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“That understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church once declared; and there must never be a recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding” (Blessed Pope Pius IX, 1st Vatican Council, S.3, C.2 on Revelation, 1870 ex cathedra) ____________________________________________________________

 

 

 

Vatican II:

 

the Great Apostasy
 

and

The Myth called Ecumenism

 

 

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GENDER WARS

 

the loss of Masculinity, Femininity — and ultimately our Humanity

 

There is something as conspicuously absent in as many MEN today as there is something extraordinarily absent in many women — and both pertain to a dearth or a deficiency that must be understood as a privation — in this case a self-inflicted evil (the privation of any good is always an evil) that occurred through an aberrant socio-ideological permutation. What are they?


• Manly men

• Womanly women


It is the ideological repudiation of unmitigated gender.

What do I mean? The clear (readily apprehensible) distinction between men and women, both in behavior, appearance, and expectations, has radically diminished in the present generation; in fact, by a very clear agendum — a political and social correctitude foisted upon us by the liberal apparat — the distinction has become so attenuated in some circles as to have become permeable. This is particularly true in academia, and exceptionally true in the Church.

Before the priest-pedophile scandal — the epicenter of which was here, in Boston — it was not uncommon to find a parish priest with all the effeminate mannerisms, vocal inflections, and physical sashaying associated with “liberated/outed” homosexuals. The excessively affected hand gestures more typical of a woman than a man, the lisping speech and delicate affectations did little to conceal his being homosexual. We all knew it. And we “correctly” said nothing … until he raped our little boys and scores of other boys. It was only when the secular law took the moral high-ground (to the damnable shame of the bishops) that we recognized our own complicity in it by giving the “gay” priest a pass through overlooking the obvious.

The Cross and Dressing … or Cross-Dressing?

Men have become increasingly feminized and submissive and women have become increasingly masculinized and dominant. Effeminate men and butch women. How did this happen? And how did it manage even to pervade the Church despite three millennia of unequivocal teaching explicitly prohibiting it?

Thou shalt not Cross-Dress

God Himself is quite clear about this:

“A woman shall not be clothed with man's apparel, neither shall a man use woman' s apparel: for he that doeth these things is abominable before God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)

Part of carrying ones Cross has always been radicated in gender and the temptations of the flesh — as we see above for both men and women. This is the clearest proscription against homosexuality together with that of Saint Paul:

“For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.” (Romans 1:24-27)

How have the divine commandments been supplanted by municipal ordinances, state and federal sanctions? And how can we conscionably comply with these ordinances when:

“Peter and the Apostles answering, said: We ought to obey God, rather than men.” (Acts 5.29)

 

The loss of Masculinity, Femininity and ultimately our Humanity

How is a society to be deemed “free” when it not only prescinds from, but legislates against the most fundamental freedom of the individual conscience that has been informed by over 2000 years of Catholic teaching — teaching which explicitly contradicts current State “policy”? With whom, then, do we stand? With God or man? With the Apostles or the politicians?

Conscience cannot be “legislated”. We have learned nothing from Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. The Nuremberg Laws of 1933 were State policy: Jews, Slavs, and the handicapped are non-persons. It was law. It was policy. It was the steel fist of the state driven by the engine of uncompromising ideology. Its stamp was final. You either thought “correctly” — or literally ceased to think. Are there parallels here? If there are not, then we are blind … or there are no such things as concurrent lines perpetually equidistant.

But we digress. Let us look a little more closely at this mutation, or permutation, between the sexes that is the fundamental ideology behind the superficial agenda of feminism and how it appears to have unfolded under the guise of “equality”. Being equal is not being the same. Being equal in the polity does not equate with being the same in gender, still less the broader effort to abolish the concept of gender despite its biological intransigence.

Men and women — if we admit the distinction  —  are not the same, unless you are a fool or a hopeless ideologue. Often they wear the same clothes and the same hair styles (women with hair as short as men, men with hair as long as women — though, happily, less so now than 30 years ago) and more than once you have asked yourself in genuine perplexity, “Is that a man or a woman … a manly women or a womanly man?” Sometimes you have been unable to reach an honestly definitive conclusion.

Perhaps the precursor to the vector of this mutation lies in “Rosie the Riveter” of the World War II era when women assumed jobs in dominantly male industries (welders, riveters, machinists, etc.) because the men were shipped off to war and needed the matériel to sustain it). Dressing themselves appropriately for the job, they donned slacks and other forms of erstwhile exclusively masculine attire — which they promptly put aside upon returning home and disposed of altogether when the war ended.

However, another war followed; one that did not pit nation against nation, or one political theory against another antagonistic to it, but something far more fundamental — a unilateral war, in fact, between biology and ideology; a war instigated and perpetrated by man — upon his very nature as human. Biology (apart from man’s manipulation of it), most would agree, is, at its most basic level, immutable: your gender, the color of your eyes, your anatomical structure, is determined at the most irreducible cellular level — in the DNA encoding that determines every physiological aspect pertaining to you even before your birth.

In Hollywood’s G.I. Jane of 1997, Demi Moore sports a recruit haircut to the scalp, ambitious to prove herself (as a paradigm for all women) as equally masculine, physically strong and strong-willed; as adept at close-hand combat, mano-a-mano, as in uttering a string of expletives after soundly stomping her seasoned, war-tested (Ranger, Navy Seal, Green Beret) drill instructor, 100 pounds heavier and one foot taller — as any man. In fact she just beat the best of them! The other (male) recruits, following the tiresomely predictable script, adulate her with cheers and embrace her as one of their own, as “one of the guys”, and off they go to have a beer, spit lungers, adjust their crotches, and pepper their speech with F-bombs. G.I. Jane is definitely “high-speed”.

Another, and far more likely contributor, was the implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which mandated that public education treat males and females equally: dresses could not be required of female students and dress codes changed in public schools across the United States.

The Mother of All Wars

Apart from sin against God, this gender war, which — illogically — is at the same time a gender transmutation, is the most vile and contemptuous war ever waged. It is the most basic war ever waged — greater than nation against nation, culture against culture, or religion against religion. All such wars pale in significance because the malice is far more fundamental, cutting across all borders, all languages, all ethnicities in every culture and in every civilization in which this poisonous seed has been sown, nourished, and cultivated by Militant Feminism and an absolutely intolerant homofascist lobby that sashays through the halls of Congress, state houses, and the halls of academia (not having children, there is much money to spend lobbying, and no small number of venal politicians). It is the mother of all wars, to use one madman’s infamous phrase.

It is nothing less than the seed of destruction for every nation, every religion, every population … and in the end, of humanity itself.

More accurately understood, it is a bitter, uncompromising, unilateral and ideological war by one species of humans against another species of humans (an intraspecific war, if you will, between species of the same genus) predicated solely on biological and ontological differences inherent within and constituting the definition of the genus itself to which both species belong. This is not simply a philosophical and biological perspective, but is necessary to understand the magnitude and the madness inherent in such a war.

It is instigated solely by one species to the end of effectively abrogating the differentiation within the genus itself, either by eliminating the species (which would eo ipso eliminate the genus) or, that failing, attempt to assimilate the species by negating any differentiation between them.

The insanity, or perhaps better yet, madness, is instigated by an unrelenting malice toward one human gender by the other: the malice toward men as men by women as wannabe men.

Simply put, it is Feminism ...

Its genesis lies in the unabashed triumph of masculinated Feminism over a once unapologetic masculinity. Let me explain.

It has little to do with the aspiration to acquire what are viewed as the prerogatives of men, and much, apparently, to do with the aspiration, not to abolish masculinity, but to acquire it; and if this cannot be achieved biologically, then it attempts to acquire the semblance of it, the closest proximity to it, through legislation, agitation, “social action”, and so on. There are, apparently, many women who, quite frankly, envy men. No, not just the presumed prerogatives of men, but masculinity itself. Far from being the champions of women, Feminism, in its ideological DNA, appears to wish to abolish women, to extirpate femininity, as though womanhood were inferior to manhood; as though femininity were an epithet rather than a virtue. Many do not simply want parity with men, or even superiority over them … but to be men. Hence, the masculinized woman: short hair, assertive, aggressive, powerful, working out with weights, body-building, tattooed, having Harleys and helmets as much as business “powersuits” … any similitude that accrues to masculinity. Didn’t Freud say something about this?

But this is the logical surd: women ideologically antagonistic to men and expressing this antagonism by striving for masculinity, that is to say, for the very thing they purportedly detest. Another way of looking at it is the desire to abolish the masculinity of men by supplanting it with the masculinity of women. Unable to abolish it biologically, they co-opt it (as von Clausewicz would say) “by other means”. They will avenge themselves on the other species … by becoming the other species!

Allies

Of course, there is a reciprocal partnership is this war on biology: the men who wish to be women. It is the complete inversion of Feminism. Attempting to abolish their own masculinity, they strive precisely for what Feminism repudiates. They are not the casualties of feminism; to the contrary, they are its closest allies. Homofascisti and Feminofascists. This alignment forms, well, an Axis around which complementary ideologies revolve. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini tolerated any opposing view, and any opposing party was summarily dealt with — demonized, marginalized, and worse. There is little difference between character assassination and summary execution: the opposition is rendered ineffective, inert. The propaganda machine of feminism and homofacism is no different. Intolerance is not to be tolerated! There is only one correct way of thinking. And if you value your livelihood, your character, your own integrity … you had better step in line …

Watch what you say

In a free and open society that is less afraid of its own government than any foreign enemy possibly lurking at its borders, the right to freedom of speech, expression, and especially religious belief is the definition of a free and open society. There is no Party line to toe … and which to breach, would cost you your freedom. But who is the guarantor of this freedom of speech, expression, and especially religious belief and its observance? In America it is not invested in a person, but in a much abused parchment we call the United States Constitution. The freedoms we cherish are indited therein. While a small, elite, moneyed, and privileged few are allowed and encouraged to enjoy their curious perversities … “We the people” (at large) exercise them at our peril. In our history was our own freedom ever more precarious?

 

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello, Editor
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Boston Catholic Journal
www.boston-catholic-journal.com
May 28, 2020

 

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The Crown of death, covid-19,: as a society and culture we deserve no less

 

COVID-19:

the Crown of Death

An Impolite Reminder
 

Who gave much thought to it before the Corona Virus — COVID-19 — made the inevitable a distinct possibility? Suddenly we are confronting the possibility of widespread death — even Democrats who have made widespread death through abortion, infanticide, “a woman’s right” to murder her own children, assisted-suicide, and euthanasia, an integral part of their Democratic platform … to make everyone’s life better, you understand (except, of course, those they acrimoniously legislate to kill.)

But this looming death —  COVID-19 — even for Democrat ideologues is far more terrible than selectively killing off babies — even those who survive abortion and are butchered alive for it fetches off whom it pleases: Democrat as well as Republican, Liberal as well as Conservative. I mean, who wants indiscriminate death? According to Democratic demagogues, death must be either chosen or legislated and eventually become the 28^th Amendment to the Constitution. But it must NOT be indiscriminate! It must be — to use the now tiresome phrase that applies to anything — “weaponized” against non-liberals, non-Democrats, and everyone else who is not in lock-step with them.

COVID-19? A political device that, in agreement with General Secretary Xi Jinping of China is the fault of President Trump and Conservative Americans who have not been correctly indoctrinated “re-educated” at American universities and colleges — and who maliciously believe the “propaganda” that Chairman Jinping himself, and his CCP, are largely and inexcusably at fault. Yes, there really are people — many of them — mostly Democrats, together with Anarchists and Nihilists — who hold that ideology is dearer than life itself.

Until it comes to them, or waits at their doorstep. They fear dying, even while they mercilessly inflict death on the innocent. They fear death even more than they fear not toeing the Party line.

“And all this —  COVID-19, death, sickness, and all the attending inconveniences — are mysteriously because of President Trump and unenlightened social and political conservatives” who are so backward, so ill-informed, that they actually believe in absolute values like life, traditional families, religion and the like. And, oh yes, ,… they are all carrying guns under their jackets and skirts and are secretly white-supremacists ... even if they are black.

Let’s cut to the chase: you are going to die! Sometime. And with absolute certainty. Democrats may sooner or later legislate your death for some capricious reason that for the time being gains superficial and utterly specious social or political traction —   and actually sounds “cool” to them —  the proof of which resides in the trenchant and profound wisdom of the late night “comedians” who eagerly lend their levitas-cum-gravitas to seal an otherwise bankrupt agendum through derision; ... or you may die by COVID-19, a heart attack, stroke, or “other” serious but non-infectious illness or disease, or even old age (until Democrats eventually find longevity as inconvenient as a baby in a womb).

 

Allow me to insult you further (as well you deserve) —

It is time to trample upon your factitious, fragile, democratic, and genderless sensitivities ... to invade your “Safe Spaces”. It will give me great pleasure and I will indulge myself. 

Allow me to put this appalling state of affairs into perspective: although Holy Mother Church has not declared it so —  especially under the extremely sensitive, earthy, idolatrous, profane, and feckless papacy of Francis —  the entire matter appears rather clear to me: it is at least plausible —  it would certainly be “just”—  and therefore extremely likely, that this 21^st century plague is entirely and existentially commensurable with this generation’s utter repudiation of God, reason, morality, and decency. To repudiate God is to repudiate all three.

Look around:

• The murder of children in —  and, if still alive, now outside — their own mother’s wombs. Babies who somehow survive abortions are either butchered alive or left unaided to die unattended while those who botched the abortion stand by.

• The depraved lusting of men for boys and other men.

• The unnatural lusting of women for other women.

• The pretension of “choice-of-gender” or “no gender” — despite all biologically discernible physical appendages (or the absence of them).

• The inhumane practice of “Gender-RE-assignment” through cosmetic surgery —   however clearly artificial and incongruous the outcome. (think 6’-2” x 220 lbs with a baritone voice, a pronounced Adam’s Apple, and a “5 O’clock shadow”).

• Lawsuits between parents, one of whom ideologically insists that their child is the opposite sex of which he or she is born despite the presence of the ineradicable YX (male) or XX (female) chromosome that scientifically defines gender. In other words, the child becomes a means to advocating an abnormal social agendum —  despite a 40-50% rate of attempted suicide among those with an artificially engineered sexual identity.¹

• “Drag-Queen Story Hours” at local libraries to which “liberal, enlightened, and progressive” mothers bring their innocent children — to introduce them to, and to indoctrinate them in, abnormal gender dysphoria — as though it were “normal” (it is not).

• God and prayer banished from schools and public places as an impediment to the corrupt and militantly atheistic agenda of “more enlightened and progressive” men and women who disdain those who are religious as backward, uneducated, ill-informed, and unenlightened ... peasants. They are not among the  smug “illuminati” —  who know better.

• Licentiousness as “liberated sexuality” — despite Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs):  HIV, chlamydia, syphilis, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C,  and attending illnesses, co-morbidity, and morbidity.

• Pornography as “entertainment” that has become among the most widely accessed venues on the Internet.

• Widespread  “recreational” drug use —  cocaine, methamphetamines (“meth”), opioids, crack, marijuana, ecstasy, heroin, flakka — together with the crime, violence, and death that accompanies it.

• Nominally Catholic institutions of higher-learning removing crucifixes and identifiably Catholic statuary, frescoes, and religious art, in obeisance to a “progressive”, liberal, and militantly secular culture.

• Nominally Catholic students at Nominally Catholic Colleges crying out for abortion while viciously (often physically) attacking Pro-Life Students and denouncing them (in their typically Democratic “open-mindedness”) with relentlessly repetitive, loathsome, and utterly tiresome mantras. Having failed to mature into adulthood, they neurotically regress to the immature mindset that they learned as spoiled brats: if one repeats something over and over ad nauseam, they will get their way as they always have (“I want it!”, “I want it!”, “I want it!”, “I want it!”) still believing that mere childish repetition will mysteriously overcome adult opposition — and that the word “no” to them (with which most of them are unfamiliar) will finally collapse under the insufferable weight of their adolescent malice, bring acceptance by wearying us into submission with their juvenile ditties: “Keep your Rosaries off my ovaries”, “Right to Life that’s a lie! You don’t care if women die”, “Woman’s body, woman’s choice”, and other such breath-taking profundities. Faces filled with hate , these Socialist pupae denounce what they cannot assail, including sanity, logic, and reason, as they sulk in their “Safe Spaces” against every imaginary “Micro-aggression” possible. Cuddling their university-supplied stuffed comfort animal in one hand, they would throttle an infant with the other. Cool!

• The defiance of every form of authority (outside the Democratic Party). That is to say, utter “freedom-from” and absolute “freedom-to” —  anything.

• A pagan earth goddess —  “Pachamama” idolized and formally worshipped in the Vatican Gardens before the approving eyes of Francis and his apostate Bishops who promote a primitive fable of the Amazonian “mother earth goddess” as the paradigm of true spirituality — rather than proclaiming the authentic Evangel of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

• PachaPAPA  apotheosizes “the environment” while mocking and repudiating the “rigid and outdated” Catholic religion of the 2000 years of his predecessors. PachaPAPA is an unabashed Modernist  and, perhaps, a pagan himself.

• Francis declares that the current Plague of COVID-19 is NOT a chastisement from God (as a result of all the above) but rather is Mother Earth “having a fit” because of “environmental pollution.” Seriously. Click the link.

 

In a word, we more than deserve this pestilence
 

America has become Liberal Amerika, and the jack-boot is on any throat of dissent or defiance.

To advert to a colloquial term presently unacceptable in polite ecclesiastical discourse, the present situation in which we find ourselves amid this escalating pestilence it is not at all unlikely a chastisement from God — and it is altogether appropriate that Godless Communist China was the flail. As a society and culture which has renounced God and that has exponentially grown in depravity and perversity, we deserve no less.

Does this mean that God does not affirm, anoint, and bless us in all our desires, crimes and perversity? Indeed, how can that possibly be, given the gentle, kind, all-loving, all-forgiving, non-demanding, and totally avuncular nature of God Who merely winks at our waywardness — that is to say, the “God” that we have been weaned upon for the past 60 years (since the conclusion of Vatican II) Who holds none accountable and has only one everlasting (and blissful) abode for all of us despite our moral turpitude and His insistent babbling about penance, atonement, and that forever-distant never-never-land that He called Hell in that fairy-tale called Holy Scripture? Such a “God” would never bridle our wantonness ...!

We need to be affirmed ... not saved! He damned-well knows that!

We’ll leave you to argue that line of reasoning at the Last Judgment.

To return to the matter at hand:

You are going to die! 100% Guaranteed!

And Who decides — unless you take your own life — is not you! Nor when you die.

You do not believe in God so why fear? There is no Hell for you or anyone else! It is the extinction of consciousness, or self-awareness — and so there is no “you” to be bothered by whatever transpires after you buy the farm. How quickly, at the hour of your death, will all the illusions you cherish about the continuation of your petty self in some insane form of “energy” or whatever you conceive to be the boat that you will float on forever — how quickly your irresponsible fantasies abandon you when you realize that there is a Judge after all and that there are consequences to the way in which you have squandered your life. Deep down inside you knew it — but hedged your bets on having the best of BOTH worlds.

You won’t.

COVID-19 is a “wake up call” to your delirium (opiated or otherwise) that life will go on forever — for you!

It is equally a call to what appears dreadfully present: the time to repent (remember that long-disdained word abolished after Vatican II?) and to believe what God Himself has revealed to you through His Only-Begotten Son Jesus Christ.

There ARE things that you MUST do! And there are things that you MUST NEVER do!

And there is One in Whom you MUST believe. However “superior” you conceitedly believe your “intellect” to be, there are greater things than the self — and particularly YOURSELF!

The First and foremost is God. But it should be of deeply personal interest to you that there are OTHER things as well … like Heaven, and … yes … Hell. And both are forever.

Whether or not you die today or next month is of little consequence. What is paradoxically vital is that you recognize it. You ARE going to die.

Repent and be converted. “Now is the acceptable time.” (2 Corinthians 6.2)

“How quaint!”, you smugly say —  as the corpses increasingly surround you — exponentially, day by day.

I do not agree. But I am, admittedly, among the peasants you disdain: how can I possibly and credibly contend with such progressive, educated, enlightened, sophisticated, and inflexible ideologues?

However, I will suggest that you have everything to gain — and much suffering — even eternal suffering — to lose.  Pascals’s Wager ^*, I submit, is apropos to the argument — and your wager has never been higher.

I will also remind you that you did not make the world, and had no say in it.  This applies equally to what lies beyond it.
 

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
March 31 2020

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^*  Summary:

• God exists, or He does not.

• We cannot appeal to Reason to determine which proposition is true. It is, however, necessarily the case that the proposition is true  or that it is not true.

• Both cannot be true and both cannot be false.

• Since Reason cannot determine the truth-value (true, or not-true) of either proposition, we must at the very least appeal to the historically universal intelligibility of the proposition itself. The question “God exists or God does not exist” is a coherent question regardless of the answer —  affirmative or not. If the question is intelligible, then the concept implicit in the question is intelligible as well. It is in no way answering the question. This is to say that the existence of God is either plausible or implausible — which is another way of saying that whether God exists or does not exist is either possibly true or possibly untrue. Given that it is at least possibly true — and that such a proposition has a conceptual pedigree that appears to historically coincide with humankind itself — the possibly true necessarily admits of the probably true as possible.

• Given that the proposition can attain to only probably true  at best and that probability “means” “as likely as not” — and given the preponderance of historical evidence (in the absence of any other kind of evidence),  probability alone is all that we can invoke — although it will never provide a conclusive answer. 

• “You must wager (it is not optional)”. That is to say, you are alive and you are going to die. The consequences of each are inevitable. There is no conditional if.

• “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.

• “Wager, then, without hesitation that God is. There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, [that is to say] an infinite chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, [for] what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.”

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The Unedited Argument by Pascal in its Entirety:

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....

...“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.”

Pensées, part III, §233
Blaise Pascal (French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian)
 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
April 12 2020

 

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Comments? Write us: editor@boston-catholic-journal.com

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¹ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-transgender-teen-suicide/trans-teens-much-more-likely-to-attempt-suicide-idUSKCN1LS39K

 

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PACHA-PAPA

 

A PAGAN PONTIFF

 

Francis approvingly receives the pagan Amazonian goddess Pachamama after the worship ceremony he attended in the Vatican Gardens
 

“NOT MY POPE”

 

 

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A Reflection on the Sequence
 

DIES IRAE
 

 Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum, coget omnes ante thronum.
 

and the Deadly Sin of Presumption
 

 

Since the inauguration of the Second Vatican Council Catholics have been illicitly assured that everyone who dies goes immediately to Heaven — no matter how sinful, selfish, and miserable their evil lives. While this clearly is not true (or Christ is a liar) we encourage you during the opening of this Holy Season of Lent to recall that the Dies Irae was the ordinary Sequence for the Requiem Mass for the dead for at least 800 and very likely 1200 years. It is a beautiful and sober reminder of the imminence and inevitability of death.  While Vatican II abolished much that is good and holy, it was not able to abolish death.

The one thing most conspicuous about this magnificent Sequence is not so much what is PRESENT in its somber verses — but what is manifestly ABSENT throughout this solemn chant — the sin of Presumption — that is to say, the unwarranted presuming that God must and will absolve us of all sin — despite the absence of any penitential act on our part or any evidence of genuine sorrow for sin. “All dogs go to Heaven”.

While this may be true of dogs, it is decidedly not true of men.

Consequently, the chant was peremptorily expunged following Vatican II in the quite sudden and eminently convenient “pastoral” realization that our now inexplicably fragile and effete sensibilities are incompatible with Holy Scripture and 2000 years of Church teaching explicated in the Dies Irae: that is further to say that the sin of Presumption was necessarily abolished together with the Dies Irae since both are construed to be inimical to “the spirit of Vatican II”, which is to say the Protestant heresy of Ecumenism first conceptualized by the “International Missionary Conference” held at Edinburgh in 1910 and subsequently institutionalized by the Protestant World Council of Churches in 1948.

In his determination to align the Catholic Church with contemporary Protestantism Pope John XXIII (“Good Pope John ...” of Vatican II infamy) appropriately established a “Catholic” replica called the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity in 1961. This, however, required a dialectic in which all competing and mutually contrary religions are reconcilable —  and the only possible way forward was to abolish religious distinctions altogether, rendering them superficial only — or failing that, to maintain that the widely divergent roads nonetheless converged in the same Heaven —  even while the manifold and conflicting conceptions of Paradise itself turn out to be both  logically and mutually irreconcilable.

Here we enter the province of Mortal Sin —  and the grave sin of Presumption which permeates all post-Vatican II liturgies and without exception pre-eminently characterizes them. Let us, then, be clear about this deadly sin, together with the reciprocal notions of responsibility and accountability inherent within it. In Catholic theology no less than in moral philosophy a distinction is understood to exist between what are construed as logical contrarieties. Some things (acts, intentions, etc.) are good and others are not. In fact, we often define the one through its contraposition to the other. Were all human acts equally commendable and reprehensible, the world would be deprived of rational order, specifically moral order understood in terms of good and evil, meritorious and culpable,  desirable and loathsome. The very notion of responsibility would be superfluous, together with any concept of accountability. Accountable to whom or what? Censurable to what standard and answerable for what? It is not simply an amoral universe of absolute indifference, but an illogical one. Such a universe would not be sustainable on earth —  why would we, a fortiori, hold it to be sustainable in Heaven?

It is the presuming of God’s forgiveness of sin and His unquestionable willingness —  even irrepressible determination —  to bring one who has led a life of unrepentant —  even vicious sin —  and who without the least compunction presumes God’s forgiveness because of God’s absolute goodness and mercy: in other words, one sacrilegiously anticipates (as the rendering of a justice due the sinner by God) salvation — having done nothing to either acquire it or to repent of the many sins that are invincible impediments to it. It is, in essence, the depriving of the free will (a perfection) of God Who somehow must (is compelled —  by some incoherent and inexplicable  agency mysteriously superior to God — to forgive every sin and all sins — despite everything His Beloved Son taught — and bring all men, Catholics, heretics, apostates, schismatics, Muslims, Shintoists, Buddhists, Animists, Scientologists, etc. to the same blessed abode where the one who despises and curses Christ on the Cross, and the one who joyfully surrenders himself in perfect love to God, equally enjoy perfect and eternal beatitude.
 
We may argue that such a conception of Heaven is tantamount to a Mental “Field Hospital” (as Francis understands the Bride of Christ, the Church) or we may simply resign ourselves to the flatus of Vatican II ... observing nothing distinguishable between them.

Indeed, in the end we find that the Mental Hospital and the “Field Hospital” are one and the same.

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
April 2, 2020
 

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 How to Make  a
 

 

PERFECT
 

and


HOLY

 

Confession

Everything a Traditional Catholic needs to know about Holy Confession

 

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You have heard it at every Mass

 

Indeed, it is very likely that you do it yourself.

It is even more likely that you do it praying the Holy Rosary.

Let us take one very, very, common example: The Apostles Creed:

 

All spoken as one sentence as quickly as possible — to get through it.

Worse still is the prayer to the very Mother of God, Mary Most Holy, ESPECIALLY as it is “recited” — rather than “prayed” in that beautiful prayer called the Angelic Salutation, but better known simply as the Hail Mary:
 

Within 14 seconds flat! … and ten times between each sacred Mystery!

REALLY?

Is that how you approach God in prayer? As fast as humanly possible?

Is that how you speak to your wife, your husband, your children — your friends and neighbors? If so, you either have none, and you never will!
 

I am not an expert in Mariology — but I am human, as Mary was and is — and even with so few credentials I cannot imagine that either God or Mary are especially impressed with my piety or devotion when I speak to them, pray to them, much like a 33 rpm record incorrectly played at either 45 rpm or 78 rpm. Try it:

Playing Praying at the Wrong Speed

 

The point of this short essay is simply this: GOD IS A PERSON — and so is Mary. I do not believe that they esteem you more holy or are in the least impressed with the speed of your prayers, or the number of your prayers-recited-as-in-a marathon. In fact, Christ Himself warned us against this:
 

Is this to derogate from formal and structured prayers such as the Holy Rosary or the litanies of the Saints? By no means! Nor is it written to diminish the piety of the one praying. No. No. No!

This is the point: when you “pray” do not make your prayer a rote “recitation” to be sped through as quickly as possible. Repetition is meaningful — or it can be useless.

Dwell on the words you pray.

Utter them in the same way as you would when sincerely talking to ANY person before you.

In fact, you ARE! You are speaking to God Most High — from your heart.

One single decade of one single Mystery of the Holy Rosary prayed to Mary, and through Mary, to the PERSON of GOD — ex corde (from the heart) in the recognition that you are addressing a real PERSON who is listening to you — exceeds all the decades of all the Rosaries recited since Mary brought this devotion to Saint Dominic in the 13th century.

The beautiful complexities latent within the Holy Rosary are many. Meditating upon a holy Mystery while simultaneously praying the Hail Mary as more than simply words accompanying our meditation is no small feat. It is — dare I say — grace; the grace of simultaneity that proximates what we glimpse of eternity.

Simply because the prayers may be many and identical does not preclude their being uttered in absolute devotion each time… for they extend beyond time to eternity … and are offered in union with Mary to God Who sees the hearts and knows the thoughts of men.

Pray — but only as sincerely as you talk!
 

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
March 12, 2020
 

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When the Shepherd Strikes the Sheep

“It is written: I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered.” (Saint Matthew 26.31)

 

 

“I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered.”¹ We have often heard this. It pertains to the imminent Passion of Jesus Christ on the very night before He was betrayed into the hands of sinful men. He, the Good Shepherd, would be struck (in fact, repeatedly ...) and the Apostles, the Disciples, and the Faithful would be scattered — they would abandon Him, flee for their lives, and their unity in Him would be broken. Their Shepherd, in Whose fold they were one flock, had been struck! What the will become of the sheep? How much anxiety rends them!

But now, in some incomprehensible and ghastly apocalyptic narrative unfolding before our very eyes, the shepherd himself strikes the sheep — and they are scattered! Unfaithful to his trust and careless of the sheep entrusted to him, the shepherd not only abandons them to the wolves who have prowled the fences for 500 years … but he himself strikes them so that they are forced to leave the sheepfold; with his staff he strikes the necks and the backs of the defenseless sheep — not even sparing the Little Lambs — who cry out in their pain as they flee, seeking a fold where they will find pasture and protection. They are confused and frightened, and no other shepherd seems to have the courage to gather the lost and the scattered — not one other shepherd! Homeless and shelterless they are prey to wolves — wolves even more remorseless than the wolves who drove them from the sheepfold.

In the gathering darkness they huddle and tremble, lacerated by a betrayal too appalling to grasp. Behold a vignette of the Holy Catholic Church of this day, under the tyranny of Francis who turns out the faithful to welcome those whose gods are idols and earth. What a terrible pronouncement mutters on the horizon!

Let us not fear. We know Whom we follow even when the hireling has fled. We know the voice of the Good Shepherd — and will not follow another.
 

He will not abandon us

Let nothing obscure the glory of God — let nothing come between us and the vision of unapproachable glory in the face of Christ Jesus. All that is on the earth and of the earth — will pass away as it came: like breath on wintery glass, and its pretension will come to nothing. The seat of power that evil men have taken to themselves, the desecration of sacred places and sacred things, the betrayal of innocence to things corrupt and vile, the scattering of the sheep who are struck by the shepherd and driven from pasture ... all this is known unto God ... and our littleness and powerlessness before it. For a time we must bend before this infamous wind, but we will not bow ... nor break, nor lose faith. Those that now ruthlessly tower like the cedars of Lebanon, in a time will no longer find their place among us ... nor we among them.

We will not, then, be troubled by recreant men. We are called to glory. What is the fecklessness of man before so great a calling? Let us not be troubled by those who have lost God and trampled His Vineyard. We know the voice of the Shepherd and will not follow another. It may seem that we are bound, hand and foot, like lambs delivered to those who would make a sacrifice of us to false gods, and we are anxious. Let it not be so. Christ goes before us, and we go with Christ to the Father. We need not fear. Has He not told us that none may take us from His Father’s hand?

Away, then, usurpers and liars! We have more pressing concerns than your feeble quest for petty power. We must to God! And we will let no one and nothing persuade us — or drive us away — from that pledge of glory to which we are called in Christ!
 

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¹  Saint Matthew 26.31

 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
March 10, 2020

 

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Further Reading on the Papacy of Francis:

• Francis as the Prince of this World and the Logical Conclusion of Vatican II

• The “Amazonian Breast” and the Descent into Madness

• Our Francis who art in Rome

• Francis’s Ten-Step Program to Happiness without God

• When Silence becomes Scandal: Lessons not Learned

• The Art of Plausible Deniability: Closing Thoughts on Amoris Laetitia

• Two Great Mysteries: God Needs Us, according to Francis

• Is Francis the Great Divider in the Post Modern Catholic Church?

• Has Francis Abolished Hell and has Logic Superseded Faith?

• The Iron Fist of Pope Francis

• Against Pharisees: by Bishop Athanasius Schneider concerning Amoris Laetitia

• The Liability of Logic and the Francis Defect

• A Tale of Two Popes: The Newest Paradigm — The Emeriti, Resignation, and Dissolution

• Quotations from Chairman Francis and other Philosophical Absurdities

• The State vs. Frankie: a Case of Institutionalized Sexual Corruption

• Francis and Catholicism as Art — “the Art of Accompaniment”

• Smoke in the Sanctuary: the Odor of Sulfur ... not Sanctity

• The Popularity of Francis may not be a Good Sign after all

• A Sober Reflection on “Laudato si”— an Encyclical Defective in Authority

• Pope Francis Entertains Term Limits on Papacy

• Pope Francis: Man must obey the U.N. (despite its contradiction to Christ and the Church

January	February	March	April	May	June
July	August	September	October	November	December

 

New: the Roman Martyrology can now be downloaded entirely as either a PDF file or as a Microsoft Word File