Editor’s Note: Donald Trump, whose family has served the Masonic Skull & Bones Lodge for nearly a century, has nominated as Secretary of Defense a man who wears a Jerusalem Cross tattoo on his arm. So what does the National Catholic Register do? They publish this rather fine but marred report, explaining the symbol and the tradition of the tattoo. But they mar it by saying the most famous persons to wear this tattoo are arch-Freemasons of the fake Royal Dynasty currently occupying the Throne of the United Kingdom. — If you have been paying attention, you can now understand who is funding the National Catholic Register, and how its signalling that it won’t be your ally in the fight against the Church.

What the article neglects to say, is that Christians of the MidEast have been tattooing the Cross on themselves long before the First Crusade, so that, if killed while traveling, all might know to what religion they belonged and how they wanted to be buried. This practice is common among the Ethiopian Copts to this day.

However, generally speaking, for other reasons that is, tattooing is considered by all sound Catholic moral theologians as a mortal sin, because being made in the image and likeness of God, we should not write or mark anything upon our flesh, as the pagans do, who by tattoos consecrate themselves to demons and false gods. In fact, one exorcist tells me that every person with a tattoo who comes to him has serious spiritual problems.

So let us continue to discourage all Catholic from marking themselves with tattoos, even though, at times and places in the past and in distant lands, marking the Cross upon the flesh was a necessity.