Eleison Comments

After the first three chapters of the Book of Job set up the problem of apparently innocent souls suffering, in the next 34 chapters there emerged in a discussion between Job and four of his friends three solutions: Eliphaz, Baldad and Sophir said that suffering is always a punishment, Elihu said that it can also be a warning, Job himself said that it is an impenetrable mystery. But in the course of the discussion he had called in question more than once his Maker, by Whom his faith knew that the suffering had come upon him. And so while Job’s patience was admirable – “the Lord has given, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the Lord” (I, 21)– nevertheless it was not perfect. Job has given Almighty God questions to answer.

Here they are: why does God give life to souls longing bitterly for death (III, 20–21)? Why does He single out Job to maltreat him (X, 2–3)? Why does He hide His face from Job and treat him like an enemy (XIII, 23–24)? Why do those who know Him never see His days (XXIV, 1–2)? And finally, “Oh, that I had someone to hear me! (Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me (XXXI, 35)!) Job is a man “blameless and upright” (I, 1), but in his extreme suffering he is not above calling the Almighty to account. Job is clearly no plaster Saint, but a man of flesh and blood, with human reactions.

However, Almighty God does know Job’s virtue, and that it was only Job’s virtue that caused him to be so put to the trial by Satan, and so although He answers to nobody and need not give an answer to Job, nevertheless He will do so (XXXVIII-XLI), as soon as Job and his four friends have all had their say. Now God’s answer is not the answer that either Job or we ourselves might have expected, because the Lord God does not address any of Job’s questions directly. Instead He appeals to His own immeasurable majesty, infinitely above all merely human calculation, in some of the pages sublimest in all Scripture for His self-revelation, and which we would do well to keep by our side, until God’s own Chastisement puts an end to the Covid nonsense and to all the suffering that it will unleash.

“Alright, Job. You have questioned me. Now let me question you (XXXVIII, 2)! Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Have you ever commanded the morning, or appointed the dawn? Do you tie the constellations together, or loosen the bonds of Orion? Do you even know the laws of the heavens? Do you give to the horse his strength? Is it at your orders that the eagle soars aloft? Can your arm match the arm of God, or can your voice thunder like His? If nobody dares provoke the crocodile, who do you think would dare take on Me? . . .

Under the hail of such questions and many more like them, Job has the wisdom to give way (XL, 3–5): “I am a nobody, what can I say? I have no more to say.” But he has been answered – God is infinitely above merely human thoughts – His thoughts are not ours, and our ways are not His (Is. LV, 8, 9). The questions of Job may not have been answered directly, but the thirst of Job for some answers has been drowned in the inscrutable majesty of God. And God goes on to warn Job against pride, as exemplified in two of God’s proudest creatures among His animals, the hippopotamus, Behemoth (XL, 15–24), and the crocodile, Leviathan (XLI). Job is humbled, and admits that his questions were out of place – “. . . . I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know . . . therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (LII, 2–5).

As a conclusion to all Job’s sufferings, God blames Job’s four friends for their ignorance and harshness towards Job, but to Job himself He gives back his family and prosperity and much more than before (XLII, 7–17). Blessed are those souls which will never question God’s purposes or plans through all the chaos and hurt to be let loose by the Covid nonsense over the next several years. We may not know what we are doing, but God has known since eternity what He is doing – getting us to Heaven!

Kyrie eleison.

Elmer Gantry is a classic film from the United States dating back to 1960, about a con-man pursuing an attractive revivalist preacher named Sister Falconer. In his pursuit of Sister he runs into a former victim of his charms who still loves him but is indignant that he is now pursuing another woman, so she says to him, “Tell me a good strong lie that I can believe, but hold me tight.” This quotation is so true to life that it was featured in these “Comments” nearly ten years ago, October 13 of 2012, #274, from where a reader remembered it, and re-applied it to the world of Covid.

What had struck her in 2021 was how seriously well-known people can be injured by the Covid jab, but if they then speak out, their fans turn against them! The pop singer Eric Clapton is one example. A more recent example is Kyle Warner, a popular mountain-bike rider from Idaho in the USA, who was seriously injured by the Covid jab, but appeared in earlier video clips to be taking his misfortune well. However, in a more recent clip he could be seen breaking down in tears, not so much because of the injury itself, as because of the hate coming at him from all sides for his telling his story and thereby making the jab look bad. What on earth is going on? Here is how the “Comments” reader was reminded of Elmer Gantry – she imagined the fans of today crying out to the puppet-masters in control of the politicians, doctors and media, all still fabricating the Covid scam, “Please deceive us! We love the rotten way of life that you give us! Please pretend you are not there, and we will pretend also!”

It is a point being continually made by these “Comments.” Ever since Luther pretended to be reforming, and not deforming, the Catholic Church, the hallmark of non-Catholic “Western civilisation” has been hypocrisy, because the Protestants have been pretending to want what God wants, but in reality they and their offspring, all alike – Puritans, Liberals, Socialists, Communists, etc. – have wanted what they wanted for themselves. During the whole process, behind various pretences of virtue has been the one reality of the advance of rot, no longer held in check by the one true Church. Finally the rot seeped even inside the Church, and that was Vatican II. In fact modernist bishops have been the worst hypocrites of all.

But let not the peoples, in the name of democracy, claim that they have been innocent, or that the rot, then or now, has all been their leaders’ fault, be it politicians or doctors or media. It is they that have wanted the free lunch from their politicians, the contraception and abortion from their doctors, and the whole scenario of lies from their media. And from here comes the Covid rot, not resisted but positively promoted by a mass of puppet politicians, delinquent doctors and vile media, all lying at every turn. Thus it is the peoples’ own fault when their world is turned upside down, when Fauci is made a hero and Kyle Warner into a villain. Here is the conclusion of the “Comments” of a decade ago –

“Tell me a good, strong lie I can believe, but hold me tight,” says the mistress that Elmer abandoned. Loving him still as she does, all she wants is to be deceived. Such is the world around us. All it asks is to be deceived. That is why we are living in a world of Satan’s lies. We do not want God. Now, life without Him cannot work – see Ps. 126, v.1, and just look around you – but we desperately want to believe that life works best of all without Him. In effect we say to our leaders, “We elected you to tell us good, strong lies, and to hold us tight in our godlessness. Please do a 9/11, a 7/7 (U.K.’s 9/11), or anything you like, just so long as we can go on believing in you as a substitute for God to look after us. The bigger the lie, the more we will believe it, but you must hold us tight. Tighten up our police states as much as you like, but you must keep out God.”

Is it any wonder we have the satanic world we have?

Kyrie eleison.

If we name the second and longest section of the Book of Job by that “patience” for which he is famous, it is because Chapters 4 to 37 consist of a dialogue between Job and four of his friends in which they mean to console him but in effect do little more than rub salt in his wounds. As Job says, some friends!

In the third section, Chapters 38 to 42, God Himself will intervene to deliver the true solution, which He alone could deliver with such authority, and which we are certainly in need of, to frame correctly in our minds the Covid-nonsense, the Chastisement coming closer and closer, and the end of the world.

Job is patient with his friends because the first three all insist that he must have sinned in order to have deserved the appalling suffering of his complete loss of property and health, and the fourth is only a little closer to the true explanation. However, in pursuit of the solution Job’s three older friends, Eliphaz and Baldad and Sophar, do enounce many valuable truths on the connection between sin and suffering. It is only that they misapply their good principles to the particular case of Job, as he knows and tells them.

Heaven knows, the sin of worldwide apostasy is more then enough to deserve the punishment of worldwide Communism descending upon us from Covid criminals such as Schwab, Gates, Fauci, and their hidden handlers, but it is not totally responsible, insofar as there are also innocents suffering.

Usually of course, suffering is closely connected with sin because it only came into the world with sin. Prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve could not have suffered because they were shielded from suffering of any kind by their supernatural gift of Original Justice, but once they sinned that was replaced by Original Sin, through which their nature lost its perfect balance and poise and from then on became deeply flawed. Hence the human nature underlying the flaw is still from God and it is still good, but its flawed condition came from Adam and Eve, and that is so grave that it can only be wiped out by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And even then God leaves our nature with the consequences of the Fall so that we have to fight with our flawed nature until we die, and so deserve Heaven. Thus if the Covid fraud causes over the next few years all the suffering it was designed to cause, let us never blame God, but rather His human enemies, making war on Him to drive Him out of His own Creation.

So from Chapters 4 to 31 Job’s three friends attempt in turn to persuade him that he has sinned – by impatience, presumption, despair, contradicting God’s justice, refusing to repent, vainglory, arrogance and so on. However, Job patiently refutes each of them in turn, because he is a “blameless and upright” man who knows that he may not be sinless, but he is not guilty as accused by them. Answering Baldad in Chapter 19, he makes a famous declaration of faith in the Redemption and resurrection, all the more remarkable for Job’s being a pagan with no access (that we know of) to the Revelation of the Old Testament: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God.” With such faith in his mind and heart, no wonder he rejected the accusations of his “consolers.”

Such faith is neither a fairy tale nor self-deceit, but sheer truth, and it is this Catholic truth in our minds and hearts which can and will carry us serenely through a mass of trials and tribulations in the next few years. “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk.IX, 24) Lord, grant to us Catholic victims of today’s seeping apostasy so to profit by any time now of relative calm that our faith will be strong enough then to carry us through any degree of intervening turbulence which You may allow ahead on our way to Heaven.

Elihu, chapters 32 to 37, is the fourth friend of Job to speak, younger than the previous three and indignant at their inability to confute Job. He does say fine things about the justice of God, whom Job is wrong to be questioning, and he does say that God uses suffering to keep souls out of Hell, but he has no direct answer to the problem of innocents suffering, answer which must come from God Himself (38–42).

Kyrie eleison.

At the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) 2021 Fall General Assembly held in Baltimore,  November 15–18, they were due to consider the application of Canon 915 of the (1983) Code of Canon Law which says: “Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty, and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Prior to the Bishops’ Assembly, the American Cardinal Raymond Burke made a Declaration, the main points of which are summarised here below;

“The Bishops will address the long-term and gravely scandalous situation of Catholic politicians who persist in supporting and advancing policies such as abortion in grievous violation of the most fundamental precepts of the moral law, while, at the same time, claiming to be devout Catholics, especially by presenting themselves to receive Holy Communion. This is a critical matter – a matter of life and death for the unborn, and of eternal salvation for the Catholic politicians involved.

There is a common refrain that what is needed is more “dialogue” with the Catholic politicians and legislators in question. However, the teaching of the natural law, which necessarily is also the teaching of the Church, is beyond discussion. The practice of abortion is a most grievous violation of the first precept of the natural law, which safeguards the inviolability of innocent and defenceless human life. There is nothing about which to dialogue. The subject of dialogue must be how best to prevent such an evil in society. Such prevention can never involve the actual promotion of the evil.

Pastoral action taken against politicians has nothing to do with “interfering in politics.” It is directed to the safeguarding of the sanctity of the Holy Eucharist and to the salvation of the souls of the Catholic politicians in question and to the prevention of the serious scandal caused by them. They are not only sinning gravely against the Fifth Commandment but they are also committing sacrilege by receiving unworthily Holy Communion.

The grave scandal caused by such Catholic politicians has contributed in a significant way to the consolidation of a culture of death in the United States, where procured abortion is simply a fact of daily life. The Catholic Church’s witness to the beauty and goodness of human life, from its first moment of existence, and the truth of its inviolability, has been grievously compromised. The USCCB had previously discussed the issue in June 2004. Some of the most influential Bishops desired to avoid any intervention with Catholic politicians who, according to the discipline of Canon 915, should not be admitted to receiving Holy Communion. The matter was remanded to a Task Force on Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians under the chairmanship of the then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. With time, the Task Force was forgotten, and the critical issue was left unaddressed by the Conference of Bishops.

While the true Church of Christ is totally opposed to the attack on innocent and defenceless human life, the Catholic Church in the United States seems to accept the abhorrent practice, in accord with a totally secularized view of human life and sexuality. Pray for the Church in the United States and in every nation, that it will be uncompromising in applying Canon 915 and that it will defend the sanctity of the Holy Eucharist, and safeguard Catholic politicians’ souls, because if they support abortion and still present themselves to receive Holy Communion, then they commit sacrilege and serious scandal.”

Catholic Politicians and Non-Admittance to Holy Communion

 Kyrie eleison

The Old Testament is a store of treasures, because every one of its 46 Books is, by definition of the Council of Trent, the Word of God. To define the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, it has been well said that the New lies hidden within the Old, while the Old comes clearly into view in the New. Thus there is no contradiction between the two Testaments, nor between the God of the Old and the God of the New Testaments (as some people are tempted to think), nor between the doctrine of the Old and the New, but the Old is simply fulfilled in the New.

Therefore the Old Testament can have much to give us in this crisis of the New Testament Church, approaching its close in human history with the end of the world. For indeed that end is not going to be without much human suffering of the innocent, which is the problem of suffering in its acutest form, and which is the central theme of the Old Testament’s 20^th Book, the Book of Job. These “Comments” will present in three separate issues Job’s problem, patience and solution respectively. Firstly the problem.

The problem is that Job is a wholly blameless and upright man, a very successful landowner with a large family of ten children and considerable property, with thousands of farm animals. Moreover he has a great piety and devotion to God. Yet he is going to be made to suffer intensely, without his knowing why. Firstly attacks from outside on his property and children deprive him entirely of both. But his only reaction is to bless God. In his own sublime words, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” But then, as though he is not suffering enough, he is attacked in his own person with loathsome sores from head to foot, so that he is reduced to scraping himself off with a fragment of pottery. His wife tempts him to seek relief in cursing God, but again he reacts with an exceptional piety: “Foolish woman, if we accept good from the hands of God, shall we not also receive evil?” – Let us remember this admirable example of Job and his noble words when the heavens come crashing around our ears in the next few years!

What Job had not known, but what the narrator of Job’s story had told us in those first two chapters of the Book, was that his appalling sufferings, apparently undeserved, had indeed come from God, from a kind of tussle between God and Satan, no less. When Satan had once appeared before God, God asked if he had ever seen such piety as in His servant Job. Satan responded that that was due to a special protection from God for Job, but if God would only stop protecting him, in suffering Job would curse God just like anyone else. God then gave Satan permission to make Job suffer in all his belongings but not in person. That was when Job had lost his family and all his property, but had said not a word against God. “You see?” said God, when Satan reappeared before Him. “Ah,” replied Satan, “but just let him suffer in his own person, and You will see him curse You.” God then gave permission to Satan to do his worst against the person of Job, but not to take his life, and that was when Job had been stricken with unbearable sores from head to foot, reducing him to a human wreck sitting on a heap of ashes, agonising over what he might have done to deserve such misery upon misery. The story continues with the patience of Job.

Meanwhile in our Covid misery, a first great piece of wisdom is to remember how all our lives are slung between two invisible powers in their tussle for our invisible souls, Satan striving with might and main to pull us down to Hell, and God doing all He can, short of taking away our free-will, to get us with Him for ever enjoying the beatific vision of Himself in Heaven. Almighty God could easily nullify all efforts of Satan, but then His Heaven would fill with robots, and that is not what He had ever meant to create Creation for. Then let us all read between the lines of the Covid nonsense, and recognise a just and loving God at work to get us to Heaven. Unlike Job, by our worldwide scorn for His very existence, we have deserved our worldwide nonsense.

Kyrie eleison

From the Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, living in hiding for fear of his life, comes yet another admirable declaration to say what every single serious churchman should be saying in order to defend and protect Our Lord’s own sheep from a gang of murderous wolves, now revelling in the effective paralysis of those who should be their shepherds. And if these “shepherds” actually believe in, and preach, compliance with the wolves, can they really not see the dictatorial power grab of these wolves? What blindness! Truly, “Only I can help you now” – Our Lady, in 1973! Here is the usual summary of the Archbishop’s clear and truthful words, as he spoke, no doubt by electronic means, to a protest meeting held in Turin on October 18 against the “Green Pass” being imposed to prove one has been inoculated –

The globalist elite have declared in no uncertain terms the society that they want to create. In the documents about the Agenda 2030 of the World Economic Forum we read: “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” Private property, in the plan of the globalists, will have to be abolished and replaced by a universal income that allows people to buy only what the elite have decided to sell them. Agenda 2030 also includes electronic money, with the obligation to buy and sell with a card that is linked to the “Green Pass” and to social credit.

The health dictatorship and the now-imminent ecological dictatorship, effectively legitimize a system for evaluating our behaviour, such as is already in force in China. Each of us will have a certain score, and if someone is not vaccinated or eats too much meat, their points will be reduced, and they will no longer have access to specific goods and services. These tyrants want to deprive us of our very means of subsistence, forcing us to be what we do not want to be, to live as we do not wish to live, and to believe in things we consider to be a blasphemous heresy.

“You have to be inclusive,” they tell us; but they hurl themselves against us, discriminating against us because we want to remain sane, because we consider it normal that the family is composed of a man and a woman, because we want to preserve the innocence of our children, because we do not want to kill children in the womb or the elderly in their hospital beds. “We respect all cultures and religious traditions,” they specify; and it is indeed true that all of the idols and superstitions find a place in the ecumenical Pantheon of the new Universal Religion desired by Freemasonry and the Bergoglian church. But there is one religion that is banned: the true Religion that Our Lord taught to the Apostles, the Religion that the Church proposes to us for belief. The lie reigns, and there is no citizenship for the truth.

Nevertheless, our protest against the Green Pass must not stop at considering this specific event, however illegitimate and discriminatory, but it must expand to the overall picture. We must know how to identify the aims of the globalist ideology and those who are responsible for this crime against humanity and God. If we do not understand the threat that looms over us, limiting ourselves to protesting only one detail of the entire project, we will not be able to mount a strong and courageous resistance. 

However, we do have something globalists do not have. We have the Faith, the certainty of Our Lord’s promise: “The gates of hell will not prevail.”We invoke the Most Holy Virgin, the  Janua Coeli , the Gate of Heaven. May she who in the Book of the Apocalypse strikes the head of the ancient Serpent be our Queen and our Leader in battle, in view of the triumph of Her Immaculate Heart.

Kyrie eleison