Catholic Church

GAZA “EXPLAINED”

GAZA “EXPLAINED” on October 26, 2024

“Vengeance is Mine,”says God, “I will repay.

For special foes I need My friends to pray.”

In 1936 an Argentinian Catholic theologian and thinker of international repute, Fr. Julio Meinvielle (1905–1973), wrote a short book entitled The Mystery of the Jews in History, centring on their essentially religious, and not just political, origin and nature and destiny. They are, as Meinvielle proves, a theological people, incomprehensible without their theological dimension, from which their politics for good or evil merely follow. No other race has ever been formed by God to be the cradle of the Messiah, the one and only Redeemer of all mankind, nor will He in the future ever again need such a cradle for another birth. Here is what makes the Jews unique in all human history, whether they like it or not. The height and depth of their divine calling, when they refuse it, is what can make them psychopathic, with consequences such as we have been observing in Gaza.

In April of 1997 two good priests published a long summary of Meinvielle’s book in the Angelus magazine, accessible at salvationisfromthejews.com/m1.html What follows is the merest overview of that summary –

Catholic theology teaches that the Jewish people are the object of a very special vocation from God. Only in the light of theology can one explain the Jew. The Jewish people have a theological lineage, chosen, consecrated, and sanctified in order to serve God as the human cradle for His divine Incarnation. However, the Jewish people, instead of acknowledging that their glory was to be the cradle of the Christ, pretended that it was the glory of the Christ to have taken his human descent from the flesh of Abraham. And the Pharisees, veritable incarnation of this idolatry, declared proudly as a reason for not accepting Christ: ” We have Abraham for our father.” As for the awaited human Messiah, they wanted and expected of him to be not the Saviour of mankind but merely a military ruler, who would assure and perpetuate the greatness of Israel over all mankind.

And so in the year 33 AD, the Jewish people, assembled before the praetorium of Pilate and urged on by their priests, demanded the death of the Promised One. Then these Jews, in the name of their Law, and to serve the material interests of their nation and race, crucified the One who had been promised them as their blessing, but was replacing their Synagogue with His Church. The Jewish people, once a mystery of goodness, now changed into a mystery of iniquity, while to others were granted the blessings of the Promise. These others now make up the Church of Jesus Christ – converted Jews at first, and later the Gentile converts.

Thus there is a theological opposition – that is to say, one allowed for by God – which exists throughout Christian history between the Synagogue and the Church. The Jewish people, whose destiny was to bring Christ to us, found Christ a stumbling block. A part of them believed in Him and built on Him to form the roots and the trunk of that Olive Tree which is the Catholic Church. The other part fell, denying Him and invoking their carnal pride of race and nation. That part of Israel was rejected by God and called upon itself the blood of Christ as a curse. It is this part that forms what we know today as “Judaism,” which is the heir and the continuation of the rabbis who rejected Christ.

Therefore ever since Christ was lifted up on Mount Calvary, the world has been torn between Jewish leadership and Christian salvation. Not to follow Christ is, in effect, to follow Judaism. Hence if the Gentiles do not want to be part of the Olive Tree of the Catholic Church, as freely offered to them, they will necessarily belong to the sterile vine of Judaism. There is no third road ahead. It is either Christ, or Judaism.

How long must this terrible enmity between Jews and Christians last? Until God in His mercy brings about the conversion and reconciliation of the Jewish people. St. Paul teaches us that the day will come when Israel will recognize Him whom it has denied: “And so all Israel should be saved, as it is written: There shall come out of Sion, he that shall deliver, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob” (Rom. XI, 25–26).

Kyrie eleison

900th “COMMENTS”

900th “COMMENTS” on October 12, 2024

Where is the true Church? Wait. It will revive,

Wherever the true faith has remained alive.

As we draw towards the close of 2024, there appears the 900th issue of these “Comments” which have appeared once a week since 2007. Amidst the confusion in Church and State which grows worse with each passing year, let the occasion be celebrated with another attempt to take the error of modernism to pieces, which has done so much damage to souls, especially since the 1960s, when it succeeded in deceiving so many high-placed Catholic churchmen at the disastrous Second Vatican Council.

Modernism inside the Catholic Church is the error of wanting to bring the Church in line with the modern world instead of bringing the modern world in line with the Church. Just before Our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven at the end of His personal ministry on earth, in the course of which he had founded His Catholic Church to be the continuation of His Incarnation among men, he gave, as His last words to His Apostles, highly important instructions: “All power is given to Me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Mt. XXVIII, 18–20).

“All power in heaven and earth” belongs to all three persons of the Omnipotent God, but it has also been entrusted by the Father to the Son in His human nature. So Jesus has a divine authority to be telling the Apostles what they must do. What He tells them is to “Teach all nations”: to teach, not to dialogue; “all nations,” including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and not just some nations: And “nations,” not just sacristies, which means that politics are to serve the Church with their considerable influence, in order to help save souls. And after souls have been taught the truths of salvation, then they are to be given the supernatural sacraments of salvation, and they are to “observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,” in other words they are to obey the commands of Jesus, not just consent to His suggestions. And if that programme seems daunting, then they have the assurance that if they fulfil His commands, they will always have His support and presence with them – even in 2024. But they must do what He says, and that is what the Church has always said and done, which is Catholic Tradition.

Just a glance at these last lines of the Gospel of St Matthew is enough to show us how well Our Lord designed and built His Catholic Church. What happened then? For three of its Seven Ages, of the Apostles, Martyrs and Doctors respectively, it thrived, building up to the approximately one thousand years of the Fourth Age, the Middle Ages stretching from the end of the ancient world to the beginning of the modern world, from around 500 to 1517, when Luther is reputed to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Church in Wittenberg. In any case he was primarily responsible for launching Protestantism, the father and mother of a series of revolutions, creating the modern world: naturalism, rationalism, LIBERALISM; ecumenism, communism, MODERNISM, and a host of other “isms,” all attempting to put together again what Luther had broken apart, the Catholic Church’s God-given wholeness of man, but failing to do because they refused to return to the true Church of Catholic Tradition.

The neo-modernism of Vatican II, as Fr Calderon clearly presents it in his admirable book Prometheus, is merely the latest in the long line of these sub-protestantisms, upgrading man at the expense of God. The clever excuse was that all the previous humanisms had merely resulted in two World Wars, but the Catholic Church itself was now going to create a new humanism which would upgrade man without downgrading God. Vain illusion! For the sake of “human dignity,” Jesus’ commands had to turn into men’s consents. God was no longer to be in command. What god was that? Millions upon millions of Catholics lost their faith in Him. Yet His true Church still lives, in the few souls keeping the true Faith.

Kyrie eleison

ROMANS X

ROMANS X on July 6, 2024

To Sunday Mass a Catholic must go!

“I just need chocolate in my own breast” – NO!

That the Israelites were, under the Old Testament, the race chosen from among all mankind to provide for the Son of God His means of living on earth a human life so that He would be able to suffer and die for all men as their Saviour and Messiah, and that the Israelites yet refused to recognise Him as their Messiah when finally He came among them, is a great mystery. One may well refer to human nature, to original sin, to human pride for an explanation, but the mystery remains. How could any race on earth have been better prepared over the two thousand years since Abraham for the coming of their Messiah, and yet have refused to recognise Him, turning themselves instead, down the two thousand years that have followed since, into His most skilful and motivated persecutors?

In Romans Chapter IX St Paul began his answer to the question by declaring that the People of God have not failed, only while under the Old Testament it consisted purely of Jews by being born in their race, under the New Testament it now consists of Jews or Gentiles by their faith in Jesus Christ. And if God freely chose to favour with that gift of faith Gentiles over Jews, that was His prerogative, and the Jews had, and still have, only themselves to blame for their refusal of that gift. That refusal serves to highlight His mercy to the Gentiles previously unable to belong to the People of God, now able by the Catholic Faith to belong to the Catholic Church, the true Israel of the spirit, whereas Jews refusing Jesus Christ and clinging to the Mosaic Law for salvation make up a false Israel of the flesh, unable to save their souls.

In Chapter X, St Paul similarly contrasts two “justices,” or states of salvation before God, also called “justifications” (v.1–4). Old Testament justification required that one should fulfil all the works demanded by the Mosaic Law, which was humanly impossible, says St Paul (v.5). On the contrary, New Testament justification requires no such demanding tasks beyond human strength, but merely that Jew or Gentile believe in Jesus inwardly and profess Him outwardly (v.6–13). Now it is true that to believe in Jesus Christ one must know about Him through a preacher (14–17). But not all men choose to believe, even if they know about Christ (16). Thus the Jews have both heard (18) and understood (19) the Gospel of Christ, but they have chosen (and freely choose down the centuries) not to believe in Christ (21).

In this Chapter X of Romans, these verses 6 to 13 are of special importance, because they were used by Luther as one of the key texts from Scripture to found Protestantism, and launch the whole modern world. In context, St Paul is contrasting the simplicity and ease of making a profession of Faith with the inhuman difficulty of fulfilling the works of the Mosaic Law (see Romans VII), but he is not here specifying what else is necessary for that profession of faith to enable a soul to enter the Catholic Church and be saved for eternity. For instance, a man may have a very forgetful son, so if the son is going to use the family car, his father may say to him, “The car needs petrol.” Now in order to run, the car needs also oil and water, but the father does not say to him, “The car needs petrol and oil and water,” because in context, that is not what the son needs to hear, although it is perfectly true and more complete.

But Luther uses the Scripture quotation as though to be saved one needs only an inward and outward profession of faith in Christ, as though the father above was saying “The car only needs petrol,” which is obviously false. To join the New Testament People of God, the Catholic Church, one must also be baptised – “He who believes and is baptised will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned” (Mk. XVI, 16). That is not what St Paul needed to add in Romans X, 8–13, but by pretending that St Paul was saying that Christian salvation needs only the subjective profession of faith, as though cars only need petrol, Luther was using the quote to cut out the entire Catholic Church! Subjectivism (man before God) has slowly but surely been taking over Catholicism ever since. Today it is “Wokeism.”

Kyrie eleison

BECOMING a CATHOLIC

BECOMING a CATHOLIC on May 25, 2024

If any soul eternity understands, 

Then let a Rosary ever be in its hands.

A reader of these “Comments” who is obviously not Catholic asks how to become one. It may be a question that interests more than just this reader. May Almighty God bless all such readers, because it is surely a grace of His that is prompting them to take a serious interest in joining the one true Church that is His – the true Roman Catholic Church. Today one has to add the adjective “true” because of course the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) fabricated a whole false Church designed to lead souls to eternal Hell instead of eternal Heaven. This can only complicate today the question of how to join the true Church, but if a soul is honestly searching for it, God has countless ways of reaching that soul with all help needed, despite any roadblocks thrown in His way by misguided or delinquent men. Let such a soul trust that God wants to bring him or her to Heaven, and He needs only the on-going cooperation of that soul to succeed. 

Being a Catholic is about getting to Heaven, which is the uninterrupted supernatural bliss, intrinsically far above and beyond all our natural powers of mind and will as human beings. The bliss consists in the supernatural vision of God as He is in Himself and not just as we can glimpse Him from His natural creatures which surround us in our brief life on this earth. The gateway to this bliss is God’s supernatural gift of Faith, which reaches far above our natural reason. Whether or not I receive from God this gift of His, basic to eternal salvation, depends entirely on Him and not on me, but on the other hand there is an old saying to the effect that to whoever does all that it lies within his nature to do, God does not deny His (supernatural) grace. This is a kind of common sense, but beware, Faith remains, essentially, God’s free gift. What I can do, once I realise how indispensable for salvation is the gift of Faith, is bend all my powers to ask Him in prayer to give it to me. (It can be highly recommended to pray the Rosary even if someone does not yet believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary is and was the Mother of God. She will step in . . . ) 

What I can also do is to apply all my reasoning faculties to examining three great propositions which I can accept by mere (but upright!) human reasoning. If I do so, they can definitely help God to give me the gift of Faith, but they cannot, just by themselves, pull down God’s gift, which remains His free gift. As the half-believing sinner said in the Gospel, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” He may have been no theologian, but he was talking Catholic sense (Mark IX, 24). These three propositions are, 1) God exists, (2 Jesus Christ was and is God, and 3) The (true) Roman Catholic Church was instituted by Jesus Christ. 

1) God exists – the most obvious argument from His creatures (as from effect to necessary cause) is the argument from intelligent design. The intelligence is visible everywhere in His creation, but it cannot come from the creatures which are themselves unintelligent, like animal, vegetable, mineral. Just one example – no spider ever steps on the sticky parts of its own web! Only the spider’s victims do that. 

2) Jesus Christ is and was God – during His life on earth, He worked numberless miracles which God alone can work, because the Author of Nature alone can interrupt at will the normal course of nature. The raising of Lazarus (see Jn. XI) was a stupendous miracle wrought directly in front of a largely hostile crowd. Relics of Our Lord revealing to modern science traces of His DNA show evidence of His human mother but none of any human father. Indeed He was born of Mary, but conceived by the Holy Ghost. 

3) Jesus Christ instituted the (true) Roman Catholic Church and no other. Mankind’s history shows all other “Christian” denominations to have started centuries after He lived on earth (1–33 AD). As for all non-Christian religions, they all deny that He was God, Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. All such religions cannot be true, and if like Vatican II they pretend that they can still be a way to Heaven, they lie again, because there can be no place for lies in the true God’s true Heaven. 

If after working over these three preliminary truths, a soul still wishes to become Catholic, then it goes to see a Catholic priest to ask to be baptised, which is the normal way of entering the Church. 

Kyrie eleison 

PUTIN and FATIMA

PUTIN and FATIMA on March 16, 2024

Hey, Russia is far from perfect!” Yes, indeed.

But little by little Russia is being freed.

Ever since February 6 when President Vladimir of Russia granted a historic interview to the well-known American journalist, Tucker Carlson, commentators all over the world have been commenting on the contents of the two-hour interview. Those contents appeared, very much shortened, in these “Comments” last week (#869, March 9), where they presented mainly the Russian view of the build-up from 2014 onwards to the outbreak of hostilities between the Ukraine and Russia in February of 2022. Since then we have often heard a figure of over half a million Ukrainian soldiers being killed by the high-grade weapons and fighting skills of the Russians. That is a whole generation of widows and orphans. What were all these fathers and husbands doing when they laid down their lives? 

Sane men will not normally lay down their lives for a trifle. That is why so many wars are religious wars, although in modern times they may not appear so. Thus the two World Wars, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, represented the remains of Christendom attempting to resist the triumph of the godless substitute for Christendom, which is Communism. Very soon after the triumph of Lenin’s Communist Revolution in St Petersburg and Moscow in Russia in 1917, Lenin had founded the Komintern in Russia to serve as the central quasi-missionary agency of Communism, working in conjunction with a number of the world’s leading banks, to spread Communism throughout the world. 

In fact we are in the presence of four messianisms: the first is that of the Chosen Race, the Jews who were specially chosen out and gifted to prepare mankind and to provide the human cradle within mankind to enable the one and only true Messiah to perform the Redemption through His Cross and His Church down to the end of the world; the second messianism is the one true messianism, that of the Catholic Church, which is the entire fulfilment of the Old Testament by the sending of human souls to Heaven over a little more than 2,000 years; the third messianism is that of the Talmudic Jews, followers of their post-christian Scripture which is no longer the Old Testament as we know it, having God Himself for its author, but the “Talmud,” their own man-made substitute for the Old Testament, because on every page of the Old Testament is mentioned in various ways Our Lord Jesus Christ to come, and for the race which crucified Him He is not to be mentioned, let alone adored as God; and lastly the fourth messianism is Communism which is a mighty offshoot of Talmudism, as being a powerful and active movement to help destroy the last remains of decadent Christendom, the main competing messianism which must be gotten out of the way of Talmudism. 

Thus messianisms can be seen as the mainsprings of human history, so to speak: a messianic people; the true Messiah; the once messianic people turning all their gifts out of hurt pride against the true Messiah; and as a result all kinds of pseudo-messianic movements down 20 centuries, all of them fighting to hinder the salvation of souls, as St Paul well understood, even so soon after the crucifixion and resurrection of Our Lord Himself (I Thess. II, 16). 

As for the Russians they are certainly a religious people, as their aptitude for the anti-christian pseudo- religion of Communism showed. But at Fatima Our Lady foretold that Russia would play an essential role in the healing of the nations’ godlessness today, and sure enough, Rome may not be built in a day, as the proverb says, but after 72 years of terrible sufferings under Communism(1917–1989), Russia has learned its lesson and is returning to Christ. Read Solzhenitsyn. God has not lost His grip. He has made the Ukrainians pay a heavy price for having chosen to trust the Talmudists, who are in complete control of the Americans, but it was their own choice. If anyone needs the help of God, let them just prefer His will. 

Kyrie eleison

Pope’s Disintegration – II

Pope's Disintegration - II on April 24, 2021

The rhyming couplets at the beginning or end of each of the issues of these “Comments” have normally only two lines of ten syllables each to make their point, which means that they can be so compressed that they are difficult to understand. Last week’s was an example. But since what it was saying goes to the heart of the great error ravaging the true Catholic Church ever since Vatican II (1962–1965), let us return to that couplet to explain it in a little more detail. Here it is again –

The Greeks, even bearing gifts, one had to fear?

To modernists those Greeks come nowhere near!

The first of the two lines refers to a famous quote from the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, which says translated, “Howsoever it be, I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts.” The Trojan war has been going on for ten years, and despite tremendous military efforts the invading army from Greece has so far been unable to capture the city of Troy. The Greeks resort to trickery. Outside the gates of Troy they will leave a hollow wooden horse filled with Greek soldiers as a “gift” for the Trojans. The Trojans are deliberating what to do with this handsome horse – should it be brought inside the gates of the city? A wise old Trojan says no, because whatsoever it be, he cannot trust the Greeks. Alas for Troy, his advice is not taken, the horse is brought in, the soldiers spill out at night, Troy is taken by surprise and the Greeks win the Trojan war, thanks to that trickery for which they were notorious in the ancient world. However, the second line of the couplet above says that even the trickery of the ancient Greeks comes nowhere near the trickery of today’s modernists penetrating into the heart of the Catholic City and destroying it to its very foundations. How can that be?

Let us say, by a progressive loss over the centuries of mankind’s sense of the reality of God and of its own dependence on God. This loss was wilful. To introduce the last age of the world with the largest harvest of souls ever for the bliss of eternal salvation, Almighty God had granted the greatest grace ever, the Incarnation of His own one and only divine Son to die on the Cross to seal in His Blood the New and Eternal Testament between God and man, and to found the Catholic Church to make available to all men by its sacraments the fruits of that death and Redemption. And after one and a half thousand years that Church had indeed succeeded in creating Christian civilisation, incomparably superior to any other.

But after 1500 years man’s pride could take it no longer, and men designed a series of ever more refined hypocrisies to get their liberty out from under God’s truth. Protestantism and Jansenism pretended to be Catholic, Liberalism pretended to be Christian, Communism pretended to be human, and the strain for Catholics of living in a more and more profoundly anti-Catholic world all around them was becoming for Catholics heavier all the time, especially since the modern world, forged by the hypocrisies, was becoming more and more “normal” all the time. Finally the strain, for instance, of having in a big city all the children that God is liable to send, became unbearable, and the supreme hypocrisy of Vatican II, post-Catholics pretending to be Catholic thanks to compliant clergy, took place, and the true Church is in scattered disarray until the moment to be chosen by God for the Augean stables to be cleaned out.

But God has never abandoned His unchanging Church, nor the souls at whatever level that cleave to it, nor need any soul fear being abandoned by God that does not want to abandon it, or God’s reality. However, God may ask of such souls some suffering to help pay for the tidal waves of sin flooding over mankind, and let it not indulge in the variety of hypocrisies by which modern men succeed in deceiving themselves that God does not exist, or that they are not preferring their own reality to His . . .

Kyrie eleison