Bishop Michael Martin advances a liturgy which is sick at the core

 As noted here, Charlotte Bishop Michael Martin has asserted that, “To instruct the faithful that kneeling [while receiving Holy Communion] is more reverent than standing is simply absurd." 

I've said this many times before, masonic forces seek to subvert the Church from within and to create a 'new church' created in the image and likeness of man. The new humanitarian religion will result from a quiet revolution within the Church. This new religion will be anti-supernatural. And it will embrace the Socialistic New World Order and the Reign of Antichrist. This is the false church Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich saw in her visions.

In this false church within the True Church, the cancer within the Mystical Body of Christ, there is a loss of the sense of the sacred.  Which is why Fr. Miceli wrote that, "Much of the new liturgy has been drained of the numinous and the sacred.  The new forms are without splendor, flattened, undifferentiated.  Why was kneeling replaced by standing?  Jesus himself fell on his knees and on his face as he prayed to his heavenly Father.  Satan too knows the meaning of worship and man's need for it.  He tried to get Jesus to fall down and worship him.  Why has the liturgical year and the Mass been so unfortunately mutilated against the wishes of the faithful?  In fact, the faithful are now confused about the Mass, the feast of the saints, the holy seasons.  Why was the Gloria, that prayer of total consecration on God's Majesty and Goodness, restricted practically to Sundays alone, and only to those Sundays outside of Lent? Moreover, is the faith really renewed and vivified by by obscuring our sense of community with the Christians of apostolic and ancient times?  The new liturgy no longer draws us into the true experience of reliving the Life of Christ.  We are deprived of this experience through the elimination of the hierarchy of feasts and the at random changing of the dates of famous feasts....

Then too, the new forms are the result of experimentation.  But one experiments with things, with objects that one wants to analyze.  Experimentation is the method of science.  The wretched idolatry and vulgarity of tinkering with sacred realities has, unfortunately, penetrated the Church and produced a mediocrity-ridden liturgy, a show for spectators that distracts from the holy, frustrates intimate communion with God and trivializes, where it does not suppress, sacred actions, symbols, music and words.

In reality, such diminished liturgies have renewed nothing.  Rather these innovations have emptied churches, dried up vocations to the priesthood and sisterhood, driven off converts and opened the doors wide to a flood of renegades.  Even though valid in its essence, such a new liturgy cannot inspire for it is colorless, artificial, banal, without the odor and flavor of sanctity.  A humanized and popularized, man-oriented liturgy will never produce saints.  Only a divinized, God-oriented liturgy can accomplish that miracle.  One suspects that many priests realize the banality of the new liturgy.  That is why they often become, during the Mass and other ceremonies, actors and entertainers.  They put on a show in order to gain the attention of the congregation.  These comedians in chasubles preach a utopian Christianity rather than the true Christianity.  Their treasure is man rather than God; their emphasis this-worldly rather than other-worldly; their goal progress rather than sanctity; their apostolate is immanent rather than transcendent; their means to their goal is the way of revolution rather than the way of the cross; they preach a secular Church instead of the Sacred Church founded by Christ; the essence of their morality is self-assertion rather than self-denial; the Christ they present to the congregation is the Humanist Christ rather than the God-Man crucified Christ...they genuflect before the world and stand before Christ...they are moved by resentment and envy instead of radiating the joy of Christ.."

In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote: "..there is a story that comes from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, according to which the devil was compelled by God to show himself to a certain Abba Apollo. He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but most strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.  

But I do not want to go into more detail. I should like to make just one more remark. The expression used by Saint Luke to describe the kneeling of Christians (theis ta gonata) is unknown in classical Greek. We are dealing here with a specifically Christian word. With that remark, our reflections turn full circle to where they began. It may well be that kneeling is alien to modern culture — insofar as it is a culture, for this culture has turned away from the faith and no longer knows the one before whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture. The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core. Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that, in our prayer, we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, in fellowship with the whole cosmos, indeed in union with Jesus Christ Himself."

So then, for Bishop Martin, Pope Benedict XVI, who taught that kneeling is an "intrinsically necessary gesture," was being "ridiculous."

Perhaps now is the time for Bishop Martin to get on his knees and pray for some humility. For he cannot hold a candle to the genius and spiritual greatness of Pope Benedict XVI.

Related reading here.

Pope Benedict XVI on the spiritual power of the Antichrist

Lifesite News reports:


"Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI linked the dominance of 'homosexual marriage' and 'abortion' in the world — such that it brooks no dissent without fear of punishment — to the 'spiritual power of the Anti-Christ' in a new biography.

'One hundred years ago,' Benedict stated in the biography by Peter Seewald, 'everybody would have considered it to be absurd to speak of a homosexual marriage. Today, one is being excommunicated by society if one opposes it.' The same applies to 'abortion and to the creation of human beings in the laboratory,' Benedict added.

'Modern society is in the middle of formulating an anti-Christian creed, and if one opposes it, one is being punished by society with excommunication,' he went on to say. 'The fear of this spiritual power of the Anti-Christ is then only more than natural, and it really needs the help of prayers on the part of an entire diocese and of the Universal Church in order to resist it.'"

The flight from God - see here - is in full swing.

This spirit of Antichrist is manifesting everywhere.  At Saint Mary's Church in Orange, I was banned from the Parish Facebook Page for upholding Catholic teaching relative to homosexual acts while the Church affiliates itself with a Methodist Church that promotes same-sex "marriage" and flies a rainbow flag of "inclusion."  See here.

There is a retreat from truth.  See here.

Many there are who are anxious to serve the demon and to prostrate themselves before him.

America Strong or America humbled?

We live in a time when the arrogance of men is being broken.  How often do we hear some ignoramus on television proclaiming that we are "America Strong" or "Boston Strong."

Chastisements are being unleashed on a sin-sick world which has become filled with satanic pride.

Locusts are destroying crops throughout the Middle East and Africa, a plague which will also affect the Western nations including the United States.  See here.

And while men have been boasting about how "strong" they are, an invisible enemy, a microscopic virus, is now overwhelming them.  See here.

The people of Nineveh repented of their sins and their city was spared from disaster. The spirit of penance which saved them from chastisement was expressed through the sackcloth and ashes. We are told in Sacred Scripture that, "The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and announce to it the message that I will tell you. So Jonah set out for Nineveh, in accord with the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an awesomely great city; it took three days to walk through it. Jonah began his journey through the city, and when he had gone only a single day’s walk announcing, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had this proclaimed throughout Nineveh: 'By decree of the king and his nobles, no man or beast, no cattle or sheep, shall taste anything; they shall not eat, nor shall they drink water. Man and beast alike must be covered with sackcloth and call loudly to God; they all must turn from their evil way and from the violence of their hands. Who knows? God may again repent and turn from his blazing wrath, so that we will not perish.' When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out." (Jonah 3: 1-10).


Where is the fast in our "strong" culture? Where is the penance? Saint Paul tells us that all men have the basic moral law before them, the Ten Commandments written in their hearts. All men are capable of knowing good from evil:

"For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse.." (Romans 1: 19-20).

But excuses are all we find today.  Not to mention a celebration of sin - even that sin which is most detestable - sodomy. As Father Albert J. Hebert, S.M. put it, "All great pagan judicial systems admitted the fact of wrong-doing and their legal systems prescribed punishment for it. It is only in our day that there is such a widespread denial of the existence of sin and moral laws. This makes God appear as the Creator of evil, and God hates this blasphemy, pride, and hypocrisy on the part of His creature man...Today, persons great and lowly commit sin, deny it and even blasphemously call it virtue. For example, active homosexuals and lesbians call their perverse practices 'love' and demand the legal status of normal married man and wife."

You don't believe the Lord would send locusts or an epidemic (or at least allow them in His permitting Will?).  Then you are ignorant of His Word.

The choice is yours.  We can bend our knee before the Lord in a spirit of repentance or He will bend our knees through Chastisement which are an act of His mercy.

Under Francis, the Catholic Church in decline

Life Site News reports:

"The Catholic Church is seeing its biggest decline in Mass attendance in the U.S. in decades that started between the papacies of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, a new Gallup poll says.

'From 2014 to 2017, an average of 39% of Catholics reported attending church in the past seven days. This is down from an average of 45% from 2005 to 2008 and represents a steep decline from 75% in 1955,' the poll found.

Francis became Pope in 2013.

Weekly Mass attendance among Catholics dropped six percentage points, the findings said, with fewer than four in 10 Catholics going to Mass in any given week.

In contrast, the survey said church attendance remained strong over the last decade with U.S. Protestants."

The eclipse of the Church has been prophesied by Our Lady:

"Mélanie, what I am going to tell you now will not always be a secret; you can publish it in 1858...

Priests, my Son's ministers, priests, by their evil life, by their irreverences and their impiety in celebrating the holy mysteries, love of money, love of honor and pleasures, priests have become sewers of impurity. Yes, priests call forth vengeance, and vengeance is suspended over their heads. Woe to priests, and to persons consecrated to God, who by their infidelities and their evil life are crucifying my son anew! The sins of persons consecrated to God cry to heaven and call for vengeance, and now here is vengeance at their very doors, for no longer is anyone found to beg mercy and pardon for the people; there are no more generous souls, there is now no one worthy of offering the spotless Victim to the Eternal on the worlds behalf.

God will strike in an unparalleled manner. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth! God will exhaust His anger, and no one will be able to escape so many evils at once. The heads, the leaders of the people of God, have neglected prayer and penance, and the devil has darkened their minds; they have become those wandering stars which the ancient devil will drag with his tail to destruction. God will permit the ancient serpent to sow divisions among rulers, in all societies and in all families; both physical and moral punishments will be suffered. God will abandon men to themselves and will send chastisements one after the other for over 35 years.

Society is on the very eve of most terrible scourges and greatest events; one must expect to be governed by a rod of iron and to drink the chalice of God's wrath..."

- Our Lady to Melanie Calvat, La Salette France.


In his book Communism and the Conscience of the West, Archbishop Fulton John Sheen warned that, "He [Satan] will set up a counterchurch which will be the ape of the Church, because he, the Devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the Mystical Body of Christ...Then will be verified a paradox - the very objections with which men in the last century rejected the Church will be the reasons why they will now accept the counterchurch." (pp. 24-25).

Even now, many are working to subvert the Catholic Church from within. Pastors who have been seduced by the spirit of Antichrist and who have fallen into hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) apostasy. As Michael Brown has noted in his book The Trumpet of Gabriel, "The spirit of anti-christ precedes the physical Antichrist. The spiritual battle precedes the physical one.." (p. 218).

Our Lady told Father Bobbi:

"The great trial has come for the Church, so violated by the evil spirits, so divided in its unity, so darkened in its holiness. See how error has flooded throughout it, error which leads to the loss of the true faith. Apostasy is spreading everywhere...how many are those pastors who grope about in the mist, become speechless out of fear or compromise, and who no longer defend their flocks from the many rapacious wolves!...The faithful are being drawn in by the enticements of a world which has become pagan, or by the countless sects which are spreading more and more.


The hour its great trial has above all come for the Church, because it will be shaken by the lack of faith, obscured by apostasy, wounded by betrayal, abandoned by its children, divided by schisms, possessed and dominated by Freemasonry, turned into fertile soil from which will spring up the wicked tree of the man of iniquity, the Antichrist, who will bring his kingdom into its interior." (Our Lady to Father Stefano Gobbi, January 1, 1993, Rubbio (Vicenza, Italy).

The Spirit of Lawlessness is upon us..

"The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the 'intrinsically perverse' political form of a secular messianism." Catechism of the Catholic Church, 676.

Signs:

Vienna -
"Whizz-kid", "Basti Fantasti" and "Messiah" are just some of the monikers given to Austrian conservative Sebastian Kurz, set to become the world's youngest leader at just 31.

His People's Party (OeVP), revamped by Kurz as a more hardline "movement", agreed late on Friday a coalition deal with the far-right that will see him sworn in as chancellor next week."

Pope Benedict XVI warned, before stepping aside for Francis, that we are entering a profound period of testing. Indeed we are.  Pray for the Church.  Now is the time of diabolical disorientation.

It was Tacitus who proclaimed, "O man, how prompt to slavery."  And waiting in the wings is a Lawless One who will rule over such men.  The Christian message will not be tolerated.  He will strive to stamp it out altogether.  He will seek to eradicate any expression of Christian thought or prayer.  He will outlaw the Holy Mass.  And then he will demand worship of himself.

Now the spirit of lawlessness is covering the earth.  Now is the time of testing

The Bishops of Malta depart from the Faith...

As this EWTN article makes clear:

"In "Concerning the Reception of Holy Communion by Divorced-and-Remarried Members of the Faithful" the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in a letter to the world's bishops on October 14, 1994 said,

7. The mistaken conviction of a divorced-and-remarried person that he may receive holy communion normally presupposes that personal conscience is considered in the final analysis to be able, on the basis of one's own convictions, to come to a decision about the existence or absence of a previous marriage and the value of the new union. However, such a position is inadmissible. Marriage, in fact, both because it is the image of the spousal relationship between Christ and his church as well as the fundamental core and an important factor in the life of civil society, is  essentially a public reality. [/library/curia/cdfdivor.txt]

By this document the Holy See affirmed the continuous theology and discipline of the Catholic Church that those who are divorced and remarried without a Decree of Nullity for the first marriage (whether that marriage was made within or outside the Catholic Church) are in an objectively adulterous union that prevents them from honestly repenting, receiving absolution for their their sins, and receiving Holy Communion. Until the marital irregularity is resolved by a Marriage Tribunal, or other procedures which apply to marriages of the non-baptized, they may not approach Penance or Holy Communion. As Pope John Paul II pointed out in Reconciliation and Penance, the Church desires such couples to participate in the Church's life to the extent possible (and this participation in Mass, Eucharistic adoration, devotions and so on is a great spiritual help to them), as they work toward full sacramental participation."

The Bishops of Malta, inspired no doubt by Francis, have rejected this perennial teaching of Holy Mother Church founded on the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.

They have just declared that:


"With 'an informed and enlightened conscience,' a separated or divorced person living in a new relationship who is able 'to acknowledge and believe that he or she is at peace with God,' the bishops said, 'cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist.'"

For the Bishops of Malta, the teaching of Christ Jesus is something irrelevant.  Relegated to the garbage basket as well is the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that the Eucharist is properly the Sacrament of those who are in full communion with the Catholic Church (CCC, 1395).

But when you've made yourself your own God, the Commandments of the Lord Jesus are easily disposed of.

The Cult of Softness and the "Francis effect"

We need priests and Bishops who fear God more than they do men.  Cowards will not lead us out of the valley of death.  Neither will homosexual or effeminate clerics who cannot relate to men.

Only shepherds who have the spiritual strength, the Cardinal Gift of Fortitude, to brave the risk of worldly criticism, will be able to lead the Catholic Church out of the valley of the Culture of Death and back on the road to the Civilization of Love which Pope John Paul II spoke of so often.

Why have so many priests succumbed to fear?  Why is it that their preaching no longer points out sin?  Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange provides us with an answer:

"The reason for this is not difficult to find.  A sermon is the result of the combined effort of all the priest's powers; it reveals his entire person; it is his struggle against the vices of the surrounding world."  In other words, if the preaching is unsound, it is because the priest's spiritual life is unsound.  Fr. Lagrange continues, "Everything in the priest cooperates in his preaching - study, reflection, his powers to compose and revise, the activity of his intellect, his imagination, his memory, his feelings, his voice.  Therefore, when he preaches, the priest stands exposed for all to study; some will be attracted, others will not.  Some will accept what he says, others will simply criticize.  So if the priest approaches his task from the human angle, he will say to himself: 'I cannot afford to lose my reputation; people of weight in the parish who take offense easily must be spared their feelings and not provoked; I must proceed warily so as not to incur criticism.'  In that way Christian eloquence is invaded by a profane eloquence in which the preacher looks after his own interests, not the glory of God or the saving of souls." (The Priest In Union With Christ, p. 156).

The Cult of Softness (see here) continues to produce only rot within the Church.

The New York Times has confirmed what devout Catholics already know, that the "Francis effect" is a myth:

"...are Catholics actually coming back? In the United States, at least, it hasn’t happened. New survey findings from Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate suggest that there has been no Francis effect — at least, no positive one.

In 2008, 23 percent of American Catholics attended Mass each week. Eight years later, weekly Mass attendance has held steady or marginally declined, at 22 percent.

Of course, the United States is only one part of a global church. But the researchers at Georgetown found that certain types of religious observance are weaker now among young Catholics than they were under Benedict. 

In 2008, 50 percent of millennials reported receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday, and 46 percent said they made some sacrifice beyond abstaining from meat on Fridays. This year, only 41 percent reported receiving ashes and only 36 percent said they made an extra sacrifice, according to CARA. 

In spite of Francis’ personal popularity, young people seem to be drifting away from the faith."

Young people are naturally idealistic. They want to be challenged.  They need to be challenged with the hard demands of the Gospel, with the truth.

But Francis offers only a non-dogmatic, Cotton-Candy Catholicism.  A sacharrin "gospel" which appeals to worldly types but which is short on substance.  And while more and more youth are abandoning the Church, rather than placing an emphasis on doctrinal truths, Francis offers unsound teaching and meets with people like Simon Cazal, a homosexual activist who claims to be married to another man while demanding that the Church founded by Christ Jesus change its teaching on homosexuality to accommodate the New Sodom.  See here.

The Cult of Softness has failed.  But Francis cannot steel himself to admit this.  He has succumbed to an alien ideology.  He has decided to genuflect before the spirit of Sodom while this demonic spirit continues to wreak havoc within an already devastated vineyard.  See here.

Father Peter Naranjo, Saint Mary's Church in Orange, Massachusetts on Twitter:

Obama defends the terrorists...

World Net Daily is reporting:

Barack Obama is being blasted for comments on why he avoids using terms such as “radical Islamic terrorism,” with one prominent voice saying the president sounds like a defense lawyer for the attackers.

“There’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam,'” the president said Tuesday during remarks at the Treasury Department. “It’s a political talking point, not a strategy.”

He continued: “What exactly would using this language accomplish? What exactly would it change?”

“Would it make ISIL (ISIS) less committed to try and kill Americans?”

“Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above,” he said. “Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”

In response, top-rated radio host Rush Limbaugh said, “It sounds to me like it’s the way defense lawyers talk. You know, when there’s a suspect, you got a defense lawyer saying, ‘Well, there’s no conclusive evidence here. We’re still looking for a motive. We haven’t found the right motive.’ Obama comes out after every one of these things, every one of these events, and Obama ends up sounding like defense lawyers speak on behalf of their clients. He doesn’t reflect the national mood about these things. It’s not even close.”

“As far as he’s concerned, they’re just a bunch of ‘militants’ that got hold of some guns, as in Fast and Furious,” Limbaugh added.

“In his world, there’s nothing that sets these people apart from any other band of bad guys or criminals. And that’s how he talks about them, and that’s what makes me suspicious. There’s clearly a difference. These people announce their intentions, they announce their objectives, and then they go fulfill them.”

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton share this in common: both live in a fantasy world where Islam is a religion of peace and good will and acts of terrorism are the result of internet propaganda and a gun culture rather than the hate-filled venom found in the Qu'ran or Islamic fundamentalism.

 

 

 

As I noted in a previous post, in his book entitled Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, Pope Benedict XVI makes a few observations which some Catholics would apparently find problematic. The Holy Father writes, "To what extent the new surge forward of the Islamic world is fuelled by truly religious forces is..open to question. In many places, as we can see, there is the danger of a pathological development of the autonomy of feeling.." (p. 104).



On page 204 of the same book, Pope Benedict XVI writes, "...even with Islam, with all the greatness it represents, is always in danger of losing balance, letting violence have a place and letting religion slide away into mere outward observance and ritualism."

Lee Harris, in his important book entitled The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West, notes how Islam's fanatical intolerance isn't limited to the Taliban or groups which openly call for Jihad. He writes, "Another example of the persistence of the fanatical intolerance of Muslims came to the world's attention in the same year as the cartoon riots. A Muslim in Afghanistan had converted to Christianity - the same Afghanistan that the United States had liberated from the fanaticism of the Taliban. But fanatical intolerance in Afghanistan clearly did not require an organization like the Taliban to keep it alive. Here again, it sprang up quite spontaneously from the religious and learned mullahs and from the bulk of the people. Islamic law demands that an apostate from Islam should be executed, and there were cries for blood that again took the form of riots and outrageous pronouncements from Muslim clerics, one of whom urged that the apostate be torn limb from limb by the people themselves. Fortunately, due to pressure from the West, the man was flown out of Afghanistan to sanctuary in Italy." (p. 210).

Hilaire Belloc wrote in The Great Heresies, "Mohammedanism...began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. It vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing. It differed from most (not from all) heresies in this, that it did not arise within the bounds of the Christian Church. The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel_which inspired his convictions. He came of, and mixed with, the degraded idolaters of the Arabian wilderness, the conquest of which had never seemed worth the Romans' while.

He took over very few of those old pagan ideas which might have been native to him from his descent. On the contrary, he preached and insisted upon a whole group of ideas which were peculiar to the Catholic Church and distinguished it from the paganism which it had conquered in the Greek and Roman civilization. Thus the very foundation of his teaching was that prime Catholic doctrine, the unity and omnipotence of God. The attributes of God he also took over in the main from Catholic doctrine: the personal nature, the all-goodness, the timelessness, the providence of God, His creative power as the origin of all things, and His sustenance of
all things by His power alone. The world of good spirits and angels and of evil spirits in rebellion against God was a part of the teaching, with a chief evil spirit, such as Christendom had recognized. Mohammed preached with insistence that prime Catholic doctrine, on the human side the immortality of the soul and its responsibility for actions in this life, coupled with the consequent doctrine of punishment and reward after death.

If anyone sets down those points that orthodox Catholicism has in common with Mohammedanism, and those points only, one might imagine if one went no further that there should have been no cause of quarrel. Mohammed would almost seem in this aspect to be a sort of missionary, preaching and spreading by the energy of his character the chief and fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Church among those who had hitherto been degraded pagans of the Desert. He gave to Our Lord the highest reverence, and to Our Lady also, for that matter. On the day of judgment (another Catholic idea which he taught) it was Our Lord, according to Mohammed, who would be the judge of mankind, not he, Mohammed. The Mother of Christ, Our Lady, "the Lady Miriam" was ever for him the first of womankind. His followers even got from the early fathers some vague hint of her Immaculate Conception.

But the central point where this new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full denial of the Incarnation. Mohammed did not merely take the first steps toward that denial, as the Arians and their followers had done; he advanced a clear affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether.

With that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure. He refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with its Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of the Mass, and therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many
other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification.

Catholic doctrine was true (he seemed to say), but it had become encumbered with false accretions; it had become complicated by needless man-made additions, including the idea that its founder was Divine, and the growth of a parasitical caste of priests who battened on a late, imagined, system of Sacraments which they alone could administer. All those corrupt accretions must be swept away.

There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same. As we all know, the new teaching relaxed the marriage laws but in practice this did not affect the mass of his followers who still remained monogamous. It made divorce as easy as possible, for the sacramental idea of marriage disappeared. It insisted upon the equality of men, and it necessarily had that further factor in which it resembled Calvinism the sense of predestination, the sense of fate; of what the followers of John Knox were always calling 'the immutable decrees of God.' Mohammed's teaching never developed among the mass of his followers, or in his own mind, a detailed theology. He was content to accept all that appealed to him in the Catholic scheme and to reject all that seemed to him, and to so many others of his time, too complicated or mysterious to be true."

Islam is useful to those who wish to promote a humanitarian religion in which Christ is regarded merely as a man. The Incarnation must be rejected, the God-Man must be replaced by the man-God. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen warned:
"A common spirit will eventually bind all atheists together to produce the man-god, as there is a common spirit which unites those who live by Christ....The mere denial of God is not emptiness and a negation but the affirmation of man as God. It does not take a gift of prophecy to see that humanity is presently polarizing and that all men are beginning to fall into the ranks of accepting either the man-god or the God-Man." Much of the liberal mainstream media has a real hatred for the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. They view Christianity as no longer fit for "modern man," as a religion which must be purged of its dogmas and made to fit with a new order.

The Holy Spirit teaches us through the Apostle John that, "This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist that, as you heard, is to come, but in fact is already in the world." (1 John 4: 2-3).

And that dark spirit is growing daily.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton exemplify this dark spirit.

Embracing a perversion of Christian doctrine and a manifestation of Antichrist

Islamic propaganda in public schools, statues are covered in Rome so as not to offend Hassan Rouhani , Robert Spencer's invitation to speak at the "Catholic" Men's Conference in Worcester, Massachusetts is rescinded.

Hilaire Belloc wrote in The Great Heresies, "Mohammedanism...began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. It vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing. It differed from most (not from all) heresies in this, that it did not arise within the bounds of the Christian Church. The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel_which inspired his convictions. He came of, and mixed with, the degraded idolaters of the Arabian wilderness, the conquest of which had never seemed worth the Romans' while.

He took over very few of those old pagan ideas which might have been native to him from his descent. On the contrary, he preached and insisted upon a whole group of ideas which were peculiar to the Catholic Church and distinguished it from the paganism which it had conquered in the Greek and Roman civilization. Thus the very foundation of his teaching was that prime Catholic doctrine, the unity and omnipotence of God. The attributes of God he also took over in the main from Catholic doctrine: the personal nature, the all-goodness, the timelessness, the providence of God, His creative power as the origin of all things, and His sustenance of
all things by His power alone. The world of good spirits and angels and of evil spirits in rebellion against God was a part of the teaching, with a chief evil spirit, such as Christendom had recognized. Mohammed preached with insistence that prime Catholic doctrine, on the human side the immortality of the soul and its responsibility for actions in this life, coupled with the consequent doctrine of punishment and reward after death.

If anyone sets down those points that orthodox Catholicism has in common with Mohammedanism, and those points only, one might imagine if one went no further that there should have been no cause of quarrel. Mohammed would almost seem in this aspect to be a sort of missionary, preaching and spreading by the energy of his character the chief and fundamental
doctrines of the Catholic Church among those who had hitherto been degraded pagans of the Desert. He gave to Our Lord the highest reverence, and to Our Lady also, for that matter. On the day of judgment (another Catholic idea which he taught) it was Our Lord, according to Mohammed, who would be the judge of mankind, not he, Mohammed. The Mother of Christ, Our Lady, "the Lady Miriam" was ever for him the first of womankind. His followers even got from the early fathers some vague hint of her Immaculate Conception.

But the central point where this new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full denial of the Incarnation. Mohammed did not merely take the first steps toward that denial, as the Arians and their followers had done; he advanced a clear affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether.

With that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure. He refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with its Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of the Mass, and therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many
other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification.

Catholic doctrine was true (he seemed to say), but it had become encumbered with false accretions; it had become complicated by needless man-made additions, including the idea that its founder was Divine, and the growth of a parasitical caste of priests who battened on a late, imagined, system of Sacraments which they alone could administer. All those corrupt accretions must be swept away.

There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same. As we all know, the new teaching relaxed the marriage laws but in practice this did not affect the mass of
his followers who still remained monogamous. It made divorce as easy as possible, for the sacramental idea of marriage disappeared. It insisted upon the equality of men, and it necessarily had that further factor in which it resembled Calvinism the sense of predestination, the sense of fate; of what the followers of John Knox were always calling 'the
immutable decrees of God.' Mohammed's teaching never developed among the mass of his
followers, or in his own mind, a detailed theology. He was content to accept all that appealed to him in the Catholic scheme and to reject all that seemed to him, and to so many others of his time, too complicated or mysterious to be true."

Islam is useful to those who wish to promote a humanitarian religion in which Christ is regarded merely as a man. The Incarnation must be rejected, the God-Man must be replaced by the man-God. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen warned:

"A common spirit will eventually bind all atheists together to produce the man-god, as there is a common spirit which unites those who live by Christ....The mere denial of God is not emptiness and a negation but the affirmation of man as God. It does not take a gift of prophecy to see that humanity is presently polarizing and that all men are beginning to fall into the ranks of accepting either the man-god or the God-Man." Much of the liberal mainstream media has a real hatred for the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. They view Christianity as no longer fit for "modern man," as a religion which must be purged of its dogmas and made to fit with a new order.

The Holy Spirit teaches us through the Apostle John that, "This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist that, as you heard, is to come, but in fact is already in the world." (1 John 4: 2-3).

And that dark spirit is growing daily.

Islam is a manifestation of Antichrist

On June 17, 1989, in Milan, Father Stefano Gobbi was given an explanation regarding the number of the beast: 666. Our Lady said, "Lucifer, the ancient serpent, the devil or satan, the red dragon, becomes, in these last times, the antichrist. The Apostle John already affirmed that whoever denies Jesus Christ is God, that person is the antichrist. The statue or idol, built in honor of the beast to be adored by all men, is the antichrist.  

"Calculate now its number 666, to understand how it indicates the name of man. The number, 333, indicates the divinity. Lucifer rebels against God through pride, because he wants to put himself above God. 333 is the number which indicates the mystery of God. He who wants to put himself above God bears the sign, 666, and consequently this number indicates the name of lucifer, satan, that is to say, of him who, sets himself against Christ, of the antichrist.  "333 indicated once, that is to say, for the first time, expresses the mystery of the unity of God. 333 indicated twice, that is to say, for the second time, indicates the two natures, that of the Divine Person of Jesus Christ. 333 indicated thrice, that is to say, for the third time, indicates the mystery of the Three Divine Persons, that is to say, it expresses they mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Thus the number, 333, expressed one, two and three times, expresses the principal mysteries of the Catholic faith, which are: (1) the Unity and the Trinity of God, (2) the incarnation, the passion and death, the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  If 333 is the number which indicates the Divinity, he who wants to put himself above God himself is referred to by the number 666. 666 indicated once, that is to say, for the first time, expresses the year 666, six hundred and sixty-six. In this period of history, the antichrist manifested through the phenomenon of Islam, which denies the mystery of the Divine Trinity and the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Islamism, with its military force, breaks loose everywhere, destroying all the ancient Christian communities, and invades Europe and it is only through my extraordinary motherly intervention, begged for powerfully by the Holy Father, that it does not succeed in destroying Christianity completely.

 "666 indicated twice, that is to say, for the second time, expresses the year 1332, thirteen hundred and thirty two in this period of history, the antichrist is manifested through a radical attack on the faith in the word (Parola) of God. Through the philosophers who begin to give exclusive value to science and then to reason, there is a gradual tendency to constitute human intelligence alone as the sole criterion of truth. There come to birth the great philosophical errors which continue through the centuries down to your days. The exaggerated importance given to reason, as an exclusive criterion of truth, necessarily leads to the destruction of faith in the Word (Parola) of God. Indeed, with the Protestant Reformation, Tradition is rejected as a source of Divine Revelation, and only Sacred Scripture accepted. But even this must be interpreted by means of the reason, and the authentic Magisterium of the herarchic Church, to which Christ has entrusted the guardianship of the deposit of faith, is obstinately rejected. Each one is free to read and to understand Sacred Scripture according to one's personal interpretation. In this way, faith in the Word (Parola) of God is destroyed. The work of the antichrist, in this period of history, is the division of the Church and the consequent formation of new and numerous Christian confessions which gradually become driven to a more and more extensive loss of the true faith in the Word (Parola) of God.

"666 indicated thrice, that is to say, for the third time, expresses the year 1998, nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. In this period of history, Freemasonry, assisted by its ecclesiastical form, will succeed in its great design; that of setting up an idol to put in the place of Christ and of His Church. A false christ and a false church. Consequently, the statue built in honor of the first beast, to be adored by all the inhabitants of the earth and which will seal with its mark all those who want to buy or sell, is that of the antichrist. You have thus arrived at the peak of the purification, of the great tribulation and of the apostasy. The apostasy will be, as of then, generalized because almost all will follow the false christ and false church. Then the door will be open for the appearance of the man or of the very person of the antichrist.   "That is why, beloved children, I have wanted to enlighten you concerning the pages of the Apocalypse which refer to the times you are living through. This is to prepare you with me, for the most painful and decisive part of the great struggle which is on the point of being fought out between your Heavenly Mother and all the forces of evil have been let loose.  "Take courage! Be strong, my little children. To you befalls the duty, in these difficult years, of remaining faithful to Christ and to His Church, putting up with hostility, struggle and persecution. But you are a precious part of the little flock, which has the task of fighting against, and in the end of conquering, the powerful force of the antichrist. I am forming you all, defending you and blessing you." (To The Priests: Our Lady's Beloved Sons, Message 407).

Whoever denies that Jesus is God is of Antichrist.  Bearing that in mind, let's look at what Dr. Mark Durie has to say about the Muslim "Jesus":

The Muslim ‘Isa (Jesus)

There are two main sources for ‘Isa, the Muslim Jesus. The Qur’an gives a history of his life, whilst the Hadith collections — recollections of Muhammad’s words and deeds — establish his place in the Muslim understanding of the future.

 

The Qur’an

‘Isa, was a prophet of Islam

Jesus’ true name, according to the Qur’an, was ‘Isa. His message was pure Islam, surrender to Allah. (Âl 'Imran 3:84) Like all the Muslim prophets before him, and like Muhammad after him, ‘Isa was a lawgiver, and Christians should submit to his law. (Âl 'Imran 3:50; Al-Ma’idah 5:48) ‘Isa’s original disciples were also true Muslims, for they said ‘We believe. Bear witness that we have surrendered. We are Muslims.’ (Al-Ma’idah 5:111)

 

‘The Books’

Like other messengers of Islam before him, ‘Isa received his revelation of Islam in the form of a book. (Al-An’am 6:90) ‘Isa’s book is called the Injil or ‘gospel’. (Al-Ma’idah 5:46) The Torah was Moses’ book, and the Zabur (Psalms) were David’s book. So Jews and Christians are ‘people of the Book’. The one religion revealed in these books was Islam. (Âl 'Imran 3:18)

 

As with previous prophets, ‘Isa’s revelation verified previous prophets’ revelations. (Âl 'Imran 3:49,84; Al-Ma’idah 5:46; As-Saff 61:6) Muhammad himself verified all previous revelations, including the revelation to ‘Isa (An-Nisa’ 4:47), and so Muslims must believe in the revelation which ‘Isa received. (Al-Baqarah 2:136) However, after ‘Isa the Injil was lost in its original form. Today the Qur’an is the only sure guide to ‘Isa’s teaching.

 

The biography of ‘Isa

According to the Qur’an, ‘Isa was the Messiah. He was supported by the ‘Holy Spirit’. (Al-Baqarah 2:87; Al-Ma’idah 5:110) He is also referred to as the ‘Word of Allah’. (An-Nisa’ 4:171)

 

‘Isa’s mother Mariam was the daughter of ‘Imran, (Âl 'Imran 3:34,35) — cf the Amram of Exodus 6:20 — and the sister of Aaron (and Moses). (Maryam 19:28) She was fostered by Zachariah (father of John the Baptist). (Âl 'Imran 3:36) While still a virgin (Al-An’am 6:12; Maryam 19:19-21) Mariam gave birth to ‘Isa alone in a desolate place under a date palm tree. (Maryam 19:22ff) (Not in Bethlehem).

 

‘Isa spoke whilst still a baby in his cradle. (Âl 'Imran 3:46; Al-Ma’idah 5:110; Maryam 19:30) He performed various other miracles, including breathing life into clay birds, healing the blind and lepers, and raising the dead. (Âl 'Imran 3:49; Al-Ma’idah 5:111) He also foretold the coming of Muhammad. (As-Saff 61:6)

 

‘Isa did not die on a cross

Christians and Jews have corrupted their scriptures. (Âl 'Imran 3:74-77, 113) Although Christians believe ‘Isa died on a cross, and Jews claim they killed him, in reality he was not killed or crucified, and those who said he was crucified lied (An-Nisa’ 4:157). ‘Isa did not die, but ascended to Allah. (An-Nisa’ 4:158) On the day of Resurrection ‘Isa himself will be a witness against Jews and Christians for believing in his death. (An-Nisa’ 4:159)

 

Christians should accept Islam, and all true Christians will

 

Christians (and Jews) could not be freed from their ignorance until Muhammad came bringing the Qur’an as clear evidence (Al-Bayyinah 98:1). Muhammad was Allah’s gift to Christians to correct misunderstandings. They should accept Muhammad as Allah’s Messenger, and the Qur’an as his final revelation. (Al-Ma’idah 5:15; Al-Hadid 57:28; An-Nisa’ 4:47)

 

Some Christians and Jews are faithful and believe truly. (Âl 'Imran 3:113,114) Any such true believers will submit to Allah by accepting Muhammad as the prophet of Islam, i.e. they will become Muslims. (Âl 'Imran 3:198)

 

Although Jews and pagans will have the greatest enmity against Muslims, it is the Christians who will be ‘nearest in love to the believers’, i.e. to Muslims. (Al-Ma’idah 5:82) True Christians will not love Muhammad’s enemies. (Al-Mujadilah 58:22) In other words, anyone who opposes Muhammad is not a true Christian.

 

Christians who accept Islam or refuse it

 

Some Jews and Christians are true believers, accepting Islam: most are transgressors. (Âl 'Imran 3:109)

Many monks and rabbis are greedy for wealth and prevent people from coming to Allah. (At-Taubah 9:34,35)

Christians and Jews who disbelieve in Muhammad will go to hell. (Al-Bayyinah 98:6)

 

Muslims should not take Christians or Jews for friends. (Al-Ma’idah 5:51) They must fight against Christians and Jews who refuse Islam until they surrender, pay the poll-tax and are humiliated. (At-Taubah 9:29) To this may be added hundreds of Qur’anic verses on the subject of jihad in the path of Allah, as well as the ‘Book of Jihad’ found in all Hadith collections.

 

Christian beliefs

 

Christians are commanded not to believe that ‘Isa is the son of God: ‘It is far removed from his transcendent majesty that he should have a son’. (An-Nisa’ 4:171; Al-Furqan 25:2) ‘Isa was simply a created human being, and a slave of Allah. (An-Nisa’ 4:172; Âl 'Imran 3:59)

Christians are claimed by the Qur’an to believe in a family of gods — Father God, mother Mary and ‘Isa the son — but ‘Isa rejected this teaching. (Al-Ma’idah 5:116) The doctrine of the Trinity is disbelief and a painful doom awaits those who believe it. (Al-Ma’idah 5:73)

 

‘Isa (Jesus) in the Hadith

‘Isa the destroyer of Christianity

 

The prophet ‘Isa will have an important role in the end times, establishing Islam and making war until he destroys all religions save Islam. He shall kill the Evil One (Dajjal), an apocalyptic anti-Christ figure.

 

In one tradition of Muhammad we read that no further prophets will come to earth until ‘Isa returns as ‘a man of medium height, or reddish complexion, wearing two light garments, looking as if drops were falling down from his head although it will not be wet. He will fight for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill pigs, and abolish the poll-tax. Allah will destroy all religions except Islam. He (‘Isa) will destroy the Evil One and will live on the earth for forty years and then he will die’. (Sunan Abu Dawud, 37:4310) The Sahih Muslim has a variant of this tradition: ‘The son of Mary ... will soon descend among you as a just judge. He will ... abolish the poll-tax, and the wealth will pour forth to such an extent that no one will accept charitable gifts.’ (Sahih Muslim 287)

 

What do these sayings mean? The cross is a symbol of Christianity. Breaking crosses means abolishing Christianity. Pigs are associated with Christians. Killing them is another way of speaking of the destruction of Christianity. Under Islamic law the poll-tax buys the protection of the lives and property of conquered ‘people of the Book’. (At-Taubah 9:29) The abolition of the poll-tax means jihad is restarted against Christians (and Jews) living under Islam, who should convert to Islam, or else be killed or enslaved. The abundance of wealth refers to booty flowing to the Muslims from this conquest. This is what the Muslim ‘Isa will do when he returns in the last days.

Muslim jurists confirm these interpretations: consider, for example, the ruling of Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368).

 

"... the time and the place for [the poll tax] is before the final descent of Jesus (upon whom be peace). After his final coming, nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus' descent (upon him and our Prophet be peace) ..." (The Reliance of the Traveller. Trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, p. 603).

Ibn Naqib goes on to state that when Jesus returns, he will rule ‘as a follower’ of Muhammad.


Related reading here.

The Grammys: Theater of Antichrist

In his excellent and prophetic book Trousered Apes, Professor Duncan Williams documented extensively the banishment of God from society in the West and said that as a result, "the Western world and its culture is saturated with violence and animalism....We are teaching savagery and are naively appalled at the success of our instruction."

Professor Williams continues, "What shocks an audience today will be acceptable tomorrow and thus the contemporary dramatist [or reality show producer, my note] is constantly impelled to seek further excesses to gratify a warped taste which he has himself implanted in the public mind....The whole modern cult of violence and animalism is in essence an admission of defeat.  Since we cannot be men to any idealistic extent, let us lapse into barbaric animalism but, still clinging to vestiges of a past which we hate but cannot escape, let us clothe our defeat in high-sounding terms: 'alienation,' 'cult of unpleasure,' 'realism,' and similar jargon.  Yet all this fashionable phraseology cannot conceal the fact that the Emperor has no clothes....The contemporary playwright or producer might well take as his motto, Apres moi, la secheresse (After me, the drought), and congratulate himself that he is writing before a morbid public appetite demands scenes of such repellent realism that actors and actresses will have to be killed on stage in order to satisfy it."

Welcome to the Theater of Lust, the Theater of Violence, the Theater of Antichrist.  At the Grammys last week, we witnessed a celebration of post-Christian savage "entertainment" produced by those who have accepted and even embraced the spirit of Antichrist.

The program featured a scantily-clad "witch" surrounded by demons in one set and a "gay marriage" ceremony.  The two acts were really consistent as the moral breakdown of America is coinciding with the homosexual juggernaut.  As Father Vincent Miceli explains in his work The Antichrist, "Dr. Abram Kardiner, distinguished physician, psychoanalyst, and anthropologist, states that homosexuality reaches pestilential and plague proportions in morally rotting societies during the final stages of total collapse. The cult of softness is perhaps the most pronounced public phenomenon among nations today. It is certainly responsible for the rotting of the moral fibre of Western Civilization not only in sex but also, in the erosion of Christian truth, in education, in art and in letters, in the repudiation of personal responsibility and in the increasing tendency to side with the forces of crime against the forces of law and order." (The Antichrist, p. 237).

The Reign of Antichrist will witness a celebration of sin and perversion the likes of which few can imagine. Pleasure is the new principle par excellence. If pleasure can justify homosexual behavior (and increasingly that is what our sin-sick society is saying), then other deviant forms of sexual activity which are viewed as pleasurable by some will also be logically justified. This will include pedophilia, pederasty, ephebophilia, gerontophilia, necrophilia, sadism, masochism and bestiality.

Father Pascal Huchede writes, "...how shall he [Antichrist] deprive the world of Christianity and have himself adored as God? Alas, it is only too true that the minds and hearts of men are admirably disposed for revolution and consequently ready to accept and bear the cruel yoke of such a tyrant..." And then, after noting that men will abandon the reasonable and supernatural religion of Jesus Christ to worship the demon, Fr. Huchede adds, "What frightful immorality must follow in the train of this shameless prostitution of religion! Never has the threefold concupiscence made greater ravage among mankind. And this is the religion sought and hoped for as the cherished boon of the aspirations of our modern free thinkers." (History of Antichrist, pp. 13-14).

Where is the outrage?  Just a few short years ago, priests and ministers across the country would have been speaking out against what has become a tidal wave of filth, immorality and the satanic.

Infected by a self-centered spirit and a silly parochialism, some who claim to be Catholic persecute the Children of Mary

In the latter times right up to the Reign of Antichrist, the enmity between the children of Mary and the children of the Devil will intensify. St. Louis de Montfort: "Mary must become as terrible as an army in battle array to the devil and his followers, especially in these latter times. For Satan, knowing that he has little time - even less now than ever - to destroy souls, intensifies his efforts and his onslaughts every day. He will not hesitate to stir up savage persecutions and set treacherous snares for Mary's faithful servants and children whom he finds more difficult to overcome than others.

It is chiefly in reference to these last wicked persecutions of the devil, daily increasing until the advent of the reign of anti-Christ, that we should understand that first and well-known prophecy and curse of God uttered against the serpent in the garden of paradise. It is opportune to explain it here for the glory of the Blessed Virgin, the salvation of her children and the confusion of the devil. 'I will place enmities between you and the woman, between your race and her race; she will crush your head and you will lie in wait for her heel' (Gen. 3:15).

God has established only one enmity - but it is an irreconcilable one - which will last and even go on increasing to the end of time. That enmity is between Mary, his worthy Mother, and the devil, between the children and the servants of the Blessed Virgin and the children and followers of Lucifer.

Thus the most fearful enemy that God has set up against the devil is Mary, his holy Mother. From the time of the earthly paradise, although she existed then only in his mind, he gave her such a hatred for his accursed enemy, such ingenuity in exposing the wickedness of the ancient serpent and such power to defeat, overthrow and crush this proud rebel, that Satan fears her not only more than angels and men but in a certain sense more than God himself. This does not mean that the anger, hatred and power of God are not infinitely greater than the Blessed Virgin's, since her attributes are limited. It simply means that Satan, being so proud, suffers infinitely more in being vanquished and punished by a lowly and humble servant of God, for her humility humiliates him more than the power of God. Moreover, God has given Mary such great power over the evil spirits that, as they have often been forced unwillingly to admit through the lips of possessed persons, they fear one of her pleadings for a soul more than the prayers of all the saints, and one of her threats more than all their other torments." True Devotion, Nos 50 - 52).

The Spotless Virgin, the Immaculata, has a special "ingenuity" in exposing the Devil's plans and tactics. Which is why the Devil often uses others - sometimes other Catholics - to try to influence us to abandon our devotion to Mary, or at least to water it down under the pretext that it is "excessive" or "harmful to ecumenism."

The Devil knows that those consecrated to the Immaculata will be protected in a special way in this time of Apostasy. Which is why he attacks their true devotion. Again St. Louis de Montfort: "Since Mary alone has crushed all heresies, as we are told by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (Office of B.V.M.), a devoted servant of hers will never fall into formal heresy or error, though critics may contest this. He may very well err materially, mistaking lies for truth or an evil spirit for a good one, but he will be less likely to do this than others. Sooner or later he will discover his error and will not go on stubbornly believing and maintaining what he mistakenly thought was the truth." (True Devotion, No. 167),

In other words, those who practice true devotion to Mary will be better disposed toward the truth and will receive special graces against error.

The Devil knows this. So he tries desperately to undermine such true devotion: "It's harmful to ecumenism," "It is excessive," "It is too pre-Vatican II," "It is Medeival." Don't you believe the lies. Consecrate yourself daily to the Immaculata. Pope John Paul II, in a General Audience of November 15, 1995, said that to honor Mary is to go to Jesus. How then can our devotion to Mary be said to be "excessive"? During the same General Audience, the Holy Father places "such as Lourdes, Fatima, Loreto, Pompei, Guadalupe and Czestochowa" [this list is not exhaustive]...are "a wonderful testimony to God's mercy, which reaches man through Mary's intercession.."

Yes the Devil knows this too well.  And so he persecutes the faithful servants of Mary (as opposed to those whose devotion to Mary is not authentic - see True Devotion to Mary, 188).  In my own parish, I cannot even participate in the Rosary without being attacked.  I am not permitted to participate in parish ministry.  I cannot even have a Mass said for my father.  St. Louis de Montfort explains, "...sinners continually hate and persecute the elect, openly and secretly.  The elect are a burden to them.  They despise them, criticize them, ridicule them, insult them,, rob them, deceive them, impoverish them, hunt them down and trample them into the dust; while they themselves are making fortunes, enjoying themselves, getting good positions for themselves, enriching themselves, rising to power and living in comfort." (True Devotion to Mary, 190).   Infected by a self-centered spirit and a silly parochialism, some within the Church would exclude those with a true marian devotion, decreeing thereby that there is not room for such within the Mystical Body of Christ.  And in so doing, they make themselves enemies of Christ Jesus Himself!

Saint Louis de Montfort's prophecy for our time

Some years ago, Fr. Vincent Miceli warned that:  "The West has divinized Security and Technocracy; the East, Science and Revolution. But in both camps atheistic humanism has become the State religion. And both of these systems of secular humanism eclipse the person, eliminate his freedom, deny his human-divine value and subject him to the tyranny of technological impersonalism. The alarming signs of the times testify to a fierce spirit of evil advancing everywhere. It is the spirit of rebellion against God and man. Hitherto the powers of government in each country, as yet relying on God and reason, were firm and vigorous enough to restrain this rebellion. But today many agnostic countries can barely contain that lawless spirit, while many others have actually legalized the principle of lawlessness itself, the principle of license masquerading as liberty.

We are reminded of St. Paul's warning to the Thessalonians. In the last days there will be an aweful, unparalleled outbreak of evil everywhere. This will be called the Great Apostasy. In the midst of this general falling away a certain Man of Sin, having the image of Satan and breathing hatred toward God and man, will appear. He will exercise frightening preternatural powers of destruction against the just. This Child of Perdition will be so special and singular an enemy of Christ that he will be called Antichrist. For just as types of Christ went before Jesus, heralding his coming, so shadows of Antichrist have already preceded him....

But compared to the final Antichrist all forerunners of him were so many mini-Antichrists. This Arch-Antichrist will orchestrate revolutions so expertly that the very framework of society will shatter into pieces under his wicked hand. In a stunningly evil way, he will knit together his totalitarian rule of heresy, sedition, revolution, schism, war - indeed of every evil movement - and hurl them effectively against the Church. Preceded by apostasy, conceived in apostasy, gestated in apostasy, born in apostasy, the Man of Sin will come to power through a General Apostasy. In other words, Antichrist could never have existed except for the decision of the majority of persons in East and West to apostatize from God and to join the forces of atheism.." (Essay entitled "Detente All Around: Prelude to Antichrist?").

Evil is indeed spreading everywhere. Men have grown weary of being men and are beginning to deny Christ more and more. Even in the Church, many are coming to accept homosexuality and abortion as good. Such persons, such enemies of Christ, may still use Christian jargon as they go through the motions of Christian worship, but at base they have opted for evil and radiate the spirit of Antichrist. More than a century ago, Cardinal John Henry Newman predicted the Desolate City which we find ourselves in today: "Surely there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ in a net, and preparing the way for a general apostasy from it..."

Our own time is a fulfillment of the prophecy issued by St. Louis de Montfort in his Prayer for Missionaries: "Tempus faciendi, Domine, dissipaverunt legem tuam: it is time to act, O Lord, they have rejected your law.  It is indeed time to fulfill your promise.  Your divine commandments are broken, your Gospel is thrown aside, torrents of iniquity flood the whole earth carrying away even your servants.  The whole land is desolate, ungodliness reigns supreme, your sanctuary is desecrated and the abomination of desolation has even contaminated the holy place.." (PM, 5).

In recent weeks, a Catholic priest who refused to distribute petitions against Washington's same-sex "marriage" law received a standing ovation from his congregation.  In the same city [Seattle], a "Pastoral Life Coordinator" also refused to circulate the petitions and this week is essentially calling for the legalization of homosexual unions as a matter of justice and equality.  And a prominent Catholic writer asserted that a homosexual man who lived with his male partner is his role model, is one of the Church's finest ornaments, and is "very likely" a saint.

In prophecy St. Montfort saw our troubled time, when so many souls - even those within the Church [if only in a bodily manner - see Lumen Gentium, 14] are deserting the Lord Jesus in their minds and hearts and assembling against Him. In his Prayer for Missionaries, the great marian saint writes: "Look, Lord God of hosts, the captains of war are forming companies, each with its full complement of soldiers; and potentates have recruited vast armies.  The ship owners have whole fleets at their disposal.  What a motley assembly of ungodly men!  Thieves, drunkards, and profligates gather together every day under the flimsiest pretexts in order to oppose you!  Blow a whistle, beat a drum, show the blunt point of a sword, promise a withered laurel branch as a reward, offer a piece of gold or silver; in short, a whiff of fame, a worthless reward, a vile beastly pleasure and, in the twinkling of an eye, along come the thieves, soldiers rally by batallions and merchants flock together.  Gambling dens and market places are crammed full and the whole of land and sea is covered with an innumerable multitude of reprobates.  These people, although at variance among themselves for reasons of distance, temperament or personal interest, are nevertheless all unanimously resolved to wage war to the death against you, under the banner and leadership of the devil." (PM, 27).

Today so many are selling out Christ and His Church as surely as Judas did for a worthless reward - for earthly fame, for what the world considers "power," or for material gain or for what Montfort referred to as "a vile beastly pleasure" - what so many today regard as "harmless fun and sex games."

A motley assembly is gathering, an unholy assembly which will form the Mystical Body of Antichrist in opposition to the Mystical Body of Christ.

President Barack Obama and the spirit of Antichrist

In his book "Wrath of God: The Days of the Antichrist," Fr. Livio Fanzaga, known as the "radio priest" in Italy, explains that, "Atheism is the religion of the future.  At its root, atheism is always a negation of God and every such negation presupposes His affirmation.  Rather than saying 'God does not exist,' a more sophisticated form of atheism will assert that 'Man is God, humanity is God, God is immanent in human history and in the lives of individuals.'  This is a form of religion which has assimilated the characteristics of a true religion.  Adore man and satisfy the religious needs present in every human heart.  Do not renounce the Kingdom of God, construct it, instead, on earth.  Just as the Catholic religion tries to unite all men under a supernatural principle represented in the person of the Vicar of Christ, so too, humanitarianism strives to unite all men and to conciliate all religions.  It seeks to institute universal peace by recognizing the supreme unifying authority of the Antichrist - perfect image of the immanent god in the world,  the man-god.  God did not become man.  The man-God is the savior of the world...Benson [Robert Hugh Benson] had greater foresight [than Feurbach and Marx].  At the turn of the century he clearly perceived that the crisis of faith will not be followed by the growth of atheism but by the rise of a new religion which deifies man...The new religion will have its own ministers of cult, its own rites and ceremonies, and its own books to celebrate those rites.  Churches and abbeys will be transformed into temples of the new religion of humanitarianism and the Mass will be displaced by the celebration of the new rites.  The statue of Christ will disappear and in its place the statue of 'man' will be raised up in the form of 'Apollo,' symbol of corporeal beauty and virility....While churches in which Christ is still adored and Our Lady honored will be empty, those of the new religion will be filled to capacity...Man will go to church to worship himself.  He will incense the altar of his own 'virility' and the statue of 'maternity' and 'continuous life.'  The crisis of faith is the crisis of the supernatural.  Man no longer believes in a God whom he cannot measure or control and who is different from him." (pp. 119-120).

Is there any real doubt that this new humanitarian religion is now rising?  The way of the new religion of the man-God is being prepared by agnostics, atheists, apostates, lovers of this world who have embraced hedonism and materialism and who have nothing but contempt for the true Church, her ministers, sacraments, devotions [especially those to Our Lady] and the lowly faithful who have consecrated themselves to the Immaculata.

As Catholics, we pray - in the Nicene Creed -  "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.."

All orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is the only Son of God and that, "There is no salvation in anyone else, for there is no other name in the whole world given to men by which we are to be saved." (Acts 4: 12).

But the world is being prepared to believe differently.  Many are now willing to abandon the only Son of God for the new religion which will proclaim the divinity of man.  President Obama, while speaking to a group of Christian clergy at the Easter Prayer Breakfast this past Wednesday, referred to Jesus not as the "only Son of God" but as "a son of God."  See here.  And he received applause from his audience.

What is this but the spirit of Antichrist?  In 1 John 4: 2-3, we read, "This is how you can recognize God's Spirit: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, while every spirit that fails to acknowledge him does not belong to God.  Such is the spirit of the antichrist which, as you have heard, is to come; in fact, it is in the world already."

Recommended reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 441-445.

St. Cecilia's "Rainbow Ministry" is not faithful to the spirit and teaching of the Church

Vatican II, in its Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (Apostolicam Actuositatem), explains that, "The hierarchy should promote the apostolate of the laity, provide it with spiritual principles and support, direct the conduct of this apostolate to the common good of the Church, and attend to the preservation of doctrine and order.

Indeed, the lay apostolate admits of different types of relationships with the hierarchy in accordance with the various forms and objects of this apostolate. For in the Church there are many apostolic undertakings which are established by the free choice of the laity and regulated by their prudent judgment. The mission of the Church can be better accomplished in certain circumstances by undertakings of this kind, and therefore they are frequently praised or recommended by the hierarchy. No project, however, may claim the name 'Catholic' unless it has obtained the consent of the lawful Church authority.

Certain forms of the apostolate of the laity are given explicit recognition by the hierarchy, though in various ways.

Because of the demands of the common good of the Church, moreover, ecclesiastical authority can select and promote in a particular way some of the apostolic associations and projects which have an immediately spiritual purpose, thereby assuming in them a special responsibility. Thus, making various dispositions of the apostolate according to circumstances, the hierarchy joins some particular form of it more closely with its own apostolic function. Yet the proper nature and distinctiveness of each apostolate must be preserved, and the laity must not be deprived of the possibility of acting on their own accord. In various Church documents this procedure of the hierarchy is called a mandate.

Finally, the hierarchy entrusts to the laity certain functions which are more closely connected with pastoral duties, such as the teaching of Christian doctrine, certain liturgical actions, and the care of souls. By virtue of this mission, the laity are fully subject to higher ecclesiastical control in the performance of this work.

As regards works and institutions in the temporal order, the role of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is to teach and authentically interpret the moral principles to be followed in temporal affairs. Furthermore, they have the right to judge, after careful consideration of all related matters and consultation with experts, whether or not such works and institutions conform to moral principles and the right to decide what is required for the protection and promotion of values of the supernatural order." (No. 24).

And in No. 25, this same document says that, "Special care should be taken to select priests who are capable of promoting particular forms of the apostolate of the laity and are properly trained. Those who are engaged in this ministry represent the hierarchy in their pastoral activity by virtue of the mission they receive from the hierarchy. Always adhering faithfully to the spirit and teaching of the Church, they should promote proper relations between laity and hierarchy."

Always adhering faithfully to the spirit and teaching of the Church, they should promote proper relations between laity and hierarchy.  Is St. Cecilia's "rainbow ministry"  faithful to this charge?  The Blog for this apostolate links directly to another Blog which states that people, "..ought to question Rome’s faulty assumptions and, indeed, Rome’s own 'objective disorders' which more often resemble a severely dysfunctional family than the Body of Christ. For centuries, Catholics were also taught to fear left-handed people as 'servants of the devil,' and the left-handed were burned at the stake along with faggots and heretics. (The word faggot, literally “burning bundle,” derives from these church burnings of gay men).  Now we know that homosexuality is no more 'disordered' or 'sinful' than left-handedness. Medical and scientific research strongly point to sexual orientation as determined at birth; that it’s nature over nurture for most people. Therefore, homosexual orientation, like left-handedness, is a Divinely created, normal variation within natural law. As such, gay people face the same moral challenges as everyone else."

This is not the teaching of the Church.  This is not the mind of Christ.  Furthermore, such an attitude is highly disrespectful of the Church's hierarchy.  This is most unfortunate.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing Canon 212 of the Code of Canon Law, says that, "In accord with the knowledge, competence, and preeminence which they possess, [lay people] have the right and even at times a duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church, and they have a right to make their opinion known to the other Christian faithful, with due regard to the integrity of faith and morals and reverence toward their pastors, and with consideration for the common good and the dignity of persons." (CCC, 907).

An apostolate which promotes homosexuality as a "Divinely created" normal variant of human sexuality is not demonstrating "due regard to the integrity of faith and morals."  An apostolate which promotes a website which refers to the Church's teaching as being imbued with "faulty assumptions" and which accuses the Teaching Church of "objective disorders" is not faithful to Catholic teaching and is not promoting proper relations between laity and hierarchy.

The "rainbow ministry" apostolate at St. Cecilia's Parish in Boston should be shut down immediately.

Extinguish not the spirit...

In 1 Thessalonians 5: 19-21, Saint Paul tells us, "Extinguish not the spirit. Despise not prophecies. But prove all things; hold fast that which is good." In that light, and considering the Gulf oil spill, let's reflect very carefully on a prophecy of Johannes Friede, an Austrian monk who died in 1257 AD:

"When the great time will come, in which mankind will face its last, hard trial, it will be foreshadowed by striking changes in nature; the alteration between cold and heat will become more intensive, storms will have more catastrophic effects, earthquakes will destroy greater regions and the seas will overflow many lowlands. Not all of it will be the result of natural causes, but man will penetrate into the bowels of the earth and will reach into the clouds, gambling with its own existence."


It was Father Albert J. Hebert who said, "Today, Jonah stands at the gates of Nineveh. Today, the angels leave Abraham and are on their way to destroy Sodom, Gomorrah and the other three cities of the plains, in the present Dead Sea area. Today, Noah and his sons patiently near the end of their building of the Ark, while the onlookers ridicule and mock them. But the clouds with the rains of the Deluge are on the way." Today, as in the days of Noah, there are scoffers who are anxious to ridicule the faithful remnant who issue the warning call: repent for a great chastisement is at hand. Jesus said it would be so. In Matthew 24: 37-41, Our Lord tells us, "As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two men will be in the field; one is taken and one is left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one is taken and one is left."

In the comments section of a previous post, one such scoffer wrote, "This website is a little negative for my taste. St Augustine also said: 'Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.' I feel for you Paul. It seems through your writing that you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. I'll pray for you so that you might write about something joyful soon, and that the thought illuminates the Christ within." To which I responded, "The truth is too negative for you Terry. I'm sorry to hear that. Let me assure you that I'm not carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I live a sacramental life and a joy-filled one in Christ Jesus. The only people who carry an unnecessary weight are those who refuse to repent of their sins. Perhaps you are simply living in denial?

Father Thomas Euteneuer, the President of Human Life International, has said, 'We’ve got a serious crisis on the horizon. I’m not a prophet of doom but I don’t see this going any other way but a serious political crisis that’s going to affect the globe. The only way we can avert a global collapse is by a moral conversion. Once again, we have to reverse the process. Just to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, is not a way to stop the collapse, the sinking of the Titanic. We have to turn back to God. And if people get fed up and just elect another political party that is just as bad as the previous political party, it does nothing to stem the global crisis that’s going to come upon us. What we need is a conversion of heart.'

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10010605.html

No need to feel for me Terry. Your time would be better spent praying for this sin-sick nation and for its conversion. In his time, Noah was considered 'too negative.' How did those people outside the Ark fare Terry?"

This is something we all need to reflect on. How did those outside the Ark fare? The Ark today is Holy Mother Church. The Ark today is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, our refuge. America is in turmoil because it has turned away from God. We need conversion of heart. A Tea Party will not save us. Neither will the Republican or Democratic parties.

Meditation: Acts 4:12.