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Names of the Deceased for November |
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Posted by: Our Lady of Fatima Chapel - 10-25-2022, 01:00 PM - Forum: For the Souls in Purgatory
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Names of the Deceased
November, the Month of the Holy Souls, is right around the corner. Beginning today, and during the entire month of November, Our Lady of Fatima Chapel is accepting names of the deceased to be placed upon the altar for remembrance during every Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered throughout November.
The names of the deceased placed upon our altar will also be remembered during each Holy Mass offered at all of the SSPX-MC missions; wherever the Holy Sacrifice is scheduled to be offered by the Apostolate during the month of November.
Please send the names of the deceased you wish to be prayed for to:
By Email:
ourladyofatimachapel@gmail.com
By Postal Mail:
OUR LADY OF FATIMA CHAPEL
16 DOGWOOD ROAD SOUTH
HUBBARDSTON, MA 01452
The Western tradition identifies the general custom of praying for the dead dating as far back as the Second Book of Maccabees 12:42-46. The custom of setting apart a special day for intercession for the faithful departed on November 2nd was first established by Saint Odilo of Cluny (d. 1048) at his abbey of Cluny in 998. From Cluny the custom spread to the other houses of the Cluniac order, which became the largest and most extensive network of monasteries in Europe. The custom was soon adopted in several dioceses in France, then spread throughout the Western Church. It was accepted in Rome only in the fourteenth century. While November 2nd remained the liturgical observance, in time the entire month of November became associated in the Western Catholic tradition with prayers for the departed; and the lists of names of those to be remembered being placed in the proximity of the altar on which the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is offered.
The legend connected with its foundation is given by Peter Damiani in his Life of Saint Odilo: A pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was cast by a storm on a desolate island. A hermit living there told him that amid the rocks was a chasm communicating with purgatory, from which perpetually rose the groans of tortured souls. The hermit also claimed he had heard the demons complaining of the efficacy of the prayers of the faithful, and especially prayers from the monks of Cluny, in rescuing their victims. Upon returning home, the pilgrim hastened to inform the abbot of Cluny, who then set November 2nd as a day of intercession on the part of his community for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory.
Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis quorum animas omnium fidelium defunctorum per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace. Amen
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| Abp. Viganò: The Vatican must withdraw its support of the ‘disastrous’ COVID shots |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-25-2022, 07:53 AM - Forum: Archbishop Viganò
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Abp. Viganò: The Vatican must withdraw its support of the ‘disastrous’ COVID shots
The results that are now emerging from the official data published in all the countries that adopted the mass vaccine campaign are incontestably disastrous.
![[Image: IMG_3909-810x500.jpeg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_3909-810x500.jpeg)
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
Oct 21, 2022
Editor’s Note: Below follows the text of a letter sent by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò to Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the moral character and physical dangers of COVID-19 inoculations and the Church’s instructions to the faithful on their use.
This letter was also addressed to members of the Holy See, including Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of His Holiness; Cardinal Peter Turkson, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences; and Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
(LifeSiteNews) – Your Eminence,
Last year, on October 23, 2021, I wrote a letter to the president of the United States Bishops’ Conference, which was also sent to you, in which I expressed – as I have already done publicly – my very strong reservations on various extremely controversial aspects regarding the moral legitimacy of the use of experimental gene serums produced using mRNA technology.
In that letter, which was written with the help of eminent scientists and virologists, I highlighted the need to update the “Note on the morality of using some anti-COVID-19 vaccines,” due to the scientific evidence that had emerged even then and moreover had been declared by the pharmaceutical manufacturers themselves.
Permit me, Your Eminence, to renew my appeal in the light of recent declarations made by Pfizer to the European Parliament and the publication of official data by the world health agencies.
First of all, I remind you that the document from the Dicastery over which you preside was promulgated on December 21, 2020, in the absence of complete data about the nature of the gene serum and its components, and also without any results from the efficacy and safety trials. The subject of the Note was limited to the “moral aspects of the use of the vaccines against COVID-19 that have been developed from cell lines derived from tissues obtained from two fetuses that were not spontaneously aborted.” The Congregation further reiterated: “We do not intend to judge the safety and efficacy of these vaccines, although ethically relevant and necessary, as this evaluation is the responsibility of biomedical researchers and drug agencies.” Safety and efficacy were thus not the subject of the Note, which in expressing an opinion about the “moral aspects of the use” did not deem it appropriate to comment on the “morality of the production” of these drugs.
The safety and efficacy of the individual vaccines should have been established after a period of experimentation, which normally takes several years. But in this case the health authorities have decided to carry out the experimentation on the entire population, departing from the normal practice of the scientific community, international regulations, and the laws of individual nations.
The results that are now emerging from the official data published in all the countries that adopted the mass vaccine campaign are incontestably disastrous: it is emerging that people who have been subjected to inoculation with the experimental serum not only have never been protected from contagion by the virus, nor from grave forms of illness, but they have actually been made more vulnerable to COVID-19 and its variants due to the irreversible compromising of their immune systems caused by mRNA technology. The data also highlights serious short- and long-term effects, such as sterility, the inducement of miscarriages in pregnant women, the transmission of the virus to children through breastfeeding, the development of serious heart conditions including myocarditis and pericarditis, the return of cancerous tumors that had previously been cured, and a whole series of other debilitating diseases. The many cases of sudden deaths – which until recently were stubbornly considered as having no relation to inoculation with the serum – are revealing the consequence of repeated doses, even in people who are young, healthy, and physically fit.
Members of the military, who are rigorously controlled by health personnel for safety reasons, are showing the same incidence of adverse effects after receiving the serum. Countless studies are now confirming that the serum may cause forms of acquired immunodeficiency in those who receive it. Worldwide, the number of deaths and grave pathologies following vaccination is increasing exponentially. These vaccines have caused more deaths than all other vaccines combined in the last thirty years. And not only this: in many nations the number of those who have died after vaccination is significantly higher than the number of those who died from COVID.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now Dicastery), although not expressing an opinion on the efficacy and safety of the serums, nevertheless defined them as “vaccines,” taking for granted that they would give immunity and protect people against active and passive contagion. But this element has now been disavowed by the declarations that are coming from all of the world health authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO), who now say that those who are vaccinated may become infected themselves and infect other people more seriously than people who are not vaccinated, and also that their immune systems have been drastically reduced if not actually cancelled.
The drugs that have been called “vaccines” thus do not correspond to the official definition of a vaccine, to which the Note presumably refers. A “vaccine” is defined as a preparation which induces the production of protective antibodies by an organism, conferring a specific resistance against a determined infective illness (either viral, bacterial, or protozoal). This definition has now been modified by the WHO, because otherwise it would not have been able to include anti-COVID drugs within the definition of a vaccine, since these drugs do not induce the production of protective antibodies and do not confer a specific resistance against the infectious disease caused by Sars-CoV-2.
It should be pointed out that the presence of graphene oxide both in the batches of the “vaccine” as well as in the blood of those who have been inoculated has now been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, despite the fact that there is no scientific justification for its presence nor for its pharmaceutical use on human beings due to its toxicity. The devastating effects of graphene oxide on the organs of people who have been subjected to inoculation are now evident, and it is likely that pharmaceutical companies will soon be held accountable.
Your Eminence surely already knows that the use of these technologies with self-assembling graphene oxide nanostructures has also been patented in order to allow for the tracking and remote control of subjects, in particular in order to monitor the vital parameters of each patient in a way that is connected to the cloud via the Bluetooth signal emitted by these nanostructures. As proof that this information is not the result of the ruminations of some conspiracy theorists, Your Eminence perhaps knows that the European Union has chosen as winners of a competition two projects dedicated to technological innovation: “The Human Brain and Graphene.” These two projects will each receive one billion euros in funding over the next ten years.
The “vaccines” against COVID-19 have been presented as the only possible alternative to a deadly disease. This was false from the very beginning, and with the perspective of two years it has also been confirmed as false: there were and are alternative treatments, but they have been methodically boycotted by the pharmaceutical companies – because they are inexpensive and not profitable for them – and discredited by scientific publications financed by Big Pharma with articles that were later withdrawn because they were clearly based on falsified data.
Furthermore, COVID-19 has been revealed to be – as was known and as was scientifically evident – a seasonal form of the coronavirus that is treatable and not deadly, a form of flu that causes only a minimal number of deaths among people who already have some other underlying condition. The multi-year monitoring of the coronavirus leaves no doubt in this regard and also eliminates the element of a “health emergency” that was used as a pretext to impose the vaccines.
International norms specify that an experimental drug cannot be authorized for distribution except in the absence of another effective alternative treatment. This is why drug agencies around the world have prevented the use of ivermectin, hyperimmune plasma, and other treatments whose effectiveness has been demonstrated. There is no need to remind Your Eminence that all of these agencies, along with the WHO, are almost entirely financed by pharmaceutical companies and foundations linked to them and that there is a grave conflict of interest at the highest levels.
In the past few days the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had to answer to the Parliament about the PNRR (The National Recovery and Resilience Plan) funding that was obtained for the laboratories in Italy and Greece where her husband works, without forgetting that the same president refused to provide the European Court of Auditors with the text messages she exchanged with the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, about supply contracts, messages which still have not been revealed.
The imposition of the experimental serum took place through a coordinated employment of methods that was unprecedented in recent history, using mass manipulation techniques that are well known to psychology experts. In this operation of media terrorism and the violation of the natural rights of individuals, accompanied by intolerable blackmail and discrimination, the Catholic hierarchy chose to take sides with the system, making itself the promoter of “vaccines,” even reaching the point of recommending them as a “moral duty.” The media skillfully used the spiritual authority of the Roman Pontiff and his media influence to confirm the mainstream narrative, and this was an essential element in the success of the entire vaccination campaign, convincing many of the faithful to undergo inoculation because of the trust they have placed in the Pope and his global role.
The vaccination obligations imposed on employees of the Holy See, following the lines of protocols imposed in other nations, have confirmed the Vatican’s absolute alignment with extremely careless and reckless positions that are completely void of any scientific validity. This has exposed the Vatican City State to possible liability on the part of its officials, with a further burden on its treasury; and the possibility should not be excluded that the faithful may bring collective lawsuits against their own pastors, who have been converted into salesmen of dangerous medicines.
After more than two years, the Church has not considered it necessary to make any statement to correct the Note, which in the light of new scientific evidence is now outdated and substantially contradicted by the harsh reality of the facts. Limiting itself strictly to an evaluation of the morality of the use of the vaccines, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has not taken account of the proportionality between the benefits of the gene serum – which have been completely absent – and the short- and long-term adverse side-effects which are now before everyone’s eyes.
Since it is now evident that the drugs sold as vaccines do not give any significant benefit and on the contrary may cause a very high percentage of death or serious diseases even in people for whom COVID is not a serious threat, it is no longer possible to consider valid any attempt to demonstrate a proportionality between risks and benefits, thus eliminating one of the assumptions on which the Note was based: “The morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed” (n. 5).
We know well that there is no “absence of other means,” and that the serum neither stops nor prevents the epidemic: this makes the mRNA “vaccine” produced with aborted cell lines not only morally unacceptable but also absolutely dangerous for one’s health, and in the case of pregnant women also for the health of their children.
The Church, in expressing a moral evaluation of the vaccines, cannot fail to take into consideration the many elements that contribute to formulating an overall judgment. The Congregation cannot limit itself to the general theory of the moral lawfulness of the drug in itself – a lawfulness that is completely questionable given its ineffectiveness, the absence of tests of its genotoxicity and carcinogenicity, and the evidence of side-effects. Instead, the Congregation must speak out about this fact as soon as possible: now that the complete uselessness of the serums “to stop or even prevent the epidemic” has been demonstrated, it can no longer be administered, and indeed there is a moral obligation for health authorities and drug companies to recall it as something dangerous and harmful, and for the individual faithful to refuse inoculation.
I further believe, Most Reverend Eminence, that the time has come for the Holy See to definitively distance itself from those private entities and multinational corporations that have believed that they can use the authority of the Catholic Church to endorse the neo-Malthusian project of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 and the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. It is not tolerable that the voice of the Church of Christ continues to be complicit in a plan to reduce the global population based on the chronic pathologizing of humanity and the induction of sterility; and this is even more necessary in the face of the scandalous conflict of interests to which the Holy See is exposed by accepting sponsorship and funding from the architects of these criminal plans.
It will not escape Your Eminence that there are very serious implications for the Holy Church as a result of her reckless support for the “psychopandemic” narrative. Taking advantage of Francis’ words and addresses to lead the faithful to submit themselves to a serum that has not only proven to be useless but actually gravely harmful has seriously compromised the authority of the Vatican, prompting it to propagate a treatment based on data that has proven to be partial and counterfeited.
This reckless and less-than-transparent behavior involved an interference by the supreme ecclesiastical authority in a field of strictly scientific concern which is instead “the responsibility of biomedical researchers and drug agencies.” After this betrayal, how will faithful Catholics and those who look to the Church as a sure guide be able to consider the Church’s positions as reliable and credible with any amount of serenity or confidence? And how will it be possible to remedy the damage that has been caused to those who, having neither medical training nor competence, have undergone a treatment that has actually compromised their health or led to premature death, for the sole reason that it was recommended to them by the Pope, or their bishop, or their parish priest, who told them that unless they were vaccinated they could not come to church, serve Mass, or sing in the choir?
The Catholic hierarchy has experienced a decline in recent years that is directly proportional to the support it has given to the globalist ideology: its commitment to support the vaccine campaign is not an isolated case, judging by the participation of the Holy See in climate initiatives – which are also based on false assumptions that have nothing scientific about them – and trans-humanistic endeavors.
But this is not the purpose for which Our Lord placed the Church on earth: she must first and foremost proclaim the Truth, keeping herself far away from dangerous involvements with the powerful of the earth, and even more so with those among them who are notoriously hostile to the teaching of Christ and Catholic morality. If the hierarchy does not shake itself away from this obsequious enslavement, if it does not rediscover the courage and dignity to stand up against the mentality of the world, it will be overwhelmed and will fall victim to its own inability to be a stumbling block and a sign of contradiction.
I am certain, Your Eminence, that you will want to consider the particular gravity of these themes, as well as the urgency of an enlightened intervention that is faithful to the teaching of the Gospel and the salus animarum which is and remains the suprema lex of the Church.
In Christo Rege,
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America
18 October 2022.
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| Canadian credit union partners with Visa to launch carbon-tracking credit card |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-25-2022, 06:38 AM - Forum: Global News
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Canadian credit union partners with Visa to launch carbon-tracking credit card
The new carbon-tracking credit card will allow those with it the ability to 'connect their daily spending decisions to the change they want to see in the world.'
![[Image: carbon-footprint-810x500.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/carbon-footprint-810x500.jpg)
shutterstock.com
Oct 24, 2022
(LifeSiteNews) – A Canadian credit union will be launching a Visa credit card which will allow users the option to track their carbon emissions.
Vancity says its “Carbon Counter” Visa card is a Canada first and claims it is needed for “climate action.”
Those who sign up for the program will get a monthly total of their purchasing carbon footprint, as well as “advice” on how to make more “climate” friendly purchases.
According to Vancity’s Chief External Relations Officer Jonathan Fowlie, its members want “ways to reduce the impact they have on the environment, particularly when it comes to the emissions that cause climate change.”
He added that the new carbon-tracking credit card will allow those with it the ability to “connect their daily spending decisions to the change they want to see in the world.”
Vancity’s program is being launched in partnership with the German company ecolytiq.
Visa is also backing the program as well in what is known as a “green transformation” of the worldwide banking system.
The CEO of Visa Europe Charlotte Hogg said last year that “A significant shift is needed towards more sustainable behaviors to meet the global net-zero goals by 2050.”
Groups such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) along with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have been strong proponents of pushing agendas that track people’s finances, much like social credit like schemes in place in China.
A large part of the great “reset” idea is the implementation of purchasing tracking mechanisms on consumers under the guise of following one’s so-called “carbon footprint.”
Indeed, at this year’s WEF’s Annual Summit in Davos, Switzerland, China-based Alibaba Group spoke of new technology that would track people’s carbon footprints through the monitoring of their spending, eating, and traveling habits.
Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder and chairman, told thousands at the Davos summit that “the future is built by us, by a powerful community such as you here in this room.”
Since taking office in 2015, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pushed the radical environmental agenda also being promoted by the WEF as part of its “Great Reset” agenda.
Indeed, Trudeau’s 2022 budget includes a portion that mandatory climate-related reporting is in the works for all federally regulated financial institutions in Canada.
This is part of a push for businesses to adopt so-called “Environmental Social Governance (ESG).”
ESG, as it is known, is a set of standards for business operations that can be used by global investors to see whether a company is following standards when it comes to its environmental, social, and governance work models.
A company’s ESG indicator can be used to create a climate “score” of a business, including its overall carbon emissions, along with internal accounting practices.
The Great Reset is a militant plan created by global elites that “seeks to ‘push the reset button’ on the global economy.” Its many critics say it would create a new world order with aspects of the Chinese Social Credit System.
READ: Federal Reserve announces social credit system ‘exercise’ to ensure banks comply with ‘climate’ models
In recent months, the Canadian federal government, citing “climate change,” has been looking to implement a “Great Reset” backed by nitrogen-rich fertilizer reduction policies in Canada like those in Sri Lanka and the Netherlands.
The Trudeau government said that a 30 percent reduction in fertilizer by 2030 is one of its goals as part of its radical climate agenda.
Farmers have warned that such radical fertilizer reduction policies will devastate the agricultural industry in Canada, which could lead to possible food shortages.
LifeSiteNews has reported that there is an official job posting by the Trudeau government for officers in the so-called “Environmental Enforcement Directorate.”
A June 2017 peer-reviewed study by two scientists and a veteran statistician confirmed that most of the recent global warming data have been “fabricated by climate scientists to make it look more frightening.”
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| Dom Prosper Guéranger: The Children of Darkness will put forward their False Doctrines |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-23-2022, 06:00 PM - Forum: In Defense of Tradition
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Taken from Dom Prosper Guéranger's Explanation of the Epistle for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost:
Epistle
Lesson of the Epistle of Saint Paul, the Apostle, to the Ephesians. Ch. v.
Brethren: See therefore, how you walk circumspectly: not as unwise, But as wise: redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore become not unwise, but understanding what is the will of God. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is luxury; but be ye filled with the holy Spirit, Speaking to yourselves in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual canticles, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord; Giving thanks always for all things, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God and the Father: Being subject one to another, in the fear of Christ.
Explanation
As the nuptials of the Son of God approach their final completion, there will be also, on the side of hell, a redoubling of rage against the Bride, with a determination to destroy her. The dragon of the Apocalypse, the old serpent who seduced Eve, will vomit his vile foam, as a river, from his mouth—that is, he will urge on all the passions of man, that they may league together for her ruin. But do what he will, he can never weaken the bond of the eternal alliance; and having no power against the Church herself, he will turn his fury against the last children of the new Eve, who will have the perilous honor of those final battles, which are described by the Prophet of Patmos.
It is then more than at all previous times that the Faithful will have to remember the injunction given to us by the Apostle in today’s Epistle; that is, they will have to comport themselves with that circumspection which he enjoins, taking every possible care to keep their understanding, no less than their heart, pure in those evil days. Supernatural light will, in those days, not only have to stand the attacks of the children of darkness, who will put forward their false doctrines; it will, moreover, be minimized and falsified by the very children of the light yielding on the question of principles; it will be endangered by the hesitations and trimmings and human prudence of those who are called far-seeing men. Many will practically ignore the master-truth, that the Church never can be overwhelmed by any created power. If they do remember that our Lord has promised himself to uphold his Church even to the end of the world, they will still have the impertinence to believe that they do a great service to the good cause by making certain politically clever concessions, which, if they were tried in the balance of the sanctuary, would be found under weight! Those future worldly-wise people will quite forget that our Lord will have no need for helping him to keep his promise of crooked schemes, however shrewd those may be; they will entirely overlook this most elementary consideration—that the cooperation, which Jesus deigns to accept, at the hands of his servants, in the defense of the rights of his Church, never could consist in the grabling, or in the disguisement, of those grand truths which constitute the power and beauty of the Bride. Is it possible that they will forget the Apostle’s maxim, which he lays down in his Epistle to the Romans —that the conforming oneself to this world— the attempting an impossible adaptation of the Gospel to a world that is un-christianized is not the means for proving what is the good, and acceptable, and the perfect will of God. So that it will be a thing of great and rare merit, in many an occurrence of those unhappy times, to merely understand what is the will of God, as our Epistle expresses it.
Look to yourselves, would St. John say to those men, that ye lose not the things which ye have wrought; make yourselves sure of the full reward, which is only given to the persevering thoroughness of doctrine and faith! Besides, it will be then, as in all other times, that, according to the saying of the Holy Ghost, the simplicity of the just shall guide them, and far more safely, than any human ingenuity could do; humility will give them Wisdom; and, keeping themselves closely united to this noble companion, they will be made truly wise by her, and will know what is acceptable to God. They will understand that aspiring, like the Church herself, to union with the eternal Word—fidelity to the Spouse, for them, as it is for the Church, is nothing else than fidelity to the truth; for the Word, who is the one same object of love to both of them, is, in God, no other than the splendor of infinite truth. Their one care, therefore, will ever be to approach nearer and nearer to their Beloved by a continually increasing resemblance to him; that is to say, by the completest reproduction, both in their words and works, of the beautiful Truth. By so doing, they will be serving their fellow creatures in the best possible way, for they will be putting in practice the counsel of Jesus, who bids them seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and confide in him for all the rest. Others may have recourse to human and accommodating combinations, fitted to please all parties; they may put forward dubious compromises which (so their suggestors think), will keep back, for some weeks, or some months perhaps, the fierce tide of revolution—but those who have God’s spirit in them will put a very different construction on the admonition given us, by the Apostle, in today’s Epistle, where he tells us to redeem the time.
It was our Lord who bought time, and at a great price; and he bought it for us, that it might be employed, by his faithful servants, in procuring glory for God. By most men, it is squandered away in sin or folly; but those who are united to Christ, as living members to the Spouse of their souls, will redeem it; that is, they will put such an intensity into their faith and their love, that as far as it is possible for human nature, not a moment of their time shall be anything but an earnest undiminished tribute of their service of their Lord. To the insolent and blasphemous things, which are then to be spoken by the Beast, these determined servants of God will give, for their brave answer, the cry of St. Michael, which he uttered against Satan, who was the helper of the Beast: Who is like unto God!
These closing weeks of the year used, in olden times, to be called: Weeks of the holy Angel. We have seen, in one of these Sundays, how there was announced the great Archangel’s coming to the aid of God’s people, as Daniel, the Prophet, had foretold would be at the end of the world. When, therefore, the final tribulations shall commence; when exile shall scatter the Faithful and the sword shall slay them, and the world shall approve all that, prostrate, as it then will be, before the Beast and his image—let us not forget that we have a leader chosen by God, and proclaimed by the Church; a leader who will marshal us during those final combats in which the defeat of the Saints will be more glorious than were the triumphs of the Church, in the days when she ruled the world. For what God will then ask of his servants will not be success of diplomatical arrangements, nor a victory won by arms, but fidelity to his truth, that is, to his Word; a fidelity all the more generous and perfect, as there will be an almost universal falling off around the little army fighting under the Archangel’s banner. Uttered by a single faithful heart, and under such circumstances, and uttered with the bravery of faith and the ardor of love—the cry of St. Michael, which heretofore routed the infernal legions will be a greater honor to God than will be the insult offered to him by the millions of the degraded followers of the Beast.
Let us get thoroughly imbued with these thoughts, which are suggested by the opening lines of our Epistle. Let us also master the other instructions it contains, and which after all, differ but little from the ones we have been developing. On this Sunday, when formerly was read the Gospel of the nuptials of the Son of God, and the invitation to his divine banquet—our holy Mother, the Church, appropriately in the Epistle, bids us observe the immense difference there is between these sacred delights and the joys of the world’s marriage feasts. The calm, the purity, the peace of the just man, who is admitted into intimacy with God, are a continual feast to his soul; the food served up at that feast is Wisdom; Wisdom too is the beloved Guest, who is unfailingly there. The world is quite welcome to its silly and often shameful pleasures; the World and the soul, which, in a mysterious way, he has filled with the Holy Spirit, join together to sing to the eternal Father in admirable unison; they will go on, forever, with their hymns of thanksgiving and praise, for the materials of both are infinite. The hideous sight of the earth’s inhabitants, who will then, by thousands, be paying homage to the harlot who sits on the Beast and offers them the golden cup of her abominaions—no, not even that will interfere in the least with the bliss caused in heaven by the sight of those happy souls on earth. The convulsions of a world in its last agony, the triumphs of the woman drunk with the blood of the martyrs—far from breaking in on the harmony which comes from a soul which is united with the Word, they will but give greater fullness to her notes which sound forth the divine, and greater sweetness to the human music of the human song. The Apostle tells all this in his own magnificent way, where he says: Who, then, shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation? or distress? or famine? or nakedness? or danger? or persecution? or the sword? True, it is written: For thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter;—but in all these things, we overcome, because of Him that hath loved us. For I am sure, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
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| Archbishop Lefebvre: New Rite of Mass Condemned by the Tradition of the Church |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-23-2022, 10:24 AM - Forum: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
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New Rite Condemned by the Tradition of the Church
![[Image: marcel_lefevre.jpg?itok=7YE9dpn3]](https://fsspx.news/sites/sspx/files/styles/dici_image_full_width/public/news/marcel_lefevre.jpg?itok=7YE9dpn3)
FSSPX.NEWS [Adapted]
Archbishop Lefebvre gives here the theological reasons for which the SSPX has constantly opposed the Novus Ordo Missæ which came out of the Second Vatican Council.
We find a very enlightening synthesis in the collection of declarations by its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, The Mass of All Time. Likewise, in his Open Letter to Confused Catholics, published in 1985, the comparison between the old and the new Mass has lost nothing of its relevance, in spite of the desire of the Holy See to correct some abuses in the conciliar liturgy during the past few years.
The New Rite Already Judged
Extracts from The Mass of All Time
1. The judgement of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci
We are not judging the intention but the facts (and the consequences of these facts, similar incidentally, to those of past centuries where these reforms had been introduced) oblige us to acknowledge, along with Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci1 (Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, sent to the Holy Father on September 3, 1969) that the “Novus Ordo Missae […] represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated [at] the Council of Trent”
2. A new rite already condemned by several Popes and Councils
It is a conception more Protestant than Catholic which expresses everything which has been unduly exalted and everything which has been diminished.
Contrary to the teachings of the 22nd session of the Council of Trent, contrary to the encyclical Mediator Dei of Pius XII, the role of the faithful in the participation of the Mass has been exaggerated, and the role of the priest has been belittled to that of a mere president.
It has exaggerated the place given to the liturgy of the Word and lessened the place given to the propitiatory Sacrifice. It has exalted the communal meal and secularized it, at the expense of respect for and faith in the Real Presence effected by transubstantiation.
In suppressing the sacred language, it has pluralized the rites ad infinitum, profaning them by incorporating worldly or pagan elements, and it has spread false translations at the expense of the true faith and genuine piety of the faithful.
And yet the Councils of Florence3 and Trent4 had both declared anathemas against all of these changes, while affirming that our Mass in its Canon dated back to Apostolic times.
The popes St. Pius V and Clement VIII insisted on the necessity of avoiding changes and transformation and of preserving perpetually this Roman Rite hallowed by Tradition.
The desacralization of the Mass and its secularization lead to the laicization of the priesthood, in the Protestant manner5.
How can this reform of the Mass be reconciled with the canons of the Council of Trent and the condemnations in the Bull Auctorem Fidei of Pius VI?
3. “It is Tradition which condemns them, not me”
I do not set myself up as a judge; I am nothing, I am merely an echo of a Magisterium which is clear, which is evident, which is in all of the books, the papal encyclicals, council documents, basically in all of the theological books prior to the Council. What is being said now does not at all conform with the Magisterium which has been professed for two thousand years. Therefore it is the Tradition of the Church, her Magisterium which condemns them. Not me!
4. The traditional judgments of the Church on the Eucharist are definitive
As for our attitude vis-à-vis the liturgical reform and the breviary, we must hold fast to the affirmations of the Council of Trent. It is hard to see how to reconcile it with the liturgical reform. Yet the Council of Trent is a dogmatic, definitive Council and once the Church has made a definitive pronouncement on certain matters, another council may not change these definitions. Without this no more truth is possible!
Faith is something which is unchangeable. When the Church has presented it with all of her authority, there is an obligation to believe it to be immutable. Now, if the Council of Trent went to the trouble of adding anathemas to all of the verities concerning the sacraments and the liturgy, it was not for nothing. How can they behave so casually, as if the Council of Trent no longer exists and say that Vatican II has the same authority and consequently can change everything? We might just as well change our Credo which dates from the Council of Nicea, which is much more ancient, because Vatican II has the same authority and is more important than the Council of Nicea…
It is our duty to be firm about these things, and this is the strongest response we can make to the liturgical reform: it goes against the absolutely definitive and dogmatic definitions of the Council of Trent.
5. An avowal by Paul VI
Here is an interesting little fact which illustrates what Paul VI thought of the changes in the Mass. (…) Jean Guitton asked him: “Why would you not accept that the priests at Ecône continue to celebrate the Mass of St. Pius V? It was what was said before. I do not see why the seminary is refused the ancient Mass. Why not allow them to celebrate it?” The response given by Paul VI is very significant. He replied: “No, if we grant the Mass of St. Pius V to the Society of St. Pius X, all that we have gained through Vatican II will be lost.” (…) It is extraordinary that the pope could see the ruin of Vatican II in the return of the ancient Mass. It was an incredible revelation! This is why the liberals wanted so much for us to say this Mass which represents for them a totally different concept of the Church. The Mass of St. Pius V is not liberal, it is anti-liberal and anti-ecumenical. Therefore it cannot conform to the spirit of Vatican II.
Holy Sacrifice or Eucharistic meal?
Extract from Open Letter to Confused Catholics.
In preparation for the 1981 Eucharistic Congress, a questionnaire was distributed, the first question of which was: “Of these two definitions: ‘The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass’ and ‘Eucharistic Meal’, which one do you adopt spontaneously?” There is a great deal that could be said about this way of questioning Catholics, giving them to some extent the choice and appealing to their private judgment on a subject where spontaneity has no place. The definition of the Mass is not chosen in the same way that one chooses a political party.
Alas! The insinuation does not result from a blunder on the part of the person who drew up the questionnaire. One has to accept that the liturgical reform tends to replace the idea and the reality of the Sacrifice by the reality of a meal. That is how one comes to speak of Eucharistic celebration, or of a “Supper”; but the expression “Sacrifice” is much less used. It has almost totally disappeared from catechism handbooks just as it has from sermons. It is absent from Canon II, attributed to St. Hippolytus.
This tendency is connected with what we have discovered concerning the Real Presence: if there is no longer a sacrifice, there is no longer any need for a victim. The victim is present in view of the sacrifice. To make of the Mass a memorial or fraternal meal is the Protestant error. What happened in the sixteenth century? Precisely what is taking place today. Right from the start they replaced the altar by a table, removed the crucifix from it, and made the “president of the assembly” turn around to face the congregation. The setting of the Protestant Lord’s Supper is found in Pierres Vivantes, the prayer book prepared by the bishops in France which all children attending catechism are obliged to use:
“Christians meet together to celebrate the Eucharist. It is the Mass... They proclaim the faith of the Church, they pray for the whole world, they offer the bread and the wine. The priest who presides at the assembly says the great prayer of thanksgiving.”
Now in the Catholic religion it is the priest who celebrates Mass; it is he who offers the bread and wine. The notion of president has been borrowed directly from Protestantism. The vocabulary follows the change of ideas. Formerly, we would say, “Cardinal Lustiger will celebrate a Pontifical Mass.” I am told that at Radio Notre Dame, the phrase used at present is, “Jean-Marie Lustiger will preside at a concelebration.” Here is how they speak about Mass in a brochure issued by the Conference of Swiss Bishops: “The Lord’s Supper achieves firstly communion with Christ. It is the same communion that Jesus brought about during His life on earth when He sat at table with sinners, and has been continued in the Eucharistic meal since the day of the Resurrection. The Lord invites His friends to come together and He will be present among them.”
To that every Catholic is obliged to reply in a categorical manner, “NO! the Mass is not that!” It is not the continuation of a meal similar to that which Our Lord invited Saint Peter and a few of his disciples one morning on the lakeside, after His Resurrection. “When they came to land they saw a charcoal fire there and a fish laid thereon and bread. Jesus said to them, come and dine. And none of them durst ask Him, ‘Who art thou?,’ knowing that it was the Lord. And Jesus cometh and taketh the bread and giveth them, and fish in like manner” (John 21: 9-13).
The communion of the priest and the faithful is a communion to the Victim Who has offered Himself up on the altar of sacrifice. This is of solid stone; if not it contains at least the altar stone which is a stone of sacrifice. Within are laid relics of the martyrs because they have offered their blood for their Master. This communion of the Blood of Our Lord with the blood of the martyrs encourages us also to offer up our lives.
If the Mass is a meal, I understand the priest turning towards the congregation. One does not preside at a meal with one’s back to the guests. But a sacrifice is offered to God, not to the congregation. This is the reason why the priest as the head of the faithful turns toward God and the crucifix over the altar.
At every opportunity emphasis is laid on what the New Sunday Missal calls the “Narrative of the Institution.” The Jean-Bart Centre, the official centre for the Archdiocese of Paris, states, “At the center of the Mass, there is a narrative.” Again, no! The Mass is not a narrative; it is an action.
Three indispensable conditions are needed for it to be the continuation of the Sacrifice of the Cross: the oblation of the victim, the transubstantiation which renders the victim present effectively and not symbolically, and the celebration by a priest, consecrated by his priesthood, in place of the High Priest Who is Our Lord.
Likewise the Mass can obtain the remission of sins. A simple memorial, a narrative of the institution accompanied by a meal, would be far from sufficient for this. All the supernatural virtue of the Mass comes from its relationship to the Sacrifice of the Cross. If we no longer believe that, then we no longer believe anything about Holy Church, the Church would no longer have any reason for existing, we would no longer claim to be Catholics. Luther understood very clearly that the Mass is the heart and soul of the Church. He said: “Let us destroy the Mass and we shall destroy the Church.”
Now we can see that the Novus Ordo Missae, that is to say, the New Order adopted after the Council, has been drawn up on Protestant lines, or at any rate dangerously close to them. For Luther, the Mass was a sacrifice of praise, that is to say, an act of praise, an act of thanksgiving, but certainly not an expiatory sacrifice which renews and applies the Sacrifice of the Cross. For him, the Sacrifice of the Cross took place at a given moment of history, it is the prisoner of that history; we can only apply to ourselves Christ’s merits by our faith in His death and resurrection. Contrarily, the Church maintains that this Sacrifice is realized mystically upon our altars at each Mass, in an unbloody manner by the separation of the Body and the Blood under the species of bread and wine. This renewal allows the merits of the Cross to be applied to the faithful there present, perpetuating this source of grace in time and in space. The Gospel of St. Matthew ends with these words: “And behold, I am with you all days, even until the end of the world.”
The difference in conception is not slender. Efforts are being made to reduce it, however, by the alteration of Catholic doctrine of which we can see numerous signs in the liturgy.
Luther said, “Worship used to be addressed to God as a homage. Henceforth it will be addressed to man to console and enlighten him. The sacrifice used to have pride of place but the sermon will supplant it.” That signified the introduction of the Cult of Man, and, in the Church, the importance accorded to the “Liturgy of the Word.” If we open the new missals, this revolution has been accomplished in them too. A reading has been added to the two which existed, together with a “universal prayer” often utilized for propagating political or social ideas; taking the homily into account, we often end up with a shift of balance towards the “word.” Once the sermon is ended, the Mass is very close to its end.
Within the Church, the priest is marked with an indelible character which makes of him an alter Christus: he alone can offer the Holy Sacrifice. Luther considered the distinction between clergy and laity as the “first wall raised up by the Romanists”; all Christians are priests, the pastor is only exercising a function in presiding at the Evangelical Mass. In the Novus Ordo, the “I” of the celebrant has been replaced by “we”; it is written everywhere that the faithful “celebrate,” they are associated with the acts of worship, they read the epistle and occasionally the Gospel, give out Communion, sometimes preach the homily, which may be replaced by “a dialogue by small groups upon the Word of God,” meeting together beforehand to “construct” the Sunday celebration. But this is only a first step; for several years we have heard of those responsible for diocesan organizations who have been putting forward propositions of this nature: “It is not the ministers but the assembly who celebrate” (handouts by the National Center for Pastoral Liturgy), or “The assembly is the prime subject of the liturgy”; what matters is not the “functioning of the rites but the image the assembly gives to itself and the relationship the co-celebrants create between themselves” (Fr. Gelineau, architect of the liturgical reform and professor at the Paris Catholic Institute). If it is the assembly which matters then it is understandable that private Masses should be discredited, which means that priests no longer say them because it is less and less easy to find an assembly, above all during the week. It is a breach with the unchanging doctrine: the Church needs a multiplicity of Sacrifices of the Mass, both for the application of the Sacrifice of the Cross and for all the objects assigned to it, adoration, thanksgiving, propitiation, and impetration.
As if that were not enough, the objective of some is to eliminate the priest entirely, which has given rise to the notorious SAAP (Sunday Assemblies in the Absence of the Priest). We can imagine the faithful gathering to pray together in order to honor the Lord’s Day; but these SAAP are in reality a sort of “dry Mass,” lacking only the consecration; and the lack, as one can read in a document of the Regional Center for Social and Religious Studies at Lille, is only because “until further instructions lay people do not have the power to carry out this act.” The absence of the priest may even be intentional “so that the faithful can learn to manage for themselves.” Fr. Gelineau in Demain la Liturgie writes that the SAAP are only an “educational transition until such time as mentalities have changed,” and he concludes with disconcerting logic that there are still too many priests in the Church, “too many doubtless for things to evolve quickly.”
Luther suppressed the Offertory; Why offer the pure and Immaculate Host if there is no more sacrifice? In the French Novus Ordo the Offertory is practically non-existent; besides which it no longer has this name. The New Sunday Missal speaks of the “prayers of presentation.” The formula used reminds one more of a thanksgiving, a thank-you, for the fruits of the earth. To realize this fully, it is sufficient to compare it with the formulas traditionally used by the Church in which clearly appears the propitiatory and expiatory nature of the Sacrifice “which I offer Thee for my innumerable sins, offenses and negligence, for all those here present and for all Christians living and dead, that it may avail for my salvation and theirs for eternal life.” Raising the chalice, the priest then says, “We offer Thee, Lord, the chalice of Thy redemption, imploring Thy goodness to accept it like a sweet perfume into the presence of Thy divine Majesty for our salvation and that of the whole world.”
What remains of that in the New Mass? This: “Blessed are You, Lord, God of the universe, You who give us this bread, fruit of the earth and work of human hands. We offer it to You; it will become the bread of life,” and the same for the wine which will become “our spiritual drink.” What purpose is served by adding, a little further on: “Wash me of my faults, Lord. Purify me of my sin,” and “may our sacrifice today find grace before You”? Which sin? Which sacrifice? What connection can the faithful make between this vague presentation of the offerings and the redemption that he is looking forward to? I will ask another question: Why substitute for a text that is clear and whose meaning is complete, a series of enigmatic and loosely bound phrases? If a need is found for change, it should be for something better. These incidental phrases which seem to make up for the insufficiency of the “prayers of presentation” remind us of Luther, who was at pains to arrange the changes with caution. He retained as much as possible of the old ceremonies, limiting himself to changing their meaning. The Mass, to a great extent, kept its external appearance, the people found in the churches nearly the same setting, nearly the same rites, with slight changes made to please them, because from then on people were consulted much more than before; they were much more aware of their importance in matters of worship, taking a more active part by means of chant and praying aloud. Little by little Latin gave way to German.
Doesn’t all this remind you of something? Luther was also anxious to create new hymns to replace “all the mumblings of popery”. Reforms always adopt the appearance of a cultural revolution.
In the Novus Ordo the most ancient parts of the Roman Canon which goes back to apostolic times has been reshaped to bring it closer to the Lutheran formula of consecration, with both an addition and a suppression. The translation in French has gone even further by altering the meaning of the words pro multis. Instead of “My blood which shall be shed for you and for many,” we read “which shall be shed for you and for the multitude.” This does not mean the same thing and theologically is not without significance.
You may have noticed that most priests nowadays recite as one continuous passage the principal part of the Canon which begins, “the night before the Passion He took bread in His holy hands,” without observing the pause implied by the rubric of the Roman Missal: “Holding with both hands the host between the index finger and the thumb, he pronounces the words of the Consecration in a low but distinct voice and attentively over the host.” The tone changes, becomes intimatory, the five words “Hoc est enim Corpus Meum,” operate the miracle of transubstantiation, as do those that are said for the consecration of the wine. The new Missal asks the celebrant to keep to the narrative tone of voice as if he were indeed proceeding with a memorial. Creativity being now the rule, we see some celebrants who recite the text while showing the Host all around or even breaking it in an ostentatious manner so as to add the gesture to their words and better illustrate their text. The two genuflections out of the four having been suppressed, those which remain being sometimes omitted, we have to ask ourselves if the priest in fact has the feeling of consecrating, even supposing that he really does have the intention to do so.
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| Archbishop Lefebvre: New Rite of Mass Condemned by the Tradition of the Church |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-23-2022, 10:24 AM - Forum: New Rite Sacraments
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New Rite Condemned by the Tradition of the Church
FSSPX.NEWS [Adapted]
Archbishop Lefebvre gives here the theological reasons for which the SSPX has constantly opposed the Novus Ordo Missæ which came out of the Second Vatican Council.
We find a very enlightening synthesis in the collection of declarations by its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, The Mass of All Time. Likewise, in his Open Letter to Confused Catholics, published in 1985, the comparison between the old and the new Mass has lost nothing of its relevance, in spite of the desire of the Holy See to correct some abuses in the conciliar liturgy during the past few years.
The New Rite Already Judged
Extracts from The Mass of All Time
1. The judgement of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci
We are not judging the intention but the facts (and the consequences of these facts, similar incidentally, to those of past centuries where these reforms had been introduced) oblige us to acknowledge, along with Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci1 (Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, sent to the Holy Father on September 3, 1969) that the “Novus Ordo Missae […] represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated [at] the Council of Trent”
2. A new rite already condemned by several Popes and Councils
It is a conception more Protestant than Catholic which expresses everything which has been unduly exalted and everything which has been diminished.
Contrary to the teachings of the 22nd session of the Council of Trent, contrary to the encyclical Mediator Dei of Pius XII, the role of the faithful in the participation of the Mass has been exaggerated, and the role of the priest has been belittled to that of a mere president.
It has exaggerated the place given to the liturgy of the Word and lessened the place given to the propitiatory Sacrifice. It has exalted the communal meal and secularized it, at the expense of respect for and faith in the Real Presence effected by transubstantiation.
In suppressing the sacred language, it has pluralized the rites ad infinitum, profaning them by incorporating worldly or pagan elements, and it has spread false translations at the expense of the true faith and genuine piety of the faithful.
And yet the Councils of Florence3 and Trent4 had both declared anathemas against all of these changes, while affirming that our Mass in its Canon dated back to Apostolic times.
The popes St. Pius V and Clement VIII insisted on the necessity of avoiding changes and transformation and of preserving perpetually this Roman Rite hallowed by Tradition.
The desacralization of the Mass and its secularization lead to the laicization of the priesthood, in the Protestant manner5.
How can this reform of the Mass be reconciled with the canons of the Council of Trent and the condemnations in the Bull Auctorem Fidei of Pius VI?
3. “It is Tradition which condemns them, not me”
I do not set myself up as a judge; I am nothing, I am merely an echo of a Magisterium which is clear, which is evident, which is in all of the books, the papal encyclicals, council documents, basically in all of the theological books prior to the Council. What is being said now does not at all conform with the Magisterium which has been professed for two thousand years. Therefore it is the Tradition of the Church, her Magisterium which condemns them. Not me!
4. The traditional judgments of the Church on the Eucharist are definitive
As for our attitude vis-à-vis the liturgical reform and the breviary, we must hold fast to the affirmations of the Council of Trent. It is hard to see how to reconcile it with the liturgical reform. Yet the Council of Trent is a dogmatic, definitive Council and once the Church has made a definitive pronouncement on certain matters, another council may not change these definitions. Without this no more truth is possible!
Faith is something which is unchangeable. When the Church has presented it with all of her authority, there is an obligation to believe it to be immutable. Now, if the Council of Trent went to the trouble of adding anathemas to all of the verities concerning the sacraments and the liturgy, it was not for nothing. How can they behave so casually, as if the Council of Trent no longer exists and say that Vatican II has the same authority and consequently can change everything? We might just as well change our Credo which dates from the Council of Nicea, which is much more ancient, because Vatican II has the same authority and is more important than the Council of Nicea…
It is our duty to be firm about these things, and this is the strongest response we can make to the liturgical reform: it goes against the absolutely definitive and dogmatic definitions of the Council of Trent.
5. An avowal by Paul VI
Here is an interesting little fact which illustrates what Paul VI thought of the changes in the Mass. (…) Jean Guitton asked him: “Why would you not accept that the priests at Ecône continue to celebrate the Mass of St. Pius V? It was what was said before. I do not see why the seminary is refused the ancient Mass. Why not allow them to celebrate it?” The response given by Paul VI is very significant. He replied: “No, if we grant the Mass of St. Pius V to the Society of St. Pius X, all that we have gained through Vatican II will be lost.” (…) It is extraordinary that the pope could see the ruin of Vatican II in the return of the ancient Mass. It was an incredible revelation! This is why the liberals wanted so much for us to say this Mass which represents for them a totally different concept of the Church. The Mass of St. Pius V is not liberal, it is anti-liberal and anti-ecumenical. Therefore it cannot conform to the spirit of Vatican II.
Holy Sacrifice or Eucharistic meal?
Extract from Open Letter to Confused Catholics.
In preparation for the 1981 Eucharistic Congress, a questionnaire was distributed, the first question of which was: “Of these two definitions: ‘The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass’ and ‘Eucharistic Meal’, which one do you adopt spontaneously?” There is a great deal that could be said about this way of questioning Catholics, giving them to some extent the choice and appealing to their private judgment on a subject where spontaneity has no place. The definition of the Mass is not chosen in the same way that one chooses a political party.
Alas! The insinuation does not result from a blunder on the part of the person who drew up the questionnaire. One has to accept that the liturgical reform tends to replace the idea and the reality of the Sacrifice by the reality of a meal. That is how one comes to speak of Eucharistic celebration, or of a “Supper”; but the expression “Sacrifice” is much less used. It has almost totally disappeared from catechism handbooks just as it has from sermons. It is absent from Canon II, attributed to St. Hippolytus.
This tendency is connected with what we have discovered concerning the Real Presence: if there is no longer a sacrifice, there is no longer any need for a victim. The victim is present in view of the sacrifice. To make of the Mass a memorial or fraternal meal is the Protestant error. What happened in the sixteenth century? Precisely what is taking place today. Right from the start they replaced the altar by a table, removed the crucifix from it, and made the “president of the assembly” turn around to face the congregation. The setting of the Protestant Lord’s Supper is found in Pierres Vivantes, the prayer book prepared by the bishops in France which all children attending catechism are obliged to use:
“Christians meet together to celebrate the Eucharist. It is the Mass... They proclaim the faith of the Church, they pray for the whole world, they offer the bread and the wine. The priest who presides at the assembly says the great prayer of thanksgiving.”
Now in the Catholic religion it is the priest who celebrates Mass; it is he who offers the bread and wine. The notion of president has been borrowed directly from Protestantism. The vocabulary follows the change of ideas. Formerly, we would say, “Cardinal Lustiger will celebrate a Pontifical Mass.” I am told that at Radio Notre Dame, the phrase used at present is, “Jean-Marie Lustiger will preside at a concelebration.” Here is how they speak about Mass in a brochure issued by the Conference of Swiss Bishops: “The Lord’s Supper achieves firstly communion with Christ. It is the same communion that Jesus brought about during His life on earth when He sat at table with sinners, and has been continued in the Eucharistic meal since the day of the Resurrection. The Lord invites His friends to come together and He will be present among them.”
To that every Catholic is obliged to reply in a categorical manner, “NO! the Mass is not that!” It is not the continuation of a meal similar to that which Our Lord invited Saint Peter and a few of his disciples one morning on the lakeside, after His Resurrection. “When they came to land they saw a charcoal fire there and a fish laid thereon and bread. Jesus said to them, come and dine. And none of them durst ask Him, ‘Who art thou?,’ knowing that it was the Lord. And Jesus cometh and taketh the bread and giveth them, and fish in like manner” (John 21: 9-13).
The communion of the priest and the faithful is a communion to the Victim Who has offered Himself up on the altar of sacrifice. This is of solid stone; if not it contains at least the altar stone which is a stone of sacrifice. Within are laid relics of the martyrs because they have offered their blood for their Master. This communion of the Blood of Our Lord with the blood of the martyrs encourages us also to offer up our lives.
If the Mass is a meal, I understand the priest turning towards the congregation. One does not preside at a meal with one’s back to the guests. But a sacrifice is offered to God, not to the congregation. This is the reason why the priest as the head of the faithful turns toward God and the crucifix over the altar.
At every opportunity emphasis is laid on what the New Sunday Missal calls the “Narrative of the Institution.” The Jean-Bart Centre, the official centre for the Archdiocese of Paris, states, “At the center of the Mass, there is a narrative.” Again, no! The Mass is not a narrative; it is an action.
Three indispensable conditions are needed for it to be the continuation of the Sacrifice of the Cross: the oblation of the victim, the transubstantiation which renders the victim present effectively and not symbolically, and the celebration by a priest, consecrated by his priesthood, in place of the High Priest Who is Our Lord.
Likewise the Mass can obtain the remission of sins. A simple memorial, a narrative of the institution accompanied by a meal, would be far from sufficient for this. All the supernatural virtue of the Mass comes from its relationship to the Sacrifice of the Cross. If we no longer believe that, then we no longer believe anything about Holy Church, the Church would no longer have any reason for existing, we would no longer claim to be Catholics. Luther understood very clearly that the Mass is the heart and soul of the Church. He said: “Let us destroy the Mass and we shall destroy the Church.”
Now we can see that the Novus Ordo Missae, that is to say, the New Order adopted after the Council, has been drawn up on Protestant lines, or at any rate dangerously close to them. For Luther, the Mass was a sacrifice of praise, that is to say, an act of praise, an act of thanksgiving, but certainly not an expiatory sacrifice which renews and applies the Sacrifice of the Cross. For him, the Sacrifice of the Cross took place at a given moment of history, it is the prisoner of that history; we can only apply to ourselves Christ’s merits by our faith in His death and resurrection. Contrarily, the Church maintains that this Sacrifice is realized mystically upon our altars at each Mass, in an unbloody manner by the separation of the Body and the Blood under the species of bread and wine. This renewal allows the merits of the Cross to be applied to the faithful there present, perpetuating this source of grace in time and in space. The Gospel of St. Matthew ends with these words: “And behold, I am with you all days, even until the end of the world.”
The difference in conception is not slender. Efforts are being made to reduce it, however, by the alteration of Catholic doctrine of which we can see numerous signs in the liturgy.
Luther said, “Worship used to be addressed to God as a homage. Henceforth it will be addressed to man to console and enlighten him. The sacrifice used to have pride of place but the sermon will supplant it.” That signified the introduction of the Cult of Man, and, in the Church, the importance accorded to the “Liturgy of the Word.” If we open the new missals, this revolution has been accomplished in them too. A reading has been added to the two which existed, together with a “universal prayer” often utilized for propagating political or social ideas; taking the homily into account, we often end up with a shift of balance towards the “word.” Once the sermon is ended, the Mass is very close to its end.
Within the Church, the priest is marked with an indelible character which makes of him an alter Christus: he alone can offer the Holy Sacrifice. Luther considered the distinction between clergy and laity as the “first wall raised up by the Romanists”; all Christians are priests, the pastor is only exercising a function in presiding at the Evangelical Mass. In the Novus Ordo, the “I” of the celebrant has been replaced by “we”; it is written everywhere that the faithful “celebrate,” they are associated with the acts of worship, they read the epistle and occasionally the Gospel, give out Communion, sometimes preach the homily, which may be replaced by “a dialogue by small groups upon the Word of God,” meeting together beforehand to “construct” the Sunday celebration. But this is only a first step; for several years we have heard of those responsible for diocesan organizations who have been putting forward propositions of this nature: “It is not the ministers but the assembly who celebrate” (handouts by the National Center for Pastoral Liturgy), or “The assembly is the prime subject of the liturgy”; what matters is not the “functioning of the rites but the image the assembly gives to itself and the relationship the co-celebrants create between themselves” (Fr. Gelineau, architect of the liturgical reform and professor at the Paris Catholic Institute). If it is the assembly which matters then it is understandable that private Masses should be discredited, which means that priests no longer say them because it is less and less easy to find an assembly, above all during the week. It is a breach with the unchanging doctrine: the Church needs a multiplicity of Sacrifices of the Mass, both for the application of the Sacrifice of the Cross and for all the objects assigned to it, adoration, thanksgiving, propitiation, and impetration.
As if that were not enough, the objective of some is to eliminate the priest entirely, which has given rise to the notorious SAAP (Sunday Assemblies in the Absence of the Priest). We can imagine the faithful gathering to pray together in order to honor the Lord’s Day; but these SAAP are in reality a sort of “dry Mass,” lacking only the consecration; and the lack, as one can read in a document of the Regional Center for Social and Religious Studies at Lille, is only because “until further instructions lay people do not have the power to carry out this act.” The absence of the priest may even be intentional “so that the faithful can learn to manage for themselves.” Fr. Gelineau in Demain la Liturgie writes that the SAAP are only an “educational transition until such time as mentalities have changed,” and he concludes with disconcerting logic that there are still too many priests in the Church, “too many doubtless for things to evolve quickly.”
Luther suppressed the Offertory; Why offer the pure and Immaculate Host if there is no more sacrifice? In the French Novus Ordo the Offertory is practically non-existent; besides which it no longer has this name. The New Sunday Missal speaks of the “prayers of presentation.” The formula used reminds one more of a thanksgiving, a thank-you, for the fruits of the earth. To realize this fully, it is sufficient to compare it with the formulas traditionally used by the Church in which clearly appears the propitiatory and expiatory nature of the Sacrifice “which I offer Thee for my innumerable sins, offenses and negligence, for all those here present and for all Christians living and dead, that it may avail for my salvation and theirs for eternal life.” Raising the chalice, the priest then says, “We offer Thee, Lord, the chalice of Thy redemption, imploring Thy goodness to accept it like a sweet perfume into the presence of Thy divine Majesty for our salvation and that of the whole world.”
What remains of that in the New Mass? This: “Blessed are You, Lord, God of the universe, You who give us this bread, fruit of the earth and work of human hands. We offer it to You; it will become the bread of life,” and the same for the wine which will become “our spiritual drink.” What purpose is served by adding, a little further on: “Wash me of my faults, Lord. Purify me of my sin,” and “may our sacrifice today find grace before You”? Which sin? Which sacrifice? What connection can the faithful make between this vague presentation of the offerings and the redemption that he is looking forward to? I will ask another question: Why substitute for a text that is clear and whose meaning is complete, a series of enigmatic and loosely bound phrases? If a need is found for change, it should be for something better. These incidental phrases which seem to make up for the insufficiency of the “prayers of presentation” remind us of Luther, who was at pains to arrange the changes with caution. He retained as much as possible of the old ceremonies, limiting himself to changing their meaning. The Mass, to a great extent, kept its external appearance, the people found in the churches nearly the same setting, nearly the same rites, with slight changes made to please them, because from then on people were consulted much more than before; they were much more aware of their importance in matters of worship, taking a more active part by means of chant and praying aloud. Little by little Latin gave way to German.
Doesn’t all this remind you of something? Luther was also anxious to create new hymns to replace “all the mumblings of popery”. Reforms always adopt the appearance of a cultural revolution.
In the Novus Ordo the most ancient parts of the Roman Canon which goes back to apostolic times has been reshaped to bring it closer to the Lutheran formula of consecration, with both an addition and a suppression. The translation in French has gone even further by altering the meaning of the words pro multis. Instead of “My blood which shall be shed for you and for many,” we read “which shall be shed for you and for the multitude.” This does not mean the same thing and theologically is not without significance.
You may have noticed that most priests nowadays recite as one continuous passage the principal part of the Canon which begins, “the night before the Passion He took bread in His holy hands,” without observing the pause implied by the rubric of the Roman Missal: “Holding with both hands the host between the index finger and the thumb, he pronounces the words of the Consecration in a low but distinct voice and attentively over the host.” The tone changes, becomes intimatory, the five words “Hoc est enim Corpus Meum,” operate the miracle of transubstantiation, as do those that are said for the consecration of the wine. The new Missal asks the celebrant to keep to the narrative tone of voice as if he were indeed proceeding with a memorial. Creativity being now the rule, we see some celebrants who recite the text while showing the Host all around or even breaking it in an ostentatious manner so as to add the gesture to their words and better illustrate their text. The two genuflections out of the four having been suppressed, those which remain being sometimes omitted, we have to ask ourselves if the priest in fact has the feeling of consecrating, even supposing that he really does have the intention to do so.
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| The Seven Stars of the Carthusians |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-23-2022, 07:13 AM - Forum: Articles by Catholic authors
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The Seven Stars of the Carthusians
TIA | October 22, 2022
St. Bruno is often pictured tonsured and in the habit of the Carthusian Order, which he founded in the 11th century. Some paintings identify him by a halo of golden stars, as at right. The stars relate to an episode in St. Bruno's Vita.
![[Image: H236_Bru.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/images_F-J/H236_Bru.jpg)
![[Image: H236_Fun.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/images_F-J/H236_Fun.jpg)
St. Bruno founder of the Carthusians; below, a corpse proclaims he is condemned by God's 'just judgment'
In the year 1084 a small group of men had gathered together, asking divine inspiration for living a more perfect life of prayer and contemplation. They included St. Bruno, the leader, and some of the most learned men of the time: Landuin, the two Stephens of Bourg and Die, canons of Sts. Rufus, Hugh the Chaplain, as well as two laymen, Andrew and Guérin.
These seven men had attended a funeral in Paris of a noted scholar famous for upright living. While the corpse was being carried to church on a stretcher, it lifted its head and said, "I am condemned by the just judgment of God."
Amazed and fearful, the priests decided to delay the funeral until the following day, but on the next day the same thing happened again.
And again on the third day the corpse proclaimed, "I am condemned by the just judgment of God."
Then St. Bruno said to his companions: "If a man of such dignity and erudition, and who was reputed so upright in his life is damned, what can become of us miserable men?"
Bruno proposed that the seven of them should seek salvation by imitating St. Paul the Hermit and withdrawing from this corrupt world. That is how they came to visit the Bishop of Grenoble, Hugh of Châteauneuf, who was known for his holiness.
On the night before the visit, the Bishop had a dream in which God made Himself a fitting habitation among the Chartreuse Mountains, a rugged area north of Grenoble. Above the habitation was a circle of seven golden stars.
The next morning, the seven men – led by St. Bruno – came to visit the Bishop to ask for his advice about their desire to withdraw from the world to a life of prayer in some wilderness. Remembering the dream, the Bishop conducted them to that very site he had seen in his dream amidst those precipitous rocks and mountains almost always covered with snow in Chartreuse. In 1084 they set up what became the motherhouse of the Carthusian Order.
As the fame of St. Bruno and the Chartreuse monks grew, he attracted more and more men to the life of prayer, penitence and labor. Pope Urban II, who had been Bruno's pupil when he taught in Reims, called him to Rome to help the Pope in his difficult Pontificate. The Pope asked St. Bruno to become the Archbishop of Reggio di Calabria.
But the Saint refused. He agreed with Bl. Urban II to return to his life of prayer. However, the Pope asked St. Bruno to not go too far away. So, he went to a mountain cave in a desert place near Squillace in Calabria to continue the solitary life. That is why St. Bruno is also depicted at times with a Bishop's miter at his feet.
The Friendship of Count Roger
One day in 1091 Count Roger of Calabria was hunting in those lands when his dogs began to bark around the Saint’s cave. The Count entered and found St. Bruno at his prayers. He was so struck by the Saint's holiness, that thenceforward he greatly honored him and his companions and supplied their wants.
![[Image: H236_Cou.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/images_F-J/H236_Cou.jpg)
Count Roger of Calabria discovers St. Bruno in a cave on his property
That same year the Count granted St. Bruno and his companions the lands around the caves they occupied.
St. Bruno went also to visit Count Roger's brother, Count Robert Guiscard, in Mileto to help Guiscard when sick (1098 and 1101), and to baptize his son Roger (1097), the future King of Sicily.
But more often it was the Count Roger who went into the desert to visit his solitary friends, and when, through his generosity, the Monastery of St. Stephen was built in 1095 near the hermitage of St. Mary, there was erected adjoining it a small country house where he would retire whenever he could escape his pressing affairs.
In the year 1098, this same Count Roger was besieging the town of Capua. One of his men named Sergius, a Greek by birth to whom he had given the command of 200 men, succumbed to a bribe and determined to betray him by delivering the Count's army to the Prince of Capua during the night.
It was on the 1st of March that he was to execute his intention. On that very night, St. Bruno, who was in the desert of Squilantia in Calabria, appeared to Count Roger and told him to fly to arms promptly if he did not want to be taken by his enemies unexpectedly.
The Count started from his sleep, and commanded his men to mount their horses to inspect the camp. They met Sergius and his men with the Prince of Capua, who, perceiving them, immediately fled out of the camp. However, Count Roger's men took 162 of the traitors, from whom they learned all the secret of the betrayal.
On the following 29th of July, Count Roger went to Squilantia and related to St. Bruno what had happened to him. The Saint said: "It was not I who warned you. It was the Angel of God, who is near Catholic Princes in time of war."
Thus does the Count Roger relate the affair himself, in a privilege granted to St. Bruno.
![[Image: H236_Cre.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/images_F-J/H236_Cre.jpg)
The Carthusian Crest with its 7 stars over a globe surmounted by a Cross:
Stat Crux dum Volvitur Orbis
(The Cross stands while the world turns) |
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| Marie-Julie Jahenny Prophecy Regarding the New Mass |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-23-2022, 06:40 AM - Forum: New Rite Sacraments
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Taken from here: http://www.catholictradition.org/Passion/jahenny.htm
THE CONSPIRACY TO INVENT THE "NEW MASS"
On November 27, 1902 and May 10, 1904, Our Lord and Our Lady announced the conspiracy to invent the "New Mass":
Quote:"I give you a WARNING. The disciples who are not of My Gospel are now working hard to remake according to their ideas and under the influence of the enemy of souls a MASS that contains words that are ODIOUS in My sight. When the fatal hour arrives when the faith of my priests is put to the test, it will be (these texts) that will be celebrated in this SECOND period ... The FIRST period is (the one) of my priesthood which exists since Me. The SECOND is (the one) of the persecution when the ENEMIES of the Faith and of Holy Religion (will impose their formulas) in the book of the second celebration ... These infamous spirits are those who crucified Me and are awaiting the kingdom of THE NEW MESSIAH."
(Therefore, it is the Jews who are responsible for the new Mass; and in fact the formula of the Offertory of the new Mass is inspired on the Jewish Kabbala. Jean Bustorf, in his Synagoga Judaica, the 1661 edition, page 242, gives the following words:
For the bread: "Benedictus Tu, Domine Deus noster, mundi domine qui panem nobis a terra produxisti."
For the wine: "Benedictus Tu, Domine Deus noster, mundi domine qui vineae fructum creaveris."
And Our Lord Adds:
Quote:"Many of My holy priests will refuse this book sealed with the words of the abyss."
Then sadly: "Unfortunately amongst them are those who will accept, it will be used."
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| Desacrificing the Mass - Parts I & II |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-22-2022, 07:18 AM - Forum: In Defense of Tradition
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Desacrificing the Mass - Part I
How Sacrifice Is Present in the Tridentine Mass
Fr. Stephen F. Somerville | March 26, 2007
In the Tridentine Mass, there is a particularly solemn invocation of the Holy Trinity. It comes at the end of the Canon of the Mass, just before the Our Father prayer. This invocation has five signs of the Cross, made by the priest with the consecrated Bread and Wine, that is, the true Body and Blood of Christ. These crosses are succeeded by a gesture of elevation or lifting up of the Victim toward Heaven.
The priest prays, meanwhile, that "all honor and glory" be given to God at this usually-called "minor elevation" of the Most Holy Victim in the Sacrifice which we call the Mass. Here are the words of the full prayer:
Through Christ, and with Him, and in Him, all honor and glory is given to Thee, O God the Father, in the unity of the of the Holy Ghost, until the end of world without end.
![[Image: A038_Mass.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_a/A038_Mass.jpg)
The element of sacrifice is clearly present in the pre-Vatican II Mass
These few lines remind us that the self-sacrifice of the Victim Jesus, offered in bloody manner on Good Friday at Mount Calvary, and now renewed by the priest on the Catholic Altar, this sacrifice, I repeat, is the supreme act of honor and glory to God. Nothing gives the Father more praise and pleasure than the oblation or offering of His Beloved Son's Body and Blood.
This offering is re-presented, made present and actual again, or made new, by the ordained priest every time he says Mass. It is not a fresh crucifixion of Jesus; it is not another killing or dying of Christ. It is the one and only sacrifice of the Eternal Son, now incarnate, and it is achieved on our altar by the separate consecrations of the bread and the wine. These become, by Divine Power, the true and real Body and Blood of the same Victim Christ as on Good Friday. The same Sacrifice is therefore present, is offered, and is pleasing to the Father.
Let us keep in mind that Jesus' whole life was an offering to God. He did not wait till Good Friday to please and glorify His Father. As soon as He came into the world, He uttered the words of the prophetic psalmist: "Here I am, Lord; I come to do Thy will." The Gospel records that He said: "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me." He said, "I do always the things that please Him." He said, "The Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing (Jn 5:19)." He said, "I honor my Father." (8:49) Twice in Jesus' earthly life, at His Baptism and His Transfiguration, God the Father testified aloud to the loving obedience of Jesus by saying "This is my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."
We began these reflections by declaring the sacrifice of Jesus' Body and Blood at the Minor Elevation of the Mass. It says, "Through Christ, all honor to Thee, Father, in the Unity of the Holy Ghost, forever."
But you might answer, these words do not say sacrifice very clearly. Can we be sure that the Mass really is a Sacrifice offered by Christ to the Father? The answer is, yes, we can be certain. Let us look at the Mass prayers, and see what they say.
At the very beginning, we hear three times, "I will go unto the altar of God" What is the altar? It is the sacred stone on which to offer sacrifice. When the priest climbs the altar steps, he prays "to be worthy to enter with pure mind into the Holy of holies, " which means the holy place in God's temple for offering sacrifice.
![[Image: A038_SacrificeofMelchizedech%20.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_a/A038_SacrificeofMelchizedech%20.jpg)
The sacrifices of the Old Covenant were prefigures of the Holy Mass
At the beginning of the Offertory, that is, the offering-time for the sacrifice, the priest prays, "Father, accept this stainless host (and host means Victim, the object of sacrifice), which I offer for my sins, for all present, for all faithful Christians, living and dead, so that it may lead to our salvation. " This sacrifice language comes from the Latin prayer Suscipe Sancte Pater.
Notice that sacrifice is being offered also for dead Christians, that is, for the faithful departed. We must remember that the Commander of the Maccabees army in the Old Testament sent money to the Jerusalem temple for sacrifices to be offered for his soldiers who had died in battle, "so that they might be loosed from their sins." So today, we Catholics often have Masses said for the departed in order to atone for their sins, and help to release them from purgatory into heaven.
Moments later, at the Mass Offertory, the priest prays to God the Sanctifier to "bless this sacrifice" and while so saying, he makes the sign of the Cross over the bread and wine, that is, precisely the sacrifice.
Then, washing his hands, the priest prays Psalm 25, a hymn of praise for the old Jerusalem temple, that is, the sacred building made for sacrifices. He says "I will go about Thy altar, Lord...I have loved the beauty of Thy house, the place of Thy glory...I have avoided evil men, whose hands are grasping sin and blood and bribes, not holy sacrifices. Be merciful unto me, my foot hath stood in the way of right, not wrong." These two prayers – the Veni Sanctificator and the Lavabo are clearly the prayers of a true priest offering a real sacrifice.
Immediately after them, the priest prays Suscipe Sancta Trinitas, with its unmistakable language of true ritual sacrifice. He says, Receive, O Holy Trinity, this oblation which we offer thee as memorial of the passion, resurrection and ascension of Christ. The priest strikingly anticipates the consecration and change of the bread and wine gifts into the very Body and Blood of Good Friday and the Easter Christ. It will not be a mere psychological, subjective calling to mind, but a concrete memorial. The flesh and blood of the Victim will really lie before our eyes.
The priest prays on, (Receive, Lord, this offering, also) to honor Holy Mary, John the Baptist, the Apostles and All Saints, that it may honor them, and save us wayfarers. Notice the Catholic care to honor both God and the Saints, and to assist ourselves, with the kindly intercession of the Saints. These are points of doctrine rejected by the Protestants: Purgatory and Intercession and Veneration regarding the Saints. The Sacrifice of the Mass declares these truths by such prayers as these.
Is it now clearer that the Catholic Mass actually affirms itself a true sacrifice of worship? Yes, it is surely clearer. But the clearest is yet to come, in the Canon Prayer of the Roman Mass. The priest begins it, still in silence as he was for the offertory prayers, and he says, "Father... accept and bless these + gifts, these + presents, these holy and + unspotted Sacrifices," and he makes three emphatic signs of the Cross over the offerings of bread and wine, as if to drive home the connection between them and the One who expired in self-sacrifice on the very Cross.
![[Image: A038_duccioLastSupper.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_a/A038_duccioLastSupper.jpg)
The Last Supper by Duccio di Buoninsegna
More prayers follow, using plain sacrifice terminology. I will cite just one of these, which precedes the Consecration. It is Quam oblationem. The priest asks: 0 God, please bless, approve, and ratify this oblation that it may become the Body and Blood of thy beloved Son, Jesus. "
Now comes the climactic consecration of the Mass. People tend to think that this account of what Jesus did and said at the Last Supper is copied from the four Gospels. Not so! These Gospels were written down 25 or more years after the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. But Mass had been offered by the Apostles with the early Church right from Pentecost Day and perhaps even earlier. Before His Ascension, it is entirely likely that Jesus taught His disciples how to conduct the service and sacrifice of Holy Thursday. Our Roman Canon contains details not in any of the Four Gospels. For example, the expression Mystery of Faith at the wine consecration. It clearly helps to express wonder and awe at the moment of change to the Blood of Christ. Pope Innocent III in 1202 declared we believe that the form of words in the Canon came from the Apostles who received them from Christ, and their successors from them.
We call this change transubstantiation, that is, change of substance, not of appearance. What we must specially notice here is the format of the Latin Altar Missal. The words of consecration, that is, the essential form words of the Sacrament, are picked out in very large, indented type, often with colored illumination. The priest is instructed to bow down low when uttering the words, In a self-audible whisper, with great reverence, as if he were speaking in the very Person of Christ, and this is precisely the case. It is no mere narrative of the Last Supper of Christ.
Finally, the language is clearly that of sacrifice. It says "the chalice...of the new and eternal covenant," that is, the sacrifice ratifying said covenant. It says the Blood “will be shed,” as in sacrifice. It is shed "for you and for many, unto the remission of sins," as it is in a true sacrifice intended to propitiate the Deity.
After the consecration, in Unde et memores, the priest remembers the passion of Christ and offers to God - and I quote – “a pure + victim, a holy + victim, a spotless + victim, the holy bread of + eternal life and the chalice + of everlasting salvation.” Five hand-signs of the Cross over the offerings accompany these words. The next prayer expressly compares this offering with famous sacrifices of old, namely of Abel (son of Adam), of patriarch Abraham, and of High Priest Melchisedech. Then the priest asks the Angels to carry the offerings up to the very altar of God in Heaven, just as Jesus Himself ascended to Heaven six weeks after His sacrificial immolation on Calvary. This too is clear sacrifice-language.
The purpose of sacrifice is not only to honor God, but to propitiate Him, that is, appease Him, after the offences of men's sins. In other words, Sacrifice must be pleasing to God, and must re-establish good relations, or what we call "communion" with God. Accordingly, the Sacrifice of the Mass now enters into its communion phase, and this is specially expressed by reverently partaking of the flesh of the Victim, in what we call Holy Communion. As we all know instinctively, to share food together is a sign of brotherly love. The Mass is a Sacrament of our mystical unity with Christ and one another.
I now conclude all these remarks with reference to one final, brief, but magnificent declaration of sacrifice in the Roman Mass. It is the prayer Placeat tibi just before the priest's final blessing. In brief he says, "O Holy Trinity, may my service please thee, and may my sacrifice be acceptable to thee, and be a propitiation to win thy loving mercy." It is now abundantly clear. The Roman Rite Catholic Mass is indeed a Sacrifice, truly and really, offered for the honor of God and the salvation of men. The words of the Mass say this; the gestures of the Mass reinforce it.
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| Benedict XVI: Biased Interpretation of St. Robert Bellarmine |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-22-2022, 07:04 AM - Forum: The Architects of Vatican II
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Biased Interpretation of St. Robert Bellarmine
TIA | April 6, 2011
I have a fervent devotion to all of Holy Mother Church's Doctors and strive to revive their timeless teachings in modernist times.
Incredibly, in the last several weeks, Pope Benedict XVI has found public occasion to modernize, contemporize and conciliarize no fewer than five of the Bride of Christ's holiest and most traditional of Doctors: St. Robert Bellarmine; St. Francis de Sales, St. John of the Cross, St. Augustine, and St. Lawrence of Brindisi.
Benedict's penchant for engaging in historical revisionism seems boundless. Unfortunately, his efforts generally succeed owing to Conciliar Catholics' spiritual blindness and to their overwhelming ignorance of their Faith and the authentic and glorious history of our Holy Church. Here I chose to defend only one of these five Doctors, St. Robert Bellarmine, due to the number and weightiness of the papal inaccuracies spun around him.
![[Image: A085_Bellarmine.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/HTimages_a/A085_Bellarmine.jpg)
St. Robert Bellarmine, defender of the Faith against Protestantism
In a general audience February 23, 2011 in Paul VI Hall, Benedict XVI downplayed the polemical nature of St. Robert’s Bellarmine preaching. (Zenit, “On St. Robert Bellarmine," Feb. 23, 2011).
Trying to give a new look to the Saint’s famous work Controversiae, which firmly responded to Protestant errors, the Pope called its style “historical,” “an attempt to confirm the Church’s identity in face of the Protestant Reformation,” rather than a theological refutation of error. This work, he said, “attempts to synthesize the various theological controversies of the time, avoiding every controversial and aggressive style in confronting the ideas of the Reformation.”
Quite the contrary, St. Robert Bellarmine was a heroic and brilliant Defender of the Faith and enemy of all heresies and all those heretics responsible for spreading the dissent that swept through Europe in the wake of Protestantism's great revolt against God.
It was not only the “ideas” of the Reformation but its errors that he categorically refuted. In fact, he affirmed the opposite of what now Benedict XVI attributes to him. Indeed, judging the heretics St. Robert stated in his work on Christian Doctrine, "Amongst Catholics, there are good and bad, but among heretics not one can be good," the Saint affirmed in another (Cf. Doctrina Christiana, Paris: 1870).
A militant defender of the Faith
I labored to have St. Robert speak in his own defense and to indisputably prove that at no time in his long and illustrious ecclesiastical life was he ever a 'synthesizer of theological controversies,’ as presented by Pope Ratzinger. What follows are but a few texts of this Great Saint and Doctor of the Church in which he defends the Faith and attacks the heretics. They present a quite different picture of the Saint than the non-controversial and non-aggressive preacher described by the present Pontiff in his audience.
He is clear when he condemns heretics and schismatics and declares they should not be called Christian:
•"Heretics and schismatics place an obstacle to God's grace by their sins of infidelity and schism in which they actually persevere." (On the Sacrament of Baptism, Book I Chapter 6).
• "A manifest heretic is not a Christian, as is clearly taught by St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Jerome and others." (On the Church Militant)
• "For men are not bound, or able to read hearts; but when they see that someone is a heretic by his external works, they judge him to be a heretic pure and simple, and condemn him as a heretic." (De Romano Pontifice, II, 30)
In conflict with Benedict’s promotion of ecumenism and respect for the false religions, St. Robert Bellarmine boldly proclaims that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church:
• "The knowledge of the dogmas of the Faith of Christ is necessary for everyone who earnestly desires the salvation of his soul." (Christian Doctrine, Introduction)
• "Our [present day] heretics, more audacious than Pelagians, deny that Baptism is necessary, not only for the remission of sin, but also for the attainment of Heaven. However, those who imagine that there is another remedy besides Baptism openly contradict the Gospels, the Councils, the Fathers, and the consensus of the Universal Church." (On Baptism, Book I, Chapter 4)
Contradicting once again the teaching of Benedict XVI, St. Robert Bellarmine echoes the constant teaching of the Church, affirming that all those who do not accept Christ and His Gospel will be condemned to Hell for all eternity:
• "If the Son of God will have all men to be saved, how is it that so many suffer the torments of Hell? I answer in one word: they wish it. He sends preachers of His Gospel to all parts of the world to proclaim: "He who believes, and is baptized, shall be saved. "And if any are unwilling to enter on this way, they perish by their own fault and not by the lack of will on the part of the Redeemer. For an hour the perfidious Jews exulted over Christ in His sufferings; for an hour Judas enjoyed the price of his avarice; for an hour Pilate gloried that he had regained the friendship of Herod and not lost the friendship of Caesar. But for nearly two thousand years they have all been suffering the torments of Hell, and their cries of despair will be heard for ever and ever." (The Seven Words Spoken by Christ on the Cross, Westminster, MD: Carroll Press, Thomas Baker, 1933)
These are just some texts I can present of the Great Doctor of the Church to show that he can never be presented as an ecumenical saint, as Benedict XVI tried to do..
One could perhaps say that the papal “historical reinterpretation” of St. Robert Bellarmine is not so different from a falsification.
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| ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ movie is now available for free viewing [until October 28] |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-22-2022, 06:53 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ movie is now available for free viewing
'When people get fearful, their capacity for critical thinking gets disabled.'
![[Image: Fauci-810x500.png]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Fauci-810x500.png)
Dr. Anthony Fauci
YouTube
Oct 19, 2022
(LifeSiteNews) – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in collaboration with Jeff Hays Films has released a film version of Kennedy’s bestselling book “The Real Anthony Fauci” that details the extent of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s influence on global public health, especially during the time of the declared COVID pandemic.
Currently, the movie is available to view for free at the film’s website for a limited time.
The film is jam-packed with information about the life of Anthony Fauci and his role in the transformation of public health into a veritable pseudo-governmental infrastructure that has decided public policy for decades.
The film begins with a summary of Event 201, which was a pandemic-response exercise that took place just weeks before the advent of COVID-19 in the public discussion.
That event, the film recalls, was sponsored by the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, and the CIA had a hand in its operations. The notion of fighting “misinformation” was a central theme at the pandemic exercise, as was the idea of asymptomatic spread, a rushed vaccine, and other things.
The film portrays the event as something like a simulation for what was to come with the declared pandemic just a couple months later.
Showing the unprecedented response to the coronavirus, the film showed a montage of the various media campaigns that appear engineered to get everyone to think in the same manner about the virus. Kennedy believes this was done to stoke fear among the populous.
At one point, he remarked, “When people get fearful, their capacity for critical thinking gets disabled.”
In came Fauci, portrayed by the media as the cool, calm and collected scientist as opposed to the vilified and bombastic President Donald Trump.
mRNA vaccine-tech inventor Dr. Robert Malone quipped “in comes Tony Fauci, savior of the West.”
The overall thesis of the film, as in the book, is that Fauci has been on a decades-long quest to be something of a Czar of public health, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Highlights of his time working in public health during the HIV/AIDS crisis are shown, and Fauci can be seen recommending something like social distancing as a preventive to contracting HIV even then.
The film notes that the narrative on HIV/AIDS was woefully incorrect, as was the narrative on COVID, and as he did then, Fauci has remained obstinate that he has done nothing wrong even in the face of severe criticism from colleagues and other scientists.
Another point the film makes is that Fauci has a history of jumping on the bandwagon of expensive and highly toxic medicines as treatments for diseases, ignoring their devastating harm to life and health and ignoring and or belittling and suppressing far safer medicines that can be repurposed for little to no money.
This has played out in the present day with Fauci’s reluctance to recommend safe and effective COVID treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and instead recommended highly dangerous and expensive remdesivir, as well as the now-proven dangerous COVID jabs.
The film is packed with loads more information about Fauci’s professional life and how his endeavors climaxed in his massive influence over the world’s response to COVID.
Those interested in watching the whole thing can do so if they act quickly, as the film will only be free until October 28.
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| Is Masonic infiltration responsible for the widespread apostasy among Catholic clergy? |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-21-2022, 09:52 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Archbishop Lefebvre spoke about the infiltration of Freemasonry in the Vatican upper echelons several times (see here and here, for example). But it is always a good refresher to remind ourselves that these are the same Freemasons in ecclesiastical robes who have given us the New Mass (i.e. Archbishop Annibale Bugnini) and those who were in preeminent positions to fill the ranks of the episcopacy with those friendly to the Freemasonic cause (i.e. Cardinal Baggio)!
Is Masonic infiltration responsible for the widespread apostasy among Catholic clergy?
As should be clear to anyone looking at the facts surrounding Pecorelli’s List, Freemasonry has certainly entered the walls of the Vatican at least several decades ago.
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Oct 20, 2022
(LifeSiteNews) Something has gone seriously wrong within the hierarchy of the Church. The widespread heresy, scandal, corruption, and apostasy of the shepherds whom Christ aptly condemned as “wolves in sheep’s clothing” is too systematic, and now overt, to have come about by mere chance or human weakness.
Ingenious planning and ruthless, calculated execution have brought the Church’s hierarchy to such a state that evil bishops no longer hide their rejection of the Deposit of Faith, their hatred of Christian morals, or their contempt toward believing, faithful Catholics.
The pro-LGBT, pro-contraception, pro-abortion, pro-women-priests agenda of the German bishops’ “Synodal Way,” the Flemish bishops’ “rite of blessing” for homosexual couples, Cardinal Arthur Roche’s derisive labelling of traditional Catholics as more Protestant than Catholic, the Pope’s elevation of numerous LGBT-promoting bishops to the College of Cardinals, the cover-up of the infamous McCarrick case, the widespread network of the gay lobby among bishops and within the walls of Rome, the handing over of the underground Church in China to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by the Vatican, the Holy See’s endorsement and joining of the strongly pro-abortion Paris Climate Agreement, the worship of the Pachamama and participation in indigenous invocations of the spirits of the dead… the list goes on and on.
The mass apostasy that we are seeing today within the ranks of the Church’s highest members, however, has not been the work of a single day or of a single year. In this regard, a few facts will help put the present situation in perspective. The report below will include the following:
- The Masonic plan to infiltrate the Church’s hierarchy laid out in the “Alta Vendita,” and Vatican/Masonic correspondence evidencing an attempt to take over Italian seminaries in the 1960s.
- Pecorelli’s List of 1978 identifying 120 Vatican officials who were members of Freemasonry, including their dates of entry, code numbers, and acronyms.
- Facts about the Roman Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due (P2) and its leader Licio Gelli, as background to Pecorelli’s List.
- The Vatican-commissioned Gagnon investigation regarding the infiltration of Freemasons within the Holy See, and the circumstances surrounding the death of John Paul I.
- The undercover work of Father Luigi Villa against Freemasons in the Vatican, a mission assigned by Padre Pio and confirmed by Pius XII.
- Notable names on Pecorelli’s List and the damage to the Church done by Masonic prelates.
The Alta Vendita: A Masonic plan laid out
In the late nineteenth century, the document, “The Permanent Instruction on the Alta Vendita,” directed members of the Masonic Lodge to undertake a century’s long effort to undermine the Catholic Church from within. The document stated:
Quote:The Pope, whoever he may be, will never come to the secret societies. It is for the secret societies to come to the Church… The work we have undertaken is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a century perhaps, but in our ranks the soldier dies and the fight continues…
Once your reputation is established in the colleges… and in the seminaries – once you shall have captivated the confidence of professors and students, act so that those who are engaged in the ecclesiastic state should love to seek your conversation… Then little by little you will bring your disciples to the degree of cooking desired. When upon all the points of ecclesiastical state at once, this daily work shall have spread our ideas as light, then you will appreciate the wisdom of the counsel in which we take the initiative…
That reputation will open the way for our doctrines to pass to the bosoms of the young clergy, and go even to the depths of convents. In a few years the young clergy will have, by force of events, invaded all the functions. They will govern, administer, and judge. They will form the council of the Sovereign. They will be called upon to choose the Pontiff who will reign; and that Pontiff, like the greater part of his contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with the… humanitarian principles which we are about to put into circulation…
Let the clergy march under your banner in the belief always that they march under the banner of the Apostolic Keys. You wish to cause the last vestige of tyranny and of oppression to disappear? Lay your nets like Simon Bar Jona. Lay them in the depths of sacristies, seminaries, and convents, rather than in the depth of the sea… You will bring yourselves as friends around the Apostolic Chair.
At the time of the publication of the Alta Vendita, Italian Freemasonry carried an especially anti-clerical animus and hatred of the papacy and the Church. In 1877, the Lodge, Propaganda Massonica, also known as Propaganda Due (P2), was established in Rome for political persons whose membership was kept utterly secret due to the Papal condemnations of Masonry. But by 1917, in celebration of their 200-year anniversary, the Masons brazenly marched in St. Peter’s Square flying a banner that read, “Satan will rule in the Vatican, the Pope will be his slave.”
Several decades later, following the promptings of the Alta Vendita, the Freemasons in Italy began to execute a concrete plan to undermine the Church from within. In 1961, the chairman of the Pontifical Commission for Cultural Heritage of the Church, Monsignor Francesco Marchisano, who went by the Masonic code name FRAMA, wrote three letters to the grand master of the Grand Orient of Italy (G.O.I.) regarding a plan to take over priestly seminaries in Italy’s Piedmont and Lombardy regions.
The seminaries of Trent, Turin, and Udine were identified as ideal locations for the attempt, where a good number of fellow Freemasons were known to have already infiltrated. The letters were obtained and published in September 2002, by Fr. Luigi Villa, in a dossier titled, “An Appointment Scandal,” and again in September 2019, in the journal founded by Fr. Villa, Chiesa Viva.
The 2002 publication came in response to the appointment of Marchisano to the position of vicar general for the Vatican City and president of the San Pietro Works. Villa had previously exposed Marchisano’s full Masonic registration data in June 1981 in Chiesa Viva. The monsignor’s letters to the Grand Master read as follows:
Quote:May 23, 1961
Venerable and Illustrious Grand Master,
With great joy I received, through F. MAPA [Msgr. Pasquale Macchi, Secretary of Pope Paul VI], your delicate task: to quietly organize throughout the Piedmont and Lombardy, a plan to destroy the studies and discipline in the seminaries. I don’t deny that the task is huge and I need many collaborators, especially among the teaching staff. You should notify me so I can approach them as soon as possible with some study tactics. I reserve more accurate communications after a meeting and personal interview with MAPA.
Meanwhile, please accept my prayerful greeting.
Frama
To Ven G. Master of the G.O. (delivered by hand)
Quote:September 12, 1961
Illustrious and Reverend G. Master,
After having approached and contacted F.F. [Fellow Freemasons] Pelmo and Bifra [Franco Biffi, Rector of the Lateran University] several times, I returned to MAPA to submit an initial work plan. He recommends starting with the disintegration of the curriculum, pressing upon our faithful teachers, because with a new updating of topics of pseudo-philosophy and pseudo-theology, they will cast the seed at the students, now thirsty for anything new. Thus, the disciplinary disruption will be a simple consequence that will result spontaneously, without us having to deal with it: the students will think they did it themselves. It is therefore essential that you pay these teachers well, of whom you already have the list. I will be a diligent overseer and I will refer everything to you, faithfully.
With the most devoted and friendly greeting
Frama
The Grand Master – Palazzo Giustiniani (delivered by hand)
Quote:October 14
Illustrious and Reverend G. Master,
In the meeting, last night, F.F. [Fellow Freemasons] Pelmo, Mapa, Bifra, Salma [Salvatore Marsili, O.S.B. Abbot of Finalpia], Buan [Abp. Annibale Bugnini, Commission on the Liturgy], Algo [Alessandro Gottardi, Archbishop of Trent] and Vino [Virgilio Noe, Master of Ceremonies] were present, I could conclude that: – First, we should start experiments at some seminaries of Italy, those of Trent and Turin, or that one of Udine where we have a good number of F.F.[Fellow Freemasons]; – Secondly, we must spread our concept of freedom and human dignity, in all the seminaries without any hesitation from either of the Superiors, nor by any law. We need a comprehensive printing. At this point, we need a meeting with all of you to decide how to act and to whom to entrust the various tasks.
With my prayerful greeting
Frama
The Grand Master – Palazzo Giustiniani (delivered by hand)
‘Pecorelli’s List’: 120 Vatican officials named Freemasons
On September 12, 1978, nearly a century after the publication of the Alta Vendita and just shy of two decades since the launching of the plot to take over Italy’s seminaries, Italian lawyer and investigative journalist Carmine Minor Pecorelli, director of a news agency and journal specializing in political scandals and crimes, L’Osservatorio Politico, published a list of high-ranking Vatican cardinals, bishops, and priests whom he identified as members of Masonic lodges. The list came to be known as “Pecorelli’s List,” and included the names, dates of entry into Freemasonry, code numbers, and acronyms of 120 Vatican officials.
Pecorelli himself belonged to the Roman Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Due (P2), which was discovered by the Italian police to have ranking members of nearly every branch of the country’s government, including national defense. An official investigation uncovered lists of members grouped by political office, all under the thumb of Licio Gelli, venerable master of the Masonic Lodge.
Why Pecorelli published a list of high-ranking members of the Vatican whom he claimed also numbered among the Freemasons may never be known. Was it slander? Was it to discredit the Church? Or was it because his list would have just exposed the greatest scandal within the walls of the Vatican in his (or our) lifetime, a work not unappealing to a political journalist with sensitive inside information.
What is known is that Pecorelli was shot dead in Rome six months later, almost to the day, on March 20, 1979. He was killed with four gunshots in Rome’s Prati district. Apparently, the bullets were of the Gevelot brand, a peculiarly rare type of bullet not easily found in either legal or clandestine markets. The same type of bullet was discovered in the “Banda della Magliana’s” weapon stock, concealed in the Italian government Health Ministry’s basement. Among those targeted by the police investigations was the head of Propaganda Due, Licio Gelli.
Propaganda Due and Licio Gelli
Licio Gelli had joined Italian Freemasonry only a few years before in 1965. However, he quickly rose to a role of incredible power within Masonry and within Italy when, in 1970, Lino Salvini, then Grand Master of Italy’s Grand Orient Lodge, tasked Gelli with restructuring the Propaganda Due Lodge of Rome, of which he became the venerable master in 1975. This lodge, originally founded in 1877 for Roman politicians whose membership in Masonry had to be kept utterly secret due to their public office and proximity to the papacy, rose from numbering a mere 14 members in the mid-1960’s to almost 1,000 by the end of the 1970’s under Gelli’s leadership.
On March 17, 1981, Italian police raided Gelli’s home as part of an investigation into the alleged kidnapping of the Sicilian banker, Michele Sindona. The authorities discovered lists of 962 members of the Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due. The names included 43 members of Parliament, 3 cabinet members, 43 generals, 8 admirals, the heads of all of Italy’s armed forces, heads of the security services, diplomats, police chiefs in Italy’s four biggest cities, and Vatican officials, to give only a few of the more prominent political personages.
To Italian authorities not numbering among the members of P2, Gelli’s vast network of Masons secretly answerable to him constituted a “state within a state” and threatened the nation’s stability and sovereignty. Having thrown itself into the fray of Italy’s politics, P2 was involved in such things as the “Italicus” train bombing of 1974, in which 12 people were killed, and the Bologna Station massacre, in which 85 people were killed.
Its members were also found to have taken control of the Vatican Bank, bringing the Holy See nearly to bankruptcy in a financial scandal that broke in the mid-1980s and from which the Vatican has yet to fully extricate itself. In the 1970s, the activities of P2 caused a stir even within Freemasonry, finally leading to the official dissolution of the Propaganda Due Lodge in 1981 by the Grand Orient of Italy.
The Gagnon report
Simultaneous to the publication of Pecorelli’s List, within the walls of the Vatican, the findings of a three-year official audit of all the offices of the Holy See, conducted by Archbishop Edouard Gagnon, concerning allegations that certain prelates and clerics of the Roman Curia were secretly members of Freemasonry, were presented in person to Pope John Paul I. According to the recently published memoirs of Gagnon’s secretary, Father Charles Murr, “Archbishop Gagnon compiled an exhaustive dossier which left him in no doubt that these shocking allegations were in fact true.”
Gagnon’s investigation of Freemasonry within the Roman Curia had been officially commissioned by Paul VI in response to the particular accusation that two high-ranking prelates were Freemasons: Annibale Bugnini and Sebastian Baggio. Bugnini was in charge of the Commission for the reform of the Latin Liturgy following the Second Vatican Council, which produced the Novus Ordo Missale Romanum. Baggio was Prefect for the Congregation for Bishops, responsible for the nomination and choice of bishops throughout the entire Catholic world.
While the full contents of Gagnon’s investigation are not publicly known, some details about the affair have been divulged. Among such details is the fact that Gagnon made known that he did in fact have evidence confirming that Archbishop Bugnini and Cardinal Baggio were members of Freemasonry. This evidence included the authentication of documents by INTERPOL, the International Criminal Police Organization, responsible for the investigation of international crimes. Gagnon’s findings thus corroborated Pecorelli’s List, which also included the names of these cardinals.
As a result of Gagnon’s investigation, Bugnini was sent in the last years of his life to Iran as Apostolic Nuncio, where he would ostensibly do the least harm to the Church, given the scarcity of Catholics in Iran and the nearly non-existent interaction between the Holy See and Iran’s Islamic government.
Baggio, however, proved harder to get rid of. He would, in fact, remain head of the Congregation for Bishops until 1984, several years into the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, holding a tenure of twelve years in that position. The length of his tenure would contribute considerably to the incalculable harm done to the Church by this Masonic episcopal kingmaker.
Taking a step back, a few striking facts about the month-long pontificate of John Paul I raise the question of the depth of the Masonic plots within the Vatican. On September 12, 1978, Pecorelli published his list of Vatican officials who were members of Freemasonry. On September 25, 1978, Archbishop Gagnon met privately with John Paul I to present to him the findings of his three-year investigation into the same matter. The archbishop carried a large dossier and made known to his secretary that he broached to the Pontiff the topic of Baggio’s membership in the Masonic Lodge. He also told his secretary that the Pope had agreed to deal with the Mason cardinal.
On September 28, John Paul I called Baggio personally to have him come meet the Pontiff in his office that day. Baggio met privately with the Pope in his personal apartment later that evening at 8 p.m. for about an hour and was heard to be yelling at the Pope by the Swiss Guards who were in attendance outside the room, to which they later testified. The next morning, September 29, John Paul I was found dead in his room. He was declared by the doctor to have died around 11 p.m. the night before. Six months later, on March 20, 1979, Pecorelli was shot dead in Rome.
Given the circumstances and questions surrounding the death of John Paul I – the fact that the Pontiff died so suddenly a mere two weeks after the publication of Pecorelli’s List, three days after he received Gagnon’s report in private audience, and only two hours after his confrontation with Baggio, the Mason naming the Church’s bishops and the last man to have seen the Pontiff before he was found dead – Father Luigi Villa, a Vatican official working under the protection of the Holy Office (about whom more will be said below), ordered Cardinal Palazzini to have an autopsy conducted. Three autopsies, officially called “medical examinations,” were conducted, the verdict of each confirming that the Pope had been assassinated. The results of the autopsies were not published by the Vatican, which officially gave “heart attack” as the cause of the Pope’s death, after changing the narrative several times.
Fr. Luigi Villa
To add to the Masonic intrigue within the Church, in addition to the work of Archbishop Gagnon in investigating Freemasonry within the Vatican, there was another priest who for several decades, both before and after, was also engaged in the same mission.
In 1956, Fr. Luigi Villa, on a visit to Padre Pio, was assigned by the saint with the mission to dedicate his entire life to defending the Church from the work of the Freemasons, especially those within the Church. Subsequently, Pope Pius XII personally confirmed this mission by giving Villa a papal mandate to do exactly this. The Pope placed the priest under the protection of Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office, Pietro Parente, and Pietro Palazzini.
Villa worked tirelessly over the course of his priestly career to uncover and obstruct the maneuvers of the Freemasons who had infiltrated the ranks of the hierarchy, enduring seven assassination attempts on account of the enemies he made.
In 1971, Villa founded the journal Chiesa Viva, with correspondents from all continents, to expose the work of the Masons within the Church. Villa himself conducted investigations into the membership of prelates and priests within Freemasonry, verifying documents with police records and listings from Masonic lodges. In 1992, Chiesa Viva re-published Pecorelli’s List together with a presentation by Magistrate Carlo Alberto Agnoli, author of “La Massoneria alla Conquista della Chiesa,” who stressed the reliability of the List.
Notable names on Pecorelli’s List
Volumes could be written on the damage done to the Church by the cardinals, bishops, and priests named as Freemasons on Pecorelli’s List. I limit myself to considering only a few.
Archbishop Annibale Bugnini is listed as having joined Freemasonry on April 4, 1963, with the code number 1365/75 and the acronym BUAN. Bugnini was the man who spearheaded the changes made to the liturgy, the aims of which changes were to remove from the Roman Rite of the Mass anything that would be objectionable to Protestants. The texts of the Church’s ancient prayers and her selections from Scripture were stripped of much of their doctrinal content as well as the prized Tridentine emphasis on the sacrificial character of the Mass, so crucial to the countering of Protestant heresies. The changes to the arrangement of the sanctuary were modeled off the style of the Masonic Temple, in which the altar stands in the center rather than facing East.
The noted anthropocentric overtones of the Novus Ordo liturgy and the drastic shift toward a liberalizing of doctrine and practice in the Church, which has accompanied the liturgical changes in the Mass, are the unsurprising fruit of the work of a Freemason allowed to unscrupulously change at will whatever he pleased and thought he could impose with impunity upon the entire Latin Church.
Equally damaging to the Church was the long tenure of Cardinal Sebastian Baggio in his role as Prefect for the Congregation for Bishops, which effectively made him a Masonic puppet-master of sorts. According to Pecorelli’s List, Baggio enrolled in the Masonic Lodge on August 14, 1957, with the code number 85/2640 and the acronym SEBA. In 1962 he was appointed Prefect for the Congregation for Bishops, after Cardinal Jean Villot – also listed by Pecorelli as a Mason, and who at the time served as Secretary of State under Paul VI – lobbied hard to get Baggio appointed to the role. It would have been bad enough that a Freemason should have a hand at all in the choice of any bishop, but that Baggio was made Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and was thus free to name liberal, modernist, homosexual, and Masonic bishops the world over for more than a decade is unfathomable.
In a letter to his venerable grand master, dated January 4, 1969, Baggio thanked the Masonic Lodge for securing his elevation to the Sacred College of Cardinals, assuring his fellow Masons of his continued cooperation in penetrating ecclesiastical circles, especially roles of leadership, for the sake of “ruining the whole Church from within in all sectors.” This letter was photographed and recently published in 2019 in Chiesa Viva:
Quote:January 4, 1969
To the Venerable Grand Master
To the Most Esteemed Assistants
I have just received the communication from Mapa of my appointment as cardinal, obtained from You through all Your powerful ways. I hasten to express to you all, beloved and esteemed Brothers, my grateful and devoted thanks. As in the past, I am always at Your disposal regarding our programs of expansion and penetration in ecclesiastical circles, especially in those spheres of leadership that will be, tomorrow, the main points for ruining the whole Church from within in all sectors.
With renewed loyalty, V.F. greets you.
SB (Sebastiano Baggio)
To add insult to injury to the Bride of Christ and assure the wholesale retreat of the rearguard of orthodox bishops in the Church, it was during Baggio’s rule as bishop-maker that the retirement age of 75 was set for bishops for the first time in the Church’s history. The immediate effect of the novel legislation was that many episcopal See’s throughout the world became vacant as bishops over 75 handed in their letters of resignation. This situation uniquely allowed Baggio an amply free hand to replace nearly the entire episcopacy of the Church in the space of a very short time and to attempt to reshape it in his own image. Rarely has any man, whether pope or bishop, been in such a position to influence so vast a part of the Catholic episcopacy in so short a time.
It was from this era that the Church in the U.S. was given such bishops as McCarrick, Weakland, Mahony, Brown, and Bernadin. The crimes and sins on these men’s hands include homosexual rape, a homosexual affair, sexual abuse of minors, cover-up of abusive priests, advocacy for women priests, a militant trampling upon the Church’s traditional music and liturgy, the forbidding of Catholics to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament for Holy Communion, and the watering-down of the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life for the unborn, to put just a few sins and scandals to their names.
Other persons named on Pecorelli’s List include Cardinal Villot, the Secretary of State for the Holy See under Paul VI, who acted as a kind of patron for Baggio, getting him appointed to the Congregation for Bishops. Also named was Bishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, who joined Masonry on August 21, 1967, with the code number 43/649, and the acronym MARPA, who was involved in the bank scandal that nearly toppled the Holy See financially in the 1980s.
Another prominent name was Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Minister of Foreign Affairs under Paul VI and Secretary of State under John Paul II. Casaroli entered Masonry on September 28, 1957, with the code number 41/076, under the acronym CASA. It was Casaroli who was responsible for the Vatican’s open attitude toward the communists during the pontificate of Paul VI, a policy called Ostpolitik, which led the Pope to remove Cardinal József Mindszenty as Primate of Hungary, resulting in the establishment of a state church under the control of Hungary’s communist rulers. This policy was later rejected by John Paul II, coming as he did from behind the Iron Curtain, but the damage to the Church in Eastern Europe had already been done.
Now, lest it be thought that the Masons named on Pecorelli’s List are a thing of the past, it must be pointed out that within the last decade names on his list continue to appear in the goings-on of the Vatican. Just one such case is Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, whom Pecorelli identified as having entered Masonry on April 2, 1970, with the code number 3317/42 and the acronym PIPIVI. Pinto ruled as Dean of the Church’s highest court, the Roman Rota, from September 2012 to March 2021, making headlines when he took it upon himself to criticize the four cardinals who had submitted the “dubia” to Pope Francis regarding his teaching in Amoris Laetitia on admitting the divorced and remarried to Holy Communion.
As should be clear to anyone looking at the facts surrounding Pecorelli’s List, Freemasonry has certainly entered the walls of the Vatican at least several decades ago. Full verification of the list, while difficult, is certainly possible, given the police seizure of Licio Gelli’s documents naming all the members of Rome’s Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Due. Archbishop Gagnon’s report also lies unpublished within the archives of the Vatican. In addition to these sources, there are the investigations conducted by Fr. Luigi Villa, some of which were published in the journal Chiesa Viva.
With Italian prelates such as Bishop Francesco Soddu of Terni recently presuming to publicly attend the inauguration of a new entrance to the Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy, a new investigation into Freemasonry within the ranks of the Church’s hierarchy is long overdue. Only then will the damage Masonry has caused and is causing the Body of Christ begin to be brought to light.
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| Benedict XVI: [Failed] Vatican II Was "Meaningful" And "Necessary" |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-21-2022, 08:05 AM - Forum: The Architects of Vatican II
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Benedict XVI: [Failed] Vatican II Was "Meaningful" And "Necessary"
The retired pontiff defended the Second Vatican Council in a newly released letter
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Oct 21, 2022
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews [slightly adapted, emphasis mine]) – Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has written a letter about the Second Vatican Council, describing it as “meaningful and necessary.”
The letter from the emeritus pope – a rare public intervention from the 95-year-old – was sent to Father Dave Pivonka, the president of Franciscan University of Steubenville, to mark the 2022 Annual Conference of the Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation currently being held at the university.
Thanking the university for the conference examining his theological stance, Benedict wrote about the meaning of the Second Vatican Council in the Church today.
The announcement of the Council by Pope John XXIII caused a stir, noted the emeritus pope, saying there were “many doubts as to whether it would be meaningful, indeed whether it would be possible at all, to organize the insights and questions into the whole of a conciliar statement and thus to give the Church a direction for its further journey.”
However, the German Pontiff argued that such concerns were not supported by the Council.
“In reality, a new council proved to be not only meaningful, but necessary,” he wrote. “For the first time, the question of a theology of religions had shown itself in its radicality.”
Continuing, Benedict wrote that “the same is true for the relationship between faith and the world of mere reason. Both topics had not been foreseen in this way before.”
As such, Vatican II “at first threatened to unsettle and shake the Church more than to give her a new clarity for her mission,” Benedict argued.
He doubled down on his support for the Council by writing that “In the meantime, the need to reformulate the question of the nature and mission of the Church has gradually become apparent. In this way, the positive power of the Council is also slowly emerging.”
Furthermore, the emeritus pontiff wrote that with the Council and the new theological attention given to ecclesiology, “the wider spiritual dimension of the concept of the Church was now joyfully perceived.”
But at the same time, he argued, the “concept of the Church as the mystical body of Christ” had “passed its peak.” It was this that prompted him to write his doctoral dissertation, stated Benedict.
While the “the complete spiritualization of the concept of the Church, for its part, misses the realism of faith and its institutions in the world,” Benedict wrote that with “Vatican II, the question of the Church in the world finally became the real central problem.”
The pope’s letter was read out to the conference participants by former Director of the Holy See Press Office, Father Federico Lombardi.
Pope Benedict spent part of his early ecclesiastical career playing a key role in Vatican II, after receiving his doctorate in 1953. During the entirety of the Council, Ratzinger – then just a priest – was theological adviser to Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne.
READ: New biography describes great influence of Joseph Ratzinger in the revolutionary upheaval of Vatican II
Historian Roberto de Mattei, in his history of the council, described Ratzinger as one of the German theologians who “distinguished themselves” as being “in the ‘marching flank’ of progressivism.” The young German priest also worked closely with dissident clerics such as Frs. Karl Rahner, Bernard Häring and Yves Congar during the Council.
De Mattei noted, however, that in later years, Ratzinger rediscovered the “role of tradition and of Roman institutions.”
While the emeritus pontiff described the Council as “necessary” and “meaningful,” such praise for the Council has long been disputed by Catholics.
Liturgist and theologian Peter Kwasniewski wrote of the Council that “it must be remembered with shame and repentance as a moment in which the hierarchy of the Church, to varying degrees, surrendered to a more subtle (and therefore more dangerous) form of worldliness.”
“Moreover,” he continued, “the errors contained in the documents, as well as the many errors commonly attributed to the Council or prompted by it, must be drawn into a syllabus and anathematized by a future pope or council so that the controverted matters may be laid to rest, as former councils have wisely and charitably done in regard to the errors of their times.”
After Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich recently claimed that Vatican II prevented the Catholic Church from becoming “a small sect, unknown to most people,” Catholics rebuffed this argument.
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| Australia’s Commonwealth Bank begins tracking transactions, links it to carbon footprint |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-20-2022, 02:41 PM - Forum: Global News
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Australia’s Commonwealth Bank begins tracking transactions, links it to carbon footprint
Surveilling transactions to nudge social change
Reclaim the Net | October 20, 2022
Australia’s Commonwealth Bank (CBA) has added a new feature to its online banking software that tells customers their carbon footprint based on monthly spending. The move follows a partnership between the bank and CoGo, a company that provides carbon footprint management solutions.
According to the bank, the national average of carbon emitted is 1,280 kilograms, while a sustainable figure is 200. The bank has provided the option to “pay a fee” to offset the carbon footprint.
CBA said it does not share data with CoGo. It added that eventually the data will be broken down into each individual transaction.
The bank calculates a person’s carbon footprint based on the transactions using their credit or debit cards.
“By combining our rich customer data and CoGo’s industry-leading capability in measuring carbon outputs, we will be able to provide greater transparency for customers so that they can take actionable steps to reduce their environmental footprint,” CommBank Group executive Angus Sullivan said in a statement.
“Our data capability will provide greater personalization for customers overtime, including more granular information about their carbon footprint with the option to offset individual transactions.”
He added: “There are more opportunities for customers to take actionable steps to reduce and offset their emissions than ever before. From purchasing clean energy products via a 0.99 percent Green Loan and accessing renewable energy at wholesale costs with Amber, to customers now being able to offset their monthly transactions via the CommBank app using CoGo’s technology.”
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| CDC votes to add COVID shots to child vaccine schedule |
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Posted by: Stone - 10-20-2022, 02:37 PM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular]
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‘This is corruption’: Dr. Robert Malone blasts CDC vote to add COVID shots to child vaccine schedule
I am shocked by the malfeasance. I have no trust left at all in our public health. It is broken.
Thu Oct 20, 2022
ANALYSIS
(Robert Malone) – On Wednesday afternoon, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted unanimously by 15–0 for the CDC to recommend that children get the COVID-19 “vaccines and boosters.”
The actual vote to add this experimental COVID-19 mRNA injection to the childhood vaccination schedule is on Thursday.
It is important to recognize that this is a work-around because Congress is not funding more jabs into arms. If this product is put on the childhood schedule, Congress does not have a say in the funding. Furthermore, if the emergency use authorization (EUA) vanishes, then the liability of the companies would continue under the childhood schedule. This is corruption.
I honestly didn’t think the ACIP would “go there.” For one, this is still an unlicensed product. I am still not sure an EUA vaccine product can be added to the schedule. I don’t believe it has ever been done before.
It is now predicted that CDC is almost certain to add the COVID-19 shots to its “Childhood Vaccines Schedule” on Thursday. This means that public schools, which all use this schedule, will then be able to mandate the “vaccines” in order for children to attend public school.
This is all being done at the last minute and basically behind the backs of the public, as this received virtually no media attention prior to the vote. I do not believe that this vote was announced to the public beforehand. Alternative media only figured it out due to the sharp eyes of Steve Kirsch.
The CDC very recently opened up its scheduled vote for public comment and received thousands of negative comments. You can read those comments here. Please feel free to add your own comments by clicking here.
ACIP’s decision to add the COVID-19 shots is based on regulatory capture, budgetary issues, politics, and it is not based on scientific data.
We all know the adverse event profile of the jabs. It is horrific. The small sample size in the clinical trials were poorly designed and inadequately powered.
We all know other countries have completely stopped vaccinating children with these products.
If they add these jabs to the childhood schedule, it will completely break the trust of the American family in the CDC, as it should.
I am shocked by the malfeasance. I have no trust left at all in our public health. It is broken.
Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.
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