Wars and Rumors of Wars

And Jesus being come out of the temple, went away. And his disciples came to shew him the buildings of the temple. [2] And he answering, said to them: Do you see all these things? Amen I say to you there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed. [3] And when he was sitting on mount Olivet, the disciples came to him privately, saying: Tell us when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the consummation of the world? [4] And Jesus answering, said to them: Take heed that no man seduce you: [5] For many will come in my name saying, I am Christ: and they will seduce many.

[6] And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. [7] For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places: [8] Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows. [9] Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall put you to death: and you shall be hated by all nations for my name's sake. [10] And then shall many be scandalized: and shall betray one another: and shall hate one another.

[11] And many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many. [12] And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. [13] But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved. [14] And this gospel of the kingdom, shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come. [15] When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand.

[16] Then they that are in Judea, let them flee to the mountains: [17] And he that is on the housetop, let him not come down to take any thing out of his house: [18] And he that is in the field, let him not go back to take his coat. [19] And woe to them that are with child, and that give suck in those days. [20] But pray that your flight be not in the winter, or on the sabbath.

[21] For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be. [22] And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened. [23] Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him. [24] For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. [25] Behold I have told it to you, beforehand.

[26] If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not. [27] For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be. [28] Wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered together. [29] And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be moved: [30] And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all tribes of the earth mourn: and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty. (Matthew 24: 1-30.)

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ taught us to remain calm in every circumstance of our lives, explaining that there will be wars and rumors of wars but that the end is not yet to come. We must remain ever calm in the loving arms of Our Lady, who told Juan Diego the following as his uncle was suffering from an illness from which Juan Diego thought he was going to die:

"Listen and take heed, least of my sons," she said quietly. "There is nothing which thou needst dread. Let not thy heart be troubled. Do not fear this illness, neither any other illness or affliction. Am I not here beside thee; I, thy Merciful Mother? Am I not thy hope and salvation? Of what more dost thou have need? Let nothing distress or harass thee. As to the illness of thy uncle, he will not die of it. Indeed, I ask thee to accept as a certainty my assurance that he is already cured." (Frances Parkinson Keyes, The Grace of Guadalupe, published in 1941 by Julian Messner, Inc., pp. 47-48.)

We are not to fear any illness or affliction. There is no suffering, nor any world crisis, that we can bear in this life that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His fearful Passion and Death as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were plunged through and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I am not a prophet of end times or of any times and cannot explain to anyone with any kind of authority or “infallible” insight what the tragic events still unfolding in the needless war that Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin has undertaken in neighboring Ukraine, with which it has a long and most complex historical relationship, including the Soviet-era forced starvation of Ukrainians that killed upwards of ten million people (advising the presence of graphic images of starving human beings, see History of Ukraine: The genocide of Ukrainians by Stalin            for more details). I do know, however, that all that happens is within the Providence of God and that we must simply realm in a spirit of perfect equanimity as remain steadfast upon Our Lord, especially through her Most Holy Rosary, through these incredibly tumultuous times when neither men nor their nations are willing to submit themselves with docility to Christ the King and His true Church.

Thus, as the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and possible installation of a puppet government with which Russian President Vladimir Putin can “negotiate” on his terms is complex and involves a variety of historical, geopolitical, economic, linguistic, and cultural factors, many of which are steeped in mythologies, including those that most Americans have about the United States of America, that have little to do with actual reality, any commentary on it is necessarily fraught with a whole host of qualified distinctions. That is, there are as many ways to look at the situation in Ukraine as there are those who comment upon it. It is important, therefore, for anyone seeking to comment on it to be careful and judicious in presenting a complex situation in as fair and reasonable manner as possible.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that a commentary such as this one does concern infallibly revealed truths. While truths contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith will be brought to bear upon various points in this commentary, especially in the conclusion, much of this commentary is a review of historical facts and geopolitical factors have developed the way that have as a result of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that was institutionalized by the rise of the multifaceted and interrelated by the rise of the forces of naturalism that can be called by the name of Judeo-Masonry, which refers to the overarching belief of all naturalists: that the Incarnation and Redemptive Act of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is irrelevant to the temporal or eternal good of men and their nations.

With this preface having been stated, which is by way of reminding readers that this commentary is provided merely to provide something of one Catholic’s perspective on a complex matter, it is my goal here to provide the sort of commentary on the issue of illegal immigration, which was published in May of 2010 (see Good Catholic Common Sense Must Prevail, part 1 and Good Catholic Common Sense Must Prevail, part 2).

War Must be Just, and to be Just There Must be a Casus Belli

As has been noted so many times before on this website, the Just War Theory, which was expounded at first by Saint Augustine and then by Saint Thomas Aquinas eight centuries later with variations of it having been formulated over the centuries, requires a reason for engaging in armed conflict. What follows is an attempt to apply the principles of the Just War Theory to the present circumstances in Ukraine.

1. There must be a wound to justice that poses a real and imminent threat to the good order of nations and/or to the territorial integrity or well-being of innocents by an aggressor. The threat must be real, not imaginary, not concocted for political purposes. In this instance, there was no real and imminent threat to the good order of nations nor to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federated Republic. Russia had already annexed Crimea in 2014 and two breakaway regions, Donetsk, and Luhansk, had declared themselves to be “people’s republics.” International agreements in 2015 let the situation in these two regions stay as they were, and there was no immediate reason for Russia to invade Ukraine, admitting that Ukraine stands accused of shelling Donbas, a Russiophilic part of Urkiane near the country’s borders with Russia. There was, however, absolutely no wound to justice to justify a massive invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no threat to Russia’s legitimate national security to the extent that required the sort of invasion that has been taking place for the past five days.
2. All peaceful means to avoid armed hostilities must be exhausted. Diplomatic efforts to avert war must be genuine. It was the authority of the Vicar of Christ himself during the Middle Ages and various times thereafter who attempted to broker disputes in order to avoid war. In the Ukrainian tragedy, there were no serious negotiations undertaken to prevent the use of armed force, and it is clear that Vladimir Putin simply wanted to install a regime in Kiev that would not be enticed to joining the useless, moribund collection of woke globalists in the North American Treaty Organization, which he believed had crossed a “red line” by erecting military bases near his country’s border. However, it is quite immoral to appear to open to negotiations when one’s only goal is to wage an full-scale war upon a sovereign nation and thus put innocent civilians in harm’s way.
3. A duly constituted authority must make the determinations concerning the waging of war. This means that a legitimate governing authority guided by right intentions and right principles must be in charge of the decision-making process, one that has not usurped power, or as is happening at this time in Ukraine, by a governmental leader, Vladimir Putin, who has sought war unjustly as a first means to prosecute plans of territorial expansion and/or nationalistic or geopolitical ends.
4. The goals of a war must be well-defined and have a reasonable chance of being realized. In other words, there must be a reasonable chance for success in the pursuit of narrowly defined goals. Goals are to be defined narrowly so as to limit the harm caused by a needlessly protracted war, yes, even when a nation is prosecuting a just cause. Such is not the case at all with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
5. The good end being sought must not be outweighed by the foreseen evil to be done. This is known as the Catholic principle of proportionality, which states that a good end can be rendered unjust to pursue if a judgment is made that the amount of the foreseen evil to be done in the prosecution of a just war will cause greater evils than the one the war is being waged to eradicate. Putin cares about none of this.
6. As far as is possible, noncombatants must never be deliberately targeted in warfare. The United States has a mixed record when it comes to the realization of this part of the Just War Theory. Our military forces have tried to use remarkable restraint in many instances. Other times, however, they have not. William Tecumseh Sherman used raw terrorism against civilian population centers as he cut a swath of fiery destruction from the Atlantic Ocean to Atlanta during the War between the States. The government of the United States of America aided the anti-Catholic Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (the latter two of which were known to contain the highest concentrations of Catholics in Japan) were bombed during World War II. Something less than laser precision caused thousands of civilian casualties during the Gulf War and during our long and immoral presence in Afghanistan, which commenced on October 7, 2001, and during and after the American invasion and occupation of Iraq on March 20, 2003. In the present instance, although Russian military forces are encountering fierce resistance from Ukrainian military forces and armed civilians, they do not have any scruples about mowing down unarmed civilians or bombing heavily populated centers of civilian population.
7. A just cessation to hostilities must be realized as soon as possible. Once again, the record of the United States’ own record in this regard is very mixed. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done so as to force an unconditional surrender from Japan, something that the Soviets insisted on in the Potsdam Conference as their condition for entering the war against Japan (so that they could recover claims lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.) Japan was willing to surrender conditionally. Those who are convinced of their absolute moral and racial superiority over others, though, cannot consider ending hostilities even if it is possible to conclude a peace that is just without having humiliated one's enemies. Vladimir Putin wants only one thing: for victory on his terms, something that will serve as a warning to other countries neighboring Russia, especially Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as all other former “republics” under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, whose leaders want to become a stooge of American and globalist interests while pretending to be “democracies” when they are anything but that.

In other words, none of the predicates of the Just War Theory have been met. This does not mean that there was no intransigence on the part of Ukrainian officials on some matters. However, that intransigence, which is part of both diplomacy and an effort to secure the integrity of the borders of one’s nation, not that such a concept matters to United States President in Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is not a casus belli justifying a massive invasion of foreign troops and the deaths of innocent civilians. This is an immoral, unjustifiable war.

No “White Hats” or “Black Hats” in the Ukrainian Situation: A Brief Historical Summary

It was eight years ago when some Americans were upset with then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro for his response an earlier crisis in Ukraine, which began when its then corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown in a American-sponsored and engineered coup d’etat on February 22, 2014, fleeing to exile in Russia (see Did We Provoke Putin’s War in Ukraine?). While Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro was indeed a vacillating fool on matters of foreign policy, a man who was tongue-tied and paralyzed when it comes to dealing with even the hint of a suggestion that Mohammedanism is evil in se, no American president has ever had any business meddling the affairs of Ukraine. There have been too many American presidents who have made it a point to meddle in the affairs of other nations, engaging in exercises of social engineering that resulted in the persecution of foreign nationals and the needless deaths of untold numbers of Americans, who should never have been put in harm’s way in the first place.

Yanukovych, who had been Prime Minister of Ukraine from November 21, 2002, to December 31, 2004, had been elected to the presidency in 2004 before the Supreme Court of Ukraine invalidated his election on grounds on election fraud following days of protest that came to be known as the “Orange Revolution.” The man who was elected in the presidency in the court ordered rerun election, Viktor Yushchenko, proved himself to be corrupt in his own right and did not even qualify for the ballot to run for re-election in 2010, at which time Viktor Yanukovych was elected and actually got to serve as the president of Ukraine until his ouster nearly three months ago now. In other words, politics in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was in existence, albeit with an ever-changing set of national boundaries from March 10, 1919, to December 25, 1991, are filled with intrigue, corruption, and scandal. Sort of sounds like the naturalist farce that takes place here in the United States of America, doesn’t it?

Indeed, as more than one secular commentator has noted, ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been decades in the making because of a truly bipartisan effort on the part of American presidential administrations to give Russia every reason to be suspicious of a pro-globalist and supposedly “pro-democracy” Ukraine. Ukrainian leaders helped to undermine a president, Donald John Trump, whose administration had actually provided them with military arms, something that the administration of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., refused to do despite their “pro-democracy” rhetoric, to cover up for Hunter Biden, thus weakening Ukraine militarily with Russia. As Trump himself has noted and as a majority of Americans agree, Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if he had been president (see 62% of Voters Say Putin Wouldn’t have invade Ukraine if Trump Were President).

A secular commentator explained why Vladimir Putin took the risk without for one moment justifying his grotesque act of war:

Russian President Vladimir Putin chose this war, Joe Biden said in his Thursday afternoon speech to America regarding the conflict in Ukraine. That is true, but U.S. elites also had something to do with Putin’s ugly and destructive choice—a role that Democrats and Republicans are eager to paper over with noble-sounding rhetoric about the bravery of Ukraine’s badly outgunned military. Yes, the Ukrainian soldiers standing up to Putin are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a weapon, first against Russia and then against each other, with little consideration for the Ukrainian people who are now paying the price for America’s folly.

It is not an expression of support for Putin’s grotesque actions to try to understand why it seemed worthwhile for him to risk hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of thousands of servicemen, and the possible stability of his own regime in order to invade his neighbor. After all, Putin’s reputation until this moment has always been as a shrewd ex-KGB man who eschewed high-risk gambles in favor of sure things backed by the United States, like entering Syria and then escalating forces there. So why has he adopted exactly the opposite strategy here, and chosen the road of open high-risk confrontation with the American superpower?

Yes, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But the larger answer is that he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening. That’s because for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin.

While the timing of Putin’s attack on Ukraine is no doubt connected to a variety of factors, including the Russian dictator’s read on U.S. domestic politics and the preferences of his own superpower sponsor in Beijing, the sense that Ukraine poses a meaningful threat to Russia is not a product of Putin’s paranoia—or of a sudden desire to restore the power and prestige of the Soviet Union, however much Putin might wish for that to happen. Rather, it is a geopolitical threat that has grown steadily more pressing and been employed with greater recklessness by Americans and Ukrainians alike over the past decade.

That Ukraine has allowed itself to be used as a pawn against a powerful neighbor is in part the fault of Kyiv’s reckless and corrupt political class. But Ukraine is not a superpower that owes allies and client-states judicious leadership—that’s the role of the United States. And in that role, the United States has failed Ukraine. More broadly, the use of Ukraine as a goad against enemies domestic and foreign has recklessly damaged the failing yet necessary European security architecture that America spent 75 years building and maintaining.

Why can’t the American security establishment shoulder responsibility for its role in the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine? Because to discuss American responsibility openly would mean exposing the national security establishment’s role in two separate, destructive coups: the first, in 2014, targeting the government of Ukraine, and the second, starting two years later, the government of the United States.

In the last year there have been two attempted “pro-democracy” inter-elite coups in pro-Kremlin states on Russian borders: Belarus and Kazakhstan. Both of those so-called “color revolutions” failed, but Ukraine represents a much more pressing concern, especially given the country’s push for NATO membership, which Biden officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly encouraged last year with no intention or possibility of actually making it possible. Yet rather than compelling the United States to rethink the wisdom of planting the NATO flag on Russia’s border, Putin’s escalating rhetoric—and troop movements—only made the Biden team dig in deeper.

This is a game that Biden and key figures in his administration have been playing for a long time, beginning with the 2013-14 Obama administration-backed coup that toppled a Russia-friendly government in Kyiv. This was the so-called Maidan Revolution, a sequel of sorts to the George W. Bush-backed Orange Revolution of 2004-05. Much of that same Obama foreign policy team—Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and others—is now back in the White House and State Department working in senior posts for a president who personally ran Obama’s Ukraine policy.

What did all these figures have in mind for Ukraine? The White House and U.S. foreign policy experts from both parties are united in claiming that Ukraine is a U.S. ally, a democracy, and a beacon of freedom, which are no doubt fine words to hear when you have been left to fight Vladimir Putin on your own. But to understand what Ukraine truly is, we must start where all geopolitics begins: by looking at a map.

Ukraine is situated between two greater powers, Russia and the European Union. That makes Ukraine a buffer state. Geopolitical logic dictates that buffer states cultivate and maintain cordial relations with the greater powers that surround them, unless they want to be swallowed up by one of those powers. That’s because siding with one great power against another often leads to catastrophe. No less an authority than the prophet Isaiah tells us so. He warned the Jews not to side with the pharaoh—a broken reed, he called Egypt, which pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it—in the dynasty’s conflict with the Babylonians. Isaiah was right: The Jews bet wrong and were dragged off into exile.

Today Israel is no longer a buffer state; rather, it’s a regional power. But geography didn’t change, which means that Israel is still a tiny country surrounded by larger entities, like Turkey and Iran.

So how did the Jewish state transcend buffer-state status? Because it acquired what is reportedly a large nuclear arsenal with air, land, and sea delivery capabilities—the vaunted nuclear triad—which render it immune to an enemy’s first strike, and ensures, for the time being anyway, that Israel is no longer a stomping ground for empires. Conversely, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for U.S. security guarantees in the event its neighbors, Russia in particular, turned hostile.

What kind of strategy dictates that a state hand over its security vis-a-vis local actors to a country half the world away? No strategy at all. Ukraine was not able to transcend its natural geography as a buffer state—and worse, a buffer state that failed to take its own existence seriously, which meant that it would continue to make disastrously bad bets. In 2013, the European Union offered Kyiv a trade deal, which many misunderstood as a likely prelude to EU membership. Young Ukrainians very much want to join the EU, because they want access to Europe so they can flee Ukraine, which remains one of the poorest countries on the continent.

The trade deal was an ill-conceived EU project to take a shot at Putin with what seemed like little risk. The idea was to flood the Ukrainian market, and therefore also the Russian market, with European goods, which would have harmed the Russian economy—leading, the architects of this plan imagined, to popular discontent that would force Putin himself from office. Putin understandably saw this stratagem as a threat to his country’s stability and his personal safety, so he gave Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych an ultimatum: either reject the deal and accept Moscow’s $15 billion aid package in its place, or else suffer crippling economic measures.

When Yanukovych duly reneged on the EU deal, the Obama administration helped organize street demonstrations for what became history’s most tech-savvy and PR-driven regime change operation, marketed to the global public variously as Maidan, EuroMaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, etc. In February 2014, the protests forced Yanukovych into exile in Moscow. Consequently, Nuland and other Obama administration officials worked to assemble a new Ukrainian government friendly to the United States and therefore hostile to Russia.

In late February, the Russians responded to the American soft coup in Ukraine by invading Crimea and eventually annexing it and creating chaos in Eastern Ukraine. The Obama administration declined to arm the Ukrainian government. It was right to avoid conflict with Moscow, though by leaving Kyiv defenseless, it showed that the White House had never fully gamed out all the possible scenarios that might ensue from setting a client state on course for conflict with a great power. Instead, Obama and the Europeans highlighted their deadly miscalculation by imposing sanctions on Moscow for taking advantage of the conditions that Obama and the Europeans had created.

The White House seems to have taken a perverse pride in the death and destruction it helped incite in Eastern Europe. In April 2014, CIA Director John Brennan visited Kyiv, appearing to confirm the agency’s role in the coup. Shortly after came Vice President Biden, who took his own victory lap and counseled the Ukrainians to root out corruption. Naturally, a prominent Ukrainian energy company called Burisma, which was then under investigation for corruption, hired Biden’s son Hunter for protection.

By tying itself to an American administration that had shown itself to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support. Russia then lopped off half of the Donbas region on its border and subjected Ukraine to a grinding, eight-year-long war, intended in large part to underline Russian capacity and Ukrainian and American impotence.

Ukraine then made a bad situation even worse. When the same people who had left them prey to Putin asked them to take sides in an American domestic political conflict, the Ukrainians enthusiastically signed on—instead of running hard in the opposite direction.

In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign came calling on Ukrainian officials and activists to lend some Slavic authenticity to its Russia collusion narrative targeting Donald Trump. Indeed, Russiagate’s central storyline was about Ukraine. Yes, Trump had supposedly been compromised by a sex tape filmed in Moscow, but Putin’s ostensible reason for helping Trump win the presidency was to get him to drop Ukraine-related sanctions. Here was another chance for Ukraine to stick it to Putin, and gain favor with what it imagined would be the winning party in the American election.

With the CIA’s Brennan and a host of senior FBI and DOJ officials pushing Russiagate into the press—and running an illegal espionage campaign against the Trump team—Ukrainian political figures gladly joined in. Key participants included Kyiv’s ambassador to Washington, who wrote a Trump-Russia piece for the U.S. press, and a member of the Ukrainian parliament who allegedly contributed to the dossier. The collusion narrative was also augmented by Ukrainian American operatives, like Alexandra Chalupa, who was tied into the Democratic Party’s NGO complex. The idea that this game might have consequences for Ukraine’s relations with its more powerful neighbor doesn’t seem to have entered the heads of either the feckless Ukrainians or the American political operatives who cynically used them.

Of course, Ukraine was hardly the only American client state to involve itself in domestic political gamesmanship. By appearing before the U.S. Congress to argue against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took sides with Republicans against a sitting American president—which seems like an even bigger potential faux pas.

The differences between the two situations are even more revealing, though. The Iran deal touched on a core Israeli national interest. As a U.S. ally, Israel was challenging the wisdom of handing nuclear weapons to its own (and America’s) leading regional competitor and rival. By contrast, Ukraine had no existential or geopolitical reason to participate in the anti-Trump operation, which allowed it at best to curry favor with one side of the D.C. establishment while angering what turned out to be the winning party. Russiagate was the kind of vanity project that a buffer state with a plunging GDP and an army equipped with 40-year-old ex-Soviet weapons in a notoriously risky area of the world can ill afford—especially one that lacked a nuclear arsenal.

And that was only the beginning. Just as Russiagate seemed to be coming to a close in July 2019, U.S. national security officials injected yet another Ukraine-related narrative into the public sphere to target the American president. This one appears to have been initiated by Ukrainian American White House official Alexander Vindman and his colleague Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst who had served as Vice President Biden’s point man on Ukraine during the Obama administration. When Vindman told Ciaramella about a phone call in which Trump had asked the Ukrainian president for information regarding allegations about the Biden family’s corrupt activities in Kyiv, they called on help from U.S. intelligence services, the State Department, the Pentagon, Democratic Party officials, and the press. Quick, scramble Team Ukraine—Trump is asking questions!

In order to cover up for what the Bidens and perhaps other senior Obama officials had done in Ukraine, a Democratic Congress impeached Trump for trying to figure out what American policymakers had been doing in Ukraine over the past decade. As for the Ukrainians, they again put themselves in the middle of it, when they should have stayed home.

The end result was that the Ukrainians had helped weaken an American president who, unlike Obama, gave them arms to defend themselves against the Russians. More seriously, they reinforced Putin’s view that, especially in partnership with the Democrats, Ukraine did not understand its true place in the world as a buffer state—and would continue to allow themselves to be used as an instrument by policymakers whose combination of narcissism and fecklessness made them particularly prone to dangerous miscalculations. The 2020 election victory of Joe Biden, a man whose family had been paid by the Ukrainians to protect them, can have done little to quiet Putin’s sense that Ukraine needed to be put in its place before it was used yet again as a weapon against him.

From the perspective of the U.S. national security establishment, Biden’s victory over Trump signaled that its actions in Ukraine would stay hidden. So long as the media continued to bark that the 45th president of the United States is Putin’s stooge, no one would be held accountable for anything. Except, as it turns out, D.C. political operatives aren’t the only people who can make history. Putin can, too. And the people of Ukraine will come out much the worse for both of their efforts. (Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble.)

Vladimir Putin cannot be indemnified for the deadly course of action that he has taken, but Ukrainian leaders deserve much blame for tying themselves as they did to the American intelligence and national security apparatus that put in place a man, Biden, who has been wrong about every national security matter in his entire fifty-year career in the government of the United States of America.

The Errors of Russia: A Chastisement for Us All

Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation a former Soviet KGB agent and director of one of its successors, the FGB, under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, from 1998 to 1999, is a corrupt Russian autocrat by dint of his own personality. It was his assignment to track down foreign nationals in the Democratic Republic of [East] Germany, a task to which he devoted himself with utmost diligence. He has distinguished himself during his two different tenures as President of the Russian Federation as a corrupt man who rewards his friends lavishly, something that the czars and commissars did before him, of course, and who is not averse to the harassing and silencing of those in his country who dare to criticize him, whether publicly or privately. If you think about this for a moment or two, it might occur to you that it is an act of utter hypocrisy for American President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., to criticize Putin’s suppression of dissent within the Russian Federation as he, Biden,, resents and seeks to punish, especially by means of the Unite States Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, those who criticize him and his policies, which he believes are infallible and thus beyond question.

As a Russian nationalist who has aligned himself with the heretics of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leaders have long sought to persecute Ukrainian Catholics, especially those who belong to the Uniate Rite Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which has roots dating back to the very Christianization of Russia itself and has been a Uniate Rite since the late-Sixteenth Century at the time of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1595, Vladimir Putin  attempted to portray his actions eight years ago in Crimea (which was given to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita S. Khrushchev, who was known as the “Butcher of the Ukraine”–see Crimes of Khrushchev Against the Ukrainian People and The Bumpkin Butcher) during his time as the regional governor until Stalin, in 1954) and in the eastern part of Ukraine as being a bulwark against the godlessness of the Western world’s New World Order. Some “conservatives,” including some here in the United States of America, have fallen for this public relations effort.

It must be remembered that Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism are one and the same, which is why the late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who suffered in the gulags under Joseph Stalin for having criticized him, was an admirer of Putin’s in the late-1990s precisely because of the latter’s Russian nationalism and why the late Pultizer Prize laureate in literature, who was justly critical of Western immorality, materialism, legal positivism, and relativism, hated the Catholic Faith. For all of his excellent work condemning Marxism and Western liberalism, Solzhenitsyn equated Christianity with Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism.

Moreover, as has been noted on this site many times in the past, the errors of Russia spoken of by Our Lady in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal, refer to the antecedent roots of Bolshevism (also see Occult roots of the Russian Revoliution), Russian Orthodoxy.

Indeed, Marxism-Leninism, the most aggressive, atheistic form of socialism, was but a logical successor of nearly one thousand years of errors in Russia that made it possible for Talmudic financiers to build on the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by Orthodoxy by instituting the overtly anti-Theistic rule of the politburo. Just look at three of the pre-Communist errors of Russia, which remains, I believe, an instrument by which a chastisement will be visited upon the West for its infidelity to Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen:

1. Denial of Papal Primacy, presaging the errors of Martin Luther and John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer, et al.

2. Denial of the Magisterial Authority of the Catholic Church, leaving doctrinal decisions in the hands of committees of bishops.

3. The subordination of the Orthodox Church to the civil state, presaging the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the separation of Church and State wrought by Martin Luther and cemented by the rise of Judeo-Masonry and other, inter-related forces of naturalism.

Obviously, the errors of Russian Orthodoxy helped to shape the nature of Russian government over the centuries, something that Greek Orthodoxy, finding itself immersed in the heart of Mohammedanism, could not do. Thus, Russian Orthodoxy helped to pave the way over the centuries for Protestantism and Freemasonry by means of its rejection of the Social Reign of Christ King as it must be exercised by the Catholic Church.

The principal error of Modernity, the rejection of the Incarnation as an absolute necessity in the right ordering of men and their nations, had its antecedent roots in Russia. The errors of Russia influenced, albeit indirectly at times and through many filters, the ideas of the so-called Enlightenment in the West. And the failure of those anti-Incarnational and, at times, anti-Theistic ideas to resolve social problems, which have their remote cause in Original Sin and their proximate causes in the Actual Sins of men, made possible the rise of all manner of utopian theories.

Vladimir Putin is thus no friend of the true Faith. He, a thoroughly amoral man in both his public and private lives, has simple wrapped himself up in the mantle of Russian Orthodoxy to arouse support in the Russian Federation and to win the sympathy of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, having first wrested control of Crimea from the 2014 provisional government in Kiev, which is, the birthplace of Christianity in Russia, in order to isolate those who overthrew Viktor Yanukovych and put the economic squeeze on them so that they will eventually make their peace with “Greater Russia,” which he has been unable to do under the Jew named Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin has long desired to reconstitute parts of Imperial Russia and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For a review of the many times in which the boundaries of Ukraine have been redrawn over the centuries, please see 22 Maps That Explain The Centuries-Long Conflict In Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin also has geopolitical goals to accomplish as he seeks to reestablish a semblance of Russian dominance in a region that he seen come under the influence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the apparatchiks who run the European Union. Viktor Yanukovych has been in exile for eight years now because he accepted Vladimir Putin’s bribe of “economic assistance” rather than that offered by the Eurosocialists of the West, whose ways of “freedom” and “diversity” caused the Obama administration to organize the “mobs” that showed him the way out of Kiev to his exile in Moscow. The American coup of eight years ago made possible two successive Ukrainian administrations that were so friendly to the West that they cut off their face to spite their nose, thereby provoking the Russian bear into an invasion that was not justified proportionally to the provocation.

A writer for The Federalist website summarized the conflict as follows:

Not every war is unnecessary or avoidable, but history might well judge the Russo-Ukrainian war as both, not least because the United States and its European allies could have prevented it but didn’t.

The decision to go to war was Russia’s, and Russia bears ultimate responsibility for what happens now. But that does not absolve the West of its strategic incompetence and complacency, and it does not mean the United States and its allies are guiltless in all of this.

At multiple points leading up to the current crisis, there were ways for the United States and Europe to create off-ramps for both Moscow and Kyiv, to shepherd a negotiated settlement so that both sides got a minimum of what they needed, and some of what they wanted.

What might that have looked like? For Moscow, a recognition of its strategic claim on Crimea and the port of Sevastopol as the home of its Black Sea Fleet. For Kyiv, the promise of political independence and greater integration with Europe in exchange for territorial concessions.

The West should have also considered the folly and recklessness of floating the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine, something no serious person ever thought Russia would accept without going to war to prevent it. And yet as far back as 2008, the United States openly discussed the possibility of Ukraine’s membership in NATO, even as Kyiv still claimed sovereignty over Russia’s most important naval base in Sevastopol. Under these conditions, the idea of Ukraine joining NATO was preposterous.

Instead, for years now the West has encouraged Ukraine to take a hard line on Russia, with false promises that the U.S. and NATO would stand up to Moscow and defend Ukraine when it came down to it, or that Ukraine would become a NATO member and thus secure its untenable borders.

As the political scientist John Mearsheimer argued back in 2016, the West has been leading Ukraine “down the primrose path, and that the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. … What we’re doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We’re encouraging the Ukrainians to think they will ultimately become part of the West, because we will ultimately defeat Putin and we will ultimately get our way, time is on our side.”

That encouragement — false encouragement, as it turns out — made the Ukrainians unwilling to compromise with Russian or consider Russian demands that were not unreasonable, given the historically unique circumstances of modern Ukraine’s borders and the problems those borders have always presented.

What’s more, the West’s encouragement of Ukraine did not match up with the West’s policies toward Moscow. You don’t tacitly commit to defending Ukraine from Russia while simultaneously making your nation energy dependent on Russia, as Germany and other European powers have done over the past decade, or flood your financial sector with billions from Russian oligarchs, as London has done.

The Biden administration not only encouraged European energy dependence on Russia (by waiving sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last May) but substantially contributed to it by reversing the Trump administration’s achievement of U.S. energy independence. As my colleague Tristan Justice explains, President Biden’s energy policies have taken away the ability of the U.S. and its allies to sanction Russian oil exports, a key source of the Kremlin’s wealth:

“From Russia, the United States still imports nearly 600,000 barrels of oil every day. In contrast, the Keystone XL Pipeline Biden shut down was supposed to transport 830,000 barrels at peak capacity. Biden didn’t sanction the Russian energy sector, because he couldn’t have. Trump could have, and probably would have.”

All of this adds up to an historic failure by the West. For many years, the U.S. and its NATO allies knew that revisionist powers like Russia and China were unhappy with the post-Cold War international order, determined to revise it according to their strategic ambitions. It was up to the West, and especially the United States, to ensure that those attempts at revision did not take the form of all-out war, either on the European continent or in Asia.

Already, though, we see Beijing extending a hand to Moscow, calling for negotiations that could at this point only end with Russia achieving its strategic aims in Ukraine. 

Simply put, the West has not done what is necessary to preserve the U.S.-led international order, and now that order is unraveling in real time. (The West Could Have Prevented the Russo-Ukarinian But Chose Not To.)

In other words, the dispute in Ukraine has not been about “right and wrong.” It is about which set of errors, the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity adhered to by the West or the errors of Russian nationalism that have persecuted untold millions of human beings, including our coreligionists in Poland, Lithuanian, Belarus and Ukraine over the centuries, is going to serve as the driving political force in what will remain of the territorial boundaries of Ukraine after Putin is finished with this latest effort to redraw those lines.

The West and the Overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014

For its part, the morally corrupt leaders of the pro-abortion, pro-perversity governments of the European Union and the United States of America have a vested interest in helping to spread the same joys of “democracy” and “freedom” that have permitted licentious to lay waste to the remnants of formerly Catholic Europe, whose indigenous population, choked off by means of chemical and surgical abortifacients, is being overcome by the descendants of the Mohammedan hordes who were turned back by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours on October 10, 732 A.D., by the combined Christian forces under the leadership of King John of Austria in the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, and by the forces under the command of Polish King John Sobieski in the Battle at the Gates of Vienna on September 12, 1683. Western leaders and their Talmudic financiers have wanted to establish a foothold in the former birthplace of Christianity in Russia, taking full advantage of the fact that over sixty-two percent of the population of Ukraine is atheistic, fruit of over seventy years of Bolshevik rule, interrupted in some parts of the country because of Nazi occupation during World War II. This is all about the consequence of the errors of Russia spreading as Our Lady said would be the case if it was not consecrated to her Immaculate Heart by a true pope and all of the world’s true bishops.

Western leaders, steeped in their support of all manner of social evils as they advance a statism whose goals are Marxist in conception if not in name, saw the mobs that ousted the Russian-friendly Yanukovych instruments to enslave Ukraine under their schemes of social engineering and banking, which makes their condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s current invasion of the country quite hypocritical as they sought to accomplish with bribery and flattery what Putin is seeking to accomplish with armed force.

Indeed, the aforementioned Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn identified the West’s ethnocentrism as the chief reason its leaders are incapable of understanding the rest of the world, including his own beloved Russia, then in Soviet captivity:

There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units. For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in communist captivity. It may be that in the past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West, I am no judge here; but as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it stands apart from the Western world in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered peoples’ approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success, there were no geographic frontiers to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the twentieth century came the discovery of its fragility and friability. We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious, and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different. (Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. June 8, 1978.)

Those who have any sense of history know how well American attempts to Americanize other countries, starting with Our Lady’s own beloved Mexico, have worked in the course of this country’s history (see  Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part one, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part two, Then, Now and Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part three, Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part four and Then, Now And Always: Viva Cristo Rey!, part five). Catholics suffered mightily under the yoke of one American-backed revolutionary Masonic regime after another, the devil’s revenge for Our Lady of Guadalupe’s having converted over nine million Aztecs and Mayans to the true Faith.

Unlike his starry-eyed opponents in the West, however, Vladimir Putin does not blink when he sets out to assert Russia’s dominance over a country. He knew that the weaklings in the West would not risk a nuclear conflagration over Ukraine, and he knows now that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr, and the rest of the globalist gang than can never shoot straight would never be able to stop his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Alas, you see, it is far easier for Putin pacify lands that are historically with the Russian sphere of influence than it is for the blind statists and globalists of the West to “Americanize” or “democratize” lands that will never conform to the American model of “democracy” that is responsible for the triumph of unbridled licentiousness and the rise of a neo-barbarism that calls to mind the state of much of Europe before it as Catholicized in the First Millennium.

There is simply no moral high ground on which the United States of America, which permits the chemical and surgical assassination of nearly four thousand innocent babies in their mothers’ wombs every day and untold numbers of people in hospitals by means of starvation and dehydration or by vivisection for their body members even though they are not dead, to stand to denounce Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine as he is merely doing what comes naturally to a Russian nationalist: to protect the people of his nationality for his own domestic political purposes in the Russian Federation and to show the West that Russia will not dance to the tune of its bankers.

Whither the Catholics of Ukraine

Only about a third of the country of Ukraine is Christian, which is part of the wretched legacy of godless Communism in Ukraine during the seventy years of Bolshevik rule (1919-1989). Of that percentage, only nine percent are Catholics, who constitute about three percent of the total population in Ukraine. Nearly sixty-six percent of Christians in Ukraine belong to one of three different sets of the Orthodox.

Still and all, the Russian Orthodox leadership, with which Vladmir Putin has allied himself, has long been upset about the presence of any form of Catholicism in the Ukraine, no less of the Latin elements that remain among Roman Rite Catholics in the country. The Russian Orthodox have never gotten over the inroads made by Catholicism in Ukraine during the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1569 to 1795. Much like their counterparts in “ecumenical dialogue” in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, staring with Patriarch Krill himself, desire to eradicate true Catholicism, although the Russians want to do so not for the sake of conciliarism but to make Ukraine “pure” for Russian Orthodoxy without the “corrupting” influence of what is seen as the “Roman religion.”

A recent article from the Catholic News Agency summarized the history of Catholic suffering in Ukraine:

Though most of Ukraine's population is Eastern Orthodox, Catholics are among those suffering amid Russia's invasion of the country. Russian military entered Ukraine at several points on Thursday, and missile strikes on military targets and cities were also reported.

Here is what to know about Ukraine's Catholic population:

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

About 9 percent of Ukrainians (about 3.6 million persons) are Greek Catholics, meaning they are Catholics who belong to Churches of the Byzantine rite. The vast majority of these are part of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is led by Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuck of the Ukrainian Archeparchy of Kyiv-Halych.

The Byzantine rite celebrates the liturgy in the form used by the Eastern Orthodox Churches, regularly using the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

Ukrainian Greek Catholics are concentrated in the country's western oblasts bordering Poland, particularly Lviv. There are, however, 16 eparchies or exarchates (equivalent to dioceses or vicariates) of the Church throughout the country, including in Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is rooted in the 10th century Christianization of Kievan Rus', a state whose heritage Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus all claim. That event also forms the roots of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

This Church also has a diaspora, with a sizable presence in the U.S., Canada, Poland, and Brazil, and smaller communities elsewhere in Europe, and in Argentina and Australia.

Latin rite Catholics

There is also a Latin, or Roman, rite hierarchy in Ukraine, to which about 1 percent of the population belongs (about 371,000 persons). This is also concentrated in the west of the country, with six dioceses being suffragan to the Archdiocese of Lviv, and it has cultural ties to Poland and Hungary.

Others

Ukraine is also home to the Ruthenian Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, and the Armenian Catholic Archeparchy of Lviv.

The Ruthenian Catholic Church also uses the Byzantine rite, and it is centered in an oblast that borders four of Ukraine's western neighbors. There are nearly 320,000 Catholics in the Mukachevo eparchy, who are served by about 300 priests.

There is an Armenian Catholic Archeparchy in Lviv, though it has been vacant since World War II. Armenian Catholics in Ukraine are few in number, and are often entrusted to the pastoral care of priests of other Catholic Churches.

Persecution

Catholic Churches were severely persecuted in Ukraine while the country was part of the Soviet Union, and the renewal of conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the 2010s brought with it fears of ecclesial conflict and persecution.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was outlawed under Soviet rule, from 1946 to 1989, and the Ruthenian Catholic Church was suppressed in 1949.

In 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea and armed conflicts in other border regions between Ukrainian military forces, and pro-Russian rebel groups and Russian soldiers, the then-apostolic nuncio to Ukraine warned of a return of persecution because of Russia's expansion into Ukrainian territory.

“The danger of repression of the Greek-Catholic Church exists in whatever part of Ukraine Russia might establish its predominance or continue through acts of terrorism to push forward with its aggression,” Archbishop Thomas Gullickson said Sept. 23, 2014.

Archbishop Gullickson was nuncio to Ukraine from 2011 to 2015, and he retired in 2020, at age 70.

“Any number of statements emanating from the Kremlin of late leave little doubt of Russian Orthodox hostility and intolerance toward Ukrainian Greek-Catholics,” he said in September 2014 to directors of Aid to the Church in Need.

“There is no reason for excluding the possibility of another wholesale repression of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church as came about in 1946 with the complicity of the Orthodox brethren and the blessing of Moscow,” he stated.

Many Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic clergy were forced to leave Crimea after its annexation. Both Roman and Greek Catholics faced difficulties in properly registering ownership of church property and in ensuring legal residency for their clergy.

Under the Soviet Union, 128 priests, bishops, and nuns of the Ruthenian Catholic Church were put in prisons or sent into exile in Siberia. The eparchy of Mukachevo had 36 priests martyred during the persecution. (Things to Know About the Catholic Church in Ukraine. By the way, Eastern rite bishops are, by and large, true bishops as they have apostolic succession and are consecrated in a valid rite of the Catholic Church.)

Pray for the Catholics of Ukraine (it is hard for me not to refer to the country as “The Ukraine” as was done for most of my own lifetime) at this time. They will suffer mightily if Russians are able to install their stooges in Kiev.

No Peace Without Christ the King

Human nature is flawed as a result of Original Sin. The souls of men are wounded further by the effects of their Actual Sins, which is why we must seek to recover by penance what we have lost by sin. There will always be conflicts in the world even if it is God’s Holy Will for the Social Reign of Christ the King to be restored prior to the Second Coming of Our King on the Last Day.

Indeed, Pope Pius XII, writing in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatucs, October 10, 1939, explained that Europe was frequently torn by wars even when there its kingdoms recognized the true Faith. Pope Pius XII also noted, however, the difference between then and now and his own time was that conflicts last longer, are more deadly and more intractable precisely because men have turned away from Christ the King, choosing to persist in their sins:

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, 1939.)

Our true popes were as one in reminding Catholics that Protestant Revolution led to the subsequent rise and triumph of naturalism, thereby hasting the decay of men and their nations to the point of barbarism and beyond.

Pope Pius XII’s predecessor, Pope Pius XI, used his own first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, to remind the world that there is simply no peace, either in the souls of men or in the world where the persistence in sin is glorified as a “human right:”

13. It is most sad to see how this revolutionary spirit has penetrated into that sanctuary of peace and love, the family, the original nucleus of human society. In the family these evil seeds of dissension, which were sown long ago, have recently been spread about more and more by the fact of the absence of fathers and sons from the family fireside during the War and by the greatly increased freedom in matters of morality which followed on it as one of its effects. Frequently we behold sons alienated from their fathers, brothers quarreling with brothers, masters with servants, servants with masters. Too often likewise have we seen both the sanctity of the marriage tie and the duties to God and to humankind, which this tie imposes upon men, forgotten.

14. Just as the smallest part of the body feels the effect of an illness which is ravaging the whole body or one of its vital organs, so the evils now besetting society and the family afflict even individuals. In particular, We cannot but lament the morbid restlessness which has spread among people of every age and condition in life, the general spirit of insubordination and the refusal to live up to one’s obligations which has become so widespread as almost to appear the customary mode of living. We lament, too, the destruction of purity among women and young girls as is evidenced by the increasing immodesty of their dress and conversation and by their participation in shameful dances, which sins are made the more heinous by the vaunting in the faces of people less fortunate than themselves their luxurious mode of life. Finally, We cannot but grieve over the great increase in the number of what might be called social misfits who almost inevitably end by joining the ranks of those malcontents who continually agitate against all order, be it public or private.

15. It is surprising, then, that we should no longer possess that security of life in which we can place our trust and that there remains only the most terrible uncertainty, and from hour to hour added fears for the future? Instead of regular daily work there is idleness and unemployment. That blessed tranquillity which is the effect of an orderly existence and in which the essence of peace is to be found no longer exists, and, in its place, the restless spirit of revolt reigns. As a consequence industry suffers, commerce is crippled, the cultivation of literature and the arts becomes more and more difficult, and what is worse than all, Christian civilization itself is irreparably damaged thereby. In the face of our much praised progress, we behold with sorrow society lapsing back slowly but surely into a state of barbarism.

16. We wish to record, in addition to the evils already mentioned, other evils which beset society and which occupy a place of prime importance but whose very existence escapes the ordinary observer, the sensual man — he who, as the Apostle says, does not perceive “the things that are of the Spirit of God” (I Cor. ii, 14), yet which cannot but be judged the greatest and most destructive scourges of the social order of today. We refer specifically to those evils which transcend the material or natural sphere and lie within the supernatural and religious order properly so-called; in other words, those evils which affect the spiritual life of souls. These evils are all the more to be deplored since they injure souls whose value is infinitely greater than that of any merely material object. . . .

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.

Authority itself lost its hold upon mankind, for it had lost that sound and unquestionable justification for its right to command on the one hand and to be obeyed on the other. Society, quite logically and inevitably, was shaken to its very depths and even threatened with destruction, since there was left to it no longer a stable foundation, everything having been reduced to a series of conflicts, to the domination of the majority, or to the supremacy of special interests.

29. Again, legislation was passed which did not recognize that either God or Jesus Christ had any rights over marriage — an erroneous view which debased matrimony to the level of a mere civil contract, despite the fact that Jesus Himself had called it a “great sacrament” (Ephesians v, 32) and had made it the holy and sanctifying symbol of that indissoluble union which binds Him to His Church. The high ideals and pure sentiments with which the Church has always surrounded the idea of the family, the germ of all social life, these were lowered, were unappreciated, or became confused in the minds of many. As a consequence, the correct ideals of family government, and with them those of family peace, were destroyed; the stability and unity of the family itself were menaced and undermined, and, worst of all, the very sanctuary of the home was more and more frequently profaned by acts of sinful lust and soul-destroying egotism — all of which could not but result in poisoning and drying up the very sources of domestic and social life.

30. Added to all this, God and Jesus Christ, as well as His doctrines, were banished from the school. As a sad but inevitable consequence, the school became not only secular and non-religious but openly atheistical and anti-religious. In such circumstances it was easy to persuade poor ignorant children that neither God nor religion are of any importance as far as their daily lives are concerned. God’s name, moreover, was scarcely ever mentioned in such schools unless it were perchance to blaspheme Him or to ridicule His Church. Thus, the school forcibly deprived of the right to teach anything about God or His law could not but fail in its efforts to really educate, that is, to lead children to the practice of virtue, for the school lacked the fundamental principles which underlie the possession of a knowledge of God and the means necessary to strengthen the will in its efforts toward good and in its avoidance of sin. Gone, too, was all possibility of ever laying a solid groundwork for peace, order, and prosperity, either in the family or in social relations. Thus the principles based on the spiritualistic philosophy of Christianity having been obscured or destroyed in the minds of many, a triumphant materialism served to prepare mankind for the propaganda of anarchy and of social hatred which was let loose on such a great scale. . . .

47. It is apparent from these considerations that true peace, the peace of Christ, is impossible unless we are willing and ready to accept the fundamental principles of Christianity, unless we are willing to observe the teachings and obey the law of Christ, both in public and private life. If this were done, then society being placed at last on a sound foundation, the Church would be able, in the exercise of its divinely given ministry and by means of the teaching authority which results therefrom, to protect all the rights of God over men and nations.

48. 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.

49. 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.)

This is pretty clear.

Despite all of the blathering about “inter-religious dialogue” as the means to “peace” in the world that we have heard from the conciliar “popes” from the time of the “election” of “Saint John XXIII” on October 28, 1958, the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude, the Social Reign of Christ the King is the necessary precondition, although never an infallible guarantor, of a just social order founded upon a due concern for the eternal good souls.

The entire world, including the people in Ukraine, Syria, Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Red China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Libya, Egypt, is suffering because of the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity, which have metastasized so rapidly in the past sixty years now because of the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s “official reconciliation” with those errors.

To Our Lady of Fatima and Saint Joseph

As noted before, we are suffering the consequences of the failure of Pope Pius XI, who may not have been aware of Our Lady’s request for the collegial consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart, and Pope Pius XII, caught in the throes of the Cold War in the immediate aftermath of World War II, to consecrate Russia with all of world’s true bishops to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The errors of Russia have indeed spread throughout the world, including here in the United States of America, and remain influential in Russia and its neighbors. Indeed, we must never forget that “Saint John XXIII” promised silence about Communism at the “Second” Vatican Council in exchange for the presence of Russian Orthodox “observers” at this milestone event in the history of heresy (see The Council of Metz).

We must also remember that Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful, appeared with Our Lady during the Miracle of the Sun on October 13, 1917, in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal. Saint Joseph’s protection is essential to keep us from the blight of the twin, interrelated errors of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

There is only one path to peace, the true peace of Christ the King, and that is the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. May the Rosaries we pray every day help to plant the seeds for the restoration of Catholicism as the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Yesterday was Quinquagesima Sunday, the day on which we read the miracle of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s restoring sight to the blind man as He was walking through Jericho en route to Jerusalem to undergo the events of His Passion and Death during Holy Week.

So many people, including even a lot of believing Catholics, permit themselves to be blinded by the agitations of the moment and become fearful of the future. The holy, penitential season of Lent that will start on Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022, provides up with an opportunity to withdraw from the agitation engendered by various sections of the Judeo-Masonic synagogue of competing sets of naturalistic approaches to life and public policy and even from the details of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War to have the spiritual eyes of our immortal souls restore to a 20/20 vision that permits us to see and to remember that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ really meant it when He said:

[5] I am the vine: you the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. (John 15: 5.)

Pope Saint Gregory the Great’s sermon on the Gospel passage read at yesterday’s Mass and contained in the readings for Matins in the Divine Office teaches us that we must permit Our Lord to keep our eyes opened to the supernatural realities rather than to choose to be blinded by various tricks of the adversary to see and to think on the merely natural level:

Our Redeemer, foreseeing that the minds of His disciples would be troubled by His suffering, told them long before both of the pains of that suffering, and of the glory of His rising again, to the end that, when they should see Him die as He had prophesied, they might not doubt that He was likewise to rise again. But, since His disciples were yet carnal, and could not receive the words telling of this mystery, He wrought a miracle before them. A blind man received his sight before their eyes, that if they could not receive heavenly things by words, they might be persuaded of heavenly things by deeds.

But, dearly beloved brethren, we must so take the miracles of our Lord and Saviour, as believing both that they were actually wrought, and that they have some mystic interpretation for our instruction. For in His works, power speaketh one thing and mystery again another. Behold here, for instance. We know not historically who this blind man was, but we do know of what he was mystically the figure. Mankind is blind, driven out from Eden in the persons of his first parents, knowing not the light of heaven, and suffering the darkness of condemnation. But, nevertheless, through the coming of his Redeemer, he is enlightened, so that now he seeth by hope already the gladness of inward light, and walketh by good works in the path of life.

One must note that as Jesus drew to Jericho a blind man received his sight. Now, this name Jericho, being interpreted, signifieth the city of the moon and in Holy Scripture the moon is used as a figure of our imperfect flesh, of whose gradual corruption her monthly waning is a type. As, therefore, our Maker draweth nigh to Jericho, a blind man receiveth his sight. While the Godhead taketh into itself our weak manhood, man receiveth again the light which he had lost. By God's suffering in the Manhood, man is raised up toward God. This blind man is also well described as sitting by the wayside begging, for the Truth saith: “I am the Way.” John XIV, 6. (Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Matins, Divine Office, Quinquagesima Sunday.)

Our Lord provided His Apostles with a forewarning about the events of His Passion and Death. Their eyes, however, were blinded as they did not have yet a full understanding of what He meant when He told them that He was going to fulfill the prophecies that were written about Him. All but one of them ran away while He redeemed us on the wood of the Holy Cross, and even the first pope himself, Saint Peter, thrice denied knowing Him before he repented. The Apostles, save for Saint John the Evangelist, were fearful.

Our Lady gave strength and comfort to Saint John the Evangelist at the foot of the Cross, and she stands ever ready to give that same strength and comfort to us during our own personal crosses and during this time that is redolent of the Roman Empire’s overt persecution of the first Catholics as a counterfeit church preaches all that is opposed to what her Divine Son has taught, revealed and entrusted to the infallible protection of His Catholic Church.

There is nothing to fear.

There are only crosses to be borne with love and prayers to be said to Our Lady for forbearance during these truly tumultuous times.

Our Lady’s Holy Rosary vanquished the Albigenses.

Our Lady’s Holy Rosary vanquished the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto and at the Gates of Vienna.

Our Lady’s Holy Rosary kept Calvinist fleets from invading Peru in the Sixteenth Century and The Philippines in the Seventeenth Century.

Our Lady’s Holy Rosary forced the Red Army to withdraw voluntarily from half of Austria in 1955, one of only two times between 1945 and 1989 that it withdrew from any territory it had occupied by force.

Why do we doubt that Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary will vanquish the enemies of our own personal salvation and of her Divine Son’s Social Kingship over men and nations?

Why do we doubt that Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary will vanquish the lords of conciliarism and make them but mere footnotes in the history of heresiarchs?

Pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary, and remember these words of Pope Saint Pius X:

11. If then the most Blessed Virgin is the Mother at once of God and men, who can doubt that she will work with all diligence to procure that Christ, Head of the Body of the Church (Coloss. i., 18), may transfuse His gifts into us, His members, and above all that of knowing Him and living through Him (I John iv., 9)?

12. Moreover it was not only the prerogative of the Most Holy Mother to have furnished the material of His flesh to the Only Son of God, Who was to be born with human members (S. Bede Ven. L. Iv. in Luc. xl.), of which material should be prepared the Victim for the salvation of men; but hers was also the office of tending and nourishing that Victim, and at the appointed time presenting Him for the sacrifice. Hence that uninterrupted community of life and labors of the Son and the Mother, so that of both might have been uttered the words of the Psalmist “My life is consumed in sorrow and my years in groans” (Ps xxx., 11). When the supreme hour of the Son came, beside the Cross of Jesus there stood Mary His Mother, not merely occupied in contemplating the cruel spectacle, but rejoicing that her Only Son was offered for the salvation of mankind, and so entirely participating in His Passion, that if it had been possible she would have gladly borne all the torments that her Son bore (S. Bonav. 1. Sent d. 48, ad Litt. dub. 4). And from this community of will and suffering between Christ and Mary she merited to become most worthily the Reparatrix of the lost world (Eadmeri Mon. De Excellentia Virg. Mariae, c. 9) and Dispensatrix of all the gifts that Our Savior purchased for us by His Death and by His Blood.

13. It cannot, of course, be denied that the dispensation of these treasures is the particular and peculiar right of Jesus Christ, for they are the exclusive fruit of His Death, who by His nature is the mediator between God and man. Nevertheless, by this companionship in sorrow and suffering already mentioned between the Mother and the Son, it has been allowed to the august Virgin to be the most powerful mediatrix and advocate of the whole world with her Divine Son (Pius IX. Ineffabilis). The source, then, is Jesus Christ “of whose fullness we have all received” (John i., 16), “from whom the whole body, being compacted and fitly joined together by what every joint supplieth, according to the operation in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in charity” (Ephesians iv., 16). But Mary, as St. Bernard justly remarks, is the channel (Serm. de temp on the Nativ. B. V. De Aquaeductu n. 4); or, if you will, the connecting portion the function of which is to join the body to the head and to transmit to the body the influences and volitions of the head — We mean the neck. Yes, says St. Bernardine of Sienna, “she is the neck of Our Head, by which He communicates to His mystical body all spiritual gifts” (Quadrag. de Evangel. aetern. Serm. x., a. 3, c. iii.).

14. We are then, it will be seen, very far from attributing to the Mother of God a productive power of grace — a power which belongs to God alone. Yet, since Mary carries it over all in holiness and union with Jesus Christ, and has been associated by Jesus Christ in the work of redemption, she merits for us “de congruo,” in the language of theologians, what Jesus Christ merits for us “de condigno,” and she is the supreme Minister of the distribution of graces. Jesus “sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high” (Hebrews i. b.). Mary sitteth at the right hand of her Son — a refuge so secure and a help so trusty against all dangers that we have nothing to fear or to despair of under her guidance, her patronage, her protection. (Pius IX. in Bull Ineffabilis).

15. These principles laid down, and to return to our design, who will not see that we have with good reason claimed for Mary that — as the constant companion of Jesus from the house at Nazareth to the height of Calvary, as beyond all others initiated to the secrets of his Heart, and as the distributor, by right of her Motherhood, of the treasures of His merits,-she is, for all these reasons, a most sure and efficacious assistance to us for arriving at the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. Those, alas! furnish us by their conduct with a peremptory proof of it, who seduced by the wiles of the demon or deceived by false doctrines think they can do without the help of the Virgin. Hapless are they who neglect Mary under pretext of the honor to be paid to Jesus Christ! As if the Child could be found elsewhere than with the Mother!

16. Under these circumstances, Venerable Brethren, it is this end which all the solemnities that are everywhere being prepared in honor of the holy and Immaculate Conception of Mary should have in view. No homage is more agreeable to her, none is sweeter to her than that we should know and really love Jesus Christ. Let then crowds fill the churches — let solemn feasts be celebrated and public rejoicings be made: these are things eminently suited for enlivening our faith. But unless heart and will be added, they will all be empty forms, mere appearances of piety. At such a spectacle, the Virgin, borrowing the words of Jesus Christ, would address us with the just reproach: “This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matth. xv., 8).

17. For to be right and good, worship of the Mother of God ought to spring from the heart; acts of the body have here neither utility nor value if the acts of the soul have no part in them. Now these latter can only have one object, which is that we should fully carry out what the divine Son of Mary commands. For if true love alone has the power to unite the wills of men, it is of the first necessity that we should have one will with Mary to serve Jesus our Lord. What this most prudent Virgin said to the servants at the marriage feast of Cana she addresses also to us: “Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye” (John ii., 5).

Now here is the word of Jesus Christ: “If you would enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matt. xix., 17). Let them each one fully convince himself of this, that if his piety towards the Blessed Virgin does not hinder him from sinning, or does not move his will to amend an evil life, it is a piety deceptive and Iying, wanting as it is in proper effect and its natural fruit.

18. If anyone desires a confirmation of this it may easily be found in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. For leaving aside tradition which, as well as Scripture, is a source of truth, how has this persuasion of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin appeared so conformed to the Catholic mind and feeling that it has been held as being one, and as it were inborn in the soul of the faithful? “We shrink from saying,” is the answer of Dionysius of Chartreux, “of this woman who was to crush the head of the serpent that had been crushed by him and that Mother of God that she had ever been a daughter of the Evil One” (Sent. d. 3, q. 1). No, to the Christian intelligence the idea is unthinkable that the flesh of Christ, holy, stainless, innocent, was formed in the womb of Mary of a flesh which had ever, if only for the briefest moment, contracted any stain. And why so, but because an infinite opposition separates God from sin? There certainly we have the origin of the conviction common to all Christians that Jesus Christ before, clothed in human nature, He cleansed us from our sins in His blood, accorded Mary the grace and special privilege of being preserved and exempted, from the first moment of her conception, from all stain of original sin.

19. If then God has such a horror of sin as to have willed to keep free the future Mother of His Son not only from stains which are voluntarily contracted but, by a special favor and in prevision of the merits of Jesus Christ, from that other stain of which the sad sign is transmitted to all us sons of Adam by a sort of hapless heritage: who can doubt that it is a duty for everyone who seeks by his homage to gain the heart of Mary to correct his vicious and depraved habits and to subdue the passions which incite him to evil? (Pope Saint Pius X, Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum, February 2, 1904.)

Catholic empires, kingdoms and principalities used to honor Our Lady publicly with pilgrimages, processions and festival on her feast days, including those feast days particular to a local area or region and those not included in the universal calendar of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Moreover, Catholics who participated in these pilgrimages did so out of love for Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother as they sought to make reparation for their sins. Unlike Jorge Mario Bergoglio and most of his conciliar comrades, these Catholics had horror for and detestation of their sins, and they did not want anyone to “accompany” them in those sins. They sought to quit their sins and implore the intercessory help of Our Lady, without whose loving help we are lost. Doomed. Damned.

Pope Saint Pius X explained that Our Lady’s example of perfect humility and ready obedience to the will of God is for us all to imitate:

20. Whoever moreover wishes, and no one ought not so to wish, that his devotion should be worthy of her and perfect, should go further and strive might and main to imitate her example. It is a divine law that those only attain everlasting happiness who have by such faithful following reproduced in themselves the form of the patience and sanctity of Jesus Christ: “for whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son; that He might be the first-born amongst many brethren” (Romans viii., 29). But such generally is our infirmity that we are easily discouraged by the greatness of such an example: by the providence of God, however, another example is proposed to us, which is both as near to Christ as human nature allows, and more nearly accords with the weakness of our nature. And this is no other than the Mother of God. “Such was Mary,” very pertinently points out St. Ambrose, “that her life is an example for all.” And, therefore, he rightly concludes: “Have then before your eyes, as an image, the virginity and life of Mary from whom as from a mirror shines forth the brightness of chastity and the form of virtue” (De Virginib. L. ii., c. ii.) (Pope Saint Pius X, Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum, February 2, 1904.)

We live in a world that rewards and celebrates unchastity, impurity, indecency and perversity. It is up to us as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary to make reparation for the paganism, satanism, socialism, communism, capitalism, materialism, naturalism, hedonism, pantheism, relativism, utilitarianism, egalitarianism, authoritarianism, statism and globalism that promises men “happiness” here in order to lead them to eternal unhappiness and punishment fire for all eternity in hell while being deprived of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity. Our acts of reparation for our sins and those of the whole world will help to plant a few seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith.

And Jesus being come out of the temple, went away. And his disciples came to shew him the buildings of the temple. [2] And he answering, said to them: Do you see all these things? Amen I say to you there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed. [3] And when he was sitting on mount Olivet, the disciples came to him privately, saying: Tell us when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the consummation of the world? [4] And Jesus answering, said to them: Take heed that no man seduce you: [5] For many will come in my name saying, I am Christ: and they will seduce many.

[6] And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. [7] For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places: [8] Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows. [9] Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall put you to death: and you shall be hated by all nations for my name's sake. [10] And then shall many be scandalized: and shall betray one another: and shall hate one another.

[11] And many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many. [12] And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. [13] But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved. [14] And this gospel of the kingdom, shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come. [15] When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand.

[16] Then they that are in Judea, let them flee to the mountains: [17] And he that is on the housetop, let him not come down to take any thing out of his house: [18] And he that is in the field, let him not go back to take his coat. [19] And woe to them that are with child, and that give suck in those days. [20] But pray that your flight be not in the winter, or on the sabbath.

[21] For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be. [22] And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened. [23] Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him. [24] For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. [25] Behold I have told it to you, beforehand.

[26] If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not. [27] For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be. [28] Wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered together. [29] And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be moved: [30] And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all tribes of the earth mourn: and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty. (Matthew 24: 1-30.)

We must remain forever calm in the loving hands of Our Lady as what is more important than the agitation of the moment is the state of our own immoral soul, for which we may be called to be an account at any time. 

Wars and rumors of wars will come and go. Our date with the Divine Judge is coming sooner that we might think, which is why we must pray Our Lady’s Most Holy with fervor every day and to pray it to make the best Lent of our lives as none of us knows whether it will be our last.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us. 

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us. 

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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