Catholic Church

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

8 of 31 Reasons

8 of 31 Reasons on April 10, 2021

Two weeks ago these “Comments” had pleasure in presenting from an Israeli Rabbi a pile of good sense in the form of 31 reasons why he would not take the anti-Covid “vaccine.” The only problem was that easily most of them had to be shortened for all of them to fit within the A4 of an “Eleison Comments.” So here is a selection of eight of them at full length; –

1. It’s not a vaccine . A vaccine by definition provides immunity to a disease. This does not provide immunity to anything. In a best-case scenario, it merely reduces the chance of getting a severe case of a virus if one catches it. Hence, it is a medical treatment, not a vaccine. I do not want to take a medical treatment for an illness I do not have.

3. The presumed benefits of this medical treatment are minimal and would not last long in any case . The establishment acknowledges this, and is already talking about additional shots and ever-increasing numbers of new “vaccines” that would be required on a regular basis. I refuse to turn myself into a chronic patient who receives injections of new pharmaceutical products on a regular basis simply to reduce my chances of getting a severe case of a virus that these injections do not even prevent.

5. The establishment insists that this medical treatment is safe . They cannot possibly know this because the long-term effects are entirely unknown, and will not be known for many years. They may speculate that it is safe, but it is disingenuous for them to make such a claim that cannot possibly be known. Because they are being disingenuous, I do not trust them, and I want no part of their treatment.

9. The executives and board members at Pfizer are on record that they have not taken their own treatment, despite all the fanfare and assurances . They are claiming that they would consider it unfair to “cut the line.” This is a preposterous excuse, and it takes an unbelievable amount of chutzpah to even say such a thing. Such a “line” is a figment of their own imagination; if they hogged a couple of injections for themselves no one would cry foul. In addition, billionaires with private jets and private islands are not known for waiting in line until hundreds of millions of peasants all over the world go first to receive anything these billionaires want for themselves.

21. The government has sealed their protocol related to the virus and treatments for THIRTY YEARS. This is information that the public has a right to know, and the government has a responsibility to share. What are they covering up? Do they really expect me to believe that everything is kosher about all this, and that they are concerned first and foremost with my health? The last time they did this was with the Yemeni Children Affair. If you’re not familiar with it, look it up. Now they’re pulling the same shtick. They didn’t fool me the first time, and they’re definitely not fooling me now.

26. The horror stories are already coming in at warp speed, but the politicians are not the least bit concerned, the medical establishment is brushing them aside as unrelated or negligible, the media is ignoring them, the drug companies are steaming ahead at full speed, and those who raise a red flag continue to be bullied, censored, and punished . Clearly my life and my well-being are not their primary concern. I will not be the next guinea pig in their laboratory. I will not risk being the next “coincidence.”

30. I see all the lies, corruption, propaganda, manipulation, censorship, bullying, violation of medical ethics, lack of integrity in the scientific process, suppression of inconvenient adverse reactions, dismissal of legitimate concerns, hysteria, cult-like behaviour, ignorance, closed-mindedness, fear, medical and political tyranny, concealment of protocols, lack of true concern for human life, lack of respect for basic human rights and freedoms, perversion of the Torah and common sense, demonization of good people, the greatest medical experiment of all time being conducted by greedy, untrustworthy, godless people, the lack of liability for those who demand I risk everything . . . . I see all this and I have decided they can all have my place in line. I will put my trust in God. I will use the mind He blessed me with and trust my natural instincts. Which leads to the final reason which sums up why I will not get “vaccinated.”

31. The whole thing stinks.

Kyrie Eleison

Solzhenytsin Speaks

Solzhenytsin Speaks on April 3, 2021

Here, for Easter, is Alexander Solzhenytsin’s famous Templeton Address, drastically summarised. 1983.

When I was a child, people said it was forgetting God that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Now I am a man in 1983, that one phrase still says it all. It sums up the entire 20th century with all its crimes, starting with World War I, which would not have been possible (e.g. making poison gas into a weapon) without a godless embitterment in the leaders of Europe. Likewise World War II. Europeans are burnt out. Peace depends on stout hearts, not on the nuclear bomb. We have grown all too used to the Apocalypse. Dostoyevsky said that great events have caught us unprepared, and only after the world has been possessed by devils will it be possible to save it again.

Meanwhile the Devil is triumphing, worldwide. By 1917 the faith was extinct in Russia’s leading class, and it was being threatened in the working class. Yet once upon a time Russia was steeped in Orthodox Christianity. Piety, not materialism, moulded people’s thinking and their personalities, and organised their lives. But a schism in the 17th century and the reforms of Peter the Great weakened religion, and the secularism of the 19th century poisoned the leading class, so that by 1917 religion was crippled.

Revolution always starts with atheism, says Dostoyevsky, but never has atheism been so malevolent as it is at the heart of Communism. In the 1920’s there was a veritable cloud of Christian martyrs in Russia, from top to bottom of Church and State, while for instance children were wrenched from their parents and from all religion. Stalin favoured religion only to revive Russian patriotism against Hitler, and Brezhnev pretended to be religious so as to deceive the West, but Krushchev showed how deeply religion is hated by Communism, and by all the unworthy successors of the frenzied Lenin. However, never did any of these maddened persecutors of Christ expect what happened: beneath the Communist steamroller the Russian awareness of God is now acute and profound. Tanks and rockets will never vanquish Christianity.

In the West, religion is more threatened from inside than from outside. In the Middle Ages Secularism arose from within, more dangerous than tanks or rockets. Its ideal flies no higher than life, liberty and the pursuit of my own happiness. Good and evil are objects of mockery. Forget the human heart. Result, evil is all around. The West is slipping all the time, losing its youth. The media blaspheme Jesus and Mary. In that case, what reason do I have to hold back from doing what I like with my liberty? Why not hate my own society, as it teaches me to do? Do not the weaknesses of capitalism correspond to the weaknesses of human nature? For instance the pursuit of money to the capital sin of greed? Capitalism boasts that it establishes equality. But is that not an equality of slaves, destitute of spiritual values? And it makes me more free? But the more “free” I am, does that not mean the more blindly I hate? Salvation can never be by money or by abundance of material goods.

Without love, life and art perish. In the West that happens voluntarily at the hands of men who want to take the place of God. East and West alike have been forgetting God. Yet the key to our whole existence is the daily choice every single human heart has to make between good and evil. The modern theories re-centring everything on society have proved bankrupt, but we have not rejected their lies. Unless we turn back to God we shall never find the way out of our problems. The enemy is within me. It is we who are hanging ourselves.

Human life is merely a stage on the way to God. It is more than just the laws of matter, i.e. the physical sciences. In God we live and move and have our being: He is the “Love moves the sun and the other stars” – Dante, concluding line of the entire “Divine Comedy.” Forget the 19th and 20th centuries. We must reach for God. The so-called Enlightenment was a complete failure.

Kyrie eleison.