As Forgettable Naturalists Fight Each Other Over Forgettable Things

Many fingers have been busy in the past week typing up all types of commentaries about the unprecedent Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) raid on the Mar-a-Lago estate of former President Donald John Trump that was personalized authorized by the United States Minister of Injustice, Merrick H. Garland, who has distinguished himself for terming parents opposed to local school boards’ imposition of the so-called “woke” by agenda as “terrorists,” for refusing to enforce a Federal law to prevent protests in front of the homes of the justices of the Supreme Court  of the United States of America, and for his continued protection of First Grifter Hunter Biden, and by F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, who cannot quite say that the Hunter Biden laptop computer that has been in the possession of his bureau since December of 2019 is not Russian disinformation. Many gums, I am sure, have also been flapping on radio, internet, podcast, and television programs, not that I have spent one moment of my good Catholic time to deal listen to any of the babbling inanities of naturalism.

Those interested in reading sound secular commentaries on the degeneration of the government of the United States of America into an instrument of raw, undisguised totalitarianism where those who criticize the government or are suspect of doing so will soon come under the scrutiny of an addition armed 87,000 agents, who must be ready to to use deadly force if “necessary” of the United States Department of the Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service and where members of the United States Congress who act in accordance with the provisions of the 1887 Electoral Vote Count Act and raise objections to a state’s certified slate of electors can have their phones “confiscated” to investigate the discharge of their duties as they had seen fit to do so, can spend their time reading one or more of the following articles: Intel Committee Republicans Demand Answers: ‘No One Is Above the Law and That Includes the Attorney General’, Rep. Stefanik: ‘This Is the Same Agency Leadership That Protected Hillary Clinton, James Comey’ and Hunter Biden, Dual system of silence? Garland, Wray clam up on Trump search after blabbing about Jan. 6 probe, If FBI goons can crucify a former president, no-one is safe, Does Donald Trump Have Jeffrey Epstein’s List of Clients?,  Trump targeted: A look at the investigations involving the former president; from Russia to Mar-a-Lago, The Fascist Bureau of Investigation, Attorney General Garland's stature shrinks as he doggedly pursues Trump and among many others, ‘Where Was The Outrage’: Rubio Slams Leftists For Double Standards On Threats Of Violence To FBI Versus Supreme Court.

Before shifting the focus of this commentary, to root causes, though, there are three different articles not listed above that I consider useful to summarize what the totalitarians are trying to do to former President Donald John Trump, who promised to “drain the swamp” but did not at that time possess a sufficient knowledge of what that meant and thereby emboldened to swap to use everything it had against him, by way of contrasting the treatment he is receiving at this time with that accorded to Madame Defarge (aka Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton) six years ago and the preferential treatment being shown at this time to First Grifter Hunter Biden:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is demanding answers from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray regarding Monday’s raid of former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

On Thursday, the conservative titan and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Wray a list of questions concerning the unprecedented raid in Palm Beach, Florida, among other topics, including Hunter Biden. The FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was reportedly about documents Trump may have taken with him when he left office last year.

Grassley began by asking Wray about his knowledge of the raid before it happened, what potential role he played in approving it, and the investigation more generally. He then delves into questions concerning the equal application of the law regarding government records, citing the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “mishandling of highly classified information.”

Grassley first asks if Wray was “aware of the pending raid of Mar-a-Lago when he sat before” the Judiciary Committee on August 4. Grassley notes in the document that Wray left the hearing early before finishing his second round of questioning, and news reports that followed indicated he traveled to the Adirondacks on his government plane.

Subsequent questions concerning the Mar-a-Lago raid are as follows:

• “When did you approve the raid? When did Attorney General Garland?”
• “What was the predication for the raid? Please provide the predicating records, including the search warrant and supporting affidavit.”
• “What is the scope of the investigation that predicated the raid? Is it limited to federal records and classification issues? Please explain.”
• “Did you discuss the search warrant with anyone at the White House before or after its execution?”
• “If so, what was discussed?”
• “Did any member of the White House staff or other executive employee, official, or agent, direct you in any way to pursue and execute the search warrant? If so, who?”
• “Did you discuss the search warrant with Attorney General Garland or any of his representatives or subordinates at the Department of Justice before or after its execution? If so, what was discussed?”
• “Has the FBI employed a team to determine which records fall within the scope of investigation and those that fall outside of it? If so, when was that team employed? If not, why not?”

Grassley noted that in October 2016 he penned a letter to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch regarding the past investigation of Hillary Clinton, asserting she and staffers received “kid-gloves treatment relating to her mishandling of highly classified information.”

He emphasized that 38 people committed “91 valid security violations” and that there were another 497 violations where the committee was unable to establish culpability. Some of the 38 individuals intentionally used Clinton’s unsecured homebrew server to send classified information in correspondence. Another point of contention from Grassley were letters from Attorney Beth Wilkinson, who represented former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and her deputy Heather Samuelson, from June 2016, which “were incorporated by reference into the immunity agreements” for her two clients:

The letters set out the precise manner in which the Department and the FBI would access and use federal records and other information stored on .PST and .OST email archives from Ms. Mills’ and Ms. Samuelson’s laptops. It was my understanding that Ms. Wilkinson and lawyers from the Justice Department drafted the Wilkinson letters jointly before Ms. Wilkinson sent them to DOJ.

My letter expressed concerns about the process by which Congress was allowed to view the Wilkinson letters, that the letters inappropriately restricted the scope of the FBI’s investigation, and that the FBI inexplicably agreed to destroy these individuals’ laptops knowing that the contents were the subject of Congressional subpoenas and preservation letters.

Grassley asked Wray about those security violations:

“With respect to the 91 security violations committed by the 38 individuals relating to Secretary Clinton’s mishandling of highly classified information, did the State Department refer any of them to the Justice Department or FBI? If so, what steps were taken to investigate them for those security violations and potential criminal conduct? If no steps were taken, please explain why not.”

Grassley also noted then-State Department spokesman Mark Toner’s comments in August 2015 concerning Clinton lawyer David Kendall’s possession of a flash drive. Among its contents was “highly classified information from Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” Grassley wrote. 

“We simply cleared the site where they’re being held, made sure that it was a secure facility, and capable of holding what could be classified material,” Toner stated, which begs Grassley’s next question.

“Did the FBI engage in the same conduct with respect to former President Trump and Mar-a-Lago? If not, why not?”

Grassley’s final two questions on the Mar-a-Lago raid were as follows: 

“As the aforementioned fact pattern illustrates, the FBI, under the Obama-Biden Administration, agreed to destroy government records pertaining to Secretary Clinton’s mishandling of highly classified information as well as laptops associated with Ms. Mills and Ms. Wilkinson. Those records were subject to congressional subpoena and related requests. Has the Justice Department and FBI provided the same privilege to former President Trump and his attorneys? If not, why not?

Grassley asked Wray to answer his questions by August 25.

He appeared on Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends on Thursday and noted he spoke to Wray Tuesday. “I didn’t get any satisfactory answers,” he said.

any conservatives felt similarly about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s televised statement Thursday, where he stated that he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter.” Garland also noted he filed a motion to unseal aspects of the search warrant as well as the itemized receipt of what was seized, both of which Breitbart News has obtained.

The documents show the search warrant was approved on August 5 but was not exercised until Monday, August 8. Garland did not take questions Thursday and emphasized he is unable to provide further information regarding “the basis of the search” due to “federal law, longstanding department rules, and … ethical obligations.”

In a pair of Truth Social posts Friday afternoon, Trump expressed that all of the documents were already declassified:

Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to “seize” anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request…

…They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?

The Truths followed another post Thursday night in which he encouraged the unsealing of the documents.

“It is expected these documents, including the warrant that has been reviewed by Breitbart News, will be made public by the court soon, later on Friday or in the coming days,” Breitbart News noted. (Chuck Grassley Demands Answers from FBI Director on Mar-a-Lago Raid. Also see There's no sainthood for Obama, National Archives in Trump FBI raid uproar.)

Try, if you can, to imagine the reaction if the Justice Department had, in President Donald Trump’s second year in office, orchestrated a raid of Hillary Clinton’s Chappaqua, N.Y., home, rummaging through rooms and cracking the Clintons’ safe looking for government documents she hadn’t turned over when she left the State Department.

You can bet, at the very least, that newspapers wouldn’t be carrying run-of-the-mill headlines such as “F.B.I. Searches Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Residence” or “FBI executes search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in document investigation.” The Washington Post thought the important story to tell was how “Top Republicans echo Trump’s evidence-free claims to discredit FBI search.” 

No, the press would be in a full meltdown. Democrats would be calling for Trump’s impeachment. Celebrities would be making videos in which they cry about the future of the country. Never Trumpers would be patting themselves on the back and shouting “I told you so.” Colleges would be canceling classes so students could comfort each other and draw in their school-issued coloring books. The gnashing and grinding of teeth could be heard from space.

Needless to say, it would have been the end of the Trump administration.

But this is the Biden administration we’re talking about. And when it acts dictatorial – which is more frequent with each passing month – it’s the ends that matter, not the means, because the ends are about delivering on a leftist agenda. Did Biden authorize this raid? How far up the chain of command did it go? Don’t expect the “watchdog” press to ask such questions.

Instead, the response to the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is, if anything, celebratory.

The Los Angeles Times, for example, immediately ran a piece titled “Raid May Signal End of Another ‘Long National Nightmare.'”

The New York Times published a story with what can only be read as a hopeful headline: “If Donald Trump broke a law on the removal of official records, would he be barred from future office?” (Anyone recall the Times asking this about Hillary Clinton and her purloined documents

We won’t even bother relaying what cable new “pundits” or that hive of scum and villainy on Twitter are saying.

So, what exactly was the FBI looking for that required such extreme measures?

CNN described it this way: “Following the National Archives’ recovering of White House records from Mar-a-Lago in recent months, the FBI on Monday had to verify that nothing was left behind.”

Wait, that’s it? Not that the FBI had good reason to believe Trump illegally absconded with sensitive documents? It just wanted to make sure there weren’t any left in the house? Was there any reason to believe there were any such documents there? Or that Trump was purposefully withholding them? Did the agents have a list of “missing” documents they were trying to retrieve?

Is this the standard now for FBI raids? “We don’t have a good reason to bust into your home, we just want to make sure you don’t have anything you shouldn’t have.” If federal agents have such a low standard to search a former president’s home, what can’t they do?

The raid also draws a stark and undeniable contrast between how the FBI handled Clinton’s private server and her attempt to hide the fact that it contained official documents that she failed to turn over to the State Department, including top-secret documents that she claimed never existed.

In that case, the FBI treated Clinton with whatever is gentler than kid gloves. They gave her every benefit of the doubt. They excused the fact that she broke the law because she didn’t intend to do the nation harm.

This is, of course, a long-standing pattern in Washington. Republicans are vilified for any and all wrongdoings and made to answer for every crime, no matter how petty. Democrats get a finger-wagging, at worst.

You’d think that the FBI, its reputation for impartiality in tatters after its politicized handling of the Clinton email scandal and its eagerness to traffic in fake Russia-collusion documents, would want to act with a smidgen more restraint.

It turns out that the FBI’s campaign against Trump isn’t finished. It tried to keep him out of the White House by pushing the Russia hoax, and when that failed tried to run him out of office by dragging the investigation out for years. Now the bureau is apparently trying to make sure that Trump never holds office again. What’s the one thing we know Trump has been guilty of? He’s not a liberal Democrat or a cowardly Republican.

There’s a word for this, when law enforcement becomes an arm of one political party. What is it again? Oh, right, a police state.

This is what the left is celebrating. This is why the public needs to strip Democrats of power at the first opportunity, and never give it back. (Welcome To Biden’s Police State, Part III .)

The day before Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claimed that the FBI—along with “Russian intelligence”—had “rigged the election.” Election denialism is perfectly acceptable behavior on the left. Krugman blamed the “rigged election” on “people within the F.B.I.” who, he asserted, “clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences,” by which he meant the investigation into Clinton’s email server. One can imagine the tenor of Krugman’s rhetoric if the investigation had been launched by the administration of Mitt Romney or George W. Bush or signed off on by AG Robert Bork.

Is it still the case that investigating a candidate for wrongdoing is “rigging” an election? Yesterday, Merrick Garland’s DOJ raided the home of a former president, and likely future presidential candidate, in a case regarding “potential mishandling of classified documents,” according to The Washington Post. Is that really it? We have long been told that “mishandling of classified documents” isn’t a serious crime.

When Clinton set up a secret private server to circumvent transparency, likely to hide favor-trading related to her now-obsolete corrupt foundation, it was a potential felony. In that illegal server, the FBI would find 100 emails containing classified information, 65 marked “Secret,” 22 marked “Top Secret,” and over 2,000 emails that would be retroactively marked classified. Many felonies. Unlike Trump, who had the power to declassify any document he wished, Hillary could not. And as numerous experts pointed out, the chances that those documents were intercepted by foreign powers were quite high. No one’s home was raided by the FBI.

Indeed, Hillary’s staff then attempted to destroy all evidence related to that secret illegal server, wiping it and literally using hammers to break phones and laptops—as Comey noted at the time, they “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.” Another bunch of potential felonies. Not only were there no FBI raids, but Comey showered Clinton’s staff with immunity.

Comey would make the exceptionally unconvincing case that though everything that Hillary had done was illegal, the most qualified person to ever run for the presidency had merely acted “extremely careless.” More likely, Comey didn’t want to charge a presidential candidate with a bunch of felonies in the run-up to an election. It’s also true that the mishandling of documents had not been treated seriously in past examples. When former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger stole highly classified documents from the National Archives—memos regarding the Clinton administration’s failed anti-terrorism efforts—he was given community service. No one raided his home to look for more documents.

While these double standards may not induce you to distrust the FBI, what happened next should. Hillary would kick off the entire bogus Trump-Russia investigation, signing off on the leak of a fictitious oppo-research document, which was bolstered, most likely, by Russian disinformation. Yet, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, initial FISA applications used by the FBI to spy on Trump’s orbit “relied entirely” on information from the dossier author Christopher Steele. Not only were the applications riddled with 17 “significant errors,” and not only would the FBI withhold contradictory evidence in the case, but a lawyer for the agency doctored an email and used it as the basis for a sworn statement to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Then again, why wouldn’t an Obama administration that spied on journalists, millions of Americans, and even senators—and then lied about it–also spy on the political opposition? Those same people, some ensconced in the agency, behind this abuse were feeding the media one half-baked Trump conspiracy theory after the next. Investigation after investigation would be launched on that information, and despite lofty promises of Democrats, not a single person in Trump’s orbit would be indicted of anything having to do with colluding with Putin to undermine the election of 2016. It was all a partisan attempt to criminalize policy positions they dislike.

Now we’ve moved on to Jan. 6 committee hearings. The same double standards, of course, are again in play. When Republicans hold committee hearings, Democrats get to name their members. When Democrats hold committee hearings, they get to name all the members. When Obama Attorney General Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress over his role in sending guns to drug lords, he can laugh it off. When former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro is held in contempt, he is shackled by the FBI. When Democrats support underlying causes that end in riots, they are absolved of responsibility. When Republicans do, they are insurrectionists.

All of this is an effort to cobble together disparate events and statements to create the perception that Republicans led a concerted “coup” against the government. It seems to me, and perhaps I’ll be proven wrong, this raid is part of that partisan effort. We’ll soon find out. But you don’t have to be a fan of Trump — and I’m not; he acted recklessly and unpresidential on Jan. 6, to say the least — to see how these precedents are dangerous or how they corrode trust in institutions. Either you uphold the law for all politicians, as you would the rest of us, or you don’t.

Of course, if Republicans were doing any of this, Democrats would be calling it authoritarian. And they’d be right. (We Have No Reason To Trust The FBI.)

These commentaries are good. As far as they go, which is not where any worldly commentator is trained to go as they are, no matter being capable of seeing individual problems and keeping track of the stereotypical duplicity and hypocrisy of the power-seeking, self-aggrandizing, opposition-crushing, privileged members of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” and their symbiotic lapdogs in the deep state bureaucracy, the media, Big Tech, Big Banking, and Big Pharma, constitutionally incapable of thinking supernaturally and thus to have any real understanding as to why all that is unfolding before our very eyes is taking place.

Let me stipulate at this juncture that, yes, of course, former President Donald John Trump has been subjected to one boldly, manifest, and unapologetic injustice after another in the human order of things. Trump’s crime was that he was not a milquetoast Republican of the Thomas E. Dewey, Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr./Leslie Lynch King, Jr., George Herbert Walker Bush, Robert Joseph Dole, George Walker Bush, John Sidney McCain III, and Willard Mitt Romney variety. He had been one of theirs, even going so far as to call Patrick Joseph Buchanan a “Nazi” back in 2000 when Trump pondered the idea of seeking the Reform Party nomination that Buchanan ultimately won.

Trump changed, and they seethed. He was no longer one of their own. He spoke his mind, threw out so many insults at whoever criticized him and/or whomever he believed was a threat to his ambitions to have made the late Don Rickles, who died in 2017, envious of his talents as an insult comic. Trump is a New Yorker who speaks his mind even though his mind his not fully formed nor informed even on the natural level, no less the supernatural. He is visceral and reacts to stimuli emotively.

However, Donald John Trump was viewed as a real threat to the political status quo, a supposed “conservative” who was not playing by the Mr. Nice Nice standards of the Bushes and Romneys. His unexpected election on November 8, 2016, shocked the “left” as it much as it surprised Trump himself, and it was the latter’s unpreparedness to assume office staffed with Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointees nor White House aides who supported his agenda and were indeed trying to subvert that agenda in all too many instances gave the “left” the opportunity that the Deep State, led by Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, Samantha Powers, and a whole host of others, the chance to undermine his presidency before he assumed office, while he was in office, and now seven months into the second year of his being out of office. There will be no end to this in human terms until the president has been indicted, convicted and imprisoned for having been said to violate the same Espionage Act that Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton could have faced charges for violating before the sanctimonious stealer of government documents named James Brien Comey, whose job was to investigate not to make prosecutorial decisions, let her skate in July of 2016.

Nevertheless, though, former President Donald John Trump was and remains his own worst enemy a man who is incapable of accepting even constructive criticism with grace and of making enemies out of allies for the pettiest of reasons and the most inconsequential of matters. As noted extensively in Put Not Your Trust in Princes: In the Children of Men in Who There is No Salvation and True Last Year, True This Year, True Forever: Put Not Your Trust in Princes, in the Children of Men in Whom There is No Salvation, 2022 Edition, Trump’s was incapable of accepting the reality that he had run an aimless, disorganized and seemingly disinterested campaign for reelection wherein no one on his campaign staff seemed to have taken seriously the efforts on the part of the vast array of Democratic Party attorneys, led by the notorious Marc Elias, to exploit the Wuhan/CCP/China/SARS Cov-2/Covid-19/Coronavirus to extort “consent agreements” from governors and attorneys general in the “swing states” to permit unlimited “mail-in” voting that proved to be very successful in producing Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.’s margin of "victory” in those states. The time to have dealt with the likes of Marc Elias was when these “consent agreements” were being obtained, not after the election when the time between counting of the popular vote and the certification of slates of electors in the various states does not permit for very effective legal challenges, and certainly not the sort of willy-nilly, throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-sticks challenges brought by the cartoon figures that Rudolph William Giuliani and Sydney Powell made of themselves in this sad process.

Then President Trump demonstrated poor personal judgment in begging State of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into “finding” 11,000 votes in Georgia and in trying to get someone in the United States Department of Justice into declaring the election to have been corrupt even though elections take place in the states and there is no constitutional or statutory authority for anyone in the Department of Justice to make such a declaration. Even worse, though, if it is really the case—and it may not be—that Trump knew he lost and still wanted someone in the Justice Department and Pence to overturn he election, then he demonstrated a terrible lack of concern for how such unilateral decisions would have caused open civil unrest and bloodshed throughout the country and, given the onerous Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley’s readiness to unconstitutionally usurping the civilian chain of command to monitor the president’s actions between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2020, the pretext to throw him out of the White House in chains. Trump reacted viscerally, not rationally, as he flailed about in the two months between the election and January 6, 2021, as he was unable to recognize that he had contributed to his loss in the “swing” states by stitching together a campaign team unable to compete with the cutthroat Democratic elections lawyers and then not having the foresight to understand that a strategic, gracious retreat would have enabled him to be in a better position to prepare for a 2024 run. What he did on January 6, 2021, was morally indefensible, but it was not a crime except in the minds of those who did everything they could to keep him from being elected and then to undermine his presidency to the point of defeat.

Instead, however, Trump listened to all the wrong people and when the relatively small group of mostly nonviolent supporters went into the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, many with the full prodding of the Capitol Police, to interrupt a process during which various Republican Senators and Representatives were prepared to present  the evidence of electoral irregularities in the swing states during the electoral vote counting process, he refused to intervene in any way for several hours as he rejected pleas from his daughter, Ivanka Trump Kushner and her mother, the late Ivana Trump, Jared Kushner, and his own 2016 campaign manager, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, to do something before the corrupt, hateful, and vindictive demagogue named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., could claim the moral high ground, which he did most happily and sanctimoniously. This behavior gave his enemies yet another pretext to wage war against him on grounds of fomenting an “insurrection” even though many of them tried to thwart his own election and some even used the same processes outlined in the 1887 Electoral Vote Count Act to challenge his election on January 6, 2017, that some within the United States Ministry of Injustice consider to be “proof” of Republican “collusion” with Trump’s “insurrection” because they raised objections to the results in those “swing” states.”

The events of January 6, 2021, vitiated the efforts of Republicans to make any kind of case at all other than enter objections, which were then voted down without debate or discussion and thus without being able to present any of the evidence that had been amassed. While it is true that the presentation of the evidence would not have changed the outcome of the electoral vote count, it would have placed the evidence in public viewing. Alas, Trump’s passions got the better of him and he refused to see that there are times in the human order of things when standing down in order to fight again on the electoral battlefield in the future is prudent and just. The Mar-a-Lago raid is said to be about the Presidential Records Act, but it is really about January 6, 2021, which is probably why the United States Ministry of Injustice opposes the release of the affidavit upon which the search warrant issued by a Trump-hating, pro-Clinton Federal magistrate was based.

Even if, however, then President Trump had conceded before he did and the events of January 6, 2021, had not occurred, his enemies still would have found one excuse after another to hound him in his ex-presidency, and it is clear that head of the Biden Syndicate seethes with hatred for Trump and had been pressuring his political hack of an ideologically charged attorney general, Merrick Garland, to find some grounds to prosecute Trump, which is why the raid at Mar-a-Lago took place on Monday, August 8, 2022:

Reserved, studious and precise, Merrick Garland appears to be an attorney general selected by central casting. Unfortunately, the part he is playing belongs to another era, one where the government was widely trusted. 

After orchestrating one of the biggest events in the history of the Department of Justice, Garland proved himself too small for the moment. Whether he volunteered or was pushed into authorizing the unprecedented FBI raid on the home of former President Donald Trump, he was woefully unprepared for the entirely predictable fallout. 

It should not have been a surprise to him that about half the country believes the raid was motivated by politics. Or that Trump’s support, which had been slipping, instantly started rising among Republicans and some independents.

Even if Garland hadn’t considered politics, he might have thought of the declining credibility of his organization, especially after its shameful spying on Trump in the 2016 election. 

Gallup has tracked Americans’ confidence in 14 institutions for decades, and the criminal-justice system ranks close to the bottom of the barrel. 

It won the confidence of just 20% of respondents last year, beating out only big business, TV news and Congress, which registered a measly 12%. Small businesses topped the chart, enjoying the confidence of 70% of respondents, with the military second, at 69%. 

The public mood was apparently news to Garland, who remained out of sight for three days after the raid despite demands for an explanation. He still has not grasped the fact that it is a blaring conflict of interest for Joe Biden’s AG to raid the home of Biden’s predecessor and his likely opponent in 2024.

As I have noted, The New York Times reported in April that Biden was frustrated that Garland had not moved faster to prosecute Trump. That puts Biden’s fingerprints on the raid, with his wish becoming Garland’s command.

When he finally spoke, Garland was a lousy lawyer for his case. He foolishly took no questions as he read a statement that claimed absolute rectitude on his part and scolded critics of the FBI.

He insisted he could not, under law, give any information about the search, but said he would petition the judge to release the warrant and a list of what was taken. The search, he emphasized, was by-the-book and had absolutely no political dimension.

And then the leaks started. Within hours, and long before the warrant was made public, headlines from numerous outlets friendly to the administration began with words like “FBI seized” and “FBI recovered” before going on to describe how many boxes of documents agents took and what was in them.

The Washington Post was first to claim some documents were “relating to nuclear weapons” and said the search “underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.”

Shades of Russia, Russia, Russia right there. Subsequent headlines that Trump could face charges under the Espionage Act confirmed the government’s intent to again paint him as a traitor. 

As Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

Indeed it is and, naturally, all the sources were anonymous, with The Washington Post saying they “spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.”

In plain English, the leakers were committing a crime by disclosing the info Garland said was confidential. But breathes there a fool who believes the AG is upset and plans to find and prosecute them? 

Trump’s out of office, but that hasn’t dimmed the left’s desire to destroy him. Sadly, the cutthroat ranks now include the sitting attorney general.

Their excuse, er, reasoning is that Trump is a danger to democracy, even as they marshal an unprecedented use of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies against him.  

In truth, the real danger to democracy is the government itself when it abuses its power for partisan purposes. 

Dems, of course, remain terrified of Trump as an opponent and are trying to gin up their dispirited base for this year’s midterms.

While the possibility that Trump broke laws by taking and holding the documents cannot be dismissed, the hysterical reaction of a raid belies the fact that the government had retrieved 15 boxes of documents from him in January and negotiations continued until June. 

How is it, then, that Garland suddenly decided he needed a raid to retrieve remaining documents that left the White House 19 months ago when less radical options are available? 

The timing is doubly curious because the raid comes just three months before voters get to decide who controls Congress. If Dems lose, GOP investigations of Biden and Garland are certain. 

Part of the evidence in Trump’s favor is that Hillary Clinton got a much sweeter deal with her use of a private server to send and receive classified documents. There was no raid of her house, and even the disgraced James Comey, then the FBI director, did not trust then-AG Loretta Lynch to honestly pursue the case. 

Comey, for once, was right, with Clinton getting a free pass not long after Lynch met with Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, we apparently are watching a replay of that scam with the federal probe of Hunter Biden. An investigation in its fifth year, with not a single charge, is more of a cover-up than an investigation.

Perhaps Hunter was sending the message that he’s untouchable when a photo showed him whispering in his father’s ear as they climbed the steps of Air Force One last week for a vacation flight to South Carolina. 

The contrasting images of the week capture the Dems’ twin abuses of power: Dozens of federal agents swarming over Trump’s home while Hunter jets off with the Big Guy under the protection of federal agents and the military. 

They are not just playing with politics. They are playing with fire. (AG Merrick Garland's raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago is a farce of law.)

While I disagree with Michael Goodwin’s assessment of James Brien Comey’s letting Madame Defarge skate in July of 2016, his overall analysis of the situation, including the fact that former President Trump may have decided to take documents that he believed he declassified, albeit without fulfilling the bureaucratic paperwork to satisfy the ideological moles at the National Archives, and thus might have exposed himself to the same situation that faced Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton in 2016. The Mar-a-Lago raid was meant to send the same message as that which was sent by Robert Mueller when his team orchestrated the arrests of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone and when the Ministry of Injustice arrested Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro on the same contempt of Congress charges for which Lois Lerner and Eric Holder were never brought to answer. The “left” plays  by its own set of rules, and they are ruthless in the execution of whatever amoral schemes they devise to repress opposition voices, to charge opponents with crimes of one sort or another and to stigmatize anyone who criticizes the august infallibility of the Biden administration as a “violent rightwing extremist” intent on distorting the “rule of law” when it is the agents of this statist administration who are intent on enslaving ordinary citizens by means of confiscatory taxing policies that feed Caesar’s bloat and thus ensure their own iron grip on political power for decades to come (also see The FBI Is Now the Federal Bureau of Intimidation.) Worse yet, it would be disastrous in human terms if Trump did have documents he should have returned to the National Archives in compliance with the Presidential Records Act as it would have been foolhardy of him to do this knowing that the Deep State has two sets of rules, and he is on the receiving end of those “rules.”

The raid on Donald John Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was meant not only to target the former president and to demean and defile his family as below the law and thus worthy of contempt and as much humiliation as possible, it was meant also to divide the country even further and thus to create a Reichstag scenario wherein any opposition to the raid or criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and/or the United States Ministry of Injustice is considered an “incitement to riot” and thus illegitimate on its face. Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray are already fanning the flames of this division and is nothing other than fascistic to its very core. Sadder still is the fact that there are unhinged people who do believe in the illusion of secular salvation who might try to use violence to “express” themselves rather than to pray for the conversion of those who are serving as our persecutors and jailers at this time.

Thus, all the secular commentary on this latest descent of the American regime into a raw totalitarianism worthy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, no matter how accurate various assessments on the natural level it may be, fails to address the deeper, supernatural root causes that have produced a governmental system whose flawed premises are now manifesting the perfection of their inherent degeneracy.

Unable to Save Anything from the Existing Ruins

Remember, the purpose of this very little read website is to remind the very few readers who access it to view the world and everything happens through the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith, which informs us that everything that is occurring at this time—or at any other time in human history—is or has been wholly within the Providence of God, Who means for us to rise above the agitations d of the moment, and one of best ways to do this is to take a step back from the blare of headlines and the screeching of competing sets of naturalists to examine root causes. Such an examination will inform us that men and their nations must fall into the abyss of totalitarianism if their governmental systems are not based on sound principles that are wholly consonant with and subordinate to First and Last Things as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to His Catholic Church for their infallible explication.

Fallen men, however, are ever ready to get lost in the fog of naturalism and think that they can “fight” their way out of ever devolving messes that have their proximate root cause in the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and the subsequent rise and triumph of a whole welter of Judeo-Masonic ideologies, philosophies, programs or “solutions” that are nothing other than the adversary’s sterile efforts to create competing sets of veritable secular “religions” whose main goal is to pave the way for Antichrist’s system of One World Governance to which Modernism’s One World Ecumenical Religion is but a subservient substructure. We, though, must think as Catholics, and it is in this regard that this website exists no matter how few people seem to take any notice nor derive any real benefit to the point where they continue to enjoy the bread and circuses provided them by “conservative” news and commentary channels and websites.

Most Catholics, it would appear, want to spend their times in agitation and outrage and believe in the absolute absurdity that “things” are going to get “better” with this or that election even though there is no guarantee that, with respect to the 2022 midterm elections, the useless caste of creatures called Republicans are going to win a majority in either or both houses of the United States Congress and, if they do, will do anything substantive other than to bluff and bluster until 2024.

Thus, it is good to call to mind the following facts to understand yet again that a governmental system that is not subordinate to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church in all that pertains to the good of souls and whose leaders do not seek to pursue the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End must degenerate over the course of time into a system of raw totalitarianism. Moreover, as I have demonstrated in countless commentaries on this site in the past eighteen and one-half years, the American system of government has never been as “free” as the mythology in which even most Catholics believe has purported. Appendix B below contains a very non-exhaustive history of the ways in which opposition voices have been suppressed from colonial times to the present day.

The founding fathers of the United States of America were naturalists to the core of their being. They expected that their system of governance would be conducive to the creation and sustenance of a “civic virtue” wherein men would present themselves for public office who exhibited statesmanship by explaining their positions to the voters during elections and then, if elected, defending their actions while in office without regard to their own electoral survival but solely on the basis of what they believe constituted the common temporal good. Unfortunately for them, however, leaving aside the fact that many of the founders descended to the depths of demagoguery during the administration of President George Washington and thereafter following the formation of what became permanently established political parties, it is impossible for men to pursue or to sustain virtue on a merely natural level over time, something that Pope Leo XIII noted in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899:

Nor can we leave out of consideration the truth that those who are striving after perfection, since by that fact they walk in no beaten or well-known path, are the most liable to stray, and hence have greater need than others of a teacher and guide. Such guidance has ever obtained in the Church; it has been the universal teaching of those who throughout the ages have been eminent for wisdom and sanctity-and hence to reject it would be to commit one’s self to a belief at once rash and dangerous.

A thorough consideration of this point, in the supposition that no exterior guide is granted such souls, will make us see the difficulty of locating or determining the direction and application of that more abundant influx of the Holy Spirit so greatly extolled by innovators To practice virtue there is absolute need of the assistance of the Holy Spirit, yet we find those who are fond of novelty giving an unwarranted importance to the natural virtues, as though they better responded to the customs and necessities of the times and that having these as his outfit man becomes more ready to act and more strenous in action. It is not easy to understand how persons possessed of Christian wisdom can either prefer natural to supernatural virtues or attribute to them a greater efficacy and fruifulness. Can it be that nature conjoined with grace is weaker than when left to herself?

Can it be that those men illustrious for sanctity, whom the Church distinguishes and openly pays homage to, were deficient, came short in the order of nature and its endowments, because they excelled in Christian strength? And although it be allowed at times to wonder at acts worthy of admiration which are the outcome of natural virtue-is there anyone at all endowed simply with an outfit of natural virtue? Is there any one not tried by mental anxiety, and this in no light degree? Yet ever to master such, as also to preserve in its entirety the law of the natural order, requires an assistance from on high These single notable acts to which we have alluded will frequently upon a closer investigation be found to exhibit the appearance rather than the reality of virtue. Grant that it is virtue, unless we would “run in vain” and be unmindful of that eternal bliss which a good God in his mercy has destined for us, of what avail are natural virtues unless seconded by the gift of divine grace? Hence St. Augustine well says: “Wonderful is the strength, and swift the course, but outside the true path.” For as the nature of man, owing to the primal fault, is inclined to evil and dishonor, yet by the help of grace is raised up, is borne along with a new greatness and strength, so, too, virtue, which is not the product of nature alone, but of grace also, is made fruitful unto everlasting life and takes on a more strong and abiding character.

This overesteem of natural virtue finds a method of expression in assuming to divide all virtues in active and passive, and it is alleged that whereas passive virtues found better place in past times, our age is to be characterized by the active. That such a division and distinction cannot be maintained is patent-for there is not, nor can there be, merely passive virtue. “Virtue,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “designates the perfection of some faculty, but end of such faculty is an act, and an act of virtue is naught else than the good use of free will,” acting, that is to say, under the grace of God if the act be one of supernatural virtue.

He alone could wish that some Christian virtues be adapted to certain times and different ones for other times who is unmindful of the apostle’s words: “That those whom He foreknew, He predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son.”- Romans viii, 29. Christ is the teacher and the exemplar of all sanctity, and to His standard must all those conform who wish for eternal life. Nor does Christ know any change as the ages pass, “for He is yesterday and to-day and the same forever.”-Hebrews xiii, 8. To the men of all ages was the precept given: “Learn of Me, because I am meek and humble of heart.”-Matt. xi, 29.

To every age has He been made manifest to us as obedient even unto death; in every age the apostle’s dictum has its force: “Those who are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with its vices and concupiscences.” Would to God that more nowadays practiced these virtues in the degree of the saints of past times, who in humility, obedience and self-restraint were powerful “in word and in deed” -to the great advantage not only of religion, but of the state and the public welfare. (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

The “civic virtue” that existed in the minds of the American founding fathers was and remains illusory. We need the help of the graces won for us by Christ the King during His Passion and Death of the Holy Cross to be virtuous and to climb the ladder of sanctity with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as they must be to His own Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary out of which It was formed.

Democratic republics—and the globalist unions they make with one another--are bound to fall apart because they are founded upon a welter of errors that must degenerate into chaos and open conflict sooner or later.

Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the great Dominican foe of Modernism and the Twentieth Century’s greatest exponent of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, explained the flaws inherent in democracies that lead to their decay and dissolution over time:

Democracy is an imperfect regime, as a regime in ratione regiminis, as a result of the lack of unity and continuity in the direction of interior and exterior affairs. Also this regime should only be for the perfect already capable of directing themselves—those virtuous and competent enough to pronounce as is fitting upon the very complicated problems on which the life of a great people depends. But it is always true to say as Saint Thomas noted that these virtuous and competent men are extremely rare; and democracy, supposing such perfection among subjects, cannot give it to them. From this point of view, democracy is a bit in politics what quietism is in spirituality; it supposes man has arrived, at the age or the state of perfection, even though he still may be a child. In treating him as a perfect person, democracy does not give him what is required to become one.

Since true virtue united to true competence is a rare thing among men, since the majority among them are incapable of governing and they have a need of being led, the regime which is the best for them is the one which can make up for their imperfection. This regimen perfectum in ratione regiminis, by reason of unity, continuity, and efficacy of direction towards a single end which is difficult to achieve is monarchy. Above all a tempered monarchy which is always attentive to the different forms of national activity. It is better than democracy or than the feudal regime. Monarchy assures the interior and exterior peace of a great nation, and permits her to long endure. (Dom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On Royal Government: translated by Andrew Strain, On Royal Government)

Perhaps the events unfolding before our very eyes will be used by Our Lord, Christ the King, to bring about the coming of the Great French Monarch who will unite men around the standard of the Holy Faith and who will do battle with Antichrist before he is killed, thus preparing the way for the final battle between Our Lord Himself and the great deceiver. However, it is my own personal belief that there will have to be many more chastisements have to take place before we the great French monarch comes forward. The current circumstances, however, do show us very clearly that the anti-Incarnational civil state of Modernity is capable only of producing disorder and of being led by people who are utterly unable to see the events of the world in light of First and Last Things. 

Here is a summary of the major principles that explain why naturalism is incapable of providing the framework for social order and must yield to the forces of barbarism over the course of time:

1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.

2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.

3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.

4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.

5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.

6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.

7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.

8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in their countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.

9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her Indirect Power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.

10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are the basis of the actions of civil governance in all that pertains to the good of souls and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, the salvation of his immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church. Civil leaders must, therefore, recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws.

This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past twenty-five years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).

The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:

1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation

3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.

4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.  

5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the words of Holy Writ are for a Protestant or to a Modernist, is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact. The likes of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton have no regard for the words of the Constitution or for the just laws passed by Congress, and Donald John Trump is plainly ignorant of some of the fact that there are seven articles in the Constitution and twenty-seven amendments to it since its ratification in 1788. We are governed by men who are contemptuous or law or wholly ignorant of it. Quite a state of affairs.

6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.

A nation founded on false premises, no matter the "good intentions" of those whose intellects were misinformed by several centuries of naturalist lies and Protestant theological heresies and errors, is bound to degenerate more and more over time into a land of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and naturalism and paganism and atheism and environmentalism and feminism and barbarism. Many evils, including the daily carnage against the preborn, both by surgical and chemical means, continue to be committed in this country. American "popular culture" destroys souls and bodies both here and abroad. Full vent is given each day to a panoply of false ideas that are from Hell and confuse even believing Catholics no end as they try to find some "naturalist" hero or idea by which to win the "culture wars," oblivious to the fact that it is only Catholicism that can do so.

Widespread hypocrisy must, you see, become even more widespread and universal. After all, Americans who are not concerned about the daily slaughter of the preborn have shown themselves all too willing to overlook such "minor" things as undeclared wars, unconstitutional executive orders and directives, unjust judicial decisions, a ceaseless surrender of legitimate national sovereignty, and illegal actions that put into jeopardy the nation's national security interests. Why should little things such as hypocrisy and double standards of justice matter at all to people willing overlook crimes against God and man from which they, whether or not they realize it, must suffer as the state of the nation worsens over time?

It was in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, that Pope Pius XI described the true nature of modern political parties:

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of the government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Those in civil rule must exercise their authority for the cause of Christ the King and His true Church, a cause that is synonymous with the common temporal good of society, something that Silvio Cardinal Antoniano explained over five hundred forty years ago:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, as quoted by Pope Pius XI inDivini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

Do you have any better ideas?

God the Holy Ghost saw fit to instruct us in Sacred Scripture, including in the passage from the Book of Proverbs:

[34] Justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable. (Proverbs 14: 34.)

Christ the King will not be mocked. He will suffer the sins of men so that they and their nations might be brought to repentance. He is not, however, indifferent to that which caused Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross, sin, and that wounds the Church Militant on earth and impedes the pursuit of the true common temporal good of men and their nations.

The final part of the coronation rite contained in the 1896 Pontificale Romanum is the enthronement of a king on his throne, which is symbolic of the Throne of Christ the High Priest and King in Heaven for Whom the king must rule and Whom He will be accountable at the Particular Judgment upon his death for his stewardship of the kingdom entrusted to his royal care:

....The Metropolitan leads the King, with the sceptre in his hand and wearing the crown on his head, with the other prelates... to the throne... and enthrones the King on the throne, saying:

Stay, and keep henceforth the place mandated to you by God, by the authority of almighty God, and through the present investiture conducted by us, and by all the Bishops and other servants of God; and, insofar as you see the priesthood as standing closer to the sacred altars, remember that greater honour is due to you in your own domain, as the priesthood, being the mediator between God and men, makes you the enduring mediator between the priesthood and the people. (Pontificale Romanum.)

This concept of royal dignity rooted in a humble submission to the priesthood and to the ineffable Sacrifice of the Holy Mass is foreign to the minds of Catholics who, whether or not they realize it, are steeped in throes of Americanism that ignores these plain words of Pope Pius XI in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. It was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

That last paragraph, number twenty-eight, says it it all. The gist of the two hundred thirty-seven articles linked at the top of this article can be summarized in the following words written by Pope Pius XI  eighty-eight years, three months ago:

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

Alas, hatred and violence must reign supreme in a world that has rebelled against Its loving, merciful King, Christ the King, Whose Most Sacred Heart beats with burning love in the tabernacles of Catholic churches served by true priests who offer the ineffable Sacrifice of Calvary in an unbloody manner in a valid rite of the Catholic Church. The only remedy to the problems that beset us at the present time, noting that there will always be difficulties even in a world governed by true principles because of the vagaries of fallen human nature, is to seek with urgency the conversion of all men to the One, True Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

We must remember that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, a point made by so many of our true popes in the past two hundred years, including Pope Pius XI in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio:

Because the Church is by divine institution the sole depository and interpreter of the ideals and teachings of Christ, she alone possesses in any complete and true sense the power effectively to combat that materialistic philosophy which has already done and, still threatens, such tremendous harm to the home and to the state. The Church alone can introduce into society and maintain therein the prestige of a true, sound spiritualism, the spiritualism of Christianity which both from the point of view of truth and of its practical value is quite superior to any exclusively philosophical theory. The Church is the teacher and an example of world good-will, for she is able to inculcate and develop in mankind the "true spirit of brotherly love" (St. Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, i, 30) and by raising the public estimation of the value and dignity of the individual's soul help thereby to lift us even unto God.

Finally, the Church is able to set both public and private life on the road to righteousness by demanding that everything and all men become obedient to God "Who beholdeth the heart," to His commands, to His laws, to His sanctions. If the teachings of the Church could only penetrate in some such manner as We have described the inner recesses of the consciences of mankind, be they rulers or be they subjects, all eventually would be so apprised of their personal and civic duties and their mutual responsibilities that in a short time "Christ would be all, and in all." (Colossians iii, 11)

Since the Church is the safe and sure guide to conscience, for to her safe-keeping alone there has been confided the doctrines and the promise of the assistance of Christ, she is able not only to bring about at the present hour a peace that is truly the peace of Christ, but can, better than any other agency which We know of, contribute greatly to the securing of the same peace for the future, to the making impossible of war in the future. For the Church teaches (she alone has been given by God the mandate and the right to teach with authority) that not only our acts as individuals but also as groups and as nations must conform to the eternal law of God. In fact, it is much more important that the acts of a nation follow God's law, since on the nation rests a much greater responsibility for the consequences of its acts than on the individual.

When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

You see, good readers, those who believe in the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity that must degenerate into full-blown statists who cannot ever "coexist" peacefully with Catholics who believe in the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King and who are devoted to the restoration of Our Lord's Social Kingship as the fundamental precondition of a rightly ordered civil government that pursues the common temporal good in light of man's Last End. These statists must seek to make war upon believing Catholics, especially those who reject the Modernism of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has made its "reconciliation" with the diabolical principles of Modernity.

This degenerative process is unstoppable by merely natural means. Only a very tiny percentage of people in the United States of America understand even the rudimentary elements of the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less accept the truth that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. No matter where they fall along the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide, most Catholics in the United States of America have had their world view shaped by the naturalism of Americanism, a naturalism that has been aided and abetted by the view of Church-State relations held and advanced by the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, who are rather tyrannical in their own right in seeking to obliterate opposition to their own revolutionary schemes that are contrary to the Catholic Faith and thus to the good of both men and their nations.

Remember, the caesars of yore came for the first Catholics in first three centuries of the Church.

The Arians came for faithful Catholics during some of that time and for a time thereafter.

The barbarians came for faithful Catholics during the First Millennium.

The Visigoths and the Ostrogoths came for Catholics on the Iberian Peninsula.

The Mohammedans came for Catholics in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and in southern France as early as the Eighth Century, and then stayed in Spain until Ferdinand and Isabella drove them out in 1492.

The Tartars came for the Catholics of Eastern Europe in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.

The Albigensians came for Catholics in southern France and elsewhere while their compatriots, the Cathari, came for Catholics on the Italian Peninsula around the same time.

The Lutherans and Calvinists came for the Catholics of continental Europe in the Sixteenth Century while Henry VIII and his daughter/granddaughter, Elizabeth I, imposed a bloody reign of terror upon faithful Catholics from 1534 through much of the Seventeenth Century and even at times after that.

The Japanese pagans came for the Catholics of Japan at the end of the Sixteenth and the beginning of the Seventeenth Centuries.

The French Revolutionaries came for Catholics who refused to have anything to do with their “Constitutional Church” as they ushered in the first anti-Theistic revolution in history, presaging the later attacks upon Catholics by the Soviet, Mexican, Red Chinese, North Vietnamese, North Korea, Cuban, Cambodian, and Nicaraguan revolutionaries in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.

Perhaps even more tellingly, the nationalistic, imperialistic, Masonic hater of Catholicism named Otto von Bismarck, used the full power of the civil state against Holy Mother Church and faithful Catholics during his Kulturkampf that earned the immediate scorn and constant opposition of Pope Pius IX, who also had to deal with the anti-Catholic attacks and anti-Catholic laws of the Italian Risorgimento in the 1860s and especially after the overthrow of the Papal States in 1870.

Those peace and fun loving Buddhists came for Catholics in Thailand in 1943.

Korean pagans came for Catholics in 1839, 1846, and 1866, while Vietnamese pagans came for Catholics in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

Communist agents came for Catholics in Spain and Ukraine in the Twentieth Century.

Hitler sent his goons to kill Catholic priests and others in Germany and had his troops engage in the indiscriminate killing of Catholics in Poland.

Stalin ordered the butchery of over twenty Ukrainian priests and bishops in 1941 while others were martyred during the reigns of Nikita Khruhschev and Leonid Brezhnev. 

In our day, of course, believing Catholics are under siege by the combined forces of “democratic” tyrants, who believe all opposition is the equivalent of seditious activity, which is a little peculiar as the United States of America was born as a result of an armed rebellion against the British Crown for abuses that were far, far less egregious, less numerous and less comprehensive than exist today, and by the globalist Vatican in its conciliar captivity.

There is no need to be agitated, though, as we are in Our Lady’s loving hands. The world as it exists is being punished for its sins, for the refusal of so many people and almost every nation in the world to submit to Christ the King as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church in all that pertains to the good of souls, upon which depends the fate of entire nations and thus of the whole world.

Our True Popes Warned Us of the Consequences of Protestant Rationalism and Judeo-Masonic Naturalism

Yes, fallen human nature has wreaked havoc throughout history, even during the period of the Catholic Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the frailties of Catholics in the Middle Ages pale into insignificance when one looks at the savagery of the barbaric tribes of Europe before their Catholicization in the First Millennium and that of the barbarism and abject hedonism of the supposedly “civilized” West today. Consider this very cogent summary of the history of the Middle Ages, that is, Christendom, written by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies. Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to true worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest; retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank as the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture; bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and most wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered a condition of things, the answer is —beyond all question, in large measure, through religion, under whose auspices so many great undertakings were set on foot, through whose aid they were brought to completion.

A similar state of things would certainly have continued had the agreement of the two powers been lasting. More important results even might have been justly looked for, had obedience waited upon the authority, teaching, and counsels of the Church, and had this submission been specially marked by greater and more unswerving loyalty. For that should be regarded in the light of an ever-changeless law which Ivo of Chartres wrote to Pope Paschal II: “When kingdom and priesthood are at one, in complete accord, the world is well ruled, and the Church flourishes, and brings forth abundant fruit. But when they are at variance, not only smaller interests prosper not, but even things of greatest moment fall into deplorable decay.”

But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Yes, the glory of the Middle Ages, which saw the transformation of barbarous nations into Catholic nations where rulers ruled in many, although certainly not all, instances according to the Mind of the Divine Redeemer as He has discharged It exclusively in the Catholic Church, was undermined and attacked by the “deplorable passion for innovation” of Martin Luther and John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and John Knox and John Wesley and Richard Topcliffe and Oliver Cromwell, theological revolutionaries who wrought their work in the blood of innocent Catholics as they sacked Catholic Churches and denied her perennial rites of worship and teaching, paved a path of blood for the likes of the social revolutionaries of the English colonies in North America and in France and Latin America and Italy and Germany.

The Protestant Revolution and the so-called “Enlightenment” ushered a true dark age of proud men who refuse to submit in a humble and docile spirit to the true Church that Our Lord founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, in all that pertains to the good of souls. It is no accident that the American founders, sons of the Protestant Revolution and the subsequent spread of Judeo-Masonry during the so-called “enlightenment,” are said to be exemplars of how to govern according to alleged “interests” rather than according to objective standards of moral truth.

Writing in his first encyclical letter, Summi Pontificatus, October 10, 1939, Pope Pius XII explained how the world was suffering as result of rejecting the unity effected by the Chair of Saint Peter, the papacy:

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.

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.)

Error leads to the collapse of nations over time, and the American founding was based on the error that men could pursue civic virtue on the basis of self-interest without regard to the Sacred Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to His true Church for Its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping and without a firm reliance upon Sanctifying Grace to over the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin in order to scale the heights of personal sanctity.

Humility of Heart

Catholics are supposed to understand that, as has been mentioned so many times on this website, all that happens to us personally and happens in the world occurs within the Providence of God.

Moreover, Catholics are supposed to understand that we are to rejoice even when we suffer manifest injustices in the human order of things as such injustices are invitations sent to us by the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus to develop a true humility of heart in accepting all that occurs within the Providence of God and to accept the scorn and brutality of men as a very small part of the price we that must pay the manifest injustices that our sins caused Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday as He wrought our redemption for us in perfect obedience to His Co-Equal, Co-Eternal God the Father.

Mind you, to rejoice when injustices in the natural order of things are visited upon us is not say that we cannot seek to rectify such injustices in a spirit of prayer and without any malice upon those who have inflicted them, but we must always understand that it may not be God’s Holy Will for us to be justified in the sight of men and that to be brought low before men and to suffer injustice for the sake of His Kingdom is one of the greatest privileges He can bestow on us as the fact that we are considered worthy to suffer is a sign that, despite our best efforts to go to hell through our own lukewarmness, vacillation, worldliness, and pride, He has not given up on our salvation, that He is not through perfecting us.

Father Cajetan Mary de Bergamo’s book on Humility of Heart contains some useful thoughts about the humility that must crown our lives if accept the scorn of men with joy and wait to be exalted in glory in Heaven in the company of Our Lady, she who is the model of humility, Saint Joseph, and all the angels and saints who adore God in His Beatific Vision:

Humility generates confidence, and God never refuses His grace to those who come to Him with humility and trust. Say therefore to God: I can remain here as long as I like and do all that I can to obtain sorrow for my sins, but it is impossible for me to attain to it of myself, if Thou dost not grant it to me, O my God! I do not deserve it, but Jesus Christ has merited it for me, and it is through His merits that I ask it, and through Thy infinite goodness that I hope to obtain it.

Place yourself in this humble disposition of mind and you will be happy, for it is written of God: that "He comforteth the humble"; [2 Cor. vii, 6] "and He hath had regard to the prayer of the humble and hath not despised their petition." [Ps. ci, 18] This sorrow or contrition by which the soul is sanctified is one of the greatest graces that God can give us, and it would be presumption, temerity, and pride on our part to pretend to this grace without having asked for it with due humility.

74. A doubt may arise in our mind that since to obtain the grace of humility we must ask it of God, and ask it with humility if we wish God to hear our prayer, how can we possibly ask with humility since it is precisely that humility which we have not and for which we are asking? Do not let us lose ourselves in such speculations, which are useless in practice, since "Simplicity of heart is what the Lord desires of us."
[Wisd. i, 1]

There are certain efficacious virtues that God has infused into our souls in holy Baptism, independently of our own dispositions, "principally by infusion in Baptism," says St. Thomas. Such, for example, is faith, and such also is that humility which is necessary for us so that we may believe and pray as we ought. Let us therefore exercise in our prayers this infused humility, and in making good use of it we shall in time acquire that other evangelical virtue which is necessary to our salvation and which can only be obtained by our own co-operation.
 
Prayer, says St. Augustine, is essentially the resource of him who knows that he is both poor and needy: "Prayer is only for the needy." ["Oratio non est nisi indigentium" (Enarr. in Ps. xxvi] Let us acknowledge and confess our poverty and indigence before God, and by this confession we shall exercise humility. The really poor do not need to be taught how to ask alms humbly. Necessity is their master, and if man can humble himself before man, why should he not also humble himself before God?

If we wish to discern what belongs to God and that which is our own, it is sufficient for us to reflect that by rendering to God all that is His, nothing is left to ourselves but nothingness. So that we can truly say with the prophet: "I am brought to nothing." [Ps. lxxii, 21] This is a true saying, that all that is within us that is more than nothingness belongs to God, and He can take away what is His when He chooses without doing us any wrong.

 Therefore in what can we pride ourselves, since God can take anything away from us the moment that we begin to glory in it?

For he who glories in his wealth may soon become poor; he who glories in his health may suddenly become infirm; he who glories in his knowledge may suddenly become insane; he who glories in his holiness may suddenly fall into some great sin. What vanity, what folly, then, to glory in that which is not our own, nor even in our power to keep! "What hast thou that thou hast not received?" [1 Cor. iv, 7]

This reflection alone should suffice to make us humble, and it may be said that all true humility depends upon our persevering seriously in this thought. Oh, my soul, thou shalt be humbled when, as God says by the prophet, He will "separate the precious from the vile." [Jer. xv, 19] Thus the essence of humility consists in knowing how to discern rightly that which is mine, and that which belongs to God. All the good I do comes from God, and nothing belongs to me but my own nothingness. What was I in the abyss of eternity? A mere nothing. And what did I do of myself to emerge from that nothingness? Nothing. If God had not created me, where should I be? In nothingness. If God did not uphold me at every turn, whither should I return? Into nothingness. Therefore it is clear that I possess nothing of myself but nothingness. Even in my moral being I possess nothing but my own wickedness. When I do evil it is entirely my own work, when I do good it belongs to God alone. Evil is a work of my own wickedness; good is a work of God's mercy. In this way we separate the precious from the vile; this is the art of all arts, the science of sciences, and the wisdom of the Saints.

76. Let us imagine a man who possesses many beasts of burden which he has bought for the purpose of carrying such loads as he requires. The beasts are loaded, one with gold, one with books of philosophy, mathematics, theology and law, another with weapons, another with sacred vessels and vestments belonging to the Church, and another with reliquaries in which are precious relics of the Saints, and so on.

Now, if these animals could discourse among themselves, do you think that the one laden with gold would boast of his riches, and the one laden with books of his knowledge, and that in the same way the others would boast of bravery or of holiness according to the nature of their loads? Would not such pretensions be vain and ridiculous? Most certainly; for the rich and precious burdens borne by these animals belong to the master and not to the beast. For the master might have laden with dung the one he loaded with gold or other precious things, and being their owner he could unload each animal whenever he pleased, so that each one would appear before him as he is, namely, a vile beast of burden. Or, with St. Augustine, let us picture to ourselves the ass on which Jesus Christ sat when He was met by the multitude with their branches of palms, acclaiming Him with cries of: "Hosanna to the Son of David, Hosanna!" [Matt. xxi, 9]  Who would be so foolish as to imagine that these honours were given to the beast? These praises were not given to the ass, but to Christ who was seated on the ass. "Was that ass to be praised? That ass was carrying some one, but He who was being carried was the one who was being praised." " [Enarr. in Ps. xxxiii].

Let us apply the simile to ourselves, saying, with David: "I am become as a beast before Thee." [Ps. lxxii, 22] and whatever may be the object of our pride let us use this simile to exercise ourselves in humility.

77. We may say with St. Thomas, [12, qu. iv, art. 2] that this craving of ours to be esteemed, respected and honoured is an effect of Original Sin, like concupiscence which remains to us even after our Baptism; but God has ordained that these appetites and desires should remain in us in order that we might have occasion of mortifying ourselves and that by such means we might gain the kingdom of Heaven.

We need not be astonished nor sad when we feel these instincts within us. They belong to the wickedness of our corrupt nature and are remnants of the temptation of our first parents by the serpent, when he said to them: "And you shall be as gods." [ Gen. iii, 5] Therefore I repeat that these desires which arise from the weakness and depravity of our human nature must be borne with patience. If these desires gain the mastery over us, it is because we have encouraged and given way to them; and a bad habit which we have formed ourselves can only be cured by ourselves, and therefore the mortification of the same also lies with us. This mortification of the senses, inspired by humility, is taught by Christ in the self-denial which He imposed upon us when He said: "If any man will follow Me) let him deny himself." [Matt. xvi, 24]  And therefore I must draw this conclusion, that if I will not mortify myself with humility-----that is to say, crush my self-love and craving for esteem-----I shall be excluded as a follower of Jesus Christ, and by such an exclusion I shall also forfeit His grace and be eternally exiled from participating in His glory.

But in order to practice it, it is necessary for me to do violence to myself, as it is written: "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence) and the violent bear it away." [Matt. xi, 12]  Who can obtain salvation) except by doing violence to himself?

78. Let us listen at the gates of Hell and hear the lamentations of the eternally damned. They exclaim: "What hath pride profited us?" [Wisd. v, 8] What use or advantage was our pride to us? Everything passes and vanishes like a shadow, and of all those past evils nothing remains to us but the eternal shame of having been proud.

Their remorse is vain, because it is the remorse of despair. Therefore while there is still time let us consider the matter seriously, and say: "What advantage have I derived from all my pride? It makes me hateful to Heaven and earth, and if I do not insist upon mortifying it) it will make me odious to myself for all eternity in Hell." Let us lift up our eyes to Heaven, and, contemplating the Saints, exclaim: "Behold how their humility has profited them! Oh, how much glory have they gained by their humility!" Now, humility is looked upon as madness by the worldly, worthy only of scorn and derision; but a time will come when they will be obliged to recognize its virtue, and to exclaim, in seeing the glory of the humble: "Behold how they are numbered among the children of God." [Wisd. v, 5]

If I am humble, I shall be exalted with that glory to which God exalts the humble. O my God, humble this mad pride which predominates within me. "Thou shalt multiply strength in my soul," [Ps. cxxxvii, 3] for, "my strength hath left me." Ps. xxxvii, 11] And I will not and cannot do anything without Thy help. In Thee I place all my trust, and beseech Thee to help me. "But I am needy and poor; O God, help me. Thou art my helper and my deliverer: O Lord, make no delay." [Ps. lxix, 6.] (Father Cajetan Mary de Bergamo, Humility of Heart.)

Unfortunately, of course, former President Donald John Trump has no understanding of this, which is why he is prone to anger and to seek revenge. He does not understand that those who persecute us and/or cause us to suffer are actually our best friends as they are being used by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to purify us, to sanctify us, to save us from our disordered attachment to self and self-importance. All that we suffer is to be offered to throne of the Most Holy Trinity as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, and we are to forgive all others as we have been forgiven in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, and we are to recognize in all humility that we deserve far worse sufferings that Our Lord permits us to suffer than those which He sends us in His boundless mercy to purify, sanctify and save us.

We cannot spend our days worrying about forgettable men such as Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Xi Jinping, or even Donald John Trump. These men, each in his own way, are simply pawns of the adversary of advance evils (Trump did the bidding of the Zionist State of Israel at every turn, advanced much, although not all, of the homosexual collective’s agenda, and was a lapdog for Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx and the rest of the “public health” fascists in 2020 when these elitists used the SAS Cov-2 virus as basis to shut down the economy and rig an election to defeat him while he was doing their bidding).

We must be concerned with planting the seeds for the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter and the subsequent restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Our Lady, she who is Our Immaculate Queen.

The Rosary IS Our Weapon, and We Must It to Fight Evil, Especially That Within Our Own Lives

Our fight—and it is a fight—is with principalities and powers:

Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high place. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace:

In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one. And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God). By all prayer and supplication praying at all times in the spirit; and in the same watching with all instance and supplication for all the saints. (Ephesians 6: 11-18.)

All the tribulations in this vale of tears will be over in a blink of an eye. It is most likely that we will stand before Christ the King, Our Divine Judge, long before He is finished with chastising this world filled with men who prefer the stench of their sins to the sweet odor of Sanctifying Grace.

In the meantime, of course, we must use the spiritual weapon—and it is precisely that, a spiritual weapon—given by the Mother of God herself to Saint Dominic de Guzman, the founder of the Order of Preachers, to fight the Albigensian heresy, and we must use this same spiritual weapon to fight the advances of the adversary in our own lives, which are a constant battle against the forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and to pray for the conversion of sinners, for an end to heresies, and in reparation for our sins and those of the whole world.

We have reached quite a state of affairs, ladies and gentlemen, when a writer for a secular magazine, The Atlantic, which published an article by attorney Charles R. Marshall in 1927 questioning New York Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith’s qualifications for the American presidency given Pope Pius XI’s defense of the Social Reign of Christ the King in Quas Primas, December 11, 1925, about which Smith had not heard and had no clue as to what it meant (Smith, who dropped out of grade school to support his family, asked a friend, "What the [Hades] is an encyclical?”), which is why he asked the noted, courageous World War I chaplain, Father Francis Duffy, to write an Americanist response rejecting Quas Primas as binding upon Catholics (see Confirmations of a Different Sort and Cut From the Same Cloth), openly attacks Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary as an instrument of “militants” who bedeck their AR-15 semi-automatic rifles with Rosary beads:

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled SANCTUM ROSARIUM alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.

The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church. These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks.

The rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy. But for millions of believers, the beads, which provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Catholic theology’s concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan. As Pope Francis said in a 2020 address, “There is no path to holiness … without spiritual combat,” and Francis is only one of many Church officials who have endorsed the idea of the rosary as an armament in that fight. (The Extremist Gun Culture Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary.)

This poor author, whose identity is entirely irrelevant as far as I am concerned, has castigated believing Catholics for taking their Faith seriously and to use Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary as the spiritual weapon that Our Lady meant for it to be until the end of time. The belief in the Rosary as a spiritual weapon is not an invention of “rad trad,” “ultraconservative” Catholics as the Mother of God herself gave it to Saint Dominic to be precisely that which this poor author thinks is a cooptation:

Since the Holy Rosary is composed, principally and in substance, of the Prayer of Christ and the Angelic Salutation, that is, the Our Father and the Hail Mary, it was without doubt the first prayer and the first devotion of the faithful and has been in use all through the centuries from the time of the Apostles and disciples down to the present.

But it was only in the year 1214, however, that Holy Mother Church received the Rosary in its present form and according to the method we use today. It was given to the Church by Saint Dominic who had received it from the Blessed Virgin as a powerful means of converting the Albigensian's and other sinners.

I will tell you the story of how he received it, which is found in the very well-known book "De Dignitate Psalterii" by Blessed Alan de la Roche [1]. Saint Dominic, seeing that the gravity of people's sins was hindering the conversion of the Albingensians, withdrew into a forest near Toulouse where he prayed unceasingly for three days and three nights. During this time he did nothing but weep and do harsh penances in order to appease the anger of Almighty God. He used his discipline so much that his body was lacerated, and finally he fell into a coma.

At this point Our Lady appeared to him, accompanied by three angels, and she said: "Dear Dominic, do you know which weapon the Blessed Trinity wants to use to reform the world?"

"Oh, my Lady," answered Saint Dominic, "you know far better than I do because next to your Son Jesus Christ you have always been the chief instrument of our salvation."

Then Our Lady replied: 

"I want you to know that, in this kind of warfare, the battering ram has always been the Angelic Psalter which is the foundation stone of the New Testament. Therefore if you want to reach these hardened souls and win them over to God, preach my Psalter." 

So he arose, comforted, and burning with zeal, for the conversion of the people in that district he made straight for the Cathedral. At once unseen angels rang the bells to gather the people together and Saint Dominic began to preach.

At the very beginning of his sermon an appalling storm broke, out, the earth shook, the sun was darkened, and there was so much thunder and lightning that all were very much afraid. Even greater was their fear when looking at a picture of Our Lady exposed in a prominent place they saw her raise her arms to heaven three times to call down God's vengeance upon them if they failed to be converted, to amend their lives, and seek the protection of the Holy Mother of God. 

God wished, by means of these supernatural phenomena, to spread the new devotion of the Holy Rosary and to make it more widely known. 

At last, at the prayer of Saint Dominic, the storm came to an end, and he went on preaching. So fervently and compellingly did he explain the importance and value of the Holy Rosary that almost all the people of Toulouse embraced it and renounced their false beliefs. In a very short time a great improvement was seen in the town; people began leading Christian lives and gave up their former bad habits. [1]. De Dignitate Psalterii. The importance and Beauty of the Holy Rosary, by Blessed Alan de la Roche, O.P., French Dominican Father and Apostle of the Holy Rosary.

This miraculous way in which the devotion to the Holy Rosary was established is something of a parallel to the way in which Almighty God gave His law to the world on Mount Sinai and obviously proves its value and importance.

Inspired by the Holy Ghost, instructed by the Blessed Virgin as well by his own experience, Saint Dominic preached the Holy Rosary for the rest of his life. He preached it by his example as well as by his sermons, in cities in country places, to people of high station and low, before scholars and the uneducated, to Catholics and to heretics.

The Holy Rosary which he said every day was his preparation for every sermon and his little tryst with Our Lady immediately after preaching.

One Day he had to preach at Notre Dame in Paris, and it happened to be the feast of St. John the Evangelist. He was in a little chapel behind the high altar prayerfully preparing his sermon by saying the Rosary, as he always did, when Our Lady appeared to him and said:

"Dominic, even though what you have planned to say may be very good, I am brining you a much better sermon."

Saint Dominic took in his hands the book Our Lady proffered, read the sermon carefully and when he had understood it and meditated on it, he gave thanks to the Blessed Mother.

When the time came, he went up into the pulpit and, in spite of the feast day, made no mention of Saint John other than to say that he had been found worthy to be the guardian of the Queen of Heaven. The congregation was made up of theologians and other eminent people who were used to hearing unusual and polished discourses; but Saint Dominic told them that it was not his wish to give them a learned discourse, wise in the eyes of the world, but that he would speak in the simplicity of the Holy Spirit and with His forcefulness.

So he began preaching the Holy Rosary and explained the Hail Mary word by word as he would to a group of children and used the very simple illustrations which were in the book Our Lady had given to him.

Carthagena, the great scholar, quoting Blessed Alan de la Roche in "De Dignitate Psalterii," describes how this took place: 

"Blessed Alan writes that one day Father Dominic said to him in a vision: 'My son, it is good to preach; but there is always a danger of looking for praise rather than the salvation of souls. Listen carefully to what happened to me in Paris so that you may be on guard against this kind of mistake: I was to preach in the great church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and I was particularly anxious to give a brilliant sermon, not out of pride, but because of the high intellectual stature of the congregation. 

'An hour before the time I had to preach, I was recollectedly saying my Rosary - as I always did before giving a sermon - when I fell into ecstasy. I saw my beloved friend the Mother of God coming towards me with a book in her hand.

'"Dominic," she said, "'your sermon for today may be very good indeed, but no matter how good it is I have brought you one that is very much better."

'Of course I was overjoyed, took the book and read every word of it. Just as Our Lady had said, I found exactly the right things to say in my sermon, so I thanked her with all my heart.

'When it was time to begin, I saw that the University of Paris had turned out in full force as well as a large number of noblemen. They had all seen and heard of the great things that the good Lord had been doing through me. So I went up into the pulpit.

'It was the feast of Saint John the Apostle but all I said about him was that he had been found worthy to be the guardian of the Queen of Heaven. Then I addressed the congregation:

"'My Lords and illustrious Doctors of the University, you are accustomed to hearing learned sermons suited to your aesthetic tastes. Now I do not want to speak to you in the scholarly language of human wisdom but, on the contrary, to show you the Spirit of God and His Greatness.'"

Here ends the quotation from Blessed Alan, after which Carthagena goes on to say in his own words:

"Then Saint Dominic explained the Angelic Salutation to them, using simple comparisons and examples from everyday life."

Blessed Alan, according to Carthagena, mentioned several other times when Our Lord and Our Lady appeared to Saint Dominic to urge and inspire him to preach the Rosary more and more in order to wipe out sin and to convert sinners and heretics.

In another passage Cathagena says:

"Blessed Alan said Our Lady revealed to him that after she had appeared to Saint Dominic, her Blessed Son appeared to him and said:

'Dominic, I rejoice to see that you are not relying upon your own wisdom and that, rather than seek the empty praise of men, you are working with great humility for the salvation of souls.

'But many priests want to preach thunderously against the worst kinds of sin at the very outset, failing to realize that before a sick person is given bitter medicine he needs to be prepared by being put in the right frame of mind to really benefit by it.

'This is why, before doing anything else, priests should try to kindle a love of prayer in people's hearts and especially a love of my Angelic Psalter. If only they would all start saying it and would really persevere, God, in His mercy, could hardly refuse to give them His grace. So I want you to preach my Rosary.'

In another place Blessed Alan says:

"All priests say a Hail Mary with the faithful before preaching, to ask for God's grace. They do this because of a revelation that Saint Dominic had from Our Lady. 'My son,' she said one day  'do not be surprised that your sermons fail to bear the results you had hoped for. You are trying to cultivate a piece of ground which has not had any rain. Now when Almighty God planned to renew the face of the earth He started by sending down rain from heaven - and this was the Angelic Salutation. In this way God made over the world.

'So when you give a sermon, urge people to say my Rosary, and in this way your words will bear much fruit for souls.'  

"Saint Dominic lost no time in obeying, and from then on he exerted great influence by his sermons."

This last quotation is from the "Book of Miracles of the Holy Rosary" (written in Italian) and it is also to be found in Justin's works (143d Sermon). 

I have been very glad to quote these well-known authors word for word in the original Latin [2] for benefit of any priests or other learned people who might otherwise have doubts as to the marvelous power of the Holy Rosary. 

As long as priests followed Saint Dominic's example and preached devotion to the Holy Rosary, piety and fervor thrived throughout the Christian world and in those religious orders which were devoted to the Rosary. But since people have neglected this gift from heaven, all kinds of sin and disorder have spread far and wide.  (Saint Louis de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary.)

Yes, it is no wonder that "all kinds of sin and disorder have spread far and wide" in our day, especially since the false "pontiff" has refused on most occasions, other than a few isolated instances here and there, to exhort the large numbers of people who turn out for his "papal" extravaganza "Masses" to pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary, whose perfect number of one hundred fifty Hail Marys was, of course, altered by the insidious master of novelty and sacrilege and blasphemy named Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, who claimed to be devoted to the Rosary! Saint Dominic made no compromises with error or blasphemy. He dared not "improve" Our Lady's Psalter.

We have been confirmed to be soldiers in the Army of Christ, which means that we must do battle with against the encroaches of in in our lives and to help others do so in theirs. Pope Leo XIII made this clear in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

But in this same matter, touching Christian faith, there are other duties whose exact and religious observance, necessary at all times in the interests of eternal salvation, become more especially so in these our days. Amid such reckless and widespread folly of opinion, it is, as We have said, the office of the Church to undertake the defense of truth and uproot errors from the mind, and this charge has to be at all times sacredly observed by her, seeing that the honor of God and the salvation of men are confided to her keeping. But, when necessity compels, not those only who are invested with power of rule are bound to safeguard the integrity of faith, but, as St. Thomas maintains: "Each one is under obligation to show forth his faith, either to instruct and encourage others of the faithful, or to repel the attacks of unbelievers.'' To recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamors are raised against truth, is the part of a man either devoid of character or who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes to believe. In both cases such mode of behaving is base and is insulting to God, and both are incompatible with the salvation of mankind. This kind of conduct is profitable only to the enemies of the faith, for nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good. Moreover, want of vigor on the part of Christians is so much the more blameworthy, as not seldom little would be needed on their part to bring to naught false charges and refute erroneous opinions, and by always exerting themselves more strenuously they might reckon upon being successful. After all, no one can be prevented from putting forth that strength of soul which is the characteristic of true Christians, and very frequently by such display of courage our enemies lose heart and their designs are thwarted. Christians are, moreover, born for combat, whereof the greater the vehemence, the more assured, God aiding, the triumph: "Have confidence; I have overcome the world." Nor is there any ground for alleging that Jesus Christ, the Guardian and Champion of the Church, needs not in any manner the help of men. Power certainly is not wanting to Him, but in His loving kindness He would assign to us a share in obtaining and applying the fruits of salvation procured through His grace.

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. So soon as Catholic truth is apprehended by a simple and unprejudiced soul, reason yields assent. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

The author of The Atlantic’s obscene, blasphemous attack on Our Lady’s Holy Rosary wants his readers to think that it is only “gun-toting” Catholics intent on doing pitched battle with the government who use the Rosary as a weapon.

Well, as one is not a gun-toting Catholic and who believes that all the guns in the world are not going to stop the advance of the forces of Antichrist at this time, I place my total trust in the power of Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary, which is Holy Mother Church’s most efficacious after the perfect prayer that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The guns are not going to save us from the fires of hell, but Our Lady’s Holy Rosary will do so if we pray it fervently while meditating upon the mysteries of our salvation contained therein.

Mind you, duly constituted Catholic kings and princes did use the Holy Rosary in conjunction with armed force to rebel the attacks of Mohammedan forces and/or to repel the advances of heretics and Communists. However, it was the spiritual force of Our Lady’s Rosary that won the day as even civil potentates humbled themselves on their knees to beseech the August Queen of Heaven for her maternal protection in times of both spiritual and temporal danger.

Our Lady's Holy Rosary was victorious this day four hundred forty-seven years ago. It was prayed throughout Europe, led by the Pope of the Rosary, Pope Saint Pius V. It was prayed on the ships of the Christian fleet both before and during the battle with the Turkish forces. One of the admirals of the Christian fleet, Gian Andrea Doria, the nephew of the famed Andrea Doria, carried a small image of Our Lady of Guadalupe with him during the Battle of Lepanto. Our Lady had conquered the barbaric Aztecs and Mayans in the Americas after she left the miraculous image of herself on the tilma of the Venerable Juan Diego. That image had become so revered in the space of less than forty-five years that King Philip II of Spain had given it to the Genoese admiral Gian Andrea Dora to be used in the battle against the Mohammedan infidels Our Lady was thus demonstrating how her Divine Son had assigned to her the task of crushing barbarians and infidels just as much as she had been assigned the task of crushing heresies when she gave the Rosary to Saint Dominic de Guzman.

King Philip II of Spain was vert devoted to the preservation of the Catholic Faith in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, and he relied very tenderly upon Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary as he, more than other other potentate in Christendom, was responsible for providing the naval ships and materiel that were used by the combined Christian forces to repel the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto. William Thomas Walsh provided a stirring account of King Philip II's endeavor to preserve Christendom from yet another attempt by Mohammedans to conquer a land with force that had been conquered by the power of Christ the King's Holy Cross at it was held high by the missionaries who spread throughout pagan and barbaric lands during the First Millennium to win by example what the Mohammedans sought to wrest by the sword:

'Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?"

The Turkish fleet, about that time, was setting out from Constantinople, with instructions to find and destroy the Christian navies and to complete the conquest of Cyprus. Before Ali Pasha left the Bosphorus with forty great galleys, four Christian prisoners were crucified, and others skinned alive, as sacrifices to Mohammed for victory. While an army of 70,000 began the siege of Dolcino, on the coast of Albania, the fleet proceeded to Chios (April eighth) where it was joined by forty more vessels under Mohammed-Bey, governor of Negroponte. A second armada was preparing to follow from Constantinople, and Aluch Ali was cruising from Algiers with twenty more. Before the end of April the Grand Turk had almost 300 heavy warships, with a huge army of crack Janizaries and Spahis on board, on the way to Cyprus, where, on May nineteenth, Mustapha resumed the siege of Famagosta, which had held out heroically for nearly a year under the Venetian general Bragadino.

Mustapha loosed all his fury upon this city for three months. The Italian women fought in the breaches with their men. The children carried dirt and ammunition. Hunger at last got the better of them, and, in August, Bragadino agreed to surrender, if the Turks would spare their lives. Mustapha agreed; but as soon as the Christians had laid down their arms, he had them tortured and butchered, women and children with the men. The valiant Bragadino was skinned alive. There were other atrocities too horrible to mention. Mustapha went sailing off to range the Mediterranean in quest of the Christian fleet, with the stuffed skin of Bragadino swinging from his yardarm,

It seems incredible that with such dangers hanging over their other eastern possessions, and even their own shores, the Venetians should have haggled over the details of the League treaty for fully two months after the Pope had signed it. Pius agreed with the Spanish envoys, who were more tractable, that the demands of Venice were unreasonable (the nuncio blamed politicians among the Senators, and merchants with interests in the Levant), but he begged the King of Spain to send Don Juan to Italy as soon as possible, so that the fleet might sail. Yet Philip, although he had been assembling troops and ships since the first of the year, and had ordered his galleys armed on a war basis when the chief points of dispute were settled on April twelfth, refused to let his brother leave Spain until the treaty was signed. Up to the last minute he expected the Venetians to forsake the League. 1 He decided also that his nephews, Rudolph and Ernest, who were about to return home, must travel with Don Juan as far as Genoa. As both the Princes were ill during April, and Ernest continued so until June, the sailing of the Generalissimo seemed uncertain indeed.

At last, however, the treaty was signed, on May twentieth. 2 The news reached Madrid on the Feast of Corpus Christi, and the nuncio hastened to San Lorenzo, to notify the King. Philip was attending a solemn procession in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. It was a day he had long anticipated, for the monastery portion of the Escorial was finished, and he was formally handing it over to the Jeronymite friars he had chosen as its custodians. He would not grant Castagna an audience until the next day; but he had the Cardinal of Siguenza tell him of his pleasure over the good news, and say that Don Juan would start at once. Philip was waiting for confirmation of the news from his own commissioners. This arrived on the morning of June sixth. 3 He then gave his orders. The Prince left Madrid at three o'clock the same afternoon, reaching Guadalajara, thirty-five miles away, the same night. He was at Barcelona on the fifteenth. Don Juan of Austria was riding to the sea at last.

The Archdukes lagged behind, for Ernest was ill again. It was June twenty-fifth before they arrived. The flagship had to be repaired, and there was further wait for Ernest. Meanwhile some irritating instructions came from Antonio Perez. There was a temperamental antipathy between the suave politician who now handled nearly all the King’s correspondence and possessed the confidence that Philip gave so generously when he did give it, and the impulsive, headstrong young soldier. Perez wrote that it was His Majesty's wish that he be addressed by every one as "Your Excellency" instead of "Your Highness," the term usually employed for members of the royal family. This reminder that he was still a bastard cut Don Juan to the soul. Even the royal ambassador at Rome wrote that in Italy people would naturally call him "Su Alteza," since "Su Excellencia" was used there by people of very low degree.

Philip refused to change his instructions. He foresaw, perhaps, that if Don Juan became famous, there would be a demand that he be considered heir to the throne. And it remained to be demonstrated whether Don Juan would develop the qualities which the rule of an Empire demanded. Moreover, since Queen Anna was already pregnant and seemed likely to accomplish the chief duty for which she had been brought to Spain, he had hopes again of a legitimate heir. Pope Pius and nearly all the other notable persons of Italy called the Prince "Your Highness" from the start, however, and could not be persuaded to change by any intimations from Madrid.

It was July twentieth when Don Juan weighed anchor at Barcelona, July twenty-sixth when he reached Genoa. The greatest enthusiasm greeted him At one function there were fifty-two noted beauties to receive him On all sides his charm and gallantry, his handsome face and fine figure, his manners and his dancing, made him a hero of society. At Genoa he parted with the Austrian princes, who passed on their way to Milan. Meeting his old friend Alexander of Parma, he proceeded with him to Naples.

The Pope was pleased with what he heard of his Generalissimo, and wanted him to come to Rome. King Philip refused to allow this. Pope Pius was compelled, therefore, to send the banner of the Crusade and the Admiral's truncheon, which he blessed, to Naples, where, on August second, an immense crowd gathered to hear Mass, and to see Don Juan seated in a throne on the steps of the high altar in Santa Chiara, a noble figure in steel armor, spangled with gold, his shoulders draped with the decoration of the Golden Fleece, even his hair golden in the soft multicolored light of the old church. After Mass Cardinal Granvelle, as viceroy of Naples and a Prince of the Church, presented to him the truncheon and the azure banner on which was emblazoned the figure of Christ crucified, with the arms of the Pope, King Philip, Venice, and Don Juan at His feet.

"Take, O illustrious Prince," said Granvelle, "the insignia of the true Word Made Flesh. Take the living symbol of the holy Faith whose defender you will be in this enterprise. He gives you glorious victory over the impious enemy, and by your hand shall his pride be laid in the dust." "Amen!" A mighty shout like that of Clermont burst from the people. "Amen!" 4

On August twenty-third, when Don Juan arrived at Messina, the harbor was a cluttered forest of masts, the ancient town swarming with men of all nations. By September first, when the whole fleet was assembled, there were 208 galleys in all, 90 of Spain and her dependencies, 106 of Venice and 12 of the Pope; besides nearly 100 brigantines, frigates and transports, mostly furnished by Spain; with some 50,000 sailors and galley slaves, and 31,000 soldiers: 19,000 of them paid by King Philip (including Germans and Italians), 8,000 Venetians, 2,000 Papal troops, and 2,000 volunteers, chiefly from Spain. 

The Spanish galleys were by far the best built, best equipped and best handled, and would bear the brunt of any fighting. The Venetian ships showed up so badly in a review that Don Juan inspected some of them, and found, to his disgust, that they were not even sufficiently manned. Some had hardly any crews. Others lacked fighting men. He distributed among the worst of them about 4,000 of the famous Spanish and Italian infantry. Then he held a Council of War, attended by seventy officers. Some favored a merely defensive campaign, since the Turks evidently outnumbered them, and the risk would be great, especially as the time for autumn tempests was at hand. Others said that if the Turk galleys were more numerous, they were not as efficient; and "something always had to be left to luck." Don Juan himself apparently hesitated, thinking of the King’s instructions. 5

The Papal influence was all in favor of fighting, whatever the odds. The invincible spirit of the old saint in the Vatican was perhaps the decisive factor. When Bishop Odescalchi, his nuncio, came to bless the fleet and to give a large portion of the True Cross for distribution among the crews, each vessel having a grain of the Precious Wood, he also brought to Don Juan the solemn assurance of Pope Pius V that, if he offered battle, God would give him the victory. If they were defeated, the Pope promised "to go to war himself with his gray hairs, to put idle youth to shame." But with courage they could not fail. Had not several revelations, including two prophecies by Saint Isidore of Sevilla, described such a battle and victory as seemed imminent, won by a youth closely resembling Don Juan?

At the Holy Father's suggestion, Don Juan adopted a modus operandi seldom if ever taught in naval academies. No women were allowed aboard the ships. Blasphemy was to be punished with death. While waiting for a good wind and the return of his scouting squadron with news of where the Turks were, the Generalissimo fasted for three days. All his officers and crews did likewise. Contemporary accounts agree that not one of the 81,000 sailors and soldiers failed to confess and to receive Holy Communion. Even the galley slaves were unshackled from their long benches and led in droves ashore, to confess to the numerous priests who toiled day and night at the Jesuit College helping the chaplains of the galleys.

Saint Francis Borgia and his Society played an important part in the preparation for the voyage. Six Spanish-speaking Jesuits were chaplains of the Spanish fleet. Of the three chaplains on board the Real, two were Jesuits. While Borgia was on his way to Spain with the Pope's nephew to perpetuate the League and to try to settle all differences between the Holy See and Spain, his followers, with Dominicans, Franciscans, Capuchins and others, were going among rough men, some of them offscourings and sweepings of the vilest cities, some criminals condemned to the galleys for foul crimes, urging them to lift up their hearts and cast all sin out of God’s fleet and God's army.

When the last of the Venetians had arrived, the Armada began to put to sea, September fifteenth, in the order agreed upon. Doria led the vanguard with 54 galleys of the right wing, flying green banners. Don Juan followed next morning with the batalla or center, under azure banners, with the blue standard of Our Lady of Guadalupe over the Real. (The Pope’s Standard of the League was reserved for battle.) Marcantonio Colonna, on the flagship of the Pope, was on his right. Veniero, a cantankerous old Venetian sea-dog, at his left. The third squadron of the Venetian Barbarigo followed, with yellow banners: and the Marques of Santa Cruz (Don Alvaro de Bazan) brought up the rear with thirty Spanish galleys and some of Italy, all under white flags.

It was a sight to remember—the papal nuncio, a flaming figure in scarlet from head to foot, standing on the mole with hand uplifted to bless each ship as it passed, the crusaders kneeling on the decks, the knights and men-at-arms glittering with steel, the sailors in red suits and caps, the rowers with dark naked backs glistening with sweat, the brown sails bellying out to catch the first breeze; and on the lofty prow of the flagship, Don Juan in golden armor, like an avenging angel under the outflung blue banner of her who had trodden on the serpent's head. Thus they passed into the open Mediterranean and formed in ranks, two by two. The six great Venetian galeasses, each a bristling fort with 44 heavy guns, led the way into the sapphire-studded morning light. The galeasses kept a full mile ahead, to open the fray with a heavy bombardment. Two by two the whole Armada followed, almost in battle order, according to a plan carefully worked out by old paralyzed Don Garcia de Toledo. 6 The plan was somewhat modified, apparently, to leave spaces between the squadrons, so that Santa Cruz could intervene where his help might be needed. "In this disposition," says Cabrera, "Gianandrea Doria took the leading part, with certain contradictions from those who sought thereby to gain reputation in what they knew least about." 7

Was Don Juan the target of this innuendo of the usually well-informed chronicler? He was certainly the least experienced and most cocksure of the generals. He quarrelled with most of them. He had come to despise Requesens on the voyage from Barcelona to Genoa, when he found him always at his elbow, even at meal times; for Don Luis had had instructions from the King to keep the young hero constantly under supervision. 8 Cardinal Pacheco also had a watchful eye on him. Cardinal Espinosa, whom he heartily detested, had no high opinion of him, nor had Granvelle. Neither the King nor his ministers had much co nfi dence in the capacity of Don Juan for real leadership. The Morisco campaign had shown more courage in him than judgment, and Philip had no intention of leaving the fate of so costly a fleet and the lives of 81,000 men in the hands of an impetuous and inexperienced youth. He wrote his brother that he must attach particular weight to the opinion of Gianandrea Doria; and that he must not risk a battle without the unanimous consent of Doria, Requesens, and Santa Cruz. 9

The wisdom of these precautions was demonstrated on October first, when the fleet was becalmed off the coast of Albania. A quarrel had broken out on one of the Venetian ships, where Don Juan had placed Spanish soldiers. Captain Curcio Anticocio and three of his soldiers were involved, and old Veniero in a rage ordered them hanged on a lateen yard. When Don Juan saw the four bodies in ghastly relief against the sky he was almost beside himself with anger, and would probably have thrown himself upon the seventy-year old Venetian if Colonna, Doria and Requesens had not restrained and calmed him. The Spanish soldiers were all for giving battle immediately to the Venetians. Doubtless, with such a fiery leader as Don Juan, they would have ruined the expedition, if wiser and more moderate heads had not been ready, through the foresight of the King, to intervene. As itwas, Don Juan refused to let Veniero come anymore to his Council. 1

A brief stop at Corfu restored the morale of the fleet. The Turks had been there, and had left the usual mementoes: charred ruins of churches and houses, broken and defiled crucifixes, mangled bodies of priests, women and children, feasted on by dogs and vultures. The sight was enough to remind the Christians of the object of their quest. Informed by scouts that the Turkish fleet had withdrawn to the Gulf of Corinth, preparatory to making their return to Constantinople before the autumn storms began, they set off in pursuit. Ali Pasha was then at Preveza. According to some captured corsairs, Aluch Ali, the best of the Moslem navigators, had returned with his 73 galleys to Algiers. This news seemed to indicate that the odds in favor of the enemy would not be overwhelming.

Don Juan left Corfu on September twenty-eighth. While the Turkish fleet was skirting the southern shore of Aetolia, making for the Gulf of Corinth (or Lepanto) the Christian Armada, using oars because the wind was contrary, nosed through the waters of the Ionian Sea, with the Albanian shore off the port bows, past Nicopolis and that stretch of sea lying off Actium where the spirit of the East had fled from the spirit of the West in the jaded galleys of Antony and Cleopatra, and around the coast of Santa Maura to Cephalonia, with the narrow isle of Ithaca hugged under its lee shore, still fragrant with the memory of Penelope and the unconquerable fortitude of Odysseus.

It was October fifth when the fleet cast anchor among the Curzolares. That day a brigantine from Candia came by with news of the fall of Famagosta, and the horrible atrocities perpetuated by Mustapha upon the helpless Christians who had surrendered. A quiver of rage passed through the floating city of armed men. Nothing could have been better timed to make them fight like holy madmen.

The wind was east, the sky overcast, the sea gray with fog. All day Saturday and well into the night, the fleet remained inactive, not knowing that the wind which kept them there had brought the Turkish fleet across the Gulf of Patras to the Albanian shore, and that Aluch Ali, with all his Algerian galleys, was still with them With the falling of the starless night a dead silence settled over the sea.

About two o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the seventh, there came up a fresh steady wind from the west, across the Ionian Sea, sweeping the stars and the wide bay clear of the wraiths of fog. Don Juan, lying sleepless in the cabin of his Real, saw that he was in the middle of what seemed a huge lake, flooded with moonlight. He gave the word, the great anchors were weighed and the sails unfurled, the whips cracked over the straining backs of the galley slaves, the great ships hove through the choppy water, as if racing the dawn to the Albanian coast. When the sun came flaming up over the Gulf of Lepanto, Doria's lookout, in the vanguard, sighted a squadron of the enemy about twelve miles away, returning from a scouting trip to Santa Maura. The signal flag agreed upon was on the masthead of the royal frigate, where Doria was on watch.

"We must conquer or die here," said Don Juan, exultantly, and ordered a green banner displayed as a sign for all to get in battle array. The multiple banks of oars on the six great Venetian galeasses plunged into the sea, driving the massive hulks to their positions, two of them a mile in front of each of the three sections of the battle-line.

The Venetian Barbarigo, with sixty-four galleys, veered as closely as possible to the Aetolian shore, to prevent an encircling movement by the enemy on the north. Don Juan commanded the center or batalla of sixty-three galleys, with Colonna and Veniero on either side of him, and Requesens in the ship behind him Doria's squadron of sixty took the right wing, nearest the open sea, the most dangerous post of all. Thirty-five vessels were held in reserve in the rear under the Marques of Santa Cruz, with orders to give help wherever it might be needed. Thus the great fleet advanced into the Gulf of Patras, in a long arc extending over a league-and-a-half of sea and gradually stiffening into a straighter line as the enemy came in sight.

The Turks, having a total of 286 galleys (for HascenBey had just arrived with 22 extra ones from Tripoli) against 208, had decided to fight, and were clearing their decks for action. Mohammed Siroco with 55 galleys opposed Barbarigo. Ali Pasha and Pertew with 96 faced the batalla of Don Juan. Aluch Ali with 73 took the side nearest the open sea, opposite Gianandrea Doria. There was also a squadron of reserve in the rear. The wind had shifted to the east, bringing on the Turks with bellied sails, while the Christians had to use their oars. Toward noon it almost died away. Four hours passed while both fleets made their preparations for combat.

Doria meanwhile came back in a swift frigate to consult with Don Juan and the others. According to one account he was averse, at the start, to giving battle to an enemy with so large a preponderance of heavy ships. He wanted a council of war, at least. But Don Juan cried, "It is time to fight now, not to talk"; and so it was agreed. Cabrera says Doria not only drew up the final battle-order of the fleet, but suggested that the Generalissimo have the espolones cut away from the bows of his galleys. These were sharp spurs, fourteen feet long, which could crash through the side of an enemy ship, doing great damage when propelled by the arms of a hundred galley-slaves. It was obvious that in fighting at close quarters, hand-to-hand, ship locked to ship, they would be useless. Without them, too, Don Juan could place his bow guns lower, and hit the Turkish hulks nearer the waterline. The plan was adopted. One after another down the long line the espolones splashed into the calm sea.

The young Admiral, now in his golden armor, went in a fast frigate from ship to ship, holding up an iron crucifix for all to see. "Hey, valorous soldiers!" he cried. "Here's the chance you wanted. I have done my part. Do you now humble the pride of the enemy and win glory in this holy fight. Live or die, be conquerors; if you die, you go to Heaven." 11 The sight of the gallant young figure and the sound of his fresh voice had an extraordinary effect. A mighty shout answered him from each ship. There passed across the sparkling sea a long broken cheer as the Pope's banner of the League, with the image of Christ Crucified catching the glint of the high sun, rose above the Real beside the blue flag of Our Lady of Guadalupe. On the forward mast of his flagship Don Juan had hung a crucifix which alone of all his effects survived the fire in his house at Alcala.

As the Turks advanced in a great half-moon he knelt on the prow and in a loud voice begged the blessing of God on the Christian arms, while priests and monks throughout the fleet held up crucifixes before the kneeling sailors and soldiers. The sun was now directly overhead. The clear water, almost unrippled, flashed back a tremulous replica in vivid colors of a thousand standards, streamers, pennons and gonfalons, the cold brilliant glitter of weapons and armor, the gold and silver of armaments, all wavering kaleidoscopically between the blue sea and the dazzling sky. A hush like that which comes just before the consecration of the Mass fell over the whole Armada. The Turkish side replied with the usual blood-curdling chorus of screams, hoots, jibes and groans, the clashing of cimeters on shields, the blaring of horns and trumpets. The Christians waited in silence.

At that moment the wind, which had thus far favored the Turks, shifted to the west, and sped the Christian galleys on to the shock. Ali Pasha, in the Moslem center, opened the battle with a cannon shot. Don Juan answered, with another. As the Turkish oarsmen churned the sea, the six great galeasses of Venice opened fire with their 264 guns. This bombardment was not as devastating as had been expected, but it had the effect of breaking the enemy's line. The Turkish right was racing now to gain the open water between the Venetians and the Aetolian shore. Five ships closed upon the galley of Barbarigo, while the Moorish archers let fly clouds of poisoned arrows, which they preferred to firearms and used with more deadly effect. Ship to ship they were lashed now, fighting hand-to-hand. Huge Barbarigo fought like a lion, until, taking his shield from his face to shout an order, he was pierced through the eye with an arrow.

It was the Christian right that stood the heaviest attack. Doria was held in fear and respect by the Moslems. Moreover, he occupied the most dangerous post, where strategy and good sailing counted. If there was a match for him among the mariners of the Mediterranean, it was Aluch Ali, the Italian apostate. As the Turkish left tried to gain the open sea, to attack by poop and prow, Doria extended his line farther to the right, leaving a space between his squadron and the batalla. Aluch Ali swiftly changed his course and came crashing through the open space with his best ships, while his slower sailing galleys took the Genoese on the side toward the open sea. Doria, heavily outnumbered, fought a magnificent engagement. On ten of his vessels, nearly all the soldiers were killed in the first hour of the conflict. The handful of survivors fought on, desperately holding their ships in the hope of succor.

Santa Cruz reserve, however, had gone to the aid of some of the Venetians on the left, and the whole batalla was locked in a mortal conflict with the Turkish center. As soon as Ali Pasha saw where the holy flags flew over the galley of Don Juan, he drove straight for it. The two enormous hulks crashed prow to prow. Ali's ship was higher and heavier, and manned with 500 picked Janizaries.

The wisdom of Doria's advice to cut away the espolones was now apparent; while the Turk's artillery fired through the rigging of the Real, Don Juan's poured death into the ranks of the Janizaries as the ships grappled. Hand-to-hand they fought from one deck to the other, for two hours. Seven Turkish ships stood by to help the Sultana. As fast as the Janizaries fell on the decks, they were replaced by others from the hulks of reserve. Twice the horde of yelling Turks penetrated the Real to the mainmast, and twice the Spaniards thrust them back. But Don Juan, with heavy losses, had only two ships of reserves. Fighting gallantly in a little ring of chosen Spanish cavaliers, he was wounded in the foot. His situation was extremely perilous, in fact, when Santa Cruz, having saved the Venetians, came to his aid and rushed 200 reserves aboard.

Heartened by this fresh blood, the Spanish threw themselves on Ali and his Janizaries so furiously that they hurled them back into their own ship. Three times the Christians charged, and three times the Turks cast them out over decks now red and slippery with blood, piled with heaps of dead men, ghastly mangled trunks, severed arms and legs still quivering. The two fleets were locked in the embrace of death, ships lashed by twos and threes in water already streaked with crimson from floating bodies and limbs. The din of musketry, screams of rage and pain, clash of steel on steel, thunder of artillery, falling of spars and lashing of bloody waters between rocking timbers resounded horribly all through the Sunday afternoon. Splendid and terrible deeds were done. Old Veniero, seventy years old, fought sword in hand at the head of his men. Cervantes arose from his bed of fever to fight and to lose his left hand. Young Alexander of Parma boarded a Turkish galley alone, and survived the experience.

The moment was critical, and the issue still in doubt, when the magnificent Ali Pasha, defending his ship from the last Christian onslaught, was laid low by a ball from a Spanish arquebus. His body was dragged to the feet of Don Juan. A Spanish soldier triumphantly pounced upon it and shore away the head. One version says that Don Juan reproved him for this brutality. Another, more likely, says that the Prince impaled the head on the end of a long pike and held it up for all to see. Hoarse shouts of victory burst from the Christians on the Real, as they brushed the disheartened Turks into the sea and hoisted the banner of Christ Crucified to the enemy masthead. There was not a single hole in this flag, though the spars and masts were riddled, and the mainmast bristled with arrows like a porcupine. From ship to ship the shout of triumph was taken up, with the word that Ali was dead and the Christians had won. A panic seized the enemy, and he took to flight.

As the sun sank over Cephalonia, Doria's right wing was still furiously engaged with the Algerians. Gianandrea was red from head to foot with blood, but escaped without a scratch. When Aluch Ali saw that the Moslem fleet was getting the worse of it, he skilfully withdrew between the right and the center of the Christians. In the rear of Doria's fleet he came upon a galley of the Knights of Malta, whom he especially hated. He pounced upon it from the stern, slew all the knights and the crew, and took possession of the vessel; but when Santa Cruz attacked him, he abandoned his prize, and fled with 40 of his best ships toward the open sea and the crimson sunset. Doria's fleet pursued him until night and the coming of a storm forced him to desist.

The Christians took refuge in the port of Petala, and there counted their casualties, which were comparatively light, and their booty, which was exceedingly rich. They had lost 8,000 slain, including 2,000 Spanish, 800 of the Pope's men, and 5,200 Venetians. The Turks had lost 224 vessels, 130 captured and more than 90 sunk or burned; at least 25,000 of their men had been slain, and 5,000 captured; 10,000 of their Christian captives were set free. 12 Don Juan at once sent ten galleys to Spain to inform the King, and dispatched the Count of Priego to Rome. But Pius V had speedier means of communication than galleys. On the afternoon of Sunday, October seventh, he was walking in the Vatican with his treasurer, Donato Cesis. The evening before he had sent out orders to all convents in Rome and nearby to double their prayers for the victory of the Christian fleet, but now he was listening to a recital of some of his financial difficulties. Suddenly he stepped aside, opened a window, and stood watching the sky as if astonished. Then, turning with a radiant face to the treasurer, he said, "Go with God. This is not the time for business, but to give thanks to Jesus Christ, for our fleet has just conquered."

He then hurried to his chapel to prostrate himself in thanksgiving. Afterwards he went out, and everybody noticed his youthful step and joyous countenance. The first news of the battle, through human agencies, reached Rome by way of Venice on the night of October twenty-first, just two weeks after the event. Saint Pius went to St. Peter's in a procession, singing the Te Deum Laudamus. There was great joy in Rome. The Holy Father commemorated the victory by designating October seventh as the Feast of the Holy Rosary, and by adding "Help of Christians" to the titles of Our Lady in the Litany of Loreto.

It took ten more days for the news to reach Madrid. King Philip was not "in his closet with the fleece about his neck," nor did he hold a crystal phial of poison with "colors like the moon" anywhere except in Chesterton's poem He was in the chapel at the Escorial, listening to the monks sing Vespers, on Hallowe'en, when he heard outside an unwonted commotion, as of some one entering in great haste. Presently there came waddling in, very much out of breath, a fat gentleman of the royal household named Don Pedro Manuel. Leaning over the railing, with little ceremony, he told the King excitedly that Angulo the courier had just arrived with news of a great victory won by Senor Don Juan.

Philip's face did not change its grave and serene expression, nor did he raise his voice, as he said, characteristically, "Sosegaos. Calm yourself. Come around into the choir, so you can tell it better."

On hearing what had occurred, he went quietly back to his seat and prayed until Vespers were over. Then he betook himself to his own gallery to prostrate himself, giving thanks to Almighty God. Finally he announced the news. While the monks joyfully formed a procession, he allowed himself to receive the congratulations of courtiers and ambassadors. He ordered Mass said next morning for the souls of those who died at Lepanto.

He then went back to Madrid, to take part in the general procession next day, on the Feast of All Saints. With all the court, ambassadors and prelates and priests in gorgeous vestments of silk and gold, he walked from the church of Saint Philip to the church of Santa Maria, where Solemn High Mass was sung amid a blaze of lights and with exquisite music, by Cardinal Alexandrino, who had arrived only a few days before with Saint Francis Borgia. All sang the psalm, Domine in virtute tua laetabitur rex. Some verses and responses composed by Cardinal Alexandrino were sung so exquisitely, and the words were so appropriate, that every one, including the King, wept with joy.

The King was so affected that he ordered the psalm and the versicles of the Cardinal written out for him. In the quiet of his study he read them over. The twentieth Psalm must have seemed especially appropriate:

"In thy strength, O Lord, the king shall joy: and in thy salvation he shall rejoice, exceedingly. Thou hast given him his heart's desire; and hast not withholden from him the will of his lips. For thou hast prevented him with blessings of sweetness: thou hast set upon his head a crown of precious stones. He asked life of thee: and thou hast given him length of days for ever and ever. His glory is great in thy salvation: glory and great beauty shalt thou lay upon him. For thou shalt give him to be a blessing for ever and ever; thou shalt make him joyful in gladness with thy countenance. For the king hopeth in the Lord: and through the mercy of the Most High he shall not be moved.

"Let thy hand be found by all thy enemies: Let thy right hand find out all them that hate thee; thou shalt make them as an oven of fire, in the time of thine anger: the Lord shall trouble them in his wrath, and fire shall devour them. Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth: and their seed from among the children of men. For they have intended evils against thee: they have devised counsel which they have not been able to establish." (William Thomas Walsh, Teresa of Avila, published originally in 1943 by the Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., Rocford, Illinois, 1987, pp. 513-525.)

The Battle of Lepanto was a victory for Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary, for Pope Saint Pius V's indomitable fortiude, and for King Philip  II's calmness and resolve in the midst of the one of the greatest dangers that Christendom had faced from the Mohammedans, who have, not so incidentally, won by immigration and the obsequiousness of the conciliar revolutionaries towards them what they lost at the Battle of Lepanto: effective control of large parts of Europe.

Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., explained that the Mohammedans were intent on taking advantages of the divisions brought about by Father Martin Luther's revolution against the Divine Plan that God instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church:

Soliman II, the greatest of the Sultans, taking advantage of the confusion caused in the West by Luther, had filled the sixteenth century with terror by his exploits. He left to his son, Selim II the prospect of being able at length to carry out the ambition of his race: to subjugate Rome and Vienna, the Pope and the Emperor, to the power of the Crescent. The Turkish fleet had already mastered the greater part of the Mediterranean, and was threatening Italy when, on the 7th of October, 1571, it came into action, in the Gulf of Lepanto, with the pontifical galleys supported by the fleets of Spain and Venice. It was Sunday; throughout the world the confraternities of the Rosary were engaged in their work of intercession. Supernaturally enlightened, St. Pius V watched from the Vatican the battle undertaken by the leader he had chosen, Don John of Austria, against the three hundred vessels of Islam. The illustrious Pontiff, whose life’s work was now completed, did not survive to celebrate the anniversary of the triumph; but he perpetuated the memory of it by an annual commemoration of our Lady of Victory. His successor, Gregory XIII, altered this title to our Lady of the Rosary, and appointed the first Sunday of October for the new Feast, authorizing its celebration in those churches which possessed an altar under that invocation.

A century and a half later, this limited concession was made general. As Innocent XI in memory of the deliverance of Vienna by Sobieski, had extended the Feast of the most holy Name of Mary to the whole Church; so, in 1716, Clement XI inscribed the Feast of the Rosary on the universal Calendar, in gratitude for the victory gained by Prince Eugene at Peterwardein, on the 5th of August, under the auspices of Our Lady of the Snow. This victory was followed by the raising of the siege of Corfu, and completed a year later by the taking of Belgrade. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year.)

Yes, it was but less than one hundred twelve years after the Battle of Lepanto that Polish King Jan Sobieski used Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary to defeat the Turks at the Battle of the Gates of Vienna. That same Rosary would be used by Austrians in the 1950s to pray for the withdrawal of the forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that occupied half of their country, marking only the second time that Soviet forces had withdrawn voluntarily from a country before the events of 1989-1991 (the other time was in late-1946 when Soviet forces withdrew from the Azerbaijan region of northern Iran). Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary continues to vanquish the demons that plague the gates of our very souls, which is why we must be assiduous in a fervent and recollected recitation of at least one set of its mysteries each and every day of our lives without fail.

Our Lady hates what her Divine Son hates. She hate all evil. Although she, as the Mother of Mercy (Mater Misericordia), has compassion on us erring sinners, she hates sin. She wants us to detest all sin and evil, having experienced in the very depths of her Immaculate Heart and soul the horror of what each one of our sins did to her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death. She was sent to three shepherd children in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal, nearly ninety years ago as a final effort on the part of her Divine Son to save erring sinners from Hell, explaining to Lucia dos Santos on July 13, 1917, that she desired to have instituted in a most particular way devotion to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart by the practice of the Five First Saturdays. Our Lord, Who gave us His Most Blessed Mother to be our Mother as He was dying as a result of our sins on the wood of the Holy Cross, has sent His Blessed Mother to us in these our own very days to rescue us from sins and lukewarmness and indifference and all of the errors of Modernity in the world, represented by the anti-Incarnational errors of Russia, and of Modernism (which is why the conciliarists have been demonically feverish in helping to deconstruct the Third Secret of Fatima).

The Rosary is hated by the adversary with the same degree of passion with which he hates the Immemorial Mass of Tradition in all its unvarnished splendor and beauty. The devil knows how the Rosary has defeated him and his wiles in the past. This is what he, the ultimate trickster of darkness who hates our souls because they are made in the image and likeness of the One He hates, the Blessed Trinity, will use every trick he has in his dirty book to trap us into thinking that we are too tired or too busy or, God forbid, too "sophisticated" to pray the Rosary well or to promote it publicly as the signal means by which a just social order according to the Mind of Christ the King as He has discharged It exclusively in His Catholic Church can be established, maintained and renewed with constant spiritual vigor.

The devil will seek to discourage us from carrying extra Rosaries (and Rosary instruction pamphlets) on our person to hand out to the lost souls who are the victims of Modernity's and Modernism's assaults against the Deposit of Faith. The adversary will attempt to convince us that it is "just too much" for us to carry Green Scapulars and blessed Miraculous Medals to hand out to those whom God's Holy Providence puts in our lives on a daily basis. We must call upon Saint Michael the Archangel and to recite the August Queen of Heaven Prayer to resist these demonic efforts to dissuade us in our own devotion to Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary and its public promotion.

Such is the devil's hatred for Our Lady and the power of her Most Holy Rosary that there are, sadly, many Catholics who disparage Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary, including some who discount the fact that Our Lady had appeared to Saint Dominic to give him her Psalter. Antipope Emeritus Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI admitted over fifteen years ago that he did not pray the Rosary every day, only when he can find time for it, almost never mentioning this Heavenly weapon to promote the salvation of our souls and to fight heresy in his public allocutions. Anyone who has a cavalier attitude about Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary is, whether or not he realizes it, doing the work of the devil.

Blessed Alan de la Roche, O.P., who was visited by Our Lady and Saint Dominic in 1460 to revive the praying of the Rosary after it had fallen into a period of disuse, made it clear that it is only the devil who seeks to disparage devotion to the Mother of God and to her Most Holy Rosary, which consist of fifteen meditations on the very mysteries of our salvation:

Blessed Alan [de la Roche] relates that a certain Cardinal Pierre, whose titular church was that of Saint Mary-beyond-the-Tiber, was a great friend of Saint Dominic's and had learned from him to have a great devotion to the holy Rosary. He grew to love it so much that he never ceased singing its praises and encouraging everyone he met to embrace it. Eventually he was sent as legate to the Holy Land to the Christians who were fighting against the Saracens. So successfully did he convince the Christian army of the power of the Rosary that they all started saying it and stormed heaven for help in a battle in which they knew they would be pitifully outnumbered. And in fact, their three thousand triumphed over an enemy of one hundred thousand.

As we have seen, the devils have an overwhelming fear of the Rosary. Saint Bernard says that the Angelic Salutation puts them to flight and makes all hell tremble. Blessed Alan assures us that he has seen several people delivered from Satan's bondage after taking up the holy Rosary, even though they had previously sold themselves to him, body and soul, by renouncing their baptismal vows and their allegiance to Jesus Christ.

In 1578, a woman of Antwerp had given herself to the devil and signed a contract with her own blood. Shortly afterwards she was stricken with remorse and had an intense desire to make amends for this terrible deed. So she sought out a kind and wise confessor to find out how she could be set free from the power of the devil.

She found a wise and holy priest, who advised her to go to Father Henry, director of the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, at the Dominican Friary, to be enrolled there and to make her confession. Accordingly, she asked to see him but met, not Father Henry, but the devil disguised as a friar. He reproved her severely and said she could never hope to receive God's grace, and there was no way of revoking what she had signed. This grieved her greatly but she did not lose hope in God's mercy and sought out Father Henry once more, only to find the devil a second time, and to meet with a second rebuff. She came back a third time and then at last, by divine providence, she found Father Henry in person, the priest whom she had been looking for, and he treated her with great kindness, urging her to throw herself on the mercy of God and to make a good confession. He then received her into the Confraternity and told her to say the Rosary frequently.

One day, while Father Henry was celebrating Mass for her, Our Lady forced the devil to give her back the contract she had signed. In this way she was delivered from the devil by the authority of Mary and by devotion to the holy Rosary. (Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary, pp. 80-82.)

The devil has good reason to hate Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary. Pope Saint Pius V called upon Catholics to pray the Rosary for the success of the combined Christian forces against the infidel Turks in the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, a remarkable feat in the annals of naval warfare, wrought solely by the power of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary.

Saint Rose of Lima, T.O.P., a spiritual daughter of Saint Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers, used Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary to turn back a pending invasion of Lima, Peru, by those hideous, Catholic-hating Dutch Calvinists in 1606:

Saint Rose is most famous for her penances, done not for their own sake, but as pure expressions of her love for Jesus and vicarious satisfaction for souls dear to Him. Her love found other means of expression, as well. Rose prayed long hours for her beloved Archbishop Turibius, himself a saint, in his trials, and beseeched God for the conversion of the Peruvian Indians, who were still practicing pagan religions. She was taught to make herbal medicines and took great delight in distributing these remedies to long lines of the sick poor of Lima. 

It is natural that one with Rose’s pure love of God seek a religious vocation, but for a time even this good desire seemed to be frustrated. She discerned that it was not God’s will that she enter a cloister. A short time later she received a sign in answer to prayer that she was to be a Dominican tertiary and live at home, like Saint Catherine of Siena. At age 20 she made her profession in the Third Order of Saint Dominic. 

It was at this time that perhaps the most spectacular of Rose’s miracles occurred when Dutch pirates invaded Lima’s harbor and defeated the Peruvian fleet. Due to the Reformation, they intended not only to loot the city but also to desecrate churches. The women, children and religious of Lima took refuge in the churches. In the church of Santo Domingo, Rose stirred them all to prayer. It is said that as pirates burst into the church, they were confronted with the terrifying spectacle of a young girl ablaze with light, holding a monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament. They turned away and fled to their ships which sailed away.  St. Rose of Lima: Follower of Dominic and Spouse of the Heart of Christ)

It was put a mere forty years later invasion of Dutch Calvinists threatened the Catholic Philippines:

Sculpted by a non-Catholic Chinese artist who was later converted through the intercession of the Blessed Mother, the image of Our Lady of the Rosary was commissioned in 1593 by the Spanish Governor of the Philippines. Luis Perez Dasmarinas, who wanted the statue to memorialize both his deceased father and his own regime. The statue was entrusted to the Dominicans in Manila and was enshrined in Santo Domingo Church, where it received an outpouring of love and devotion.

Fifty-three years later, in March, 1646, while Spanish invaders were still governing the islands and were outright enemies of the Dutch, the people were shocked to learn that a fleet of five Dutch war ships was bearing down on Manila. Carrying the triple threat of conquest, pillage and Dutch Protestantism, the enemy had chosen a tim when Spanish warships were unavailable for defense.

Two commercial galleons, "The Rosary" and "The Incarnation," were donated by their owners and were quickly outfitted in preparation for battle. While sailing into position for the confrontation, the men prayed the Rosary and dedicated themselves to La Naval, Our Lady of the Rosary.

The five Dutch ships were well-equipped with canons, firearms and trained seamen; the two Spanish-Filipino cargo ships were poorly fitted with a few guns. At the end of the day it seemed unbelievable that the Dutch fled the area while the defenders of the city returned home in glory, praising Our Lady for her protection.

For the next four months the two cargo ships patrolled the waters, then, in July, they discovered that they had been trapped in a narrow strait by not five, but seven Dutch ships. Since their position did not afford a proper angle for battle, they prayed and waited. Fearful that they would be attacked, they vowed that if they were victorious they would pilgrimage barefoot to the Church of Santo Domingo to thank Our Lady of the Rosary. Through the intercession of La Naval, the two cargo ships were apparently unseen in the fading sunset since the Dutch ships turned toward Manila without firing on them. The two cargo ships then gave chase and closed in. At sunrise the next day the Dutch retreated in disgrace. As soon as the victors arrived home, they gratefully fulfilled their vow.

After the next battle the people of Manila began to call the cargo ships "the galleons of the miracle." After the fourth confrontation and victory the name was confirmed. Yet a fifth time the Dutch fleet appeared for battle. Anxious to defend their honor and restore their pride, the Dutch resolved to win at any cost. The advantage was definitely theirs when they found the two cargo ships anchored with the wind against them. Unable to move, the new cargo ships fought where they were and defeated the enemy so badly that they limped away, never to return.

Our Lady of the Rosary and the men of her two cargo ships defeated 15 well-equipped warships.

This victory at Manila is similar in many respects to the great naval victory at Lepanto, which was also credited to the intervention of Our Lady and the power of her Holy Rosary. In both instances Our Lady miraculously defended and granted victory to their seamen who placed their trust in her.

Sixteen years after the successful defense of Manila, an Ecclesiastical Council was convened in Cavite to study the unusual aspects of the five naval victories. The Council consisted of theologians, canonists, and prominent religious. On April 9, 1662, after studying all the written testimonies of the participants and eyewitnesses, the Council declared that the victories were:

Granted by the Sovereign Lord through the intercession of the Most Holy Virgin and devotion to her Rosary, that the miracles be celebrated, preached and held in festivities and to be recounted among the miracles wrought by the Lady of the Rosary for the greater devotion of the faithful to Our Most Blessed Virgin Mary and her Holy Rosary.

This decree was signed by all eight members of the Ecclesiastical Council. (Joan Carroll Cruz, Miraculous Images of Our Lady: 100 Famous Catholic Portraits and Statues, TAN Books and Publishers, 1993, pp. 367-369.)

King Jan Sobieski of Poland defeated the Mohammedan forces of the Turks in the Battle at the Gates of Vienna on September 12, 1683, an epic battler in which Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary was once again the decisive factor:

In 1683 Turkish forces threatened once again to overrun Europe. They carried the war into Austria for the purpose of annihilating the Catholic religion. Kara Mustapha, Grand Vizier of Mahomet IV, had boasted that he would not rest until he had stabled his master's horses at Saint Peter's in Rome. With an army 300,000 strong, the leader of the infidels arrived at the gates of Vienna and laid siege to the city. Days of enemy assaults, fire, and disease had reduced the Austrian capital to the last extremity. A small garrison of exhausted men, under the command of the courageous Imperial General, Count Starhemberg, himself wounded in the attack, fought desperately, with no earthly help in sight.

Pope Innocent XI urgently appealed to the princes of Europe on behalf of the beleaguered city and, on the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the "Unvanquished Lion of the North", John Sobieski, King of Poland, mounted his war-horse, going forth to battle for the glory of the cross and the preservation of all Christendom. (Letter to Blessed Pope Innocent XVI)

Before Our Lady's altar in Her sanctuary in Czestochowa, the King raised his sword and vowed not to sheathe it until the mighty Queen of Heaven had given victory. The army asked Her blessings on their enterprise. Marching towards Vienna, the men prayed the Holy Rosary, Sobieski, wearing an image of Our Lady of Czestochowa, gave his soldiers their battle cry: In the Name of Mary: Lord God, help!

Joining up with the Imperial army, under the command of Charles, Duke of Lorraine, John Sobieski, whose tranquil presence in the midst of fiercest combat had such power with his own forces, had been unanimously chosen to lead the united armies of Europe. Many a time had his fearless leadership routed the Moslem invaders!

At five o'clock on the morning of September 12, the Holy Sacrifice was celebrated by the papal legate, Father Marco d'Aviano, on the heights of Mount Kalemberg, overlooking the Austrian capital. The King yielded to no one in the honor serving that Mass. The armies of Christendom knelt in humble prayer. Later on that same day, Father Marco was to see a white dove hovering over this very king and his men while the battled raged, a sign of the victory to come.

The King gave a signal. Drums rolled, cannons roared and the great human avalanche plunged down the steep mountain precipices shouting, Jesus! Mary! Sobieski! Jesus! Mary! Sobieski!

Many were the separate and terrible combats on that memorable day, but suffice it to say that by five in the afternoon, the warrior king brandished his sword and charged upon the tent of the Turkish leader, shouting the words of the prophet king [David], Non nobis Domine exercituum, non nobis, sed Nomini tuo da gloriam. Not to us, O Lord of Host, not to us, but to Thy name give the glory. [Psalm 113:9]

The name of Sobieski spread panic throughout the enemy camp. Kara Mustapha, trembling in his boots, turned to the Tarter Khan, Selim Gieray, Can you not save me? he pleaded. I know the Polish king, Selim replied, where he is, flight is our only refuge. Look out upon the firmament and you will see that God Himself is against us. (The two armies saw the crescent moon fade in the skies.) The Moslem army fled in terror. Sobieski and his men attributed their victory to God and the power of Our Lady's name. 

We are now on our march to Hungary, the king wrote, taking advantage of their distraction to defeat the remainder of their scattered troops. I have all the princes of the Empire my companions in this enterprise, who tell me they are ready to follow such a leader not only into Hungary but to the end of the world...Thanks be to Heaven, now the half-moon triumphs no longer over the Cross.

Blessed Pope Innocent XI, established the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary to be celebrated on the twelfth of September each year as a perpetual memory of the victory of Vienna. (The Garland of Roses)

As important as these victories wrought by Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary have been, however, there is a far more important battle which each one of us fights every day: the battle that we must fight every day against the forces of the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Our Lady is as indispensable in our battle against those forces as she was in helping the combined Christian forces defeat the Mohammedans 439 years ago. We need Our Lady's constant intercession to help us avoid sin and to scale the heights of sanctity, especially in these times of apostasy and betrayal. 

Make no mistake about it, ladies and gentlemen: the public promotion of the Rosary, which consists, as the Psalter of Our Lady, fifteen decades of ten Hail Marys each, is feared by the adversary, who prowls about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Pope Leo XIII, writing to Italian Catholics in the midst of the ongoing assaults by the Judeo-Masonic regime that had overthrown the Papal States on September 20, 1870, exhorted his fellow Catholics to embrace penance and mortification and fasting a desire to eschew all human respect in order to defend the Holy Faith, words that are as applicable in our day as in his one hundred thirty-one years ago now: 

We ardently exhort you, venerable brethren, devote all your care and zeal to kindle among those committed to your charge a strong, living and active faith, and to call on all to return by penance to grace and to the faithful fulfillment of; all their duties. Among such duties, considering the state of the times, must be reckoned as paramount an open and sincere profession of the fait and teaching of Jesus Christ, casting aside all human respect, and considering before all things the interest of religion and the salvation of souls. It cannot be concealed that, although thanks to the mercy of God religious feeling is strong and widely spread among Italians, nevertheless by the evil influence of men and the times religious indifference is on the increase, and hence there is lessening of that respect and filial love for the Church which was the glory of our ancestors and in which they placed their highest ambition. Let it be your work, venerable brethren, to revive this Christian feeling among your people, an interest in the Catholic cause, a confidence in Our Lady' help, and a spirit of prayer. It is certain that the august Queen, invoked thus well by her man sons, would deign to hear their prayer, console Us in Our sorrow, and crown Our efforts for the Church and for Italy, by granting better times to both. With these desires, We bestow on you venerable brethren, and the clergy and people committed to your care, the Apostolic Benediction as a promise of graces and favors of the highest kind from heaven. (Vi E Ben Noto, September 20, 1887, the seventeenth anniversary of the overthrow of the Papal States.)

The work of changing the world and of combating the errors of the day, both of Modernity and Modernism, depends upon our desire to give up sin forever. Our Lord cannot reign as King of nations if he does not reign first as King in the hearts and souls of men, starting with our own. Saint Louis de Montfort's reminder of this truth should encourage us to get to Confession weekly and to recognize that the state of our own immortal souls will influence the degree to which our efforts to restore all things in Christ the King through Mary our Immaculate Queen will bear fruit:

It is not so much the length of a prayer, but the fervor with which it is said which pleases Almighty God and touches His Heart. One single Hail Mary that is said properly is worth more than one hundred fifty that are badly said. Most Catholics say the Rosary, the whole fifteen mysteries or five of them anyway, or least a few decades. So why is it then that so few of them give up their sins and go forward in the spiritual life? Surely it must be because they are not saying them as they should. It is a good thing to think over how we should pray if we really want to please God and become more holy.

To say the Holy Rosary to advantage one must be in a state of grace or at the very least be fully determined to give up mortal sin. This we know because all our theology teaches us that good works and prayers are only dead works if they are done in a state of mortal sin. Therefore they can neither be pleasing to God nor help us gain eternal life. This is why Ecclesiastes says: "Praise is not seemly in the mouth of a sinner." Praise of God and the salutation of an angel and the very Prayer of Jesus Christ are not pleasing to God when they are said by unrepentant sinners.

Our Lord said: "This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." It is as though He was saying: "Those who join My Confraternity and say their Rosary every day (even perhaps the fifteen decades), but without being sorry for their sins offer Me lip service only and their hearts are far from me."

I have just said that to say the Rosary to advantage one must be in a state of grace "or at least be fully determined to give up mortal sin;" first of all, because if it were true that God only heard the prayers of those in a state of grace it would follow that people in a state of mortal sin should not pray at all. This is an erroneous teaching which has been condemned by Holy Mother Church, because of course sinners need to pray far more than good people do. Were this horrible doctrine true, it would then be useless and futile to tell a sinner to say all, or even part of his Rosary, because it would never help him.

Secondly, because if they join one of Our Lady's confraternities and recite the Rosary or some other prayer, but without having the slightest intention of giving up sin, they join the ranks of her false devotees. These presumptuous and impenitent devotees, hiding under her mantle, wearing the scapular and with rosary in hand, cry out: "Blessed Virgin, good Mother--Hail, Mary! . . ." And yet at the same time, by their sins, they are crucifying Our Lord Jesus Christ and tearing His flesh anew. It is a a great tragedy, but from the very ranks of Our Lady's most holy Confraternities souls are falling into the fires of hell.

We earnestly beg everyone to say the Holy Rosary: the just that they may persevere and grow in God's grace; the sinners that they may rise from their sins. But God forbid that we should ever encourage a sinner to think that Our Lady will protect him with Her mantle if he continues to love sin, for then it will only turn into a mantle of damnation which will hide his sins from the public eye. The Rosary, which is a cure for all our ills, would then be turned into deadly poison. "A corruption of what is best is worst."

The learned Cardinal Hughes says: "One should really be as pure as an angel to approach the Blessed Virgin and to say the Angelic Salutation." One day Our Lady appeared to an immoral man who used to always say his Rosary every day. She showed him a bowl of beautiful fruit, but the bowl itself was covered with filth. The man was horrified to see this, and Our Lady said: "This is the way you are honoring me! You are giving me beautiful roses in a filthy bowl. Do you think that I can accept presents of this kind?" (Saint Louis de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary, pp. 87-88.)

Powerful words, are they not?

We should take them most seriously.

The members of Judeo-Masonic lodges and other of their naturalist allies and the conciliarists, who certainly bear much responsibility for the evils of our days, are perhaps less to blame for the state of the world and the confusion that exists amongst most Catholics today than perhaps we are. This is something we should ponder during this month of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary as we seek to use this weapon well for our own advantage and for that of our fellow sinners and for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen.

And for all those "conservatives" and traditionally-minded Catholics still attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of concilairism in the false belief that they are being "loyal" to the Catholic Church as part of the "resistance, we must remember that it is no accident at all that Antipope Emeritus Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI almost never spoke of the Rosary, refusing to do during his pilgrimage to the United States of America in 2008 or his pilgrimages to Jordan and Israel and the Czech Republic in 2009 year or in his own native Germany in 2011. That he did not do so on a regular basis, especially when addressing the young, was a crime against Our Lady and against the souls redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To refuse to exhort Catholics on a regular basis to pray the Rosary is to contribute to the worsening of the state of souls and thus of the world. And no one can claim that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has a "Marian devotion of the most traditional sort" as the current universal public face of apostasy dares to blaspheme her Divine Son by proclaiming his adherence to one false doctrine after another and by profaning her own altar at the Basilica di Santa Maggiore in Rome, Italy, by placing a beach ball and a jersey from World Youth Day in Rio di Janiero, Brazil, on Monday, July 29, 2013, the Feast of Saint Martha, and blaspheming her regularly by means of the sewer of apostasy that never ceases to flow out of this figure of Antichrist's foul mouth (for other examples, please see Blessed Among Women: Defending the Sublime Privileges of the Blessed Virgin Mary.)

Saint Louis de Montfort's The Secret of the Rosary reminds us to avoid all worldliness and worldly souls, which includes all immersion in the seemingly never-ending permutations of naturalism, and to never give up on the praying of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary:

Predestinate souls, you who are of God, cut yourselves adrift from those who are damning themselves by their impious lives, laziness and lack of devotion--and, without delay, recite often your Rosary, with faith, with humility, with confidence and with perseverance. . . .

Dear Rosary Confraternity members, if you want to lead a fashionable life and belong to the world--by this I mean if you do not mind falling into mortal sin from time to time and then going to Confession, and if you with to avoid conspicuous sins which the world considers vile and yet at the same time commit "respectable sins"--then, of course, there is no need for you to say many prayers and Rosaries. You only need to do very little be "respectable": a tiny prayer at night and morning, an occasional Rosary which may be given to you for your penance, a few decades of Hail Marys said on your Rosary (but haphazardly and without concentration) when it suits your fancy to say them--this is quite enough. If you did less, you might be branded as a freethinker or a profligate; if you did more, you would be eccentric and a fanatic. But if you want to lead a true Christian life and genuinely want to save your soul and walk in the saints' footsteps and never, never, fall into mortal sin--if you wish to break Satan's traps and divert his flaming darts, you must always pray as Our Lord taught and commanded you to do.

If you really have this wish at heart, then you must at least say your Rosary or the equivalent, every day. I have said "at least" because probably all that you will accomplish through your Rosary will be to avoid mortal sin and to overcome temptation. This is because you are so exposed to the strong current of the world's wickedness by which many a strong soul is swept away; you are in the midst of the thick, clinging darkness which often blinds even the most enlightened souls; you are surrounded by evil spirits who being more experienced than ever and knowing that their time is short are more cunning and more effective in tempting you.

It will indeed be a marvel of grace wrought by the Most Holy Rosary if you manage to keep out of the clutches of the world, the devil and the flesh and avoid mortal sin and gain heaven! If you do not want to believe me, at least learn from your own experience. I should like to ask you, if when you were in the habit of saying no more prayers than people usually say in the world and saying them they way they usually say them, you were able to avid serious faults and sins that were grievous but which seemed nothing much to you in your blindness. Now at last you must wake up, and if you want to live and die without sin, at least mortal sin, pray unceasingly; say your Rosary every day as members always used to do in the early days of the Confraternity. . . .

Even if you suffer from dryness of soul, boredom and interior discouragement, never give up even the least little bit of your Rosary--for this would be a sure sign of pride and faithlessness. On the contrary, like a real champion of Jesus and Mary, you should say your Our Fathers and Hail Marys quite drily if you have to, without seeing, hearing or feeling any consolation whatsoever, and concentrating as best you can on the mysteries. You ought not to look for candy or jam to eat with your daily bread, as children do--but you should even say your Rosary more slowly sometimes when you particularly find it hard to say. Do this to imitate Our Lord more perfectly in His agony in the garden: "Being in agony, he prayed the longer," so that what was said of Our Lord (when He was in His agony of prayer) may be said of you too: He prayed even longer.

Pray with great confidence, with confidence based upon the goodness and infinite generosity of God and upon the promises of Jesus Christ. God is a spring of living water which flows unceasingly into the hearts of those who pray. The Eternal Father yearns for nothing so much as to share the life-giving waters of His grace and mercy with us. He is entreating us: "All you that thirst, come to the waters . . ." This means "Come and drink of My spring through prayer," and when we do not pray to Him He sorrowfully says that we are forsaking Him: "They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water." (Saint Louis de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary;  pp. 99-101; 103)

Let us not forsake Our Lord. Let us go to Him through the very instrument His Most Blessed Mother gave to Saint Dominic, the Holy Rosary. Let us take seriously the words that Our Lady told Jacinta and Francisco Marto and Lucia dos Santos in the Cova da Iria to pray many Rosaries and to do penance for the conversion of poor sinners and to save them from Hell. We are poor sinners in need of conversion! We need to be saved from the fires of Hell. We must use the spiritual weapon that Our Lord has given us through His Most Blessed Mother to defeat the enemies of our salvation at the very gates of our soul this day and every day our lives as we lift high the standard of His Most Holy Cross, which is adorned to every Rosary of His Most Blessed Mother, as we seek to spread devotion to this paramount weapon against all sin and heresy.

Fidelity to the Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary has won the day not only at Lepanto or the Gates of Vienna or The Philippines or Peru or Austria in 1955 as the Soviets ended the occupation of their part of the country, of course. Fidelity to Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary has saved countless souls from sin and error, saving them from eternal damnation in the process. In the process, of course, Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary has helped to reform nations, especially during the era of Christendom in the High Middle Ages.

Consider these words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893:

13. But men of carnal mind, who love nothing but themselves, allow their thoughts to grovel upon things of earth until they are unable to lift them to that which is higher. For, far from using the goods of time as a help towards securing those which are eternal, they lose sight altogether of the world which is to come, and sink to the lowest depths of degradation. We may doubt if God could inflict upon man a more terrible punishment than to allow him to waste his whole life in the pursuit of earthly pleasures, and in forgetfulness of the happiness which alone lasts for ever.

14. It is from this danger that they will be happily rescued, who, in the pious practice of the Rosary, are wont, by frequent and fervent prayer, to keep before their minds the glorious mysteries. These mysteries are the means by which in the soul of a Christian a most clear light is shed upon the good things, hidden to sense, but visible to faith, "which God has prepared for those who love Him." From them we learn that death is not an annihilation which ends all things, but merely a migration and passage from life to life. By them we are taught that the path to Heaven lies open to all men, and as we behold Christ ascending thither, we recall the sweet words of His promise, "I go to prepare a place for you." By them we are reminded that a time will come when "God will wipe away every tear from our eyes," and that "neither mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow, shall be any more," and that "We shall be always with the Lord," and "like to the Lord, for we shall see Him as He is," and "drink of the torrent of His delight," as "fellow-citizens of the saints," in the blessed companionship of our glorious Queen and Mother. Dwelling upon such a prospect, our hearts are kindled with desire, and we exclaim, in the words of a great saint, "How vile grows the earth when I look up to heaven!" Then, too, shall we feel the solace of the assurance "that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory" (2 Cor. iv., 17).

15. Here alone we discover the true relation between time and eternity, between our life on earth and our life in heaven; and it is thus alone that are formed strong and noble characters. When such characters can be counted in large numbers, the dignity and well-being of society are assured. All that is beautiful, good, and true will flourish in the measure of its conformity to Him who is of all beauty, goodness, and truth the first Principle and the Eternal Source. (Pope Leo XIII, Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893.) 

We need Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary.

Men need to be reminded of this fact on a daily basis. Our Lady has exhorted us to pray her Most Holy Rosary. This may not get “votes.” This is one sure way to win the favor of Heaven and of planting seeds for the conversion of men and their nations to the true Faith, without which there can be true order in the souls of men or in their societies.

None of the current problems we face can be remedied or even ameliorated as long as men continue to sin unrepentantly and as their nations protect grievously sinful behavior under cover of the civil law.

We need Our Lady. We need her Most Holy Rosary.

It is that simple.

We are lost without Our Lady and her Most Holy Rosary. 

Nations are lost without pilgrimages in honor of the Mother of God.

Lost.

Done for.

Kaput.

Everyone is but a midget naturalist who rejects the simple belief that all men and all nations must honor Our Lady. She told us so: 

My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. Because He as regarded the humility of His handmaid; for behold henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Because He that is mighty, hath done great things for me; and holy is His name. And His mercy is from generation unto generations, to them that fear Him.

He hath shewed might in his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich He hath sent empty away. He hath received Israel His servant, being mindful of His mercy: as He spoke to Abraham and his seed for ever. (Lk. 1: 46-55) 

There is Heavenly work for us to do.

Let us quit our selfishness and our pessimism and anger and disordered pride once and for all.

As noted before in this commentary, God is visiting chastisements upon us for our own sins, our own lukewarmness, our own worldliness and for the many ways we waste our time by permitting us to succumb to the adversary’s agitations.

In this regard, therefore, it would be wise to consider the words spoken by Our Lady to the Venerable Mary of Agreda that are contained in The Mystical City of God, which explains that we are far from the sort of governance whereby those who exercise civil authority do so according to the mind of her Divine Son, Christ the King, as He has discharged It entirely to His Holy Church:

587. From many kingdoms and provinces where the Apostles were preaching numbers of converts came to Jerusalem in order to visit and converse with the Mother of the Redeemer of the world, at the same time offering rich gifts. Among others four sovereign princes, who were royal governors of provinces, visited Her and brought many valuable presents which they placed at her disposal for her own use and for the Apostles and disciples. The great Lady answered that She was poor like her Son, and the Apostles likewise were poor in imitation of their Master, and thus these riches were not appropriate to the life they professed. They begged Her to console them by accepting their gifts for the poor or for divine worship. Due to their persistent requests She received part of what they offered, and from some of it She wove rich vestments for the altar, while the rest She distributed among the indigent and the infirmaries, for She was accustomed to visit such places and often served and washed the poor with her own hands, performing such services, as well as distributing the alms, on her knees. Whenever it was possible She consoled the needy and assisted the sick in their last agony, nor did She ever rest from works of charity, either actually engaging in them or pleading and praying for others in her retirement.

588. She gave salutary advice to those princes or kings at their visit, admonishing them and instructing them in regard to the good government of their provinces. She charged them to watch over the equitable administration of justice without acceptation of persons; to consider themselves mortal men as all the rest; to fear the supreme Judge, by whom all are to be judged according to their own works; and above all to further the exaltation of the name of Christ and the propagation and security of the holy faith, in which alone the governments and monarchies can be solidly established, for without this government is but a lamentable and most unhappy slavery of the demons which is permitted by the hidden judgments of God for the punishment of both those who govern and who are governed. The fortunate princes promised faithfully to execute all of her instructions, and they afterwards remained in communication with the heavenly Queen through letters and other correspondence. The same happened to each one in particular who visited Her, for all of them left her presence more ardent in virtue, full of light, joy, and unspeakable consolation. Many upon seeing Her who were as yet unbelievers loudly professed their belief in the true God, for they were unable to restrain the interior forces awakened by the presence of his Blessed Mother. (The New English Edition of The Mystical City of God: The Coronation, Book 8, Chapter 10.)

This is the most precise summary of the Social Reign of Christ the King and what happens to men and their nations absent it that can be found.

Are there any more questions about why the world is in a mess?

Nations that do not acknowledge Christ the King and do not promote public no devotion to Our Lady, especially through her Most Holy Rosary, are doomed to be in “a lamentable and most unhappy slavery of the demons which is permitted by the hidden judgments of God for the punishment of both those who govern and who are governed,” and if the forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil want to attack us for using our Rosaries as the spiritual weapons against evil for which she gave her Psalter to Saint Dominic de Guzman, I say, “Let ‘em!” I will resist only by means of my prayers, knowing that I have much to suffer for my sins and am lost without Our Lady and her Most Holy Rosary.

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us now and the hour of our deaths. Amen.

All to you, Blessed Mother. All to your Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, we love you. Save souls! 

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saint Roch, pray for us.

Appendix A

Excerpts From Pope Leo XIII’s Laetitiae Sanctae, December 8, 1893

3. For We are convinced that the Rosary, if devoutly used, is bound to benefit not only the individual but society at large.

No one will do Us the injustice to deny that in the discharge of the duties of the Supreme Apostolate We have labored -- as, God helping, We shall ever continue to labor -- to promote the civil prosperity of mankind. Repeatedly have We admonished those who are invested with sovereign power that they should neither make nor execute laws except in conformity with the equity of the Divine mind. On the other hand, we have constantly besought citizens who were conspicuous by genius, industry, family, or fortune, to join together in common counsel and action to safeguard and to promote whatever would tend to the strength and well-being of the community. Only too many causes are at work, in the present condition of things, to loosen the bonds of public order, and to withdraw the people from sound principles of life and conduct.

4. There are three influences which appear to Us to have the chief place in effecting this downgrade movement of society. These are -- first, the distaste for a simple and laborious life; secondly, repugnance to suffering of any kind; thirdly, the forgetfulness of the future life.

5. We deplore -- and those who judge of all things merely by the light and according to the standard of nature join with Us in deploring-that society is threatened with a serious danger in the growing contempt of those homely duties and virtues which make up the beauty of humble life. To this cause we may trace in the home, the readiness of children to withdraw themselves from the natural obligation of obedience to the parents, and their impatience of any form of treatment which is not of the indulgent and effeminate kind. In the workman, it evinces itself in a tendency to desert his trade, to shrink from toil, to become discontented with his lot, to fix his gaze on things that are above him, and to look forward with unthinking hopefulness to some future equalization of property. We may observe the same temper permeating the masses in the eagerness to exchange the life of the rural districts for the excitements and pleasures of the town. Thus the equilibrium between the classes of the community is being destroyed, everything becomes unsettled, men's minds become a prey to jealousy and heart-burnings, rights are openly trampled under foot, and, finally, the people, betrayed in their expectations, attack public order, and place themselves in conflict with those who are charged to maintain it.

6. For evils such as these let us seek a remedy in the Rosary, which consists in a fixed order of prayer combined with devout meditation on the life of Christ and His Blessed Mother. Here, if the joyful mysteries be but clearly brought home to the minds of the people, an object lesson of the chief virtues is placed before their eyes. Each one will thus be able to see for himself how easy, how abundant, how sweetly attractive are the lessons to be found therein for the leading of an honest life. Let us take our stand in front of that earthly and divine home of holiness, the House of Nazareth. How much we have to learn from the daily life which was led within its walls! What an all-perfect model of domestic society! Here we behold simplicity and purity of conduct, perfect agreement and unbroken harmony, mutual respect and love -- not of the false and fleeting kind -- but that which finds both its life and its charm in devotedness of service. Here is the patient industry which provides what is required for food and raiment; which does so "in the sweat of the brow," which is contented with little, and which seeks rather to diminish the number of its wants than to multiply the sources of its wealth. Better than all, we find there that supreme peace of mind and gladness of soul which never fail to accompany the possession of a tranquil conscience. These are precious examples of goodness, of modesty, of humility, of hard-working endurance, of kindness to others, of diligence in the small duties of daily life, and of other virtues, and once they have made their influence felt they gradually take root in the soul, and in course of time fail not to bring about a happy change of mind and conduct. Then will each one begin to feel his work to be no longer lowly and irksome, but grateful and lightsome, and clothed with a certain joyousness by his sense of duty in discharging it conscientiously. Then will gentler manners everywhere prevail; home-life will be loved and esteemed, and the relations of man with man will be loved and esteemed, and the relations of man with man will be hallowed by a larger infusion of respect and charity. And if this betterment should go forth from the individual to the family and to the communities, and thence to the people at large so that human life should be lifted up to this standard, no one will fail to feel how great and lasting indeed would be the gain which would be achieved for society.

7. A second evil, one which is specially pernicious, and one which, owing to the increasing mischief which it works among souls, we can never sufficiently deplore, is to be found in repugnance to suffering and eagerness to escape whatever is hard or painful to endure. The greater number are thus robbed of that peace and freedom of mind which remains the reward of those who do what is right undismayed by the perils or troubles to be met with in doing so. Rather do they dream of a chimeric civilization in which all that is unpleasant shall be removed, and all that is pleasant shall be supplied. By this passionate and unbridled desire of living a life of pleasure, the minds of men are weakened, and if they do not entirely succumb, they become demoralized and miserably cower and sink under the hardships of the battle of life.

8. In such a contest example is everything, and a powerful means of renewing our courage will undoubtedly be found in the Holy Rosary, if from our earliest years our minds have been trained to dwell upon the sorrowful mysteries of Our Lord's life, and to drink in their meaning by sweet and silent meditation. In them we shall learn how Christ, "the Author and Finisher of Our faith," began "to do and teach," in order that we might see written in His example all the lessons that He Himself had taught us for the bearing of our burden of labor -- and sorrow, and mark how the sufferings which were hardest to bear were those which He embraced with the greatest measure of generosity and good will. We behold Him overwhelmed with sadness, so that drops of blood ooze like sweat from His veins. We see Him bound like a malefactor, subjected to the judgment of the unrighteous, laden with insults, covered with shame, assailed with false accusations, torn with scourges, crowned with thorns, nailed to the cross, accounted unworthy to live, and condemned by the voice of the multitude as deserving of death. Here, too, we contemplate the grief of the most Holy Mother, whose soul was not merely wounded but "pierced" by the sword of sorrow, so that she might be named and become in truth "the Mother of Sorrows." Witnessing these examples of fortitude, not with sight but by faith, who is there who will not feel his heart grow warm with the desire of imitating them?

9. Then, be it that the "earth is accursed" and brings forth "thistles and thorns," -- be it that the soul is saddened with grief and the body with sickness; even so, there will be no evil which the envy of man or the rage of devils can invent, nor calamity which can fall upon the individual or the community, over which we shall not triumph by the patience of suffering. For this reason it has been truly said that "it belongs to the Christian to do and to endure great things," for he who deserves to be called a Christian must not shrink from following in the footsteps of Christ. But by this patience, We do not mean that empty stoicism in the enduring of pain which was the ideal of some of the philosophers of old, but rather do We mean that patience which is learned from the example of Him, who "having joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame" (Heb. xvi., 2). It is the patience which is obtained by the help of His grace; which shirks not a trial because it is painful, but which accepts it and esteems it as a gain, however hard it may be to undergo. The Catholic Church has always had, and happily still has, multitudes of men and women, in every rank and condition of life, who are glorious disciples of this teaching, and who, following faithfully in the path of Christ, suffer injury and hardship for the cause of virtue and religion. They reecho, not with their lips, but with their life, the words of St. Thomas: "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John xi., 16).

10. May such types of admirable constancy be more and more splendidly multiplied in our midst to the weal of society and to the glory and edification of the Church of God!

11. The third evil for which a remedy is needed is one which is chiefly characteristic of the times in which we live. Men in former ages, although they loved the world, and loved it far too well, did not usually aggravate their sinful attachment to the things of earth by a contempt of the things of heaven. Even the right-thinking portion of the pagan world recognized that this life was not a home but a dwelling-place, not our destination, but a stage in the journey. But men of our day, albeit they have had the advantages of Christian instruction, pursue the false goods of this world in such wise that the thought of their true Fatherland of enduring happiness is not only set aside, but, to their shame be it said, banished and entirely erased from their memory, notwithstanding the warning of St. Paul, "We have not here a lasting city, but we seek one which is to come" (Heb. xiii., 4).

12. When We seek out the causes of this forgetfulness, We are met in the first place by the fact that many allow themselves to believe that the thought of a future life goes in some way to sap the love of our country, and thus militates against the prosperity of the commonwealth. No illusion could be more foolish or hateful. Our future hope is not of a kind which so monopolizes the minds of men as to withdraw their attention from the interests of this life. Christ commands us, it is true, to seek the Kingdom of God, and in the first place, but not in such a manner as to neglect all things else. For, the use of the goods of the present life, and the righteous enjoyment which they furnish, may serve both to strengthen virtue and to reward it. The splendor and beauty of our earthly habitation, by which human society is ennobled, may mirror the splendor and beauty of our dwelling which is above. Therein we see nothing that is not worthy of the reason of man and of the wisdom of God. For the same God who is the Author of Nature is the Author of Grace, and He willed not that one should collide or conflict with the other, but that they should act in friendly alliance, so that under the leadership of both we may the more easily arrive at that immortal happiness for which we mortal men were created.

13. But men of carnal mind, who love nothing but themselves, allow their thoughts to grovel upon things of earth until they are unable to lift them to that which is higher. For, far from using the goods of time as a help towards securing those which are eternal, they lose sight altogether of the world which is to come, and sink to the lowest depths of degradation. We may doubt if God could inflict upon man a more terrible punishment than to allow him to waste his whole life in the pursuit of earthly pleasures, and in forgetfulness of the happiness which alone lasts for ever.

14. It is from this danger that they will be happily rescued, who, in the pious practice of the Rosary, are wont, by frequent and fervent prayer, to keep before their minds the glorious mysteries. These mysteries are the means by which in the soul of a Christian a most clear light is shed upon the good things, hidden to sense, but visible to faith, "which God has prepared for those who love Him." From them we learn that death is not an annihilation which ends all things, but merely a migration and passage from life to life. By them we are taught that the path to Heaven lies open to all men, and as we behold Christ ascending thither, we recall the sweet words of His promise, "I go to prepare a place for you." By them we are reminded that a time will come when "God will wipe away every tear from our eyes," and that "neither mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow, shall be any more," and that "We shall be always with the Lord," and "like to the Lord, for we shall see Him as He is," and "drink of the torrent of His delight," as "fellow-citizens of the saints," in the blessed companionship of our glorious Queen and Mother. Dwelling upon such a prospect, our hearts are kindled with desire, and we exclaim, in the words of a great saint, "How vile grows the earth when I look up to heaven!" Then, too, shall we feel the solace of the assurance "that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory" (2 Cor. iv., 17).

15. Here alone we discover the true relation between time and eternity, between our life on earth and our life in heaven; and it is thus alone that are formed strong and noble characters. When such characters can be counted in large numbers, the dignity and well-being of society are assured. All that is beautiful, good, and true will flourish in the measure of its conformity to Him who is of all beauty, goodness, and truth the first Principle and the Eternal Source. 

16. These considerations will explain what We have already laid down concerning the fruitful advantages which are to be derived from the use of the Rosary, and the healing power which this devotion possesses for the evils of the age and the fatal sores of society. These advantages, as we may readily conceive, will be secured in a higher and fuller measure by those who band themselves together in the sacred Confraternity of the Rosary, and who are thus more than others united by a special and brotherly bond of devotion to the Most Holy Virgin. In this Confraternity, approved by the Roman Pontiffs, and enriched by them with indulgences and privileges, they possess their own rule and government, hold their meetings at stated times, and are provided with ample means of leading a holy life and of laboring for the good of the community. They are, are so to speak, the battalions who fight the battle of Christ, armed with His Sacred Mysteries, and under the banner and guidance of the Heavenly Queen. How faithfully her intercession is exercised in response to their prayers, processions, and solemnities is written in the whole experience of the Church not less than in the splendor of the victory of Lepanto. (Pope Leo XIII, Laetitiae Sanctae, September 8, 1893.)

Appendix B

A Long History of Repressing and Censoring Political Dissent in the Land of the “Free”

As an initial overview, it must be remembered that tyrants have sought to silence Catholics from the very birth of the Church on Pentecost Sunday, starting with the thugs who composed the Sanhedrin. Roman Emperors and the kings of barbaric tribes tried with all of their might to get Catholics to deny the Faith during the early part First Millennium. Mohammedans have tried to do so from the Seventh Century to this very day. Protestants and Freemasons and social revolutionaries have tried to do so with varying degrees of ferocity since 1517. The names of these perpetrators have ranged from Nero to Trajan to Diocletian to Mohammed to Luther to Henry to Cranmer to Calvin to Cromwell to Danton to Robespierre to Garibaldi and Bismarck to Lenin to Hitler to Mao to Ho to Castro to Ortega and to all of the petty little men and women, many of them apostate Catholics, who have served in our own government in the past thirty to forty years, ever eager to sell out the Faith for their thirty pieces of silver of popularity and political power.

Tyrants never learn their lessons. Inspired by the adversary, who hates God and who hates us because our souls made in the image and likeness of God, new generations of tyrants arise to try to silence the voice of Catholics. This is why the accommodation of the Church in her human elements to the spirit of the world has made it more possible for the witches' brew of forces that has been coalescing and mutating and re-coalescing since the Sixteenth Century to be victorious in all aspects of the popular culture of most of the countries in the so-called "developed" world. The devil and his minions grow bolder when Catholics begin to speak with the voice of the world, something that the conciliar “popes” and their “bishops” have done for over sixty years now.

In particular, of course, the Protestant Revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King that began five hundred three years ago on October 31, 1517, was an effort to “provide” “evangelical liberty” to those who had been “enslaved” by a supposedly “dictatorial” hierarchical Church that had “corrupted” the Gospel message for her own purposes. This “evangelical liberty,” however, quickly descended into rank libertinage to the extent that even Martin Luther himself was aghast at what the decline in morals that took place once he had “liberated” men from the true Church, the Catholic Church, and set them “free” as “equals” to decide for themselves the meaning of Sacred Scripture and to sack and pillage Catholic churches, monasteries and convents. 

King Henry VIII, of course, was so intent on crushing all opposition to his taking England out of the Catholic Faith that he engaged in a bloodbath of 72,000 Catholics between 1534 and the tyrant's death in 1547, a little over three percent of the population of England at that time. The killing of over 72,000 people, the seizure of the monastery and convent lands and the other discriminatory measures imposed upon Roman Catholics in the wake of the English Protestant Revolt were undertaken done quite legally, thank you. Judges sentenced Catholics to death quite routinely. The England of the Anglican Church just went about its business as though anyone who resisted the new order of things was a disloyal extremist.

This lawless desire to crush opposition transcended the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and infected many of those who believed that the English colonies situated upon and down the Atlantic seaboard of the United States of America should break from England. Those arguing against such a break did so frequently at the very threat of their lives.

To wit, Jonathan Boucher, a Anglican preacher in England and in the Colony of Virginia in the years before the Revolutionary War in the Eighteenth Century, argued in very eloquent terms against a break of the thirteen English colonies from the British Crown by reminding his listeners that true freedom comes only from Our Blessed Lord and Saviour. Boucher made some very fine points in his sermon (On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience and Nonresistance), which should be studied if for no other reason than to realize that there was some effort made by "conservative" colonists to stem the tide of rebellion and to prevent a war for "independence," which was, after all, an act of high treason against King George III.

Boucher, who sometimes packed two single-shot pistols and kept them in his pulpit when he preached so that "patriots" would not attack him, argued against what could be called "liberation theology," urging Anglicans and other colonists to accept whatever sufferings were being imposed by King George III and to offer them up to God, stating that one should not seek to rebel from the authority which God has seen fit in His Providence to provide for the governance of men. The "disconnect" of Protestantism was such, however, that Boucher could not see that his own false "church" was born in a violent, bloody rebellion against the true authority given by God Himself over men in the form of the Church that He created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. It was incongruous to argue that a rebellion against civil authority was unjust when one's very "church" was created as a result of a rebellion against God Himself.

Similarly, Americans have long fashioned their nation to be one of laws, not of men. However, this is simply not true. This is a fantasy. This is delusional.

The laws of God have been broken on these shores by the proliferation of unbridled error under the false slogans of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" from the very beginning.

President after president has engaged in activities designed to suppress legitimate dissent and opposition.

It was within a decade of the inauguration of the first President of the United States of America, George Washington, that a Congress controlled by Federalist Party members during the administration of Washington's successor, the Catholic-hating John Adams (see A Founding Hatred for Christ the King), who was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States of America, that the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed on July 14, 1798, made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government of the United States of America and its officials.

The sixteenth President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, did not exactly "cotton" to political opposition during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865, as he intimidated judges, shut down newspapers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus without an Act of Congress, held opponents in prison without trial and put civilians on trial in military courts at a time when civilian courts were open. And this is just a partial listing of what led John Wilkes Booth to cry out, "Sic temper tyrannis!" as he jumped onto the stage of the Ford Theater in Washington, District of Columbia, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, from the balcony where he had just shot Lincoln in the head, a wound that would take Lincoln's life early the next morning, Holy Saturday, April 15, 1865.

Suppression of opposition to American involvement in World War I under the administration of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson was so extensive that Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who had run as former President Theodore Roosevelt's Vice Presidential running-mate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party ticket in 1912 when Wilson was running for his first term as President against Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft, who had defeated Roosevelt, to say on the floor of the United States Senate: "It is now a crime for anyone to say anything or print anything against the government of the United States. The punishment for doing so is to go to jail" (quoted in Dr Paul Johnson's Modern Times). (See also my Fascists for Freedom.)

Just as an aside, President Thomas Woodrow Wilson wanted to use the unconstitutional Federal Reserve System, created in an act passed by the Congress of the United States of America and signed into law by Wilson on December 23, 1913, as the means to centralize the banking and monetary systems under the authority of the government of the United States of America in order to restrict the legitimate freedom of Americans to control their own private property and to make private industry dependent upon the "direction" provided it by governmental regulators and overseers. Wilson was a fascist. It was for this reason as well that Wilson saw to it that Congress enacted legislation, following the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, to create our current system of confiscatory taxation on our incomes. And it was Wilson, of course, who believed that the Masonic revolutionaries in Mexico, aping the "example" established by the French Revolutionaries, could "build" or "engineer" the "better" society in Our Lady's country by the killing of thousands upon thousands of Catholics:

Wilson replied [in 1915, to Father Francis Clement Kelley, who was a representative of James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, for whom Wilson had such contempt that he addressed him as Mister Gibbons]: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'

"Having thus instructed his caller in the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries. All efforts of Catholic to succor their coreligionists across the border were to prove fruitless, as they were to prove once again in 1924, when the fiercest persecution of all was begun by Plutarco Calles. In this systematic pogrom, all public worship came to an end in Mexico an priests were methodically hunted down and executed like outlaws. It was of this travail which Graham Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory. Generally, however, the world press ignored the Calles persecution in a “conspiracy of silence” which the American hierarchy and Pope after Pope were powerless to break. (Robert Leckie American and Catholic, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 274.)

In other words, Thomas Woodrow Wilson really believed that it was "necessary" for the Freemasonic/Communist Mexican government that enjoyed his favor to kill Catholics, whose "backward" beliefs were impediments to the institutionalization of "liberal values" that required him to suppress all opposition to his policies right here in the United States of America.

It was a scant twelve years after the stroke-disabled Wilson left office on March 4, 1921, that the thirty-third Freemason named Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Internal Revenue Service to audit his "enemies." He contravened the law in numerous ways as he used the legislative powers illicitly given to regulatory agencies by Congress during the Great Depression and during World War II to set the stage for Barack Hussein Obama's rule by decree and presidential fiat. Roosevelt, the fifth cousin of the Republican statist and fellow thirty-third degree Freemason, Theodore Roosevelt, the uncle of Eleanor Roosevelt, even ordered his Attorney General, Robert Jackson, to engage in domestic espionage. Roosevelt’s directive took the form of a memorandum dated May 21, 1940.

Robert Jackson, who was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America on July 11, 1941, did not like the directive as he believed that Franklin Roosevelt had authorized domestic surveillance on anyone suspected of being subversive. Jackson’s successor, however, Francis Biddle, who took office as the Attorney General of the United States of America on August 25, 1941, had no qualms about the directive, delegating the task of carrying it out to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, John Edgar Hoover, who was more than happy to run with this new expansion of his authority to investigate anyone at any time for any reason. The history of the Federal government’s surveillance since that time is one of completely unchecked growth.

Do not think for a single moment that abuses of deep state bureaucrats being exposed at this time is anything new. Illegal surveillance by the Federal government has been on the rise since World War II and the establishment of permanent intelligence agencies. Modern technology has advanced to such a point that these agencies, acting both legally and illegally, monitor every means of human communication today save for those done with an old-fashioned typewriter that has not connection of any kind to the internet or to a telephone line.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself, as noted just above, has long seen itself as a “check” upon elected officials, and John Edgar Hoover, who served as Director of the Bureau of Investigation from May 10, 1924, to March 22, 1935, and then as the founding Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from March 23, 1935, until the time of his death on May 2, 1972, believed in the suppression of political dissent dating back to his days as the head of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s “War Emergency Division’s” “Alien Enemy Bureau” one hundred years ago. Please, what is going on now, although certainly shocking to those not conversant with the darker sides of American history, is really nothing new at all.

Although Presidents Harry S. Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy each considered firing Hoover, the latter had amassed too much information on too many people. This information, most of it gathered quite illegally and/or by the improper use of Federal Bureau of Investigation field agents, was Hoover’s own kind of “insurance policy.”

President Lyndon Baines Johnson, on the other hand, knowing what kind of “insurance policy” that Hoover had on him, whetted Hoover’s appetite for domestic surveillance under the thinnest of legal pretexts, including wiretapping his own vice president, the garrulous spendthrift with taxpayer dollars named Hubert Horatio Humphrey:

Resigned to Humphrey's candidacy [in 1968], Johnson pressed his Vice President throughout the campaign not to stray too far from the Administration's position on Vietnam.

Humphrey largely complied. But at the end of September, when he showed greater flexibility than the White House on how to end the war, Johnson reacted angrily. He told Clark Clifford that he doubted Humphrey's ability to be President. He lacked the guts for the job. After Humphrey had become Vice President and expressed doubts about the war, the White House, according to a Humphrey aide, Ted Van Dyk, had arranged for wiretaps on Humphrey's office phones. Van Dyk learned this from two Secret Service agents on the vice-presidential detail. Neither Van Dyk nor Humphrey was surprised. Though Johnson in principle disliked taping and wiretaps, he secretly taped more than 7,500 of his own telephone conversations as President. Moreover, during the 1964 campaign, after a visit to the White House, Richard Russell wrote, "Hoover has apparently been turned loose and is tapping everything.... [Johnson] stated it took him hours each night to read them all (but he loves this)." The speed with which Johnson had information about Humphrey's presidential campaign suggested to Van Dyk that the White House was still tapping Humphrey's phones in 1968. Johnson apparently wanted the taps to gain advance notice and a chance to dissuade him should Humphrey decide to break away on the war. (Three New Revelations about Lyndon Baines Johnson.)

It should be noted, however, that the liberal Robert Dallek, who authored the synopsis of his own book about Lyndon Baines Johnson, did not include the following fact about Johnson’s wiretapping in 1968 that is covered in another book:

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson ordered Hoover to tap the phone of Republican vice- presidential nominee Spiro Agnew on the suspicion that Agnew was telling the South Vietnamese that they would get a better peace agreement from Nixon if he were elected president. The taps did not reveal that Agnew ever made such a deal. (Henry M. Holden, FBI 100 Years: An Unofficial History, Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2008, p. 218.)

Mind you, this is only a partial listing of abuses that have been committed in this alleged land of "laws and not men," a land where over fifty-five million innocent babies have been butchered by surgical means (hundreds of millions more by chemical means) since, most of those having taken place in the forty-seven years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. That staggering figure does not include those babies who were killed by surgical means in their mothers' wombs between 1967 and 1973 when various states, including Colorado, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Alaska, and Washington (and Washington, District of Columbia) decriminalized surgical baby-killing in some or all cases at various stages of a baby's development in his mother's womb.

A "civilized" nation of "laws." I don't think so.

The lawless imposition of policies even in violation of constitutions and civil code or statutory law and the suppression of opposition to the policies of statists of one stripe or another is nothing new, you see. It has been around for a long, long time. There is even a certain "logic" to the efforts on the part of naturalists to suppress opposition as those committed to their own acquisition and retention of personal power as an ultimate end/or who are committed ideologues of one system of "secular salvation" or another ape, pervert, invert and distort the Catholic Church's teaching that the civil state is is "acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue" (Pope Leo XIII, Immortal Gods, November 1, 1885.) Statists believe their anyone who opposes their schemes and their firmly held ideological beliefs is leading "minds away from truth" and must be denounced and threatened with fines and imprisonment.

The Police Came with Brutality for Operation Rescue Long Before They Came for the Truckers

Many earnest pro-life Americans believed that the election of former California Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan to the presidency of the United States in 1980 augured good things for the babies. I was one of those people, as I related in "We Have Learned Nothing" in The Remnant eighteen years ago.

Reagan's first appointee to the United States Supreme Court was Sandra Day O'Connor, whose pro-abortion position was made quite clear in her days as the Majority Leader of the Arizona State Senate. None of the supposedly "pro-life" senators, each of whom supported abortion in some cases, on the Senate Judiciary Committee cared to take seriously the testimony about O'Connor's pro-abortion stance given by the American Life League's Judie Brown and the Conservative Caucus Foundation's Howard Phillips.

Although the late President Reagan did issue a proclamation about the personhood of all preborn children in January of 1988, babies were still being killed in the same monstrous numbers each year by surgical abortion in the 1980s, to say nothing of those killed by chemical abortifacients, as they had been before Reagan took office in 1981. A lot of anxious Americans believed that "something" had to be done to remind their fellow citizens that a silent holocaust was taking place in a country they considered "civilized."

The "something" that simultaneously galvanized and polarized the pro-life community was Operation Rescue. Rescue galvanized many in the pro-life community as it held out the hope that massive sit-ins and blockages of abortuaries might singe the conscience of the nation. It polarized others in that same community, especially those who believed that we had been making "progress" in the 1980s and that we had to work through the electoral system to effect change incrementally, pragmatically.

Some Catholics were critical of the whole concept of Rescue, arguing that it was wrong to adopt the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, worse yet to entrust the leadership of such an enterprise to evangelical Protestants who believed that they had the responsibility to take Catholics out of the Church to "save" them.

Despite the polarizing aspects of Rescue, however, many thousands of Catholics were among those who were arrested at rescues between late 1987 and 1994, the time that Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Bill (FACE), with the help, it should be noted, of a few supposedly "pro-life" senators and representatives (could you imagine them voting for a "Freedom of Access to a Concentration Camp Bill").

A lot of Catholics were involved in the high-level leadership of local rescues. Indeed, it can be argued that Operation Rescue itself was an outgrowth of the solitary actions of Catholics such as Joan Andrews Bell, who had spent a considerable amount of time in prison for attempting to rescue the preborn in the 1980s, and the late John Arena, a fierce fighter for the inviolability of innocent human life in the Utica, New York, area. Mention must be made also of Joe Wall, a pro-life advocate from the Philadelphia area who had placed himself on the front lines for a long time.

That Catholics participated in an effort that was largely, although not exclusively, under the direction of evangelical Protestants was very ironic. The very evil attempting to be addressed by Operation Rescue, abortion, was the ultimate, natural, inexorable result of the division of Christendom wrought by Martin Luther and John Calvin and Henry VIII and John Knox and John Wesley and scores upon scores of others. As is noted in , which made so many Catholics comfortable in their embrace of the world, was an effort to empty the Sacred Liturgy of the Roman Rite of its distinctly Catholic features in order to appeal to Protestants

Despite the irony of the origins of Operation Rescue and that its efforts were bound to be circumscribed by the limits that exist in a nation that does not subordinate itself to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it should be exercised by the Catholic Church, the courage, and the love of those who participated in it must never be overlooked or minimized. Many thousands upon thousands of ordinary Americans, most of them Catholics, mind you, prayed Rosaries and offered up the sufferings and indignities of arrest and fingerprinting in order to bear a visible, tangible witness to the binding nature of the Fifth Commandment.

As a counterpoint to the indifference to the plight of the unborn on the part of so many bishops and priest, the late “Bishops” Austin Vaughan and George Lynch participated in rescues regularly. The late "Bishop" Paul Dudley, who was the long time conciliar “bishop” of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was dragged away by the police in one rescue. Hundreds of priests, from those with international reputations, such as the late Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., the founder of Human Life International, and the late Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., to the ordinary pastors and curates and seminarians who prayed the Rosary as they were handcuffed and hauled off to jail.

Apart from the spiritual bouquets that were given to Our Lord through Our Lady by Catholics during rescues, Operation Rescue was useful in that it showed the full fury of demonic hatred for the innocent preborn and their defenders on the part of police officers and court officers and prosecutors and judges. Police brutality was visited upon rescuers as a matter of routine.

One of the few journalists to write about this brutality was the late Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice, who noted that there would be all manner of sanctimonious outcries from left-leaning columnists if the same sort of brutality was used by police officers against black Americans or "peace" demonstrators. The rescuers who were brutalized included “bishops,” priests/presbyters, and elderly men and women. (The demonic fury of pro-abortion activists was displayed throughout the counterdemonstrations during rescues. Some of those activists used the courts to try to break the back of the entire pro-life movement, including those who did not participate in rescues, by using the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act to bring costly lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in damages from key rescue leaders. This led directly to the aforementioned F.A.C.E. Act, which was accompanied by sloganeering rhetoric that termed all opposition to abortion as "violent" and "intolerant.")

One of the worst incidents of police brutality occurred in West Hartford, Connecticut, on June 17, 1989. A videotape taken by a rescuer who had hidden a camera after having trespassed into an abortuary showed the police barging into a room in the abortuary without wearing their badges and nameplates, which were turn backwards in some instances. The force used was quite plain. I was told by people who experienced it first-hand that the force was used in a corridor of a courtroom of a judge who must have heard the screams of those being assaulted. The subject of what some have called a "police riot" in West Hartford, Connecticut, became a topic of some interest in the mainstream media for a while, including being Patrick J. Buchanan's "Outrage of the Week" on The Capitol Gang, a program he originated on Cable News Network (CNN) in 1989. Pat would later have an entire Crossfire devoted to the matter, during which program the videotape referred to above was shown on international satellite television. The images shown were simply unforgettable.

Alas, the same courts that gave us child-killing on demand proved to be of little avail to those who were assaulted in West Hartford in 1989. After fifteen years and all manner of legal wrangling and debates about legal strategy, the following press release was issued on June 25, 2004, by John Kladde of the Connecticut Pro-Life Action Network:

On June 1, rescuers from the infamous 1989 West Hartford pro-life rescues took the Town of West Hartford to task for police brutality in the case of Waugh v. West Hartford . The plaintiffs were arrested on April 1, 1989, and June 17, 1989, at the Summit Women's Center where abortions are performed.

They sued the Town contending that it had a de facto policy of using excessive force in the arrest, transport and custody of the rescuers. The relief sought was compensatory damages for inflicting unreasonable force upon the plaintiffs in violation of their rights under the Fourth Amendment.

The jury voted unanimously Monday, June 14, in 2 hours that there was no excessive force used by the WHPD against any of the plaintiffs at either rescue.

Details an be found at www.geocities.com/connplan [The website gives the full history of what took place during the past fifteen years, including the legal wrangling.]

The images on the videotape taken on June 17, 1989, are quite clear.  A jury decided that excessive force was not used. Just as in Canada at this time, those responsible for using such a level of force to arrest trespassers engaged in a non-violent demonstration who did not in any way threaten the bodily safety of the arresting officers will have to answer to God Himself at the moment of their Particular Judgments if they do not repent of their actions. The same Judgment, from which there is no appeal, awaits all judges and prosecutors who participate in the perpetuation of the American genocide of the preborn, and it awaits the “woke” prosecutors and mayors of the Cities of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, District of Columbia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and elsewhere who are indemnifying violent criminals while ignoring the pleas of victims and/or their surviving relatives to enforce the law upon those who break it.

This is not even to mention William Jefferson Blythe Clinton's aggressive promotion of the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn and the role played by Attorney General Janet Reno, a Catholic, mind you, in organizing the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy (VAAPCON) Task Force under the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  to intimidate pro-life Americans, including a woman in Toledo, Ohio, who was visited by FBI agents after she had written to a baby-killer to tell her that she was praying for her conversion, an act that was deemed by the agents to have constituted a "violent threat" against the baby-killer (see FBI's VAAPCON Spies on Pro-Lifers for more information about the Clinton-Reno war against pro-lifers).

Then again, it is easy for tyrants to order and then execute assaults upon their political “enemies” and/or to go soft on crime when they do not see the Divine impress in the souls of others, starting wit the innocent preborn, and thus have no regard whatsoever for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive and the Natural Laws.