texas woman flew on private jet to “storm the Capitol”. Mrs. Ryan also promoted his real estate agency while during the siege:  Private Jet Flyying Capitol rioter bragging about job charged. For a review of several other cases, please see: Video Shows Capitol Police officer getting crushed by protesters, NYC Man who breached US Capitol dressed in bearskin seen for the first time since the siege , Capitol Rioter Cleveland Meredith wanted to burn the District of Columbia: Federal authorities, https:/Two Rocky Mount, Virginia, police officers federally charged with storming the United States Capitol, Capitol Rioter Elizabeth from Knoxville, Tennessee, Sparks Mockery Online. These people were not members of antifa. They are ordinary Americans who permitted themselves to be agitated to such an extent as to damage a cause they said that they wanted to aid and giving their political enemies the excuse to crack down on us all sooner than they were planning to do.)

No, Mrs. Ryan, the true God of Divine Revelation did not want anyone distracted from the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and He does not want anyone to be deluded in to thinking that there is some way to “save” nations when men do not care about saving their immortal souls and/or believe, as noted earlier, that they can do pretty much whatever it is they want to do and still go to Heaven. The only way to reform nations is for men to reform their lives:

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.)

The evils of our times can be fought only with the supernatural weapons at our disposal, starting with Holy Mass and Eucharistic piety, if this is at all possible in one's area of residence in this time of apostasy and betrayal, and, of course, including frequent Confession, and deep devotion to the Mother of God, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, as we fast and make sacrifices to separate ourselves from the word.

Stop reading conspiracy websites that contribute to agitation and are based in one fiction after another, including the fictions of Calvinism and Judeo-Masonic naturalism. While it is certainly true that Antifa desires to instigate as much trouble as possible, it is also true that there are a lot of deranged people who think that violence is the solution to social problems that are caused in large measure by their own sins, and contrary to the narrative that the Capitol Police “let” the rioters inside the building, the truth is that the Capitol Police were simply overpowered by the sheer numbers of people:

A viral video does not show police allowing crowds to breach barricades during riots at the U.S. Capitol—as many have claimed on social media—the person who shot the clip has told Newsweek.

Footage captured by Marcus DiPaola, a freelance journalist working at TikTok, has been viewed more than 30 million times on Twitter and more than 1.7 million times on TikTok.

Many who have shared the clip have suggested it shows police letting people get close to the building. One Twitter post that featured the clip alongside the caption: "the police opened the [expletive deleted] gates" has been shared more than 200,000 times.

However, officers only backed away after being threatened while being vastly outnumbered, DiPaola said.

"They definitely didn't just open the barriers, the pro-Trump rioters made a fist like they were going to punch the cops, which is why I started recording, then they backed off the barricades," he told Newsweek in an email when asked for extra context to the clip.

"Completely outnumbered, there wouldn't have been any point in fighting. The rioters moved up the steps of the capitol pretty quickly, capitol police tried to hold them back but they didn't have riot shields and really got pushed around.

"That's when I saw the pro-Trump mob reach the upper steps of the capitol, they smashed in the window and just kept hammering at the door until a bunch of them got in."

Officers did use pepper spray, DiPaola said, but it was not effective at stopping the crowds, suggesting the officers were under-equipped for such scenes.

"I saw multiple police get knocked to the ground, one got trampled a little bit, but the rioters helped him up and pushed him out. The rioters really did just completely outnumber the cops, there was not much anything they could do without manpower."

Media commentators have also questioned the wider policing operation and preparedness. On Thursday morning, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough accused law enforcement of "opening the door for terrorists" in Washington, D.C.

Newsweek has contacted Capitol Police and D.C. Police for comment.

Photographs taken by Getty Images show officers battling to hold their lines in front of swathes of pro-Trump supporters who had converged to protests the president's recent election defeat.

A mob later pushed past police who were trying to block them from entering the building, where inside lawmakers debated electoral college votes which confirmed President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

The D.C. National Guard was later called to help law enforcement take back control of the area.

Four people died and 52 were arrested during the riots. The FBI has begun an investigation and is appealing for the public's help in identifying those involved. (Police Did Not Open the Gates for the Rioters.)

Antifa, which has indeed incited mayhem, destruction of property, violence, and wholesale barbarism in conjunction and/or concurrently with “black lives matter,” may have had some role to play in the tragic events lit no matches eight days ago, especially given the role of a foul-mouthed inciter of violence named John Sullivan, who, lacking a grounding in a vocabulary of the English language, employed unimaginative profanities of the sort the president himself uses both publicly and privately to egg the Trump supporters into entering the building and causing as much damage as possible. Sullivan and his “partner” actually took delight the in the unjustifiable shooting of Ashli Babbitt, who was living such a wretched life of immorality with her husband and a girlfriend that would not have placed her in good shape at her Particular Judgment.

Here is an account of Sullivan’s presence inside the Capitol that does not mention his glee at seeing Ashli Babbitt shot to death as the report about this that I read did not filter Sullivan’s filthy language:

We're beginning to learn more about the individuals who were inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. 

A young man named John Sullivan was there. He's from Utah and the founder of "Insurgence USA," which is a group dedicated to "racial justice and police reform." According to numerous news reports, he has a history of organizing leftist protests and identifies with Black Lives Matter.  

Over the summer, Sullivan was arrested after organizing a violent riot in Utah that ended with a shooting. One of the host groups was the Salt Lake Antifascist [Antifa] Coalition. From Deseret News: 

One of the organizers of a protest in Provo that resulted in a motorist being shot was arrested on Thursday.

John Earle Sullivan, 25, of Sandy, was booked into the Utah County Jail for investigation of rioting, making a threat of violence and criminal mischief.

and honk their horns to show support for law enforcement.

Another group planned a counterprotest at the same time and place. On Facebook, its event page was originally titled End Police Brutality but was later changed to Marching for Racial Equality. The Facebook pages listed the event’s hosts as the groups Insurgence, Solidarity for Justice, Salt Lake Equal Rights Movement and the Salt Lake Antifascist Coalition.

“As a protest organizer John Sullivan is heard and seen as he is promoting protesters to block roadways, keeping motorists from traveling lawfully and freely.”

Sullivan was also captured on video threatening to beat a woman in an SUV, according to the affidavit, and then kicking her door, leaving a dent.

Sullivan was seen with Jesse Taggart — the man charged with shooting the motorist — throughout the protest, the affidavit states.

“As a protest organizer, John Sullivan is heard talking about seeing the shooting, looking at the gun and seeing smoke coming from it. John did not condemn the attempted murder nor attempt to stop it nor aide in its investigation by police.”

"John did not condemn the attempted murder nor attempt to stop it nor aide in its investigation by police.”

At the U.S. Capitol, Sullivan was standing next to Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt when she was shot and killed by a police officer. In fact, he filmed it. (Man with a history of organizing Black Lives Matters protests was inside the Capitol . See also: Who is Accused Provocateur John Sullivan?)

Perhaps we will learn that there were more of Mr. Sullivan’s ilk inside the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. However, the point that I want to reiterate once again is that the president was wrong to have called his supporters to the nation’s capital in the first place and to give them the false hope that there was any real possibility of overturning the results in the six states under challenge.

Those of Trump’s supporters who entered the Capitol with weapons, however, and who might have attempted to assassinate members of Congress and perhaps Vice President Pence himself, something that was the fantasy of a man from Arizona, Jacob Chansley, who went by the pseudonym “QAnon Shaman” and was sported some kind of horned hat and was not ashamed about his heavily tattooed torso while inside the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 (see US Now Says There Is No Evidence that Capitol rioters aiimed to capture and assassinate elected officials), must be prosecuted to fullest extent of the law no matter how many times “woke” mayors and George Soros bought-and-paid for district attorneys have either refused to prosecute the antifa and “black lives matter” terrorists or have coddled them as they have held cities hostage to their nihilistic rage that is based on an abject rejection to see in all other human beings the image and likeness of the Most Blessed Trinity and thus to treat all others as they would Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the very Flesh. The fact that anarchical Communists, Hillary Rodham Clinton, James Brien Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew Weissman, Bruce Liu, et al. have gotten off scot-free time and time again is no justification for letting those intent on their rampage inside the Capitol go without prosecution.

An Excuse for Self-Righteous Hypocrites to Enslave Us All

Readers of this little viewed website that is absolutely no consequence in human terms should keep in mind that I abhor the prospect of Joseph Robinette Biden and Kamala Harris’s administration. No one who supports the nonexistent “right” of mothers to butcher their preborn babies is fit to hold public office as those committed to the advancement and protection of any of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance are incapable of fostering the common temporal good, which must be undertaken in light of the eternal and temporal good of souls. Many of the very people who are justifiably decrying last week’s violent acts at the Capitol are nevertheless unrepentant in their own support for the violence committed against the innocent preborn by chemical and surgical means every day in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world. It is impossible for men who contribute to social order to advance any kind of order except a perverse order that silences all opposition to their evil plans and completes the job begun in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, to turn the United States of America into a police state.

As has been noted in my “Sin: More Deadly Than the Coronavirus” series, the plandemicists have fanned the flames of fear even more than had President George Walker Bush and Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney twenty years ago so that people worldwide, including here in the United States of America, will accept more and more limitations on their legitimate liberties in the name of “public health” in order to accept the total elimination of dissenting voices lest there be a repetition of what happened on January 6, 2021.

The hypocrisy of this present time is pretty bold and self-righteous given the fact that the very same people denouncing violence in the Capitol were defending violence during the summer:

What a difference a week makes. On Wednesday, we discovered that House Democrats actually support police. They are against mob violence. They believe in law and order. They believe in harsh punishment for rule breakers. They believe in accountability.

They care deeply about civility. They believe words matter. They abhor intemperate rhetoric. They are against coarse language. Fancy that.

They believe in a peaceful transition of power, at least this time, as opposed to 2016. They believe in the Electoral College. They believe in the legitimacy of the people’s vote.

They believe in walls, at least when it comes to protecting their own place of work. They even believe in bringing in the National Guard to quell civil unrest, at least when it comes to preserving their own peace.

They believe in guns, at least when their own safety is at risk.

They revere American history and institutional norms. They honor the Founding Fathers. Hah!

This is what we learned while watching the Democrats in the House impeach President Trump for the second pointless time in 13 months.

We learned that they, almost to a man and a woman, suffer from an acute case of hypocrite-itis.

Where have they been the past four years with these noble ideas that conservatives have been begging them to defend?

Perhaps if Democrats had not normalized and encouraged violence when organized BLM-Antifa mobs began rampaging through our cities, the tragic events of Jan. 6 at the Capitol would not have occurred.

As Republican Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas said Wednesday:

“Last summer the Antifa and BLM riots swept across our country. Businesses were destroyed, cities burned. It was not like the horrible hours we had on January 6. But rather, they went on for weeks and in some cases months. 

“So if there’s any silver lining in this dark cloud, it’s that our friends across the aisle have come to realize that riots are bad. We conservatives have known this all along.”

Perhaps if Democrats had not weaponized the intelligence agencies to spy on President Trump’s campaign, perhaps if they had not used the Steele dossier to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency and accuse him of colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election, perhaps if they had not hobbled his administration with the three-year Mueller investigation, perhaps more Trump voters would have been willing to accept the legitimacy of a Biden presidency.

Perhaps if Dems had not already launched a spiteful partisan impeachment last year, their efforts to highlight the president’s shortcomings would have fallen on fewer deaf ears this time.

As Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said, it took just 19 minutes into Trump’s presidency for The Washington Post to trumpet: “Campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.” 

“And now with just one week left,” said Jordan Wednesday, “they’re still trying.”

Perhaps if Dems had reflected on their own culpability in the attempted assassination of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana by a Bernie Sanders supporter, their sanctimonious lectures Wednesday would be more credible.

“I’ve seen the evil of political violence firsthand and it needs to stop,” Scalise said Wednesday. “But all of us need to be unequivocal calling it out when we see it, not just when it comes from the other side of the aisle.”

Perhaps if Joe Biden had not spent two years muscling up to Trump, with threats like “I’d smack him in the mouth” and “I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” Biden’s pitch for civility might be more palatable.

Perhaps if Democrats had not spent the last four years calling Trump a dictator, authoritarian, Nazi, Hitler, white supremacist, anti-Semite, bigot, racist, hater, dangerous, demented and insane, then the hyperbole they used against him Wednesday might have been more effective.

The Aesop’s Fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” comes to mind. Democrats and their media handmaidens have spent four years demonizing Trump, using the most outlandish hyperbole their fevered imaginations could dream up.

So when finally, at the bitter end, when he behaves in a way that angers even his most loyal supporters, there is nowhere left to go in the demonization department.

Hence the absurdity of Wednesday’s rhetoric in the House, as Democrats overreached yet again, traducing the president as a “white supremacist” — or “racist in chief,” as Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan called him.

Instead of impeaching the president, the House could have censured him and gathered a lot more Republican votes.

His refrain since November about having won in a “landslide” was reckless and deluded but it had nothing to do with racism, and his speech at the Ellipse in DC on Jan. 6 explicitly called for the crowd to “peacefully” protest.

How was he to know that the Capitol would not be adequately guarded, and the mob would so easily smash their way inside?

Capitol Police had been left like lambs to the slaughter in part because the cop-hating mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, wrote to the Department of Justice the day before the protests specifically to reject federal reinforcements.

The flexible morality and selective outrage of the Democrats and their media boosters is so dishonest, it makes your head spin.

Why wasn’t BLM probed like this?

 At a thunderous press conference Tuesday, acting US Attorney for DC Michael Sherwin said law-enforcement officials are treating last week’s Capitol riot “like an international counterterrorism investigation. We’re looking at everything — money, travel records. No resource will be unchecked.” 

It is reportedly one of the “most expansive criminal investigations in the history of the Justice Department,” with all 56 FBI field offices involved.

Great, but where was that kind of gravitas when BLM-Antifa rioters locked Seattle police in a building and tried to burn them alive? 

Or when police were attacked with bricks and Molotov cocktails, whole blocks were looted and set ablaze at a cost of billions of dollars, and parts of some US cities were turned into lawless autonomous zones inside which people were murdered? For months.

There now are at least twice as many troops guarding the nation’s capital than the total number of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

Maybe it’s not overkill, but the optics also serve the purpose of further demonizing President Trump and his supporters to a worldwide audience. 

That’s why Nancy Pelosi posed merrily for photos outside the Capitol in front of rows of uniforms yesterday. All class, and subtle as a sledgehammer. (The Left’s Barefaced Hypocrisy.)

WASHINGTON, DC – In a chilling interview with Stephen Colbert, smiling Democrat Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris basically promised continued violence from Black Lives Matter in this country for the foreseeable future.

The interview took place in June on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

It began with Colbert asking Harris about her participation in recent protests in Washington, D.C.

Harris described what “protests” meant to her, saying:

“…the greatest movements that we have seen in the history of our country … have been born out of protests, have been born out of understanding the power of the people to take to the streets and force their government to become… to address what is wrong, the inequities, the inequalities… to force the government to be true to the ideals that we say we hold dear.”

“Almost every one of those marches has been about one fundamental ideal in our country, which is equal justice under law… these protests, I think, are the catalyst to getting there.”

Smiling, Harris then recounted how she saw the recent protests as:

“a beautiful sight, people of every race, age, gender, together.”

Harris also told Colbert,

“We have arrived at a point in our country that we should recognize, this is not just a moment, it is a movement… fueled by the beautiful diversity of who we are, coming together as a unified body, demanding… change and justice for everyone.”

Colbert pointed out that the news media has not been giving wide coverage to the protests, and asked Harris how important it was for the protests to continue.

Harris responded:

“It’s critically important.”

Harris then added:

“I grew up in a community that was not always on the best end of law enforcement in terms of how the laws were applied.”

Kamala Harris fully supports the BLM/Antifa riots. Don’t be fooled by harmless ole Joe Biden. He’s a means to an end. 

She continued:

“There’s not a black man I know, be he a relative or a friend, who has not been the subject of some sort of racial profiling or excessive force.”

She added that she became a prosecutor to “go inside the system” and create change.

Harris then spoke glowingly of the activities of Black Lives Matter, saying:

“I am very clear that some of the success that we’ve been able to achieve around criminal justice reform would not have happened in recent years were it not for Black Lives Matter.

“And the intensity and the brilliance of that movement that forced, at least, that there would be some counter-force to the status quo which is so reluctant to change, if not hostile to change.”

Kamala Harris Refuses to Denounce Riots in Interview With Stephen Colbert & Promises More Protests.

Smiling and agreeing when Colbert mentioned that protests are still ongoing, Harris added:

“But they’re not gonna stop.  They’re not gonna stop.  And that’s – they’re not – this is a movement, I’m telling you.  They’re not gonna stop.”

In an apparent warning, she continued:

“And everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop….

“They’re not gonna stop before election day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after election day.

“And that should be – everyone should take note of that.”

Harris continued:

“They’re not gonna let up.  And they should not.  And we should not.”

Not once did Colbert or Harris touch on the violent nature of the “protests” across the United States, with their multiple millions of dollars in property damage, murders, arson and destroyed businesses, and aggravated violence against law enforcement. (Kamal Harris Praises Black Lives Maters “Protests”.)

This should be no kind of surprise, however, as I noted in An Inversion of Truth: The Secular Magisterium and Censoring  three months ago that the time of complete censorship is upon us. The concepts of unrestrained “free speech,” “free press” and religiously liberty were bound to lead men and their societies into the abyss and the rise of a monstrous totalitarianism that help to further the way for Antichrist:

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws — in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. (Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832.)

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of “naturalism,” as they call it, dare to teach that “the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones.” And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.” From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an “insanity,” viz., that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.” But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching “liberty of perdition;” and that “if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling.”

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that “the people’s will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right.” But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?” (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only passport to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from the business of life, from the making of laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow, and, by setting forth most urgent reasons for virtuous life, bids us not only to turn away from wicked deeds, but even to curb all movements of the mind that are opposed to reason, even though they be not carried out in action. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

The entire premise of unfettered “freedom of speech,” freedom of press” and of Modernity and Modernism’s embrace “religious liberty” gives free rein to the devil, who has been using the veneer of “liberty” to sow such chaos and confusion as to make inevitable the triumph of a brutal totalitarianism. The adversary uses different means to accomplish his nefarious goals, and thus it has been and continues to be in the “free” United States of America that has never been as “free” as Americans have been convinced while they were lulled to sleep by an endless array of “bread circuses” (entertainment, good restaurants, competitive sports, etc.) while the coercive power of the civil state was being used to advance evil here and abroad in a manner that is almost unsurpassed in human history.

The putsch of the Big Tech giants who helped Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., win the presidency is simply a foretaste of what life will be like under the incoming administration. The high priests and priestesses who make Silicon Valley’s magisterial decisions about who and what to censor titled their algorithms to help Biden during the election last year and they are now banning “thought criminals” from their platforms (Twitter, Apple, Google, Facebook, et al.) in the aftermath of the tragedy that unfolded on January 6, 2021.

The titans of “Big Teach know that the incoming administration will do everything imaginable to end all political dissent and “free speech,” such as it has ever been in the United States of America, by indemnifying the long-established practices of schools, colleges, universities, corporations, so-called journalists and their media outlets, and professional sports of imposing a creeds of belief and codes of speech that carry with them career-ending punishments and social shame, although the Biden-Harris administration may not settle for shame and seek to create Red Chinese and Soviet style “re-education” centers (concentration camps) for those guilty of thought and speech “crimes.” Perhaps even more immediately in our future is state-imposed version of a Red Chinese system of “social credits,” something that major corporations, including some health insurers, are using sub rosa at this time. It will probably be the case that one can view his “social credit” score on Experian, Transunion, or Equifax the same way one views his financial credit score.

Indeed, there already moves to silence various babblers of naturalism on “talk radio,” although none of Big Tech censors appear to be going after Rush Hudson Limbaugh, for whose conversion to the true Faith we must pray before he dies, as his voice will silenced soon enough. Our minders in the civil state and their protectors in Big Tech have had it with the experiment of “free speech” and “freedom of assembly,” believing, of course that they, much like the dictators of Communist nations in the past and of the present (Red China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos; dishonorable mention, though, should go to Nicaragua, Spain, and Venezuela), can flaunt whatever rules exist for the peasants while enjoying la dolce vita for themselves.

No, do not be shocked by the hypocrisy and do not expect any kind of justice from those who are themselves personally unjust, those who scoff at supernatural and natural truths that bind the consciences of all men at all times and in all places. The secular magisterium of these days is composed of believe who believe themselves to be, in effect, to be demigods beyond criticism when they are actually demagogues beyond compare.

The demagoguery is such that there has been a collective effort on the part of “left” and their censorious friends in Big Tech and the mainslime media to deny that there were any election irregularities, no less outright fraud, whatsoever, something they keep repeating aggressively in same manner that they kept repeating the lie of Russian collusion to harass, hound and cripple the Trump administration from the beginning.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has found proof of voter fraud in the Lone Star State, and where there is smoke, of course, there is usually fire:

'Many continue to claim that there's no such thing as election fraud. We've always known that such a claim is false and misleading, and today we have additional hard evidence,' Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said.

A Texas woman has been arrested on felony charges of election fraud, illegal voting, unlawfully assisting people voting by mail, and unlawfully possessing an official ballot, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Wednesday.

And Paxton said the suspect got caught on a Project Veritas video in the midst of "shocking and blatantly illegal action."

"Many continue to claim that there's no such thing as election fraud," the attorney general added. "We've always known that such a claim is false and misleading, and today we have additional hard evidence."

What are the details?

Paxton's office said Rachel Rodriguez was exposed in a Project Veritas video last fall while engaging in vote harvesting leading up to the 2020 election, adding that his office's Election Fraud Division reviewed dozens of hours of unedited, raw footage, which led to her arrest.

At one point, Rodriguez was caught acknowledging that her actions were illegal and that she could go to jail for it, Paxton's office said.

convicted, Rodriguez could face up to 20 years in prison, his office added.

KSAT-TV reported that while the release from Paxton's office spelled Rodriguez's first name "Rachel," public records repeatedly spell it "Raquel."

The station added that in the Project Veritas video Rodriguez appears to show an older woman how to change her vote on a mail-in ballot, and she also described various types of small gifts she gets for voters she comes into contact with.

Police on Wednesday told KSAT that Rodriguez was arrested on San Antonio's east side and that the attorney general's office asked for assistance transporting her. Rodriguez was still in the process of being taken to jail just before noon Wednesday, the station added. Her arrest occurred Wednesday morning, the AG's office told KSAT.

Anything else?

"This is a victory for election integrity and a strong signal that anyone who attempts to defraud the people of Texas, deprive them of their vote, or undermine the integrity of elections will be brought to justice," Paxton added.

His office also said that individuals involved in or with knowledge of "this organized vote harvesting scheme are encouraged to come forward and cooperate with the Office of the Attorney General." (Woman Arrested on election fraud charges after getting caught on a Project Veritas Video, Officials Say.)

No, the concern about election fraud is genuine and a great deal more of it occurred through the nation, especially in the “swing” states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Even though the efforts to present such documented evidence in the joint meeting of Congress on January 6, 2021, was thwarted by the actions of the Capitol rioters, although it is a fair question to ask if that wasn’t the point of why the rioters gained access to the Capitol building in the first place, but it is more likely the case that the rioters were simply just plain stupid and thus did not realize how they were hurting the cause of the president and the case about election fraud that was about to be laid out with great specificity in the joint meeting of Congress nine days ago. As noted earlier, the fact that Democrats control the United States House of Representatives foreclosed all possibility of the success of the electoral vote challenges, the rioters kept ordinary Americans who had believed there was no election fraud or irregularities from hearing the evidence.

Hypocrisy has always been the order of the day in American politics, and the effort of the members of the organized crime family of naturalism of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” is just a perfection of the suppression of dissent against the “received truth” of this or that faction of the synagogue. The fact that the United States House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald John Trump a second time on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, the Octave Day of the Epiphany, is yet another proof, not that we needed any, that the goal of the organized crime family of the naturalist “left” is to silence all opposition while providing the illusion of opposition by “tolerating” those members of the false opposite of the naturalist “right” who accept their agenda of statism and want to play by the “rules” at which the “left” scoffs as they, the “left” play by the rules of the adversary himself.

Hypocrite Jorge Enters the Fray

As could be expected, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is a perfect stooge for Antichrist’s forces of the One World Governance and its subsidiary, the One World Ecumenical Church, denounced the Capitol rioters after praising “social justice” “protestors” in the United States in general and Marxist, pro-sodomite “black lives matter” in particular throughout the course of the past eight months, including meeting with a group of National Basketball Association (NBA) players two months ago:

A delegation of NBA players and executives from their union met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Monday as training camps are set to open next week and a new season is scheduled to tip-off in less than a month.

The private gathering was reportedly initiated by His Holiness and hurriedly planned. According to a statement issued by the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) afterward, “the meeting provided an opportunity for the Players to discuss their individual and collective efforts addressing social and economic justice and inequality occurring in their communities.”

#PopeFrancis met today with reps of the NBA Players Association to talk about their efforts to promote racial equality, social justice & to feed the poor. 

The union identified its contingent as “the NBPA’s group.” It included Sterling Brown, who recently agreed to a one-year deal with the Houston Rockets, the Orlando Magic’s Jonathan Isaac, free agents Kyle Korver, Marco Belinelli, and Anthony Tolliver, along with three NBPA officials.

The 30-minute discussion took place in the papal library of the Apostolic Palace, where attendees did not wear face coverings despite second waves of coronavirus infections that have recently hit Italy and the United States hard.

“We are extremely honored to have had this opportunity to come to the Vatican and share our experiences with Pope Francis,” Korver said after the meeting. “His openness and eagerness to discuss these issues was inspiring and a reminder that our work has had a global impact and must continue moving forward.” (Jorge Meets woth NBA players to discuss “social and economic justice”.)

This was case of the blindest, Bergoglio, leading the willfully blinded, professional sports players of any sort. Bergoglio is a consummate naturalist who is constitutionally incapable of seeing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.

The Argentine Apostate’s statements about the Capitol riots on the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Wednesday, January 6, 2021, contained his “astonishment” at the Capitol siege and his disbelief that events like this could take place in a democracy, which he holds to be as “sacred,” of course, as the man he despises, Donald John Trump, holds “sacred” a mythical landslide that is the result of his own delusional fantasies and his anger at not being able to accept the will of God while being oblivious to the demographic changes that are turning former “red” states” “purplish” or “blue”:

VATICAN CITY -- Pope Francis said Sunday that he is praying for those who died in the U.S. Capitol rioting and has appealed for calm to prevail in the United States to help safeguard that nation's democratic values.

During his traditional Sunday noon remarks at the Vatican, Francis noted that five persons had died when a mob stormed through the building where Congress was meeting on Jan. 6. That meeting was to certify President-elect Joe Biden's election victory.

“Violence is always self-destructive,” Francis said. He appealed to a “high sense of responsibility” by leaders to “calm souls” to prevent further violence.

A mob stormed the Capitol after U.S. President Donald Trump exhorted a rally of supporters to head to the building and “fight like hell” to protest his U.S. loss in November's presidential election, which he, with no factual basis, claims was “stolen.”

The rioting left a Capitol police officer and four others dead.

“I offer an affectionate greeting to the people of the United States, shaken by the recent siege of Congress,” the pope said in remarks delivered from inside the Apostolic Palace, instead of from a window overlooking St. Peter's Square due to the pandemic. “I pray for those who lost their lives, five (persons), in those dramatic moments.”

“Nothing is gained with violence and so much is lost,” he said.

“I exhort the authorities of the state and the entire population to maintain a high sense of responsibility with the aim of calming souls, promoting national reconciliation and safeguarding the democratic values rooted in American society,” Francis said.

He then prayed to the Virgin Mary, the church's patron in the United States, to “help keep alive the the culture of encounter, the culture of caring, as the superior way to build together the common good" with “all those who live in that land.”

In separate comments to a private Italian TV network that are to be broadcast Sunday evening, Francis expressed his astonishment about the mob's attack. In that interview with Mediaset's Channel 5, he said “in the most mature reality, there is always something that doesn’t work, people who take a path against the community, against democracy and against the common good.” (Bergoglio Prays for the Dead, Appeals for Calm.)

While noting the completely false narrative of the American Broadcasting Company’s report about Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s statement that included the assertion that President Donald John Trump had called on those attending the “Save America” rally to riot and storm the Capitol, this writer is astonished that the false pontiff from Buenos Aires, Argentina, can be at all “astonished” at violence of any kind in a world that is founded a violent rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King that his own false church rejects. Fallen men who are not united in the common bonds of the true Faith and who live in open defiance of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are bound to conflict with each other in a violent manner as they live in states of Original Sin or habitual Mortal Sin have souls that are in captivity to the devil, who loves to incite men to have the same kind of hatred he has for God and for their own eternal salvation, and thus are drive, if not possessed, to wreak violence in order to rectify injustices, whether real or imagined.

Writing in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, Pope Pius XI explained the state of enmity between men and their nations that existed and had increased even after the end of World War I, an enmity that is even more pronounced today than it was ninety-eight years, one month ago:

Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man's personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.

22. It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: "Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit." (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14)

23. The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. "From whence are wars and contentions among you?" asks the Apostle St. James. "Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?" (James iv, 1, 2)

24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.

25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism -- the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ -- becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)

26. Perhaps the advantages to one's family, city, or nation obtained in some such way as this may well appear to be a wonderful and great victory (this thought has been already expressed by St. Augustine), but in the end it turns out to be a very shallow thing, something rather to inspire us with the most fearful apprehensions of approaching ruin. "It is a happiness which appears beautiful but is brittle as glass. We must ever be on guard lest with horror we see it broken into a thousand pieces at the first touch." (St. Augustine de Civitate Dei, Book iv, Chap. 3)

27. There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)

28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law. . . .

It is possible to sum up all We have said in one word, "the Kingdom of Christ." For Jesus Christ reigns over the minds of individuals by His teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one's life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example. Jesus reigns over the family when it, modeled after the holy ideals of the sacrament of matrimony instituted by Christ, maintains unspotted its true character of sanctuary. In such a sanctuary of love, parental authority is fashioned after the authority of God, the Father, from Whom, as a matter of fact, it originates and after which even it is named. (Ephesians iii, 15) The obedience of the children imitates that of the Divine Child of Nazareth, and the whole family life is inspired by the sacred ideals of the Holy Family. Finally, Jesus Christ reigns over society when men recognize and reverence the sovereignty of Christ, when they accept the divine origin and control over all social forces, a recognition which is the basis of the right to command for those in authority and of the duty to obey for those who are subjects, a duty which cannot but ennoble all who live up to its demands. Christ reigns where the position in society which He Himself has assigned to His Church is recognized, for He bestowed on the Church the status and the constitution of a society which, by reason of the perfect ends which it is called upon to attain, must be held to be supreme in its own sphere; He also made her the depository and interpreter of His divine teachings, and, by consequence, the teacher and guide of every other society whatsoever, not of course in the sense that she should abstract in the least from their authority, each in its own sphere supreme, but that she should really perfect their authority, just as divine grace perfects human nature, and should give to them the assistance necessary for men to attain their true final end, eternal happiness, and by that very fact make them the more deserving and certain promoters of their happiness here below.

It is, therefore, a fact which cannot be questioned that the true peace of Christ can only exist in the Kingdom of Christ -- "the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." It is no less unquestionable that, in doing all we can to bring about the re-establishment of Christ's kingdom, we will be working most effectively toward a lasting world peace. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Paragraph number twenty-eight above says it all:

They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

There is no getting the toothpaste of Modernity back in the tube any more than it is possible to get the toothpaste of Modernism back into its own tube. Great chastisements will have to come upon men and their nations to bring them to their knees. These chastisements will occur in God’s good time and according to His Holy Will. Everything “won” in one election is easily lost in another, and it is thus foolhardy to think that the demographic and sociological trends of a nation that was born in error and been nurtured and sustained in error will reverse the drift in the direction of socialism and all the miseries that always follow in its wake.

To understand reality as it is, not as we want it to be

As has been noted so regularly on this site, we must always recognize the simple fact that our sins have played a significant part in worsening the state of the Church Militant on earth and the world-at-large. While we must pray always for the conversion of heretics, schismatics and all non-Catholics, we must first of all pray and work daily for our own conversion away from our sins, including our sins of spiritual torpor and our worldliness. We need to make reparation for our sins as we offer unto the throne of the Most Blessed Trinity all our prayers, sacrifices, sufferings, good work, fasting and almsgiving as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Suffering and reparation are not optional in the lives of Catholics as it is impossible to build up the Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ socially if we do not first build up His Kingship in our souls.

There is no getting this back by means merely human, especially when one is sobered up enough to consider that the reason that the States of Arizona and Georgia are turning “blue” is because of demographic and social changes that are irreversible. Many people from states such as California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington, and Oregon are moving to warmer climes, including here in Texas, and they are bringing the same failed statist politics that ruined their home states to their new places of residence. The United States of America is coming apart now precisely because it was pastiched together by a welter of errors that were bound to result in what we are witnessing presently.

Remember, error divides, Catholicism unites.

More to the point, error divides men into warring camps of naturalism, only Catholicism can unite men in a common bond of Faith and to therefore produce civil leaders who are intent on pursuing the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End and in full accord with the summary of Catholic Social Teaching as summarized by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

The fact that the conditions favorable to a Catholic state do not exist at this time does nothing to detract from the immutability of the Catholic teaching explicated so clearly by Pope Saint Pius X.

Indeed, the fact that the conditions favorable to a Catholic state do not exist at this time is the result of the proliferation of a deliberate, planned attack by the adversary himself upon it by using the combined, interrelated errors of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry to uproot the Holy Cross as the foundation of personal and social order in Europe and to make sure it was not the foundation of such order here in the United States of America.

Nations that do not place themselves under the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King must live under the tyranny of the shifting sands of popular sovereignty and of the caesars and caesarettes who believe that we exist to do as “we are told” as they cluck, cluck, cluck about “just” they are while promoting evils that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

The best response to the statism of the moment that is but the inevitable consequence of the Protestant overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the rise of scads of Judeo-Masonic ideologies promising “the people” some form of secular salvation is to be found in an address given by Archbishop of Venice, Giuseppe Melchiorre, in 1896:

In August 1896 in Padua, the second Congress of the Catholic Union for Social Studies took place. We have already seen that this organization had been created seven years before by Professor Giuseppe Toniolo, in the presence of the Bishop of Mantua [Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto]. This time, eight bishops were present and several directors of the Opera del Congressi took part. All the eminent representatives of the Italian Catholic Movement were present (Medolago Pagnuzzi, Alessi and others). Cardinal Sarto’s address attracted considerable notice. Faced with “ardent enemies” (unbelief and revolution) “…menacing and trying to destroy the social fabric,” the Patriarch of Venice invited the participants to make Jesus Christ the foundation of their work: “the only peace treaty is the Gospel.” He warned them against what is now called the “welfare state,” the state which provides everything and provides all socialization: “substituting public almsgiving for private almsgiving involves the complete destruction of Christianity and it is a terrible attack on the principle of ownership. Christianity cannot exist without charity, and the difference between charity and justice is that justice may have recourse to laws and even to force, depending on the circumstances, whereas charity can only be imposed by the tribunal of God and of conscience.” If public assistance and the redistribution of wealth are institutionalized, “poverty becomes a function, a way of life, a public trade…” (Yves Chiron, Saint Pius X: Restorer of the Church. Translated by Graham Harrison. Angelus Press, 2002, p. 100)

No formula of a naturalist of the “left” or of the “right” can produce true improvement that will redound to men and their nations. It is only by light of the Catholic Faith that men can see clearly enough to pursue temporal matters in light of eternity.

Get out of the diabolical trap of naturalism.

Refuse to be agitated by the “talking heads” on radio and television who do not understand anything about First and Last Things and thus whose histrionics are nothing more than the injurious babbling spoken of by Pope Pius IX as they do not understand that the remote cause of all human problems is Original Sin and that their proximate causes are to be found in the Actual Sins of men and thus can be remedied only by the daily conversion of souls as they seek to grow in sanctity by cooperating with the graces sent to them by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

These “talking heads” make constant advertence to the genius of the “founding fathers,” men who a founding hatred for Christ the King, and their founding principles that have convinced men that they can establish a social order without regard to any religion, no less the true religion, which is the very premise of Judeo-Masonry. How can men who believe in the very principles that are the fruit of the Protestant Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Judeo-Masonry that are the foundation of “American exceptionalism” help us to understand issues that must be viewed through the deeper, supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith? They can’t.

Consider these words of Father Edward Leen and learn from them once and for all, please!

A shudder of apprehension is traversing the world which still retains its loyalty to Jesus expressing Himself through the authority of His Church. That apprehension has not its sole cause the sight of the horrors that the world has witnessed in recent years in both hemispheres. Many Christians are beginning to feel that perhaps all may not be right with themselves. There is solid reason for this fear. The contemplation of the complete and reasoned abandonment of all hitherto accepted human values that has taken place in Russia and is taking place elsewhere, causes a good deal of anxious soul-searching. It is beginning to be dimly perceived that in social life, as it is lived, even in countries that have not as yet definitely broken with Christianity, there lie all the possibilities of what has become actual in Bolshevism. A considerable body of Christians, untrained in the Christian philosophy of life, are allowing themselves to absorb principles which undermine the constructions of Christian thought. They do not realise how much dangerous it is for Christianity to exist in an atmosphere of Naturalism than to be exposed to positive persecution. In the old days of the Roman Empire those who enrolled themselves under the standard of Christ saw, with logical clearness, that they had perforce to cut themselves adrift from the social life of the world in which they lived–from its tastes, practices and amusements. The line of demarcation between pagan and Christian life was sharp, clearly defined and obvious. Modern Christians have not been so favorably situated. As has been stated already, the framework of the Christian social organisation has as yet survived. This organisation is, to outward appearances, so solid and imposing that it is easy to be blind to the truth that the soul had gradually gone out of it. Under the shelter and utilising the resources of the organisation of life created by Christianity, customs, ways of conduct, habits of thought, have crept in, more completely perhaps, at variance with the spirit of Christianity than even the ways and manners of pagan Rome.

This infiltration of post-Christian paganism has been steady but slow, and at each stage is imperceptible. The Christian of to-day thinks that he is living in what is to all intents and purposes a Christian civilisation. Without misgivings he follows the current of social life around him. His amusements, his pleasures, his pursuits, his games, his books, his papers, his social and political ideas are of much the same kind as are those of the people with whom he mingles, and who may not have a vestige of a Christian principle left in their minds. He differs merely from them in that he holds to certain definite religious truths and clings to certain definite religious practices. But apart from this there is not any striking contrast in the outward conduct of life between Christian and non-Christian in what is called the civilised world. Catholics are amused by, and interested in, the very same things that appeal to those who have abandoned all belief in God. The result is a growing divorce between religion and life in the soul of the individual Christian. Little by little his faith ceases to be a determining effect on the bulk of his ideas, judgments and decisions that have relation to what he regards as his purely “secular” life. His physiognomy as a social being no longer bears trace of any formative effect of the beliefs he professes. And his faith rapidly becomes a thing of tradition and routine and not something which is looked to as a source of a life that is real.

The Bolshevist Revolution has had one good effect. It has awakened the averagely good Christian to the danger runs in allowing himself to drift with the current of social life about him. It has revealed to him the precipice towards which he has was heading by shaping his worldly career after principles the context of which the revolution has mercilessly exposed and revealed to be at variance with real Christianity. The sincerely religious–and there are many such still–are beginning to realise that if they are to live as Christians they must react violently against the milieu in which they live. It is beginning to be felt that one cannot be a true Christian and live as the bulk of men in civilised society are living. It is clearly seen that “life” is not to be found along those ways by which the vast majority of men are hurrying to disillusionment and despair. Up to the time of the recent cataclysm the average unreflecting Christian dwelt in the comfortable illusion that he could fall in with the ways of the world about him here, and, by holding on to the practices of religion, arrange matters satisfactorily for the hereafter. That illusion is dispelled. It is coming home to the discerning Christian that their religion is not a mere provision for the future. There is a growing conviction that it is only through Christianity lived integrally that the evils of the present time can be remedied and disaster in the time to come averted. (Father Edward Leen, The Holy Ghost, published in 1953 by Sheed and Ward, pp. 6-9.)

What should we do?

To Accept God’s Holy Will in All Things

Catholics must accept God’s Holy Will in all things and to stop kicking against the goad when things in their own lives or in the world turn out as they either expected or had prayed that they would be. It is because President Donald John Trump is incapable of accepting God’s Holy Will as He manifests itself to him in the economy of Divine Providence that he, a serial blasphemer who uses the most foul, vulgar language in his private life and in his notorious “rallies” before throngs of his fellow blasphemers and users of profane crudities as part of their own speech, must lash out at allies such as Michael Richard Pence when they do not do what he wants done or fail to change the course of things as they have unfolded within the Providence of God.

Blessed Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., who was a confessor of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and of the Princess of York, Mary of Modena, the wife of the last Catholic king of England, King James II, at the Court of Saint James, wrote a short book on Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence that has much to teach each of us about the necessity of refusing to be agitated in the midst of the events of this world and stop the utter insanity of Catholics, of all people, wasting their good Catholic time on addictions to conspiracy websites, especially QAnon, that elevate their hopes for some “naturalistic” shortcut to prevent the chastisements of the just God from being delivered upon us.

Here are some relevant passages from Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence:

It is one of the most firmly established and most consoling of the truths that have been revealed to us that (apart from sin) nothing happens to us in life unless God wills it so. Wealth and poverty alike come from Him. If we fall ill, God is the cause of our illness; if we get well, our recovery is due to God. We owe our lives entirely to Him, and when death comes to put an end to life, His will be the hand that deals the blow.

But should we attribute it to God when we are unjustly persecuted? Yes, He is the only person you can charge with the wrong you suffer. He is not the cause of the sin the person commits by ill-treating you, but He is the cause of the suffering that person inflicts on you while sinning. God did not inspire your enemy with the will to harm you, but He gave him the power to do so. If you receive a wound, do not doubt but that it is God Himself who has wounded you. If all living creatures were to league themselves against you, unless the Creator wished it and joined with them and gave them the strength and means to carry out their purpose, they would never succeed. You would have no power over me if it had not been given you from above, the Savior of the world said to Pilate. We can say the same to demons and men, to the brute beasts and to whatever exists — You would not be able to disturb me or harm me as you do unless God had ordered it so. You are sent by Him, you are given the power by Him to tempt me and to make me suffer. You would have no power over me if it had not been given you from above.

If from time to time we meditated seriously on this truth of our faith it would be enough to stifle all complaint in whatever loss or misfortune we suffer. What I have the Lord gave me, it has been taken away by Him. It is not a lawsuit or a thief that has ruined you or a certain person that has slandered you; if your child dies it is not by accident or wrong treatment, but because God, to whom all belongs, has not wished you to keep it longer.  (Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, p. 40, as found online at: Trustful Surrender To Divine Providence.)

Perhaps someone who reads this site could send the president a copy of Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence as it appears that he is still raging about his defeat and what he can do “exact revenge” on the ten Republican members of the United States House of Representatives who voted to impeach him on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, the Octave Day of the Epiphany:

ustrated by the loss of his Twitter account and forced to accept that he soon must leave office, President Trump has effectively stopped doing his job, delegating daily responsibilities to Vice President Mike Pence while hunkering down with a shrinking group of acquiescent aides and contemplating additional presidential pardons.

Trump had considered leaving the White House before his final day in office Wednesday, even as early as this weekend, but he has opted to depart on the morning of President-elect Joe Biden's Inauguration Day, according to two people familiar with discussions who cautioned that, with Trump, plans are always subject to change.

Intrigued by the idea of upstaging Biden, the ever self-centered president has requested a major sendoff. It would begin with a throng of cheering, flag-waving staffers and supporters to see him off on the White House's South Lawn, according to a person familiar with the planning, and continue to a more formal ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, featuring a red carpet, military band, color guard and 21-gun salute. He'll make his final Air Force One flight to Florida, to take up residence at Mar-a-Lago, his West Palm Beach, Fla., estate.

While Trump is still unwilling to formally concede to Biden directly, or to participate in the traditional show of the peaceful transfer of power by attending his successor's swearing-in, Pence on Thursday called Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and "congratulated her and offered assistance ahead of inauguration," according to a person familiar with the call.

Pence, his relationship with Trump all but severed now because he refused to abet the president's efforts to defy the Constitution and overturn the election result, confirmed earlier in the week that he plans to attend Biden's inauguration. Trump, in one of his final tweets last week, made it clear he would not be going.

Previously, Trump had floated the idea of leaving town early to avoid having to host Biden at the White House before the inauguration ceremonies at the Capitol, as has long been traditional — to provide the time-honored photo of the outgoing and incoming presidents that gives visual definition to America's peaceful transfer of power. Though he now might stay until Inauguration Day, Trump still has no plans to meet with the president-elect.

His administration this week did extend one traditional courtesy, inviting Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, to stay at Blair House, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, on the eve of the inauguration.

Finally forced by the bipartisan furor after last week's insurrection at the Capitol to acknowledge the "new administration" — if not his defeat — Trump has withdrawn almost completely from the duties of the job he fought so hard to keep. Aides and friends who have spoken with him this week describe him as "irate" about Twitter deleting his account, but also say he's been sobered somewhat by warnings from his lawyers about his potential legal liability for inciting last week's deadly riot.

Since the moment the pro-Trump mob smashed through the Capitol doors and into the House and Senate chambers to stop Congress' count of the electoral votes, Pence has effectively taken over the responsibilities of the presidency. With Trump mesmerized by live television coverage of his supporters fighting for him, it fell to Pence — who'd been presiding over the count, and had to be rushed into hiding — to authorize the deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia to quell the mob.

Just a week later, the president was watching television again — with country music star Toby Keith, to whom he gave a medal — as the House voted to impeach him for inciting an insurrection, making him the only president to be impeached twice. He was confident the Senate again would fail to convict him, according to one person who speaks with him regularly, and focused mostly on his ire at the 10 House Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment, peppering aides with questions about who some of the lawmakers were and what he could do to exact revenge.

Trump spent time Thursday instructing aides to knock down reports of his frustration with Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the few outside attorneys still willing to defend him. That afternoon, while Trump took farewell photos with staffers as others loaded boxes into moving vans and cars just outside the West Wing, Pence visited the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a briefing about security preparations for the inauguration ceremony.

After the meeting, Pence told reporters that the government would "ensure that we have a safe inauguration, that President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are sworn in ... in a manner consistent with our history and traditions."

On his way home, Pence stopped to greet some of the 20,000 National Guardsmen posted outside the Capitol, thanking them for their service to ensure the inauguration ceremonies are safe.

By Friday, Trump still had not addressed the nation about reports from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that domestic terrorists, emboldened by the breach of the Capitol that left at least five dead, threatened not only the inauguration but all 50 state capitals.

My Pillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell, one of Trump's staunchest defenders in arguing that fraud cost the president reelection, was spotted around an otherwise quiet White House. As Lindell left the West Wing, a photographer captured an image showing that the notes he was holding referred to "martial law" and the "Insurrection Act."

Pence is also scheduled to deliver an address Saturday on the administration's "foreign policy accomplishments" at California's Naval Air Station Lemoore, and then to the 10th Mountain Division, in Fort Drum, N.Y., his office announced Wednesday.

Typically, outgoing presidents take part in an official farewell ceremony with members of the armed forces. Trump, however, isn't bothering. On Thursday, the White House emailed a brief statement to reporters from Trump that could mark a final, 67-word valedictory. It was, above all, a salute to himself.

"United States military troops in Afghanistan are at a 19-year low. Likewise, Iraq and Syria are also at the lowest point in many years," the president said. "I will always be committed to stopping the endless wars. It has been a great honor to rebuild our military and support our brave men and women in uniform. $2.5 trillion invested, including in beautiful new equipment — all made in the U.S.A."

Spending his final days almost entirely out of view, Trump is said to be readying a number of pardons and weighing whether to give one to himself. A self-pardon would be an act of untested and dubious constitutionality and one — at a time when he and his family business are under investigation — suggesting indifference to the law in an effort to inoculate himself from any federal prosecutions.

Those who have been in contact with the president are loath to predict whether he will go through with the brazen move. His calculations now must be weighed against the unsettled matter of his impeachment trial in the Senate; a conviction could bar him from ever seeking office again.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made it clear in a statement Wednesday that he is open to voting in favor of Trump's conviction, a move some administration officials say was intended to dissuade the president from a self-pardon or any other damaging moves in his final days.

"He knows self-pardon is fraught, will invite scrutiny and does not protect him from state actions," one former senior administration official said of Trump. But the calculation, the official said, was more about "whether it's ultimately worth the scrutiny and hassle" than any impeachment endgame. (Trump Retreats From His Daily Job, Lets Pence Become de facto Acting President. I do not think that Mr. Lindell's carrying notes that contained the words "martial law" and "insurrection act" was accidental as I think that the president is atempting to cause agita amongst those of his critics, especially Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, who think that he is capable of using the insurrection act to impose martial law. In other words, Trump is letting his critics get agitated enough to waste their time writing about a military coup that is not going to happen.)

This is the man so many sought to defend, a man who gets irate because, no matter how unjust the censorship, of course, cannot accept the fact that he has lost his “twitter” account?

To paraphrase Saint Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, “Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ asked what doth it profit a man to gain the whole and suffer the loss of his soul, but for twitter? For twitter?”

Please, sober up.

Sure, Donald John Trump has been the victim of numerous injustices, including the latest impeachment vote that was void of all due process, not that such is required by the Constitution of the United States of America as it is not, but to commit the unspeakable blasphemy of the heretic named William Franklin Graham III, the son of the late Fuller Brush Man himself, William Franklin Graham, Jr., of comparing the injustices that the president has suffered in the past five and one-half years to those of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is simply obscene and to divinize a man who does not even know how to accept God’s Holy Will or, of course, to carry his cross with joy,  serenity, and gratitude:

The Rev. Franklin Graham compared the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump to Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the Roman authorities.

In a Facebook post Thursday in which Mr. Graham praised Mr. Trump at length while also calling the day of the assault on the U.S. Capitol “a low point in his presidency,” the minister declared “shame, shame” on those GOP lawmakers who “joined with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday.”

“The House Democrats impeached him because they hate him and want to do as much damage as they can,” said Mr. Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

“And these ten, from his own party, joined in the feeding frenzy. It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal,” he said.

In Matthew’s Gospel, before the Last Supper, Judas goes to the chief Jewish priests in Jerusalem and is paid 30 pieces of silver to help hand over Jesus. Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts also say that the Temple authorities paid Judas without specifying an amount.

Matthew and Luke both say that Judas was filled with shame afterward; the former saying he committed suicide, the latter that a field swallowed up his body. (Franklin Graham Compares Republicans Voting to Impeach Trump to Judas’s Betrayal of Our Lord.)

One of my chief complaints about Catholics who have lost their minds over Donald John Trump since June 12, 2015, since he descended on the escalator from in his Trump Tower in the City of New York, to announce his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is the irrational tendency of so many, although not all, of them to place a near-salvific hope in a man who has no clue about how to save to save his own immortal soul and, worse yet, does not even given his salvation a moment’s thought as he stews in his justices about this or that injustice, real or imagined, slight  or exaggerated. This is not exactly the stuff of trustful surrender to Divine Providence!

As has been noted so many hundreds of times before on this site, this is the moment in God has from all eternity chosen us to live.

God is Omniscient. He lives outside of time and space. He sees both the beginning and the end of the world as an instant “now.”

This means that we must trust in Him at all times without complaint and to pray for the desire to accept the crosses of any given moment as the path He has chosen for us to work out our salvation in fear and in trembling as we seek to give glory unto Him as the consecrated slaves of His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

We are not to live our lives in fear of the titans of the corporate world, including those in “Big Tech, or in fear of the forgettable men of politics who must meet Christ the King as their Divine Judge when they die after lifetimes of scoffing at Him, His Holy Church, and applicability, if not the very existence, of His sacred truths in the social lives of men and their nations.

Remember, God is more powerful thatn Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr, Kamala Harris, Charles Schumer, Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, et al. We must have an abiding trust in Divine Providence, and to recognize that the United States of America is overdue for the chasisement that is about to descend upon us.

Perhaps it is wise to consider the account of a locution that Saint Anthony Mary Claret had on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1859:

"On Christmas Day God infused into me the love of persecution and calumnies. . . . I dreamed I was imprisoned for a crime of which I was innocent. . . . To one who would have defended me, as St. Peter wished to defend Our Savior, I said: 'Shall I not drink the chalice my Father has given me?'

"On January 6, 1859, Our Lord made known to me that I am like the earth . . . which is trampled upon, yet doesn't speak. I, too, must be trodden underfoot and say nothing. The earth suffers cultivation. I must suffer mortification. Finally, to produce anything, the earth needs water; I, for the performance of good works, divine grace."

How consoling it must have been to hear Jesus promise him divine love, while tenderly addressing him as: "My little Anthony"--on April 27, 1859! And how he strove, ever harder, to obey his Redeemer's injunction, given at 4:25 a.m., on September 4, of that same year: "You have to teach your missionaries mortification, Anthony," to which, a few moments later, Our Lady added, "Thus will you reap fruit in souls, Anthony!"

And, now conditioned to receive supernatural messages in precise words and audible tones, and when they were precepts, to obey perfectly, he was ready for the most glorious promise and the most portentous revelation of all. "At 7:30 on the morning of September 23, Our Lord told me: 'You will fly across the earth . . . to preach of the immense chastisements soon to come to pass.' And He gave me to understand those words of the Apocalypse: 'And I behold and heard the voice of one eagle flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a a loud voice: Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabitants of the earth; by reason of the rest of the voices of the three angels who are yet to sound the trumpet.' this meant that the three great judgments of God that are going to fall upon the world are: 1) Protestantism and Communism; 2) the four archdemons who will,in a truly frightful manner, incite all to the love of pleasure, money, reason and independence of will; 3) the great wars with their horrible consequences."

Can we read this prophecy, set down for us a century ago, just when our world was entering upon the "golden age" of industry and commerce, of the scientific achievement that our grandfathers were assured was destined to create a life so good for all peoples that war would be banished forever, and doubt from whence it came? And do we dare to trace it from the Protestant Reformation to the curse of Communism; from the conquest of materialism to the deification of poor weak human reason and self-determination into "the great wars and their horrible consequences"! Upon the clean tablet of Anthony Claret's selfless spirit Our Lord engraved the warning His servant was to spell out for us" the incredible but inevitable graph of the "progress" of one century--our century! (Franchon Royer, The Life of St. Anthony Mary Claret, published originally in 1957 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1985, pp. 211-213.) 

Americans brought Protestantism with them to Cuba in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and thereafter. Communism followed in its wake sixty and one-half years later. 

The United States of America is founded upn Calvinist and Judeo-Masonoic principles. Communism was bound to follow over the course of time, and it is here in fact if not yet in name.

We must trust in God's Holy Providence and recognize the prophetic moment in which we are living.

Our Lady herself called upon Saint Anthony Mary Claret to be the new Saint Dominic of his time in order to spread devotion to her Most Holy Rosary:

On various other occasions during that perplexing year [1857] which had brought him home to Spain, he had been blessed by direct messages--in words--from the Blessed Mother. In October: "Now you know; be sorry for the sins of your pat life, and watchful in the future. . . . Do you hear me, Anthony? Be watchful in the future. This is what I have to say to you." And later: "You must be the Dominic of these times in propagating devotion to the Rosary."  (Franchon Royer, The Life of St. Anthony Mary Claret, published originally in 1957 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1985, p. 211.)

Fear of the events of this world must have no place in the life of a Catholic as the only thing that we must fear is Mortal Sin and terrible prospect of dying therein.

In a word, we must, as Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere wrote, trust in God’s inscrutable wisdom:

Trust in God's Wisdom

It is then a truth of our faith that God is responsible for all the happenings we complain of in the world and, furthermore, we cannot doubt that all the misfortunes God sends us have a very useful purpose. We cannot doubt it without imputing to God a lack of judgment in deciding what is advantageous for us.

It is usually the case that other people can see better than we can ourselves what is good for us. It would be foolish to think that we can see better than God Himself, Who is not subject to any of the passions that blind us, knows the future and can foresee all events and the consequences of every action.

Experience shows that even the gravest misfortunes can have good results and the greatest successes end in disaster. A rule also that God usually follows is to attain His ends by ways that are the opposite to those human prudence would normally choose.

In our ignorance of what the future holds, how can we be so bold as to question what comes about by God's permission? Surely it is reasonable to think that our complaints are groundless and that instead of complaining we ought to be thanking Providence. Joseph was sold into slavery and thrown into prison. If he had felt aggrieved at these apparent misfortunes, he would really have been feeling aggrieved at his happiness for they were the steps to the throne of Egypt. Saul loses his father's asses and has to go on a long vain hunt for them. But if he had felt annoyed at the great waste of time and energy it caused him, his annoyance could not have been more unreasonable as it was all a means of bringing him to the prophet who was to anoint him king of his people.

Let us imagine our confusion when we appear before God and understand the reasons why He sent us the crosses we accept so unwillingly. The death of a child will then be seen as its rescue from some great evil had it lived, separation from the woman you love the means of saving you from an unhappy marriage, a severe illness the reason for many years of life afterwards, loss of money the means of saving your soul from eternal loss. So what are we worried about?

God is looking after us and yet we are full of anxiety! We trust ourselves to a doctor because we suppose he knows his business. He orders an operation which involves cutting away part of our body and we accept it. We are grateful to him and pay him a large fee because we judge he would not act as he does unless the remedy were necessary, and we must rely on his skill. Yet we are unwilling to treat God in the same way! It looks as if we do not trust His wisdom and are afraid He cannot do His job properly. We allow ourselves to be operated on by a man who may easily make a mistake — a mistake which may cost us our life — and protest when God sets to work on us.

If we could see all He sees we would unhesitatingly wish all He wishes. We would beg Him on bended knees for those afflictions we now ask Him to spare us. To all of us He addresses the words spoken to the Sons of Zebedee: You know not what you ask — 0 blind of heart, your ignorance saddens me. Let me manage your affairs and look after your interests. I know what you need better than you do yourselves. If I paid heed to what you think you need you would have been hopelessly ruined long ago.  (Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, pp. 41-42, as found online at: Trustful Surrender To Divine Providence.)

Why are we so hesitant to accept these truths and thus to leave in peace?

Remember, the babblers of talk radio and all news cable channels and various naturalistic websites do not have anything to offer their listeners and/or viewers as they do not see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus wind up heightening anxiety and raising hopes in secular “solutions” needlessly.

Trials are the means by which we win God’s favor and show forth our total trust in Him to others:

When God sends us trials

If you would be convinced that in all He allows and in all that happens to you God has no other end in view but your real advantage and your eternal happiness, reflect a moment on all He has done for you; you are now suffering, but remember that the author of this suffering is He who chose to spend His life suffering to save you from everlasting suffering, whose angel is always at your side guarding your body and soul by His order, who sacrifices Himself daily on the altar to expiate your sins and appease His Father's anger, who comes lovingly to you in the Holy Eucharist and whose greatest pleasure is to be united to you. We must be very ungrateful to mistrust Him after

He has shown such proofs of His love and to imagine that He can intend us harm. But, you will say, this blow is a cruel one, He strikes too hard. What have you to fear from a hand that was pierced and nailed to the cross for you? — The path I have to tread is full of thorns. If there is no other to reach heaven by, do you prefer to perish forever rather than to suffer for a time? Is it not the same path He trod before you out of love for you? Is there a thorn in it that He has not reddened with His own blood? — The chalice He offers you is a bitter one. But remember that it is your Redeemer who offers it.

Loving you as He does, could He bring Himself to treat you so severely if the need were not urgent, the gain not worthwhile? Can we dare to refuse the chalice He has prepared for us Himself?

Reflect well on this. It should be enough to make us accept and love whatever trials He intends we should suffer. Moreover it is the certain means of securing our happiness in this life quite apart from the next.

Loving recourse to God

Let us now suppose that by these reflections and the help of God you have freed yourself from all worldly desires and can now say to yourself: All is vanity and nothing can satisfy my heart. The things that I so earnestly desire may not be at all the things that will bring me happiness. It is difficult for me to distinguish what is good from what is harmful because good and evil are nearly always mixed, and what was good for yesterday may be bad for today. My desires are only a source of worry and my efforts to realize them mostly end in failure. After all, the will of God is bound to prevail in the end.

Nothing can be done without His command, and He cannot ordain anything that is not for my good.

After this let us suppose that you turn to God with blind trust and surrender yourself unconditionally and unreservedly to Him, entirely resolved to put aside your own hopes and fears; in short, determined to wish nothing except what He wishes and to wish all that He wishes. From this moment you will acquire perfect liberty and will never again be able to feel troubled or uneasy, and there is no power on earth capable of doing you violence or giving you a moment's unrest.

You may object that a person on whom both good and evil make the same impression is a pure fiction. It is nothing of the kind. I know people who are just as happy if they are sick or if they are well, if they are badly off or they are well off. I know some who even prefer illness and poverty to health and riches.

Moreover it is all the more remarkable that the more we submit to God's will, the more He tries to meet our wishes. It would seem that as soon as we make it our sole aim to obey Him, He on His part does His best to try and please us. Not only does He answer our prayers but He even forestalls them by granting the very desires we have endeavored to stifle in our hearts in order to please Him, and granting them in a measure we had never imagined.

Finally, the happiness of the person whose will is entirely submitted to God's is constant, unchangeable and endless. No fear comes to disturb it for no accident can destroy it. He is like a man seated on a rock in the middle of the ocean who looks on the fury of the waves without dismay and can amuse himself watching and counting them as they roar and break at his feet. Whether the sea is calm or rough, whichever way the waves are carried by the wind is a matter of indifference to him, for the place where he is firm and unshakeable. That is the reason for the peaceful and untroubled expression we find on the faces of those who have dedicated themselves to God. Practice of trustful surrender It remains to be seen how we can attain to this happy state.

One sure way to lead us to it is the frequent practice of the virtue of submission. But as the opportunities for practicing it in a big way come rather seldom, we must take advantage of the small ones which occur daily, and which will soon put us in a position to face the greater trials with equanimity when the time comes. There is no one who does not experience a hundred small annoyances every day, caused either by our own carelessness or inattention, or by the inconsideration or spite of other people, or by pure accident. Our whole lives are made up of incidents of this kind, occurring ceaselessly from one minute to another and producing a host of involuntary feelings of dislike and aversion, envy, fear and impatience to trouble the serenity of our minds. We let an incautious word slip out and wish we had not said it; someone says something we find offensive; we have to wait a long time to be served when we are in a hurry; we are irritated by a child's boisterousness; a boring acquaintance buttonholes us in the street; a car splashes us with mud; the weather spoils our outing; our work is not going as well as we would wish; a tool breaks at a critical moment; we get our clothes torn or stained — these are not occasions for practicing heroic virtue but they can be a means of acquiring it if we wish. If we were careful to offer all these petty annoyances to God and accept them as being ordered by His providence we would soon be in a position to support the greatest misfortunes that can happen to us, besides at the same time insensibly drawing close to intimate union with God.

To this exercise — so easy and yet so useful for us and pleasing to God — another may be added. Every morning as soon as you get up think of all the most disagreeable things that could happen to you during the day. Your house might be burnt down, you might lose your job or all your savings, or be run over, or sudden death might come to you or to a person you love. Accept these misfortunes should it please God to allow them; compel your will to agree to the sacrifice and give yourself no rest until you really feel prepared to wish or not to wish all that God may wish or not wish.

Finally, if some great misfortune should actually happen, instead of wasting time in complaint or self-pity, go throw yourself at once at the feet of your Savior and implore His grace to bear your trial with fortitude and patience. A man who has been badly wounded does not, if he is wise, chase after his assailant, but makes straight for a doctor who may save his life. Even if you wanted to confront the person responsible for your misfortune, it would still be to God you would have to go, for there can be no other cause of it than He.

So go to God, but go at once, go there and then. Let this be your first thought. Go and report to Him what He has done to you. Kiss the hands of God crucified for you, the hands that have struck you and caused you to suffer. Repeat over and over again to Him His own words to His Father while He was suffering: Not My will but Thine be done. In all that Thou wishest of me, today and for always, in heaven and on earth, let Thy will be done, but let it be done on earth as it is done in heaven. (Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, pp. 42-45, as found online at: Trustful Surrender To Divine Providence.)

We should meditate upon the wisdom contained in Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere’s text, especially as they relate to going to God “at once” as our “first thought” and then to thank him for the adversities, both individual and social, that He makes manifest to us as part of the loving plan of His Divine Providence for us.

Although I will append part of the beginning and the end of Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence in Appendix B below, it is very instructive for present purposes to consider the following passage concerning public calamities:

We ought to conform to God's Will in all public calamities such as war, famine and pestilence, and reverence and adore His judgments with deep humility in the firm belief that, however severe they may seem, the God of infinite goodness would not send such disasters unless some great good were to results from them. Consider how many souls may be saved through tribulations which would otherwise be lost, how many persons through affliction are converted to God and die with sincere repentance for their sins. What may appear a scourge and punishment is often a sign of great grace and mercy.

As far as we are personally concerned, let us meditate well on this truth of our faith that the very hairs of our head are numbered, and not one of them will fall except by the will of God. In other words we cannot suffer the least harm unless He wills and orders it. Relying on this truth we can easily understand that we have nothing more or less to fear in times of public calamity that at any other time. God can just as easily protect us in the midst of general ruin and despair as He can deliver us from evil while all around is peace and content. The only thing we need to be concerned about is to gain His favor, and this is the inevitable effect of conforming our will to His. Let us therefore hasten to accept from His hand all that He sends us, and as a result of our trustful surrender He will either cause us to fain the greatest advantages from our misfortunes or else spare us them altogether. (Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, pp. 21-22, as found online at: Trustful Surrender To Divine Providence.)

Pray always to accept God’s Holy Will in all things, especially during the chastisements of the present times and see in those chastisements the means by which we can sanctify and thus save our immortal souls as members of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

Pope Pius XII used his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus, the darkness that had descended on the world shortly after the onset of World War II, and he explain the darkness was the result of the revolt against the Chair of Saint Peter as the seat of human unity that began in the Sixteenth Century:

19. As Vicar of Him Who in a decisive hour pronounced before the highest earthly authority of that day, the great words: “For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth. Every one that is of the truth, hearest My voice” (Saint John xviii. 37), We feel We owe no greater debt to Our office and to Our time than to testify to the truth with Apostolic firmness: “to give testimony to the truth.” This duty necessarily entails the exposition and confutation of errors and human faults; for these must be made known before it is possible to tend and to heal them. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (Saint John viii. 32).

20. In the fulfillment of this, Our duty, we shall not let Ourselves be influenced by earthly considerations nor be held back by mistrust or opposition, by rebuffs or lack of appreciation of Our words, nor yet by fear of misconceptions and misinterpretations. We shall fulfill Our duty, animated ever with that paternal charity which, while it suffers from the evils which afflict Our children, at the same time points out to them the remedy; We shall strive to imitate the Divine Model of shepherds, Jesus, the Good Shepherd, Who is light as well as love: “Doing the truth in charity” (Ephesians iv. 15).

21. At the head of the road which leads to the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the present day stand the nefarious efforts of not a few to dethrone Christ; the abandonment of the law of truth which He proclaimed and of the law of love which is the life breath of His Kingdom.

22. In the recognition of the royal prerogatives of Christ and in the return of individuals and of society to the law of His truth and of His love lies the only way to salvation.

23. Venerable Brethren, as We write these lines the terrible news comes to Us that the dread tempest of war is already raging despite all Our efforts to avert it. When We think of the wave of suffering that has come on countless people who but yesterday enjoyed in the environment of their homes some little degree of well-being, We are tempted to lay down Our pen. Our paternal heart is torn by anguish as We look ahead to all that will yet come forth from the baneful seed of violence and of hatred for which the sword today ploughs the blood-drenched furrow.

24. But precisely because of this apocalyptic foresight of disaster, imminent and remote, We feel We have a duty to raise with still greater insistence the eyes and hearts of those in whom there yet remains good will to the One from Whom alone comes the salvation of the world — to One Whose almighty and merciful Hand can alone calm this tempest — to the One Whose truth and Whose love can enlighten the intellects and inflame the hearts of so great a section of mankind plunged in error, selfishness, strife and struggle, so as to give it a new orientation in the spirit of the Kingship of Christ.

25. Perhaps — God grant it — one may hope that this hour of direct need may bring a change of outlook and sentiment to those many who, till now, have walked with blind faith along the path of popular modern errors unconscious of the treacherous and insecure ground on which they trod. Perhaps the many who have not grasped the importance of the educational and pastoral mission of the Church will now understand better her warnings, scouted in the false security of the past. No defense of Christianity could be more effective than the present straits. From the immense vortex of error and anti-Christian movements there has come forth a crop of such poignant disasters as to constitute a condemnation surpassing in its conclusiveness any merely theoretical refutation.

26. Hours of painful disillusionment are often hours of grace — “a passage of the Lord” (cf. Exodus xii. 11), when doors which in other circumstances would have remained shut, open at Our Savior’s words: “Behold, I stand at the gate and knock” (Apocalypse iii. 20). God knows that Our heart goes out in affectionate sympathy and spiritual joy to those who, as a result of such painful trials, feel within them an effective and salutary thirst for the truth, justice and peace of Christ. But for those also for whom as yet the hour of light from on high has not come, Our heart knows only love, Our lips move only in prayer to the Father of Light that He may cause to shine in their hearts, indifferent as yet or hostile to Christ, a ray of that Light which once transformed Saul into Paul; of that Light which has shown its mysterious power strongest in the times of greatest difficulty for the Church.

27. A full statement of the doctrinal stand to be taken in face of the errors of today, if necessary, can be put off to another time unless there is disturbance by calamitous external events; for the moment We limit Ourselves to some fundamental observations.

28. The present age, Venerable Brethren, by adding new errors to the doctrinal aberrations of the past, has pushed these to extremes which lead inevitably to a drift towards chaos. Before all else, it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils which We deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal norm of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations; We mean the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself, which has its foundation in God, Almighty Creator and Father of all, supreme and absolute Lawgiver, all-wise and just Judge of human actions. When God is hated, every basis of morality is undermined; the voice of conscience is stilled or at any rate grows very faint, that voice which teaches even to the illiterate and to uncivilized tribes what is good and what is bad, what lawful, what forbidden, and makes men feel themselves responsible for their actions to a Supreme Judge.

29. The denial of the fundamentals of morality had its origin, in Europe, in the abandonment of that Christian teaching of which the Chair of Peter is the depository and exponent. That teaching had once given spiritual cohesion to a Europe which, educated, ennobled and civilized by the Cross, had reached such a degree of civil progress as to become the teacher of other peoples, of other continents. But, cut off from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, not a few separated brethren have gone so far as to overthrow the central dogma of Christianity, the Divinity of the Savior, and have hastened thereby the progress of spiritual decay.

30. The Holy Gospel narrates that when Jesus was crucified “there was darkness over the whole earth” (Matthew xxvii. 45); a terrifying symbol of what happened and what still happens spiritually wherever incredulity, blind and proud of itself, has succeeded in excluding Christ from modern life, especially from public life, and has undermined faith in God as well as faith in Christ. The consequence is that the moral values by which in other times public and private conduct was gauged have fallen into disuse; and the much vaunted civilization of society, which has made ever more rapid progress, withdrawing man, the family and the State from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear, in regions in which for many centuries shone the splendors of Christian civilization, in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, the signs of a corrupt and corrupting paganism: “There was darkness when they crucified Jesus” (Roman Breviary, Good Friday, Response Five).

31. Many perhaps, while abandoning the teaching of Christ, were not fully conscious of being led astray by a mirage of glittering phrases, which proclaimed such estrangement as an escape from the slavery in which they were before held; nor did they then foresee the bitter consequences of bartering the truth that sets free, for error which enslaves. They did not realize that, in renouncing the infinitely wise and paternal laws of God, and the unifying and elevating doctrines of Christ’s love, they were resigning themselves to the whim of a poor, fickle human wisdom; they spoke of progress, when they were going back; of being raised, when they groveled; of arriving at man’s estate, when they stooped to servility. They did not perceive the inability of all human effort to replace the law of Christ by anything equal to it; “they became vain in their thoughts” (Romans i. 21).

32. With the weakening of faith in God and in Jesus Christ, and the darkening in men’s minds of the light of moral principles, there disappeared the indispensable foundation of the stability and quiet of that internal and external, private and public order, which alone can support and safeguard the prosperity of States.

33. It is true that even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars which laid her waste; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of settling them, for they had then an effective moral sense of the just and of the unjust, of the lawful and of the unlawful, which, by restraining outbreaks of passion, left the way open to an honorable settlement. In Our days, on the contrary, dissensions come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis which has overthrown the sound principles of private and public morality. (Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1919.)

Catholicism, not Americanism, not conservatism, not Trumpism, not liberalism, not socialism, not feminism, not egalitarianism, not communism, not fascism, not nationalism, not naturalism, not conciliarism, not anything else, is the sole foundation of human salvation and thus of all social order.

Queen of the most holy Rosary, help of Christians, refuge of the human race, victorious in all the battles of God, we prostrate ourselves in supplication before thy throne, in the sure hope of obtaining mercy and of receiving grace and timely aid in our present calamities, not through any merits of our own on which we do not rely, but only through the immense goodness of thy mother’s Heart. In Thee and in thy Immaculate Heart, at this grave hour of human history, do we put our trust; to thee we consecrate ourselves, not only with all of Holy Church, which is the mystical body of thy Son Jesus, and which is suffering in so many of her members, being persecuted, but also with the whole world, torn by discords, agitated with the hatred, the victim of its own iniquities. Be thou moved by the sight of such material and moral degradation, such sorrows, such anguish, so many tormented souls in danger of eternal loss! Do thou, O Mother of mercy, obtain for us from God a Christ-like reconciliation of the nations, as well as those graces which can convert the souls of men in an instant, those graces which prepare the way and make certain the long desired coming of peace on earth. O Queen of peace, pray for us, and grant unto the world in the truth, the justice, and the charity of Christ. Above all, give us peace in our hearts, so that the kingdom of God, may spread it the tranquility of order. Accord thy protection to unbelievers and to all those who lie in the shadow of death; cause the Sun of Truth to rise upon them; may they enabled to join with us in repeating before the Saviour of the world: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to men of good will.” Give peace to the nations that are separated us from error or discord, and in a special manner to those peoples who profess a singular devotion toward thee; bring them back to Christ’s one fold, under the one true Shepherd. Obtain full freedom for the holy Church of God; defend her from her enemies; check the ever-increasing torrent of immorality; arouse in the faithful a practical love of purity, a practical Christian life, and an apostolic zeal, so that the number of those who serve God may increase in merit and in number. Finally, even as the Church and all mankind were once consecrated to the Heart of thy Son Jesus, because He was for all those who put their hope in Him an inexhaustible source of victory and salvation, so in like manner do we consecrate ourselves forever to thee also and to thy Immaculate Heart, Of Mother us and Queen of the world; may thy love and patronage hasten the day when the kingdom of God shall be victorious and all the nations, at peace with God and with one another, shall call thee blessed and intone with thee, from the rising of the sun to its going down, the everlasting “Magnificat” of glory, of love, of gratitude to the Heart of Jesus in which we alone can find truth, life, and peace. (Pope Pius XII, Rescript from the Secretariat of State, November 17, 1942, document exhibited, November 19, 1942, The Raccolta: A Manual of Indulgences, Prayers and Devotions Enriched with Indulgences, approved by Pope Pius XII, May 30, 1951, and published in English by Benziger Brothers, New York, 1957, pp. 345-347.)

The world is more a victim of its own iniquities, more torn with discords and more agitated by hatreds than it was when seventy-five years ago during the height of World War II when Pope Pius XII wrote his prayer of consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Men and their nations are adrift as they become more and more divided as a result of the proliferation of errors that receive the sanction the civil law and the applause of “opinion makers” and as men, steeped in a variety of what Mortal Sins in the objective order things, run amok in the belief that living as beasts will not hurt themselves and their nations, no less the entire world.

This is all a chastisement for the multifarious ways in which the Most Holy Trinity has been dishonored and blasphemed in a land of such “civil liberty” that every manner sin and indecent behavior is protected by the civil laws and celebrated in all the quarters of social life.

It might do well to recall that prophecy of the Venerable Marie-Julie Jahenny as to what would befall the “great island nation” after there had been a black president:

“After the important island nation has a black president it will be the last president and the country will disintegrate. After many, many years, it will return, but never ever the same.”  (Marie Julie-Jahenny)

We are eyewitnesses to the process of American disintegration, which is all the more reason for us to spend time, if at all possible where you live in this time of apostasy and betrayal, before the Blessed Sacrament and by uniting ourselves more fully to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Which beats for us with such love in the Adorable Sacrament of the Altar, through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Conscious of making reparation for our own sins, which, although forgiven and thus no longer exist, are in need of our making satisfaction here in this passing, mortal vale of tears before we die, may our Rosaries each day help lift the scales of naturalism that cloud our vision, thus making us courageous apostles of the Social Reign of Christ the King who recognize and are unafraid to proclaim that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

We need to pray for the conversion of President Donald John Trump and his family as well to do what he is incapable of doing: to pray for his enemies, which are indeed quiet legion, so that they were be converted to the true Faith, to publicly abjure their crimes against Christ the King and against men and thus for one and all to enjoy happy reunion in the bliss of an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise.

Put not thy trust in princes:

[2] Praise the Lord, O my soul, in my life I will praise the Lord: I will sing to my God as long as I shall be. Put not your trust in princes: [3] In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation. [4] His spirit shall go forth, and he shall return into his earth: in that day all their thoughts shall perish. [5] Blessed is he who hath the God of Jacob for his helper, whose hope is in the Lord his God:

[6] Who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all things that are in them. [7] Who keepeth truth for ever: who executeth judgment for them that suffer wrong: who giveth food to the hungry. The Lord looseth them that are fettered: [8] The Lord enlighteneth the blind. The Lord lifteth up them that are cast down: the Lord loveth the just. [9] The Lord keepeth the strangers, he will support the fatherless and the widow: and the ways of sinners he will destroy. [10] The Lord shall reign for ever: thy God, O Sion, unto generation and generation. (Psalm 145: 2-10.)

Any questions?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!   

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

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.

Pope Saint Marcellus I, pray for us.

Appendix A

Papal Condemnations of Slavery and the Slave Trade

Eugene, Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God,

To our venerable brothers, peace and apostolic benediction, etcetera.

1. Not long ago, we learned from our brother Ferdinand, bishop at Rubicon and representative of the faithful who are residents of the Canary Islands, and from messengers sent by them to the Apostolic See, and from other trustworthy informers, the following facts: in the said islands—some called Lanzarote—and other nearby islands, the inhabitants, imitating the natural law alone, and not having known previously any sect of apostates or heretics, have a short time since been led into the Orthodox Catholic Faith with the aid of God’s mercy. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, it has happened that in some of the said islands, because of a lack of suitable governors and defenders to direct those who live there to a proper observance of the Faith in things spiritual and temporal, and to protect valiantly their property and goods, some Christians (we speak of this with sorrow), with fictitious reasoning and seizing and opportunity, have approached said islands by ship, and with armed forces taken captive and even carried off to lands overseas very many persons of both sexes, taking advantage of their simplicity.

2. Some of these people were already baptized; others were even at times tricked and deceived by the promise of Baptism, having been made a promise of safety that was not kept. They have deprived the natives of the property, or turned it to their own use, and have subjected some of the inhabitants of said islands to perpetual slavery, sold them to other persons, and committed other various illicit and evil deeds against them, because of which very many of those remaining on said islands, and condemning such slavery, have remained involved in their former errors, having drawn back their intention to receive Baptism, thus offending the majesty of God, putting their souls in danger, and causing no little harm to the Christian religion

3. Therefore, We, to whom it pertains, especially in respect to the aforesaid matters, to rebuke each sinner about his sin, and not wishing to pass by dissimulating, and desiring—as is expected from the pastoral office we hold—as far as possible, to provide salutarily, with a holy and fatherly concern, for the sufferings of the inhabitants, beseech the Lord, and exhort, through the sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ shed for their sins, one and all, temporal princes, lords, captains, armed men, barons, soldiers, nobles, communities, and all others of every kind among the Christian faithful of whatever state, grade, or condition, that they themselves desist from the aforementioned deeds, cause those subject to them to desist from them, and restrain them rigorously.

4. And no less do We order and command all and each of the faithful of each sex, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands, and made captives since the time of their capture, and who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free, and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of money. If this is not done when the fifteen days have passed, they incur the sentence of excommunication by the act itself, from which they cannot be absolved, except at the point of death, even by the Holy See, or by any Spanish bishop, or by the aforementioned Ferdinand, unless they have first given freedom to these captive persons and restored their goods. We will that like sentence of excommunication be incurred by one and all who attempt to capture, sell, or subject to slavery, baptized residents of the Canary Islands, or those who are freely seeking Baptism, from which excommunication cannot be absolved except as was stated above.

5. Those who humbly and efficaciously obey these, our exhortations and commands deserve, in addition to our favor, and that of the Apostolic See, and the blessings which follow there from, but are to be possessors of eternal happiness and to be placed at the right hand of God, etcetera

Given at Florence, January 13th, in the Year of Our Lord, 1435 (Pope Eugene IV, Sicut Dudum, January 13, 1435.)

To all faithful Christians to whom this writing may come, health in Christ our Lord and the apostolic benediction.

The sublime God so loved the human race that He created man in such wise that he might participate, not only in the good that other creatures enjoy, but endowed him with capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face; and since man, according to the testimony of the sacred scriptures, has been created to enjoy eternal life and happiness, which none may obtain save through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, it is necessary that he should possess the nature and faculties enabling him to receive that faith; and that whoever is thus endowed should be capable of receiving that same faith. Nor is it credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it. Hence Christ, who is the Truth itself, that has never failed and can never fail, said to the preachers of the faith whom He chose for that office ‘Go ye and teach all nations.’ He said all, without exception, for all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith.

The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God’s word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.

We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

By virtue of Our apostolic authority We define and declare by these present letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, which shall thus command the same obedience as the originals, that the said Indians and other peoples should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living. (Sublimus Dei, May 29, 1547.)

Placed at the summit of the Apostolic power and, although lacking in merits, holding the place of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who, being made Man through utmost Charity, deigned to die for the Redemption of the World, We have judged that it belonged to Our pastoral solicitude to exert Ourselves to turn away the Faithful from the inhuman slave trade in Negroes and all other men. Assuredly, since there was spread abroad, first of all amongst the Christians, the light of the Gospel, these miserable people, who in such great numbers, and chiefly through the effects of wars, fell into very cruel slavery, experienced an alleviation of their lot. Inspired in fact by the Divine Spirit, the Apostles, it is true, exhorted the slaves themselves to obey their masters, according to the flesh, as though obeying Christ, and sincerely to accomplish the Will of God; but they ordered the masters to act well towards slaves, to give them what was just and equitable, and to abstain from menaces, knowing that the common Master both of themselves and of the slaves is in Heaven, and that with Him there is no distinction of persons.

But as the law of the Gospel universally and earnestly enjoined a sincere charity towards all, and considering that Our Lord Jesus Christ had declared that He considered as done or refused to Himself everything kind and merciful done or refused to the small and needy, it naturally follows, not only that Christians should regard as their brothers their slaves and, above all, their Christian slaves, but that they should be more inclined to set free those who merited it; which it was the custom to do chiefly upon the occasion of the Easter Feast as Gregory of Nyssa tells us. There were not lacking Christians, who, moved by an ardent charity ‘cast themselves into bondage in order to redeem others,’ many instances of which our predecessor, Clement I, of very holy memory, declares to have come to his knowledge. In the process of time, the fog of pagan superstition being more completely dissipated and the manners of barbarous people having been softened, thanks to Faith operating by Charity, it at last comes about that, since several centuries, there are no more slaves in the greater number of Christian nations. But – We say with profound sorrow – there were to be found afterwards among the Faithful men who, shamefully blinded by the desire of sordid gain, in lonely and distant countries, did not hesitate to reduce to slavery Indians, negroes and other wretched peoples, or else, by instituting or developing the trade in those who had been made slaves by others, to favour their unworthy practice. Certainly many Roman Pontiffs of glorious memory, Our Predecessors, did not fail, according to the duties of their charge, to blame severely this way of acting as dangerous for the spiritual welfare of those engaged in the traffic and a shame to the Christian name; they foresaw that as a result of this, the infidel peoples would be more and more strengthened in their hatred of the true Religion.

It is at these practices that are aimed the Letter Apostolic of Paul III, given on May 29, 1537, under the seal of the Fisherman, and addressed to the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, and afterwards another Letter, more detailed, addressed by Urban VIII on April 22, 1639 to the Collector Jurium of the Apostolic Chamber of Portugal. In the latter are severely and particularly condemned those who should dare ‘to reduce to slavery the Indians of the Eastern and Southern Indies,’ to sell them, buy them, exchange them or give them, separate them from their wives and children, despoil them of their goods and properties, conduct or transport them into other regions, or deprive them of liberty in any way whatsoever, retain them in servitude, or lend counsel, succour, favour and co-operation to those so acting, under no matter what pretext or excuse, or who proclaim and teach that this way of acting is allowable and co-operate in any manner whatever in the practices indicated.

Benedict XIV confirmed and renewed the penalties of the Popes above mentioned in a new Apostolic Letter addressed on December 20, 1741, to the Bishops of Brazil and some other regions, in which he stimulated, to the same end, the solicitude of the Governors themselves. Another of Our Predecessors, anterior to Benedict XIV, Pius II, as during his life the power of the Portuguese was extending itself over New Guinea, sent on October 7, 1462, to a Bishop who was leaving for that country, a Letter in which he not only gives the Bishop himself the means of exercising there the sacred ministry with more fruit, but on the same occasion, addresses grave warnings with regard to Christians who should reduce neophytes to slavery.

In our time Pius VII, moved by the same religious and charitable spirit as his Predecessors, intervened zealously with those in possession of power to secure that the slave trade should at least cease amongst the Christians. The penalties imposed and the care given by Our Predecessors contributed in no small measure, with the help of God, to protect the Indians and the other people mentioned against the cruelty of the invaders or the cupidity of Christian merchants, without however carrying success to such a point that the Holy See could rejoice over the complete success of its efforts in this direction; for the slave trade, although it has diminished in more than one district, is still practiced by numerous Christians. This is why, desiring to remove such a shame from all the Christian nations, having fully reflected over the whole question and having taken the advice of many of Our Venerable Brothers the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, and walking in the footsteps of Our Predecessors, We warn and adjure earnestly in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude, or lend aid and favour to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are, without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and devoted sometimes to the hardest labour. Further, in the hope of gain, propositions of purchase being made to the first owners of the Blacks, dissensions and almost perpetual conflicts are aroused in these regions.

We reprove, then, by virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, all the practices abovementioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name. By the same Authority We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in this Apostolic Letter. (Pope Gregory VII, In Supremo Apostolatus, 1839.)

Appendix B

Excerpts from Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence

Treating of the Will of God Saint Thomas, following Saint Augustine, teaches that it is the cause of all that exists. The Psalmist tells us that “all that the Lord wills he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and in all the deeps.: Again in the book of the Apocalypse it is written: “Worthy art thou, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for thous hast created all things, and because of thy will they existed and were created.”

Hence it is the Will of God which from nothingness drew out the universe with all its grandeur and all that lives in it, the earth with all that is on it and beneath it, all creatures visible and invisible, living and inanimate, reasonable and without reason, from the highest to the lowest,

If God then has produced all theses things, as Saint Paul says, according to the purpose of his will, is it not supremely right and reasonable as well as absolutely necessary that they should be preserved and governed by Him according to the counsel of His will? And how could a thing remain unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?

 But the works of God are perfect, it is written  in the Canticle of Moses. They are so well done that God Himself, whose judgment is strict and righteous, found when He had created them that they were good and very good? It is quite obvious that He who hath founded the earth by wisdom and hath established the heavens by understanding could not show less perfection in governing His works that in creating them. So, as He is careful to remind us, if His Providence continues to have care of all things, it is in measure and number and weight, it is with justice and mercy. Neither can any man say to him, Why dost thou so? For if He assigns to His creatures the end that He wills, and chooses the means which seem good to Him to lead them to it, the end He assigns them must be good and wise, nor can He direct them towards  their end other than by good and wise means. Therefore do not become foolish, the Apostle tells us but understand what the will of the Lord is, so that doing it you may receive the promise, that is to say eternal happiness, for it is written ten: the world with its lust is passing away, but he who does the will of God abides forever.

1.God controls all events whether good or bad

Nothing happens in the universe without God willing and allowing it. This statement must be taken absolutely of everything with the exception of sin. “Nothing occurs by chance in the whole course of our lives is the unanimous teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, 'and God intervenes everywhere.'

I am the Lord, He tells us Himself by the mouth of the prophet Isaias, and there is none else. I form light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil, I the Lord, do all these things. It is I who bring both death and life, I whole inflict wounds and heal them,  He said to Moses, The Lord killeth and maketh alive, it is written in the Canticle of Anna, the mother of Samuel, He bringeth down to the tomb and He bringeth back again; the Lord maketh poor and maketh rich, he humbleth and he exalteth. Shall there be evil (disaster, affliction) in a city which the Lord hath not done? Asks the prophet Amos: Good things and evil, life and death, poverty and riches are from God Solomon proclaims. And so on in numerous other passages of Scripture.

Perhaps you will say that while this is true of certain necessary effects, like sickness, death, cold and heat, and other accidents due to natural causes which have no liberty of action, the same cannot be said in the case of things that result from the free will of man. For if, you will object, someone slanders me, robs me, strikes me, persecutes me, how can I attribute his conduct to the will of God who, far from wishing me to be treated in such a manner, expressly forbids it? So the blame, you will conclude, can only be laid on the will of man, of his ignorance or malice. This is the defense behind which we try to shelter from God and excuse our lack of courage and submission.

It is quite useless for us to try and take advantage of this way of reasoning as an excuse for not surrendering to Providence. God Himself has refuted it and we must believe on His word that in events of this kind as in all others, nothing occurs except by His order and permission.

Let us see what the Scriptures say,

He wishes to punish the murder and adultery committed by David and He expresses Himself as follows by the mouth of the prophet Nathan: Why therefore hast thou despised the word of the Lord, to do evil in my sight? Thou hast killed Urias the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon. Therefore the sword shall never depart from thy house, because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Urias the Hittite to be thy wife. Thus saith the Lord: Behold I will raise up evil against thee out of thy own house, and I will take thy wives before thy eyes and give them to thy neighbor and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun. for thou didst it secretly, but I will do this thing in the sight of all Israel, and in the sight of the sun.

Later when the Jews by their iniquities had grievously offended Him and provoked His wrath, He says: The Assyrian is the rod and the staff of my anger, and my indignation is in his hands, I will send him to the deceitful nation, and I will give him charge against the people of my wrath, to take away the spoils, and to lay hold on the prey and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.

Could God more openly declare Himself to be responsible for the evils that Absalom caused his father and the King of Assyria the Jews? It would be easy to fin other instances but these are enough. Let us conclude then with Saint Augustine: “All that happens to us in this world against our will (whether due to men or to other causes) happens to us only by the will of God, by the disposal of Providence, by His orders and under His guidance; and if from the frailty of our understanding we cannot grasp the reason for some event, let us attribute it to divine Providence, show His respect by accepting it from His hand, believe firmly that He does not send it (to) us without cause.”

Replying to the murmurs and complaints of the Jews who attributed their captivity and sufferings to misfortune and causes other that the will of God, the prophet Jeremias says to them: Who is he that hath commanded a thing to be done when the Lord commandeth it not? Do not both evil and good proceed out of the mouth of the Highest? Why doth a living man murmur, a man suffering for his sins? Let us search our ways, and seek, and return to the Lord. Let us life up our heart with our hands to the Lord in the heavens, saying, We have done wickedly and provoked thee to wrath; therefore thou are inexorable.

Are not these words clear enough? We should take them to heart for our own good, Let us be careful to attribute everything to the will of God and believe that all is guided by His paternal hand.

How can god Will or Allow Evil?

However, you will perhaps now say, there is sinfulness in all these actions. How then can God will them and take part in them if He is all-holy, and can have nothing in common with sin?

God indeed is not and cannot be the author of sin. But it must be remembered that in every sin there are two parts to be distinguished, one natural and the other moral. Thus, in the action of the man you think you have a grievance against there is, for example, the movement of the arm that strikes you, or the tongue that offends you, and the movement of the will that turns aside from right reason and the law of God. The physical action of the arm or the tongue, like all natural things, is quite good in itself and there is nothing to prevent its being produced with and by God's cooperation. What is evil, what God could not cooperate with, is the sinful intention which the will of man contributes to the act.

When a man walks with a crippled leg the movement he makes comes both from the soul and the leg, but the defect which causes him walk badly is only in the leg. In the same way all evil actions must be attributed to God and to man insofar as they are natural, physical acts, but they can be attributed on to the will of man insofar as they are sinful and blameworthy.

If then someone strikes you or slanders you, as the movement of the arm or tongue is in no way a sin, god can very well be, and actually is, the author of it; for existence and movement in man not less than in any other creature proceed not from himself but from God, who acts in him, and by him. For in Him, says Saint Paul, we live and move and have our being. As for the malice of the intention, it proceeds entirely from man and in it alone is the sinfulness in which God has no share but which He yet permits in order not to interfere with our freedom of will. Moreover, when God co-operates with the person who attacks or robs you, He doubtless intends to deprive you of health or goods because you are making a wrong use of them and they will be harmful to your soul. But He does not intend that the attacker or robber should take them from you by a sin. That is the part of human malice, not God's design.

An example may make the matter clearer. A criminal is condemned to death by fair trial. But the executioner happens to be a personal enemy of his, and instead of carrying out the judge's sentence as a duty, he does so in a spirit of hate and revenge. Obviously the judge has no share in the execution's sin. The will and intention of the judge is not that this sin should be committed, but that justice should take its course and the criminal be punished.

In the same way God has no share at all in the wickedness of the man who strikes or robs you. That is something particular to the man himself. God, as we have said, wishes to make you see your own faults, to humble you, deprive you of what you possess in order to free you from vice and lead you to virtue; but this good and merciful design, which He could carry out in numerous others ways without any sin being involved, has nothing in common with the sin of the man who acts as His instrument. And in fact it is not this man's evil intention or sin that causes you to suffer, humiliates or impoverishes you, but the loss of your well being, your good name or your possessions. The sin harms only the person who is guilty of it. This is the way we ought to separate the good from the evil in events of this kind and distinguish what God operates through men from what men add to the act by their own will.  .  (Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, pp. 3-8, as found online at: Trustful Surrender To Divine Providence.)

Adversity Is Useful for the Just and Necessary For Sinners

Imagine the anguish and tears of a mother who is present at a painful operation her child has to undergo. Can anyone doubt on seeing her that she consents to allow the child to suffer only because she expects it to get well and be spared further suffering by means of this violent remedy?

Reason in the same manner when adversity befalls you. You complain that you are ill-treated, insulted, slandered, robbed. Your Redeemer (the name is a tenderer one than that of father or mother), your Redeemer is a witness to all you are suffering. He who loves you and has emphatically declared that whoever touches you touches the apple of His eye, nevertheless allows you to be stricken though He could easily prevent it. Do you hesitate to believe that this passing trial is necessary for the health of your soul?

Even if the Holy Ghost had not called blessed those who suffer, if every page of Scripture did not proclaim aloud the necessity of adversity, if we did not see that suffering is the normal destiny of those who are friends of God, we should still be convinced that it is of untold advantage to us. It is enough to know that the God Who chose to suffer all the most horrible tortures the rage of man can invent rather then see us condemned to the slightest pain in the next life is the same God who prepares and offers us the chalice of bitterness we must drink in this world. A God Who has so suffered to prevent us from suffering would not make us suffer today to give Himself cruel and pointless pleasure.

We must have trust in Providence

When I see a Christian grief-stricken at the trials God sends him I say to myself: Here is a man who is grieved at his own happiness. He is asking God to be delivered from something he ought to be thanking Him for. I am quite sure that nothing more advantageous could happen to him than what causes him so much grief. I have a hundred unanswerable reasons for saying so. But if I could read into the future and see the happy outcome of his present misfortune, how greatly strengthened I would be in my judgment! If we could discover the designs of Providence it is certain we would ardently long for the evils we are now so unwilling to suffer. We would rush forward to accept them with the utmost gratitude if we had a little faith and realized how much God loves us and has our interests at heart.

What profit can come to me from this illness which ties me down and obliges me to give up all the good I was doing, you may ask. What advantage can I expect from this ruin of my life which leaves me desperate and hopeless? It is true that sudden great misfortune at the moment it comes may appear to overwhelm you and not allow you the opportunity there and then of profiting by it.

But wait a while and you will see that by it God is preparing you to receive the greatest marks of His favor. But for this accident you would not have perhaps become less good than you are, but you would not have become holy. Isn't it true that since you have been trying to lead a good Christian life there has been something you have been unwilling to surrender to God? Some worldly ambition, some pride in your attainments, some indulgence of the body, some blameworthy habit, some company that is the occasion of sin for you? It was only this final step that prevented you from attaining the perfect freedom of the love of God. It wasn't really very much, but you could not bring yourself to make this last sacrifice. It wasn't very much, but there is nothing harder for a Christian than to break the last tie that binds him to the world or to his own self. He knows he ought to do it, and until he does it there is something wrong with his life. But the very thought of the remedy terrifies him, for the malady has taken such a hold on him that it cannot be cured without the help of a serious and painful operation.

So it was necessary to take you unawares, to cut deep into the flesh with skilful hand when you were least expecting it and remove the ulcer concealed within, or otherwise you would never be well. The misfortune which has befallen you will soon do what all your exercises of piety would never have been able to do.

Unexpected advantages from our trials

If the consequence of your adversity is that which was intended by God, if it turns you aside completely from creatures to give yourself unreservedly to your Creator, I am sure that your thanks to Him for having afflicted you will be greater than your prayers were to remove the affliction. In comparison with this misfortune all the other benefits you have received from Him will appear to have been very slight favors indeed. You have always regarded the temporal blessings He has hitherto showered on you and your family as the effects of His goodness towards you, but now you will see clearly and realize to the depths of your being that He has never loved you so much as when He took away all that He gave you for your prosperity, and that if He was generous in giving you a family, a good position, an income and good health, He has been over-generous in taking them all away.

I am not referring to the merit we acquire by the virtue of patience. Generally speaking, one day of adversity can be of more profit to us for our eternal salvation than years of untroubled living, whatever good use we make of the time.

It is common knowledge that prosperity has the effect of softening us. When a man is materially well off and content with his state, it is a great deal if he takes the trouble to think of God two or three times a day. His mind is so pleasantly occupied with his worldly affairs that it is easy for him to forget all the rest. Adversity on the other hand leads us as if naturally to raise our eyes to Heaven to seek consolation in our distress. Certainly God can be glorified whatever condition we are in, and the life of a Christian who serves Him when fortune is favorable is most pleasing to Him. But can he please Him as much as the man who blesses Him while he is suffering? It cannot be doubted that a man who enjoys good health, position, wealth and the world's esteem, if he uses his advantages as he ought, attributing them to God and thanking Him for them, by doing so glorifies his Maker and leads a Christian life. But if Providence takes away what he has and strikes him down, and in the midst of his reverses he continues to express the same sentiments, returning the same thanks and obeying his Lord with the same promptness and submission as he did formerly, it is then that he proclaims the glory of God and the efficacy of His grace in the most convincing and striking manner.

Opportunities for acquiring merit and saving our souls

Judge then what recompense those persons will receive from Christ who have followed Him along the way of His Cross. On the judgment day we shall understand how much God has loved us by giving us the opportunities to merit so rich a reward. Then we shall reproach ourselves for complaining at what was meant to increase our happiness, for grieving when we should have been rejoicing, for doubting God's goodness when He was giving us concrete evidence of it. If such will be our feelings one day, why not anticipate them now?

Why not bless God here and now for something we shall be thanking Him for everlastingly in heaven?

It is clear from this that whatever the manner of our life we should always accept adversity joyfully. If we are leading a good life adversity purifies us, makes us better and enables us to acquire greater merit. If our life is sinful it serves to bring us to repentance and obliges us to become good.

Recourse to Prayer

It is a strange fact that though Christ repeatedly and solemnly promised to answer our prayers, most Christians are continually complaining that He does not do so. We cannot account for this by saying that the reason is because of the kind of things we ask for, since He included everything in His promise — All things whatsoever you shall ask. Nor can we attribute it to the unworthiness of those who ask, for His promise extended to everybody without exception — Whoever asks shall receive. Why is it then that so many prayers remain unanswered? Can it be that as most people are never satisfied, they make such excessive and impatient demands on God that they tire and annoy Him by their importunity? The case is just the opposite. The only reason why we obtain so little from God is because we ask for so little and we are not insistent enough. Christ promised on behalf of His Father that He would give us everything, even the very smallest things. But He laid down an order to be observed in all that we ask, and if we do not obey this rule we are unlikely to obtain anything. He tells us in St. Matthew: Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice and all these things shall be given to you besides.

To obtain what we want

We are not forbidden to wish for money, material well-being and whatever is necessary to maintain us in our position in life, but we must wish for these things in their proper order. If we want our desires in this respect to be met without fail we must first of all ask for the larger things, so that while granting them He may also add the smaller ones.

We can take an example from the case of Solomon. God gave him the choice of whatever he desired and he asked for wisdom, which was needful for him to carry out his kingly duties. He did not ask for riches or glory, judging that if God gave him such an opportunity he ought to make use of it to obtain the greatest advantage. His prudence gained for him both what he asked for and what he did not ask for. Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life or riches . . . behold I have done for thee according to thy words —I will willingly grant you wisdom because you have asked me for it, but I will give you long life, honor and riches as well because you did not ask for any of them — Yea, and the things also which thou didst not ask, to wit, riches and glory.

If then this is the order God observes in the distribution of His benefits, we must not be surprised if our prayers have so far been unsuccessful. I confess that I am often moved to pity when I see the eagerness of some people in giving alms, making vows of pilgrimage and fasting, or having Masses said for the success of their temporal affairs. I am afraid the prayers they say and get said are of little use.

They should make their offerings and vow their pilgrimages to obtain from God the amendment of their lives, the gift of Christian patience, contempt for the things of the world and detachment from creatures. Then afterwards they could pray for return of health or success in business. God would then answer these prayers, or rather He would anticipate them; it would be enough to know their desires for Him to fulfil them.

Until we have obtained these first graces, anything else may be harmful to us and, in fact, usually is so. That is the reason why we are refused. We murmur and accuse God of not keeping His promises. But our God is a Father of kindness who prefers to put up with our complaints and criticisms rather than stop them by gifts which would be fatal to us.

To be delivered from evil

What has been said of benefits can also be said of the ills from which we wish to be delivered. I do not desire wealth, a person will say, but I would be satisfied with not having to suffer hardship. I leave fame and reputation to those who want it, but I would like at least not to be an object of scorn. I can do without pleasures, but I cannot support pain; I have prayed and begged God to lessen it but He will not hear me. It is not surprising. You have secret ills far greater than the ills you complain of, but you do not ask Him to deliver you from them. If for this purpose you had said half the prayers you have said to be healed from your outward ills, God would have delivered you from both a long time since. Poverty serves to keep you humble while your nature is proud, the scorn of the world to free you from your attachment to it, illness to keep you from the pleasure-seeking which would be your ruin. It would be hating you, not loving you, to take away your cross before giving you the virtues you lack. If God found some desire in you for these virtues He would give you them without delay, and it would be unnecessary for you to ask for the other things.

We do not ask enough

It is clear then that we do not receive anything because we do not ask enough.

God could not give us little, He could not restrict His liberality to small things without doing us grave harm. Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that we offend God if we ask for temporal benefits or to be freed from misfortune. Obviously prayers of this kind can rightly be addressed to Him by making the condition that they are not contrary to His glory or our eternal salvation. But as it is hardly likely that it would redound to His glory for Him to answer them, or to our advantage to have them answered if our wishes end there, it must be repeated that as long as we are content with little we run the risk of obtaining nothing.

Let me show you a good way to ask for happiness even in this world. It is a way that will oblige God to listen to you. Say to him earnestly: Either give me so much money that my heart will be satisfied, or inspire me with such contempt for it that I no longer want it.

Either free me from poverty, or make it so pleasant for me that I would not exchange it for all the wealth in the world. Either take away my suffering, or — which would be to your greater glory — change it into delight for me, and instead of causing me affliction, let it become a source of joy. You can take away the burden of my cross, or you can leave it with me without my feeling its weight. You can extinguish the fire that burns me, or you can let it burn in such a way that it refreshes me as it did the three youths in the fiery furnace.

I ask you for either one thing or the other. What does it matter in what way I am happy? If I am happy through the possession of worldly goods, it is you I have to thank. If I am happy when deprived of them, it gives you greater glory and my thanks are all the greater. This is the kind of prayer worthy of being offered to God by a true Christian.

When you pray in this way, do you know what the effect of your prayers will be?

First, you will be satisfied whatever happens; and what else do those who most desire this world's goods want except to be satisfied? Secondly, you will not only obtain without fail one of the two things you have asked for but, as a rule, you will obtain both of them. God will give you the enjoyment of wealth, and so that you may possess it without the danger of becoming attached to it, He will inspire you at the same time with contempt for it. He will put an end to your sufferings and even more He will leave you with a desire for them which will give you all the merit of patience without having to suffer. In a word He will make you happy here and now, and lest your happiness should do you harm, He will let you know and feel the emptiness of it. Can one ask for anything better?

But if such a great blessing is well worth being asked for, remember that still more is it worth being asked for with insistence.

For the reason why we obtain little is not only because we ask for little but still more because, whether we ask a little or we ask a lot, we do not ask often enough.

Perseverance in Prayer

If you want all your prayers to be answered without fail and oblige God to meet all your wishes, the first thing is never to stop praying. Those who get tired after praying for a time are lacking in either humility or confidence, and so do not deserve to be heard. You would think that they expected their requests to be obeyed at once as if they were orders. Surely we know that God resists the proud and shows His favors to the humble. Won't our pride allow us to ask more than once for the same thing? It shows very little trust in God's goodness to give up so soon and take a delay for an absolute refusal.

Once we have really understood just how far God's goodness extends we can never believe that we have been refused or that He wishes to deprive us of hope.

Rather, the more He makes us keep on asking for something we want, the more confident we should feel that we shall eventually obtain it. We can begin to doubt that our prayer has been heard only when we notice we have stopped praying. If after a year we find that our prayer is as fervent as it was at the beginning, then we need not doubt about the success of our efforts, and instead of losing courage after so long a delay, we should rejoice because we can be certain that our desires will be all the more fully satisfied for the length of time we have prayed. If our first attempts had been quite useless we would not have repeated them so often and we would have lost hope; but as we have kept on in spite of this, there is good reason to believe we shall be liberally rewarded.

In fact it took St. Monica sixteen years to obtain the conversion of Augustine, but the conversion was entire and far beyond what she had prayed for. Her desire was that her son's incontinence might be checked by marriage, and instead she had the joy of seeing him embrace a life of holy chastity. She had only wanted him to he baptized and become a Christian, and she saw him a bishop. She asked God to turn him aside from heresy, and God made him a pillar of the Church and its champion against heretics. Think what would have happened had she given up hope after a couple of years, after ten or twelve years, when her prayers appeared to obtain no result and her son grew worse instead of better, adding avarice and ambition to the wildness of his life and sinking further and further into error. She would have wronged her son, thrown away her own happiness, and deprived the world of one of the greatest Christian thinkers.

Obstinate Trust

As a final word I address myself to those faithful souls kneeling in prayer before the altar and asking God for the graces He is so pleased to hear us asking for. You who are happy that God has shown you the vanity of the world, you who groan under the yoke of your passions and beg to be delivered from them, you who burn with desire to love God and serve Him as He would be served, you who intercede with God for the sake of one who is dear to you, do not grow weary of asking, be steadfast and tireless in your demands. If you are refused today, tomorrow you will obtain everything; if this year brings nothing, the next will bring you abundance. Never think your efforts are wasted. Your every word is numbered and what you receive will be in the measure of the time you have spent asking. Your treasure is piling up and suddenly one day it will overflow to an extent beyond your dreams.

Consider the workings of Divine Providence and think that the refusal you meet with now is only God's stratagem to increase your fervor. Remember how He acted towards the Canaanite woman, treating her harshly and refusing to see or listen to her. He seemed to be irritated by her importunity, but in reality He admired it and was delighted with her trust and humility, and for that reason He repulsed her. With what tenderness does He repulse those whom He most wishes to be indulgent to, hiding His clemency under the mask of cruelty! Take care not to be deceived by it. The more He seems to be unwilling, the more you must insist.

Do as the woman of Canaan, use against Him the very arguments He may have for refusing you. It is true that to hear me, you should say to Him, would be to give the bread of the children to dogs. I do not deserve the grace I ask, but I do not ask You to give me what I deserve; I ask it through the merits of my Redeemer. You ought to think more of Your promises than of my unworthiness, and You will be unjust to Yourself if You give me only what I deserve. If I were worthier of Your benefits it would be less to Your glory to give me them. It is unjust to grant favors to a sinner, but I do not appeal to Your justice but to Your mercy.

Do not lose courage when you have begun so well to struggle with God. Do not give Him a moment's rest. He loves the violence of your attack and wants to be overcome by you. Make importunity your watchword, let persistence be a miracle in you. Compel God to throw off the mask and say to you with admiration 'Great is thy faith, be it done as thou wishest. I can no longer resist you, you shall have what you desire, in this life and the next.'

Exercise In Conformity to Divine Providence

1. ACT OF FAITH, HOPE AND CHARITY

2. ACT OF FILIAL SUBMISSION TO PROVIDENCE

3. USEFULNESS OF THIS EXERCISE

The practice of this exercise is of great importance because of the advantages it always confers on those who undertake it devoutly.

Act of Faith, Hope and Charity First make an act of faith in God's Providence. Meditate well on the truth that God's continual care extends not only to all things in general but to each particular thing, and especially to ourselves, our souls and bodies, and everything that concerns us. Nothing escapes His loving watchfulness — our work, our daily needs, our health as well as our infirmities, our life and our death, even the smallest hair on our head which cannot fall without His permission.

After this act of faith, make an act of hope. Excite in yourself a firm trust that God will provide for all you need, will direct and protect you with more than a father's love and vigilance, and guide you in such a way that, whatever happens, if you submit to Him everything will turn out for your happiness and advantage, even the things that may seem quite the opposite.

To these two an act of charity should be added. Show your deep love and attachment for Divine Providence as a child shows for its mother by taking refuge in her arms. Say how highly you esteem all His intentions, however hidden they may be, in the knowledge that they spring from an infinite wisdom which cannot make a mistake and supreme goodness which can wish only the perfection of His creatures. Determine that this feeling will have a practical result in making you ready to speak out in defense of Providence whenever you hear it denied or criticized.

Act of Filial Submission to Providence

After repeating these acts several times with fervor, commit your soul lovingly to Divine Providence as a child rests and sleeps in its mother's arms. Make your own the words of David: I will lie down and sleep in peace, for thou alone, O Lord, hast established me in hope.  Or again in the words of the psalm: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. In verdant pastures he gives me repose; Beside restful waters he leads me; he refreshes my soul. He guides me in right paths for his name's sake. Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil; for you are at my side With your rod and your staff that give me courage.

You spread the table before me in the sight of my foes; You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Only goodness and kindness follow me all the days of my life; And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord For years to come.

Filled with the joy these consoling words inspire, the soul can trustfully accept from Divine Providence whatever happens now or in the future with tranquility and peace of mind. Its happiness is that of a child who feels protected and secure. Not that it lives in idle expectation of what it needs or neglects to occupy itself with the affairs of daily life. On the contrary it does all in its power and employs all its faculties in attending to them well.

But what it does it does under God's guidance and regards its own judgment as entirely subject to God's. It freely entrusts everything to His governance without expecting any other result from its actions but what is in accordance with His will.

Usefulness of This Exercise

What honor and glory is given to God by the soul that acts thus!

It is a great glory for Him to have a creature so attached to His Providence, so dependent on Him, full of such firm hope and peace of mind in the expectation of what He will send. His concern for such a one is redoubled, He watches over the slightest things that are of interest to him and inspires those who are over him to act prudently; and if for any reason they try to act in a manner harmful to him, He prevents them in the hidden ways of His Providence from carrying out their designs and compels them to do only what is to his advantage.

Thus the Lord keeps those who love Him. If the Scriptures speak of God as having eyes, it is in order to watch over them; as having ears, to hear them; as having hands, to defend them. And those who touch them, touch the apple of His eye. I shall carry you in my arms, He says by the mouth of the prophet Isaias, I shall caress you upon My knees. As one whom his mother caresses, so will I comfort you And in Osee: I was like a foster father to Ephraim, I carried them in my arms. Long before Moses had said: In the desert the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his child, all along your journey until you arrived at this place. Again God says in Isaias: You shall be nursed with the breasts of kings, and you shall know that I am the Lord your Savior and your Redeemer.

In the person of Noah we can find a figure of the happiness of the man who throws himself entirely upon God. While the floodgates of heaven were opened and the world was laid in ruin Noah was safe and at peace in the ark because God was guiding him. Others remained at the mercy of the waters, losing all they had, their families, their lives. Thus the man who entrusts himself to Providence, lets God be the pilot of his bark, floats tranquilly on the ocean of life in the midst of storm and tempest, while those who try to guide themselves are in continual unrest, and their only pilot being their own inconstant will, they are tossed about by sea and wind until they end in shipwreck.

Let us then trust ourselves entirely to God and His Providence and leave Him complete power to order our lives, turning to Him lovingly in every need and awaiting His help without anxiety. Leave everything to Him and He will provide us with everything, at the time and in the place and in the manner best suited. He will lead us on our way to that happiness and peace of mind for which we are destined in this life as a foretaste of the everlasting happiness we have been promised.  (Blessed Father Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, pp. 46-58, as found online at: Trustful Surrender To Divine Providence.)