“LUV’ is the fatuous, non-stop talk of love you see everywhere today. So often, it is just self-centered affection, a pleasure in itself. These words from the 19th-century Spanish priest, Fr. Félix Sardá y Salvany, are a good description of it:

The liberal charity that is fashionable today is, in form, flattery, condescension, and affection; but it is, at its core, the essential contempt for the true goods of man and for the supreme interests of truth and of God.

You don’t love anyone unless you care about his or her supernatural welfare and you can’t achieve that true charity unless you yourself have supernatural faith.

Never has love been so pervasively professed as in our age, and never has it been so truly absent. We live in a loveless time, as was predicted.

“And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold.” St. Matthew 24: 12

“Iniquity” is lawlessness, the falling away from God’s laws and truth for a do-as-thou-wilt, indifferentist spirituality devoid of true love of God.

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“WORLDY people constantly need to feel supported and reaffirmed in their false and wicked judgments by other unhappy souls like themselves, for deep down in their troubled and guilty consciences they know they are wrong and sense, however faintly, that they are being unjust and selfish. The world is a vast conspiracy of sinners and transgressors of God’s holy Law who seek refuge and understanding for their sins and crimes among themselves, impiously thinking that by feeling supported by an infinite majority of blind sinners like themselves they might be able to escape God’s inscrutable and implacable judgment and His holy and righteous wrath. They are certainly worthy of pity, for they are so misguided and ignorant of the only path that leads to unchanging Truth and eternal life.

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“LET it be known, then, that from Judas to the former Father Jacinto, the lineage of Church ministers who betray their Leader and sell themselves to heresy continues uninterrupted. That alongside and in opposition to the tradition of truth, there also exists in Christian society the tradition of error; in contrast to the apostolic succession of good ministers, hell has the diabolical succession of perverted ministers. This should not scandalize anyone. In this regard, let us recall the Apostle’s words, which he did not forget to warn us about: ‘There must be heresies, so that those among you who are truly tested may be revealed.'”

— Fr. Félix Sardá y Salvany, 1887

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“WHOEVER refuses to assent to divinely revealed truths on even one point truly abdicates all faith, for he refuses to submit to God insofar as He is the sovereign truth and the proper motive of faith.”

— Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum,  1896

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Prayer for Deceased Soldiers

You are all-powerful, O God, and live forever in light and joy. Look with pity and love, we beseech You, upon those who have bravely fought and gallantly died for our country.

By laying down their lives, they have showed supreme love for others. We implore you to accept their sacrifice and their belief in the justice of the cause for which they died. May their offering not be in vain. Deign to forgive any sins or misdeeds they may have committed. Bring them quickly, we implore You, into Your august presence, where fear, sadness, mourning and death no longer exist. Have pity, in Your loving kindness, on those they leave behind. In Your own inscrutable ways, make good their absence, and lavishly bestow Your love and consolations upon those deprived of their presence. This we ask of You in the name of Jesus Christ, Our King. Amen.

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“WHEN his disciples saw him, in the height of the fever, lying upon his back and praying, they entreated him to turn over and take a little rest upon his side while the violence of his sickness would allow him. But Martin answered them ‘Suffer me to look heavenward rather than earthward, that my spirit may see the way whereby it is so soon going to the Lord.’ At the moment of death he saw the enemy of mankind, and cried out: What are you come here for, you bloody brute? You murderer, you’ll find nothing in me. With these words on his lips, he gave up his soul to God, being aged eighty years. He was received by a company of Angels, who were heard praising God by many persons, especially by holy Severinus, Bishop of Cologne.” Source

St. Martin of Tours, Roman soldier, hermit, monk, and the third Bishop of Tours, likely died in 397 AD in France and has been venerated continuously for over 1,500 years. He was also what would be considered today a “religious extremist” incapable of engaging in dialogue.

O Martin, thou Priest of God, thou worthy shepherd, pray God on our behalf.

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Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners,  nor sat in the chair of pestilence.

But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night.

And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit, in due season.

And his leaf shall not fall off: and all whatsoever he shall do shall prosper.

Not so the wicked, not so: but like the dust, which the wind driveth from the face of the earth.

Therefore the wicked shall not rise again in judgment: nor sinners in the council of the just.

For the Lord knoweth the way of the just: and the way of the wicked shall perish.

Psalm 1: 1-7

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A woman walked into a local breakfast cafe.

As she was being seated in a booth, she noticed a sign on a chalkboard behind the cash register and hostess station. An attempt at self-promotional humor, the sign said in bold, cursive lettering, “There is no unhappiness that can’t be cured by a good breakfast.”

The woman read these words and they fell into heart like drops of acid.

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Softly and gently, dearly-ransom’d soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,

And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.

And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,

Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.

Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;

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“MENNNAS was a Christian Egyptian soldier who had withdrawn himself into a desert place to do penance, but one day, during the persecution under the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, upon the said Emperors’ birthday, when the people were gathered together at a great show, stood forth in the theatre, and reviled with a loud voice the idolatries of the Gentiles. Thereupon he was arrested, and being bound at Cotyasus, the chief city of Phrygia, under the authority of the President Pyrrhus, was first savagely lashed with thongs, then racked, then scarified with fire applied to his naked body, then had his wounds lacerated by rubbing with hair-cloth, then dragged through thorns and iron spikes with hands and feet tied, then lashed again with whips loaded with lead, and lastly slain with the sword, and thrown into a fire. The Christians saved his body thence and buried it, and it hath in after times been carried to Constantinople.”

St. Mennas was an officer in the imperial army of Rome. He was rudely booted from the general calendar of saints in the 1960s, along with many other holy martyrs. If only this warrior saint had known that “proselytism,” as Jorge Bergoglio said, “is solemn nonsense!” He might have chosen dialogue instead of the combative and extremist measure of “revil[ing] in a loud voice,” and then prevented these unpleasant experiences for himself. Pray for us, St. Mennas, and for all those who implicitly argue that your martyrdom was in vain.

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“ANY top-down expansion of the electorate that breaks the historical continuity of the founding demographic—regardless of the universalist rhetoric used to justify it—is always a coup d’état designed to conquer the sovereign populace from within. In the grammar of absolute statecraft, a sovereign political order is fundamentally an intergenerational estate built by the accumulated social capital and martial sacrifices of a distinct founding lineage.

“Because the total volume of sovereign power remains fixed, every new input injected into the political system from above automatically executes a mathematical split of absolute power. Every vote manufactured by the state automatically subtracts from the individual defensive weight of the original ballots, systematically neutralizing the sovereign primacy of the creators.

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“IN the reign of the Emperor Decius one Tryphon strove by preaching the faith of Jesus Christ to bring all men to worship Him. For this cause he was taken by the servants of Decius. He was first tormented upon the rack, and flesh stripped from him with iron claws; then red-hot nails were driven into his insteps, he was beaten with cudgels and scarified with lighted torches. The sight of the courage wherewith he bore all, brought the Praefect Respicius to believe in the Lord Christ, and he forthwith declared himself a Christian. He also was diverse ways tormented, and then led along with Tryphon before the statue of Jupiter. When Tryphon prayed, the statue fell down. Then were both Tryphon and Respicius savagely lashed with whips loaded with lead, until they grasped the crown of a most glorious testimony, upon the 10th day of November. Upon the same day a certain maiden named Nympha, having openly confessed that Jesus Christ is very God, added the palm of martyrdom to the crown of virginity.” Source

Why did these holy martyrs die this way when, according to Bob Prevost, (aka “Pope” Leo), they could have honored Jesus Christ by simply “caring for their own dignity” and saying, “How ya’ doin’?” to their neighbors?

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Hindu ‘asceticism’ is nothing more than a form of Epicureanism for Brahmins, a refined and selfish pursuit of a superior spiritual indifference to all desires, even good ones, and to all responsibilities; an indifference justified by considering all suffering as expiation for sins committed in a previous life, etc., etc. What good can Catholics learn from such a worldview? We would very much like to know.

FROM The Great Biblical Apostasy of the Vatican Council [Translated from Spanish by Google]:

“Article 18 of the decree Ad Gentes, on missionary activity, exhorts “religious institutes” in mission countries to, in addition to striving to adapt the “mystical riches with which they are entirely filled” to the “character and idiosyncrasies of each people,” “carefully consider how to apply to Christian religious life the ascetic and contemplative traditions whose seed God had frequently sown in ancient cultures [in general and, consequently, also in their religions] before the proclamation of the Gospel.” The council, on the other hand, now unduly revalues ​​the “ancient cultures,” whose gods were “demons,” and whose sacrifices were offered “to demons and not to God” (1 Cor 10:20), claiming to recognize in them an irregular presence of the semina Verbi, the “seeds of revealed truth.” But this violates a truth always considered to belong to the deposit of faith. (The same concept is repeated in Lumen Gentium § 17 and Ad Gentes § 11, but applied to all contemporary non-Christian peoples, including pagans: missionaries must discover, “with joy and reverence, the seeds of the Word contained in them”; “in them,” that is, in the “national and religious traditions” of the mission countries whose evangelization is entrusted to them.)

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“MANY make even long journeys in order to adorn the graves of their parents, brothers and sisters, or other near friends and acquaintances, and to recite some pious prayers there. This custom of visiting the graves is very laudable and in every way appropriate, being very wholesome both for us and for the departed; for us, because the cemetery produces in us an earnest, holy disposition of mind, and causes us to make good resolutions to amend our life; for the departed, because the graves vividly remind us of our departed friends and fellow-Christians, and call upon us to pray for the repose of their souls. Since to visit the graves is of benefit both for you and the departed, I exhort you to cast,

I . One glance upon the graves,
II. One glance into the graves, and
III . One glance beyond the graves.

Read more here.

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“THE world lives immersed in a gigantic lie and in immense collective madness and blindness, in an absurd and banal fiction that it constructs in its suicidal zeal to banish and separate God from the world and everything that vaguely recalls God. The world is horrified at the thought that there is an infinitely holy and just God who sees and judges all, a God who loves truth and virtue and hates lies and vice, because deep down the world knows it is in error and darkness, but it does not want to be rebuked because it has been, is, and always will be proud and murderous like its prince, the devil. That is why the world hates the light of God, because it feels sinful and knows that its works are not good, so it never approaches the Truth, which is Jesus Christ, so as not to be repressed and condemned for its wickedness and duplicity.

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“IT is a wonderful thing and full of scandal, that from the time when the pure doctrine was first called to light, the world should daily grow worse and worse …. The world becomes every day worse, men are now more vindictive, more avaricious, less inclined to mercy, more immodest and undisciplined, and much worse than they were in the times of the papacy.”

— Martin Luther in Post. Evan. Dom. i. post Adv.

‘”Formerly, when we were seduced by the pope, men willingly followed good works; but now all their study is to get everything to themselves by exactions, pillage, theft, lying, usury.”

— Luther,  Serai, in Dom. 26, post Trin.

“The greater part of the people seem only to have embraced the Gospel in order to shake off the yoke of discipline, and the obligation of fasting, penance, etc, which lay upon them in the time of popery, and to live at their pleasure, enjoying their lust and lawless appetites at their content. They therefore lent a willing ear to the doctrine that we are justified by faith alone, and not by good works, having no relish for them.”

— Martin Bucer, de Regn. Christi, 1. i. c. 4.

“Those whom I once knew to have been chaste, sincere, and without fraud, I found after they had embraced this sect to be licentious in their conversation, neglectful of prayer, passionate, vain, as spiteful as serpents, and lost to the feelings of human nature. I speak from experience.”

— Erasmus,  ad Frat. Infer. Germ.

“What an evangelical generation is this! Nothing was ever more licentious and more seditious — nothing is less evangelical than these pretended gospellers.”

— Erasmus, Ep. i. 6, 4. (more…)

“The sovereign, or the parliament, that pretends to govern a country in opposition to the laws of God has no right to aught but revolt and contempt from every upright man; to give the sacred name of law to tyrannical enactments of that kind is a profanation, unworthy not only of Christian, but of every man who is not a slave.”

FROM commentary on Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost by Dom Prosper Guéranger:

The will of God!—there is the origin, there is the real greatness of all authority amongst men! Of himself, man has no right to command his fellow man. The number, however imposing it may be, makes no difference with this powerlessness of men over my conscience; for whether they be one, or five hundred, I, by nature, am equal to each one among them; and by adding the number of their so-called rights over me, they are only adding to the number of nothingness. But God, wishing that men should live one with the other, has thereby wished that there exist amongst them a power which should rule over the rest; that is, should direct the thousands or millions of different wills to the unity of one social end. God leaves to circumstances, though it is his providence that regulates those circumstances—he leaves to men themselves, at the beginning of any mere human society, a great latitude as to the choice of the form under which is to be exercised both the civil power itself and the mode of its transmission. But once regularly invested with the power, its depositories, its possessors, are responsible to God alone, as far, that is, as the legitimate exercise of their authority goes, because it is from God alone that that power comes to them.

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“APART from the happiness of the saints in heaven, I think there is no joy comparable to that of the souls in purgatory. An incessant communication with God renders their happiness daily more intense, and this union with God grows more and more intimate, according as the impediments to that union, which exist in the soul, are consumed. These obstacles are the rust and the remains, as it were, of sin; and the fire continues to consume them, and thus the soul gradually expands under the divine influence. Thus, according as the rust diminishes and the soul is laid bare to the divine rays, happiness is augmented. The one grows and the other wanes until the time of trial is elapsed. Yet the pain is not lessened, it is only the time of suffering which decreases. With regard to the will of these souls, they can never say that these pains are pains, so great is their contentment with the ordinance of God, with which their wills are united in perfect charity.”

— St. Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory

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