Category Archives: Faith

Editorials, Faith

A Generation unfit to be members of the Catholic Clergy

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

There are a lot of reasons to call an extraordinary Synod to put the Vatican back in order — where a Pope is a de facto prisoner in a Monastery at the center of Vatican gardens, and an Argentine Jesuit is ruling the roost from a Hotel on the southern border. — No I am not writing a novel!

But one thing no one is talking about is the global or radical solution for the crisis of pedophilia in the institutions of the Catholic Church during the last 70 years. The numbers of victims world wide may be over a hundred thousand. That is not clear. But it is clear what generation of clergy perpetrated these horrible abominations and betrayed the most sacred trust in all of creation: being a Catholic priest of God.

It was the generation which wanted, enacted, promoted, promulgated, implemented and enforced Vatican II.

Every problem in the Church right now was either directly or indirectly caused by that generation of clergy.

What needs to be said is this: they are not fit to be clergy; they are not fit to rule the Church of God; they are not fit to be entrusted with the formation of the faithful in anything. They are completely morally bankrupt, and in recent years are showing everyone that they are also completely spiritually and theologically bankrupt. Very, very few of them can even calla spade a spade, anymore.

Until the Church deposes that entire generation, the Crisis will not be over. We are in and headed for truly apocalyptic scenarios of institutionalized devil worship on the altars of every Catholic Church in the name of obedience to this corrupt and perverse generation. We are already in an apocalyptic scenario, inasmuch as 99.99% of clergy offer their masses in communion with the Apostate, Arch-Heretic, Arch-Blasphemer and Idolater, as if he were as valid a pope as Saint Pius X and more valid than Jesus Christ, while ignoring the true Vicar of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI!

They are a generation of fakers. The Catholic Religion means nothing to them other than appearances. And they need to be told that by the faithful, to their faces.

Being a priest requires that you are honest. The egomaniac, the psychotic, the pyschopathic and the sociopathic should not be admitted, let alone rule. Those who would sacrifice the whole content of our Holy Faith to keep up appearances are no less unworthy. And those, who wont do anything about it, are even worse! because knowing that there is a problem and recognizing it as a problem, they do not react as if it were a problem. Theirs indeed shall be a more weighty punishment!

I love Jesus Christ and the Priesthood He has shared with men. But I cannot ignore it when I see men unworthy in the most radical and fundamental measure to that MOST sacred duty. It would be disrespect for Christ and the priesthood to remain silent about these things any longer.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a detail of a photo by Br. Bugnolo of the Altar of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, here at Rome.

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Canon Law, Debates, Faith

Adoration of the Eternal Word requires the recognition of Benedict XVI as the Pope

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

Alas we live in an age of disbelief, of denial, of every sort of ideology invented to pretend that disbelief and denial are not godless excuses against the Lord and Creator. How right Our Lord was when He pronounced the parable of the Owner of the Vineyard who after many attempts to obtain due reverence and respect from his tenant vine-dressers, send his only son thinking that would convince them.

Our Lord and Creator has entrusted to us a beautiful and fruitful vineyard in His Creation, in this planet, Earth, in the human nature with which each of us is wonderfully made and gifted into existence. In gratitude we are obliged to render back to Him His due.

The First and Greatest Commandment is the adoration of God with the entirety of the being which He gave us: in truth, in love, in faith, in hope, in service which above all begins with worship.

The Adoration of the Eternal Word

There are three Divine Persons in the Most Holy Trinity, and the middle one, Who became Man for our salvation is called rightly by Saint John the Apostle: the Word of God. Of Himself, He said: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.

If we believe, then, in Jesus Christ — not just with our lips or our public actions — but in our minds and hearts, we must therefore adore the Eternal Word. Not just as Incarnate, but as coming forth from the Mouth of God from all eternity and containing in Himself all Truth, all Wisdom, all Light, all Knowledge: saving Truth, redeeming Wisdom, clarifying Light and illuminating Knowledge.

It follows then, since by Faith we know that all that is good in this world is a reflection, distant though it may be, of the goodness of God, that every word by which truth can be signified is a reflection or distant similitude to the Word of God.

This, more than anything else, is the great reason behind the Catholic Religion’s fidelity to words, to writings, to documents: to their preservation, to their faithful translation, to their assiduous study and to their printing and publication.

All this is the consequence of the adoration of the Eternal Word which lies at the center of the Catholic Faith: in the hearts of every Catholic, in every liturgy of the Church, and in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar: Jesus Christ present really, truly and substantially: a Presence proclaimed and defended throughout the ages with words.

Words are the touchstones of fidelity

If there is one constant in all of Catholic history it is this: every Saint, Doctor or Father of the Church and every Catholic hero has been faithful to words: to their meaning, to their intent, to their purpose. They all have been men and women of their word. They all have been men and women who believed the words of those who came before them, whether as Apostles or Evangelists, Fathers of the Church, Popes speaking as popes.

This is why, if we want to know the truth, we have the simple and quick solution: believe the words the Church gives us, hold fast to them, perceive their meaning and put that into practice, make it the rule of your life and the itinerary of your journey. Trust in them and never look back.

Every temptation is against the Word

Contrariwise, every temptation which can be brought, has been brought or will ever be brought against the Will of God for any creature will be manifest in an attack on words, on their meaning and signification, on their intent or purpose. When you see this in action you can be certain that the spirit behind the speaker, the voice in his throat and hand in his mind is from the netherworld: the world where there is no meaning, no light, no wisdom, no knowledge of the good and above all no truth, or similitudes of It.

This can be clearly seen in the controversy over the Declaration made by Pope Benedict XVI. It all turns upon words, with one party saying they do not mean what they say, and the other party saying they mean exactly what they say. One party wants them to mean more than what they say, because they already have — here I use a metaphor — their hand in the cookie-jar, and they do not want to stop shoving the cookies in their mouth. Their mindset is of the juvenile who never grew up, of the egomaniac who sees no meaning but in what returns to himself, of the sociopath who denies any moral law which has authority to govern his passions, and of the psychopath who denies there is anything to defend what is right or wrong.

The other party is truly faithful to the Eternal Word. It does not presume that words mean other than what they say. It does not presume that the Code of Canon Law is not operative and does not mean what it says. It does not presume John Paul II was ignorant in promulgating it, nor does it presume that Pope Benedict XVI intended something other than what he did.

This other party has nothing to gain by their position, because not only are they universally reviled for it, but they never intended to get anything personal out of it. That is why they do not see the controversy as a personal fight. They have nothing personal to defend in it.

I have written this short reflection to help those who are confused by the liars and tricksters and those with personal skin in the game, as they say: the ones who want you to pay them to tell you to shut up, stop thinking, buckle under, go along with apostasy, because they who deny and attack words, know what is best for you!

For us who are Catholics, we know that we shall be judged on every idle word we say, because God the Word considers words important. That is why He founded His Church upon words and through words transmits salvation to all who receive them, faithfully and humbly.

WHY IS BENEDICT XVI STILL THE POPE?

Canon 332 §2 reads:

If it happen that the Roman Pontiff renounce his munus, for validity there is required that the renunciation be made freely and manifested duly, but not that it be accepted by anyone whomsoever.

But Pope Benedict’s Declaratio reads, in part:

… I declare, that I renounce the ministerium entrusted to me through the hands of the Cardinals..

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CREDITS:  The Featured Image is of the Tabernacle in the Basilica of Saints Boniface and Alexis at Rome, on the Aventine. Photo by Br. Bugnolo.

 

Faith, News

The implicit blasphemies of Bergoglians

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

There has been much written about the blasphemies which come forth from the mouth of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as a torrent out of a mouth of a dragon intent upon destroying Holy Mother Church (cf. Apocalpyse, chapter 12).

But little has been written about the blasphemies implicit in the position of those who insist that he is the pope or a member of the Catholic Church, and not separated from Her in virtue of Canon 1364, ipso facto a thousand times over.

Blasphemy consists chiefly in attributing evil to God. It is the most outrageous attack on the Divine Majesty because God is infinite Goodness and there is no darkness in Him.

For this reason, if any rational creature, Angelic or human, were to hold as true something which implies God is evil, he would be guilty of implicit blasphemy or blasphemy in causa, as the moralists say, because the assent of his mind to the evil reason would be the cause of him inevitably verbally blaspheming God, a thing which is happening more and more with those who refuse to examine the abundant, clear and incontrovertible evidence of history and law, that Pope Benedict XVI is still the pope because he never resigned in accord with Canon 332.

But since these horrible sins of blasphemy are overlooked by the controlled Catholic Media, it is a necessity that they be exposed for what they are by the Catholic media which is not controlled.

Falsehoods which imply and cause blasphemy

Here I will list just a few, I am sure you can think of more. Just add your suggestions in the comments:

  1. That a true pope can hand over 30 Million Catholics to be persecuted unto death, simply because he wants good relations or financial support from a Marxist Dictatorship, and still be the pope.
  2. That a true pope can blaspheme God and the Saints and still be the pope.
  3. That a true pope can alter the Our Father.
  4. That a true pope can abandon Apostolic Teaching on the Sacraments.
  5. That a true pope can work to overthrow the teaching of the Church against sodomy, abortion, contraception.
  6. That a true pope can institutionalize idolatry in the Church.
  7. That a true pope can replace the Gospel with the Agenda of Globalism.
  8. That a true pope can authorize any of the above.
  9. That Jesus Christ, Who promised Saint Peter and His successors, that He would pray for them, that their faith NEVER fail, is praying for Bergoglio.
  10. That the Most Holy Trinity would give us such a monster to be His Vicar.
  11. That Jesus Christ would want us to obey such a monster as His Vicar.
  12. That the Most Holy Trinity and the Saints of Heaven are in communion with such a monster.
  13. That God thinks it is a sin to NOT name Bergoglio in the Canon of the Mass.
  14. That God reckons as sinners, heretics or schismatics those who separate themselves from such a monster, denounce him or fault him for his abominations and sacrileges.
  15. That God could tolerate as His Vicar a man who refuses to kneel before Himself in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
  16. That God could tolerate as His Vicar a man who blasphemies His Holy Immaculate Mother.
  17. That God could regard as His Vicar a man elected in the lifetime of His Vicar in contravention to canon 359.

So when next anyone tells you that the apologists for Bergoglio or those members of the the College of Cardinals, College of Bishops, Catholic clergy or the Catholic media, who insist Bergoglio is the pope, ARE NOT INVOLVED IN GREAT FRAUD and evil, recite to them this list of blasphemies.

Note well: anyone who does not think blasphemy is a sin, either is an atheist or a devil worshipper.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is Albrecht Dürer’s, the Beast of the Apocalypse, which is in the public domain. It shows the 7 headed Beast spewing out blasphemies against Holy Mother Church and Our God.

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Editorials, Faith, News

Divine & Empowering vs. Nasty & Effeminate

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

One of the objectives of radical marxists is to get the masses to think evil is good and good is evil, truth is a lie and lies are truth. We see all those who support Bergoglio involved in this sort of fraud and wickedness.

They want us to surrender to them, on account of feeling that victory is impossible. Trad Inc. has pushed this in recent days in nearly those exact words.

What they cannot stand is when Catholics use moral categories and call them out for their sin. They cannot suffer that there be any law or moral norm by which they can be judged. There is only one evil, and that is judging them as lovers of wickedness.

That is why their profession of faith is: Who am I to judge the wicked? And don’t you dare judge me!

But their faith is a ruse, because as soon as you challenge them in their lies they become very judgemental.

On Tuesday, the Vatican asked the police to take me in for a talk. Two hours of grueling accusations and interrogation, in an attempt to find me in violation of some law or regulation. It call came to naught, because from my youth, God and my parents instructed me to be squeaky clean about the observance of all law.

But the attempt had not principally the purpose of harassing me. It was all about shutting up the faithful who wanted to give their testimony in accord with Canon 212 as to what they thought about the last 7 years. In the Piazza San Pietro that day there were at least two dozen faithful. The Secretary of State at the Vatican had to ask the police to take me away before I could interview them and publish their laments and criticisms to the world. That is all what it was about.

So since the agenda of the Argentine is to shut down conversation and persecute truth tellers, I want to respond in this Editorial with an important truth.

Benedict is the Pope

This is a Divine and Empowering truth. Because those who know it AND who profess it

  1. Unite themselves to the MOST HOLY TRINITY
  2. Unite themselves to Jesus Christ, the King of Heaven and Earth
  3. Unite themselves with Jesus’s TRUE AND ONLY VICAR ON EARTH
  4. Unite themselves with the ONLY TRUE CHURCH, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
  5. Unite themselves with the COMMUNION OF SAINTS IN HEAVEN

And by these 5 bonds of Unity, they, as it were, plug themselves into the infinite power of God and the infinite Mediation of Jesus Christ.

And against this there is nothing, but

The nasty and effeminate attempts of individuals who do not have the moral maturity or the intellectual capacity to respond in a constructive dialogue which seeks the truth. Because it does not take a doctorate in Canon Law, nor a doctorate in Latin, nor a doctorate in Philosophy, to understand that Benedict XVI is the Pope and has never ceased to be the Pope.

You only have to remember your third grade lesson on vocabulary. If it is a different word, it has a different meaning. That’s why words are different.

If you accept this truth with the same childlike spirit today, as you did when you were in the Third Grade (In the UK they call this year 4), then you are all set. The truth that Benedict is still the pope flows directly from this principle:

  1. Canon Law requires the renunciation of munus, to resign the Papacy.
  2. Pope Benedict renounced ministerium.
  3. Therefore, Pope Benedict did not resign the Papacy.

All the arguments to the contrary are excuses — what a minute — Let me correct myself — after 7 long years THERE ARE STILL NO CONTRARY ARGUMENTS to the 1.2.3 which I just posted here.

It’s Child’s play

In English, the phrase, It is child’s play, means that it is so easy a child can do it without being taught. Adults who have a difficulty in such a thing are therefore inexcusable.

I am reminded about the final comment which Bishop Arrieta made to me when I met him on Dec. 11, 2019: about my approach to the problem of the failed renunciation being a “strange mixture of Thomism and philosophy”. When I met with the Bishop I did not realize that the very copy of the Code of Canon Law which I use on a daily basis was edited by BISHOP ARRIETA before he was a Bishop. And it is there, in his own words, on Canon 126 that he explains that for a juridical act to be valid it has to posit the act of the same essence as that which is required by the law. So his final comment to me was not honest. He himself admitted 20 years before the very principle I was using to demonstrate the renunciation was invalid.

This is why, when you are told to shut up and be quiet or are insulted on a daily basis or threatened with a denial of the sacraments, of your job, or office, or of your faculties as a priest, or of your pension or housing, in response to your profession that Benedict XVI is still the pope, you need to recognize what it is: the nasty and effeminate tactics of immature crooks, who do not deserve to be called men of God.

We must stop being non-judgemental

The only way to restore the order of justice in society is see that justice is applied to the guilty in punishments which fit the crimes they perpetrate and that justice is applied to the innocent by defending them and honoring them for their righteousness. This is why being judgemental is essential to victory and overcoming the Crisis in the Church.

And this is why all the Saints and Fathers of the Church are know for their timely and opportune ability to insult the wicked, reprove error, and vituperate what is evil and immoral. Those who say a Saint should never do these things are simply liars.

They are also calling Christ a liar, Who publicly shamed Herod by calling him a female fox — a vixen — to denounce his sodomy. And Who called the Scribes and Pharasees a brood of vipers on two occasions — at least — as is recorded in Matthew 12:34 and 23:33.

Stoicism is a heresy

Finally, we have to avoid the very subtle heresy which has been promoted by evil Jesuits for nearly 4 centuries: Stoicism. In manuals of spiritual theology and direction, they have advocated that it is evil to allow your emotions to be stirred for any reason. This is not the Catholic Faith. This is the error of the pagan philosophers of the school of Stoicism, who held that all emotions were privations or due order in the soul.

God gave us the ability to feel anger, sadness, fear, revulsion, disgust, happiness, joy, gladness etc.. When we allow these emotions to move in harmony with the works of justice and to oppose the works of darkness, we are using our emotions virtuously as God wants. So in matters of controversy, we should not denigrate any servant of God who uses emotions to attack what is evil and whom is promoting evil. Because this is a work of justice. And if it causes us to wince, then we are lacking in fortitude and temperance.

At the same time let us not let the wicked manipulate our attention by their insults. They are not worthy of our attention any more than to defend the truth by refuting their daily lies. Being completely morally and intellectually bankrupt, without any defense of their errors, they have to insult since they have nothing other to say and because insult covers that they have nothing other to say by stirring up passions which cloud the mind.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is the detail of a photo by Alberto Luccaroni and is used here in accord with the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 unported license under which it is offered here.

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Faith, News

Divine Faith vs. Social Acceptability

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

Beware: not all men have faith — says Saint Paul. This is a Scripture which in previous generations was not considered so significant, because all had faith and no one publicly contested it. If you did what everyone else was doing you would be deemed faithful. And no one noticed.

But in the Great Apostasy, this principle of going along with the herd, fails. Because the herd is no longer the sheep of the Lord and no longer in the sheepfold of the Lord.

Christ did not call us sheep for nothing. He knows we tend to follow the herd. This is even true in countries like the United States of America which has strong currents of individualism in its national culture and society.

I remember nearly 20 years ago, when I was invited to attend a Trad Inc. conference and afterwards I was invited to a reception. Out came the liquor and a lot of it. I drank water. Everyone seemed somewhat surprised and obsessed to as why I did this. I said I am a son of Saint Francis, and I have renounced the world. After about 30 minutes no one wanted to talk to me, and no one could talk to me. That was the last reception of Trad Inc. I went to. I set my sights on finding a monastery or hermitage in Europe after that, as I never liked herds, especially ones not headed in the direction of Christ Crucified.

With Bergoglio’s usurpation of the papacy, I see the same psychological behaviors which broke out in the USA when Obama first ran for the presidency. Being born of a Kenyan Citizen and a mother who was a minor at the time, he was born a native of the Crown Colony of Kenya. His grandmother said he was born in Kenya, which would mean that he was a natural born citizen of Kenya. For more than a decade, he and his wife claimed he was a Kenyan, born in Kenya, or implied the same during his visits there. All US records of persons returning from Kenya during the week of his birth at the port of Honolulu went missing after his election.

That controversy regarded the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that every U.S. President be born on U.S. soil of 2 parents who both were U.S. citizens at the time of the child’s birth. It is an objectively verifiable requirement. In the election of 2008 the entire political establishment in the United States of America ignored the requirement. Constitutionally, therefore, the entire presidency of Barrack Obama was a fiction. He was a usurper and none of the laws he passed had or have legal force. But the ruling class ignored it, because many of their children are not natural born citizens, as the Constitution requires, and but are rather of mixed citizenship and birth as globalism demands.

That Bergoglio should be thrust into power after an unexpected, apparent and strange abdication by Pope Benedict is not therefore surprising. It was an extension of the globalist agenda to put into power men who were not qualified for office and in a manner which was extralegal. The entire propaganda arm of the MSM worldwide supported both revolutions. Even to this day, the MSM never says anything bad about Obama, he is their messiah.

If I recall correctly, Trad Inc. ignored the questions about Obama just as they ignored the questions about Bergoglio, whether arising from the vote canvassing in the Conclave or the problems in the renunciation of Benedict. Their positions on both are consistent. They accept as true whatever narrative the Left puts out and they accept without question the legal arguments which the party of the anointed-of-the-Left put out.

I think they do this, because the Traditional Movement in the Catholic Church came into being with strong influences from international Conservatism, of the kind sponsored by the Masonic Lodge, which never really want to fight the left, only go leftwards at a slower pace. This is not the common definition you hear of Conservatism in the USA, because its too impolitic to speak of it. But if you read what Conservatives stood for 60, 40, and 20 years ago, and compare it to day, you will see what I mean.

The Divine and Catholic Faith, however, teaches us to hold fast to truths and teaching without any alteration over any length of time. This regards principles of law, principles of philosophy as well as the Deposit of the Faith and perennial Magisterium. This is why inside the Traditional Movement there are actually 2 camps which 2 different principles of inspiration, but only one is of God, and that one is clearly not in power.

If there is to be a uniting of Catholics opposed to the Anti-Church it can only be of those who chose to be motivated and loyal to the divine faith, period. It has to arise from a spirit higher that political motivation and it has to be free from the errors of such political movements. It cannot include those who say being a faithful Catholic requires or allows you to be a socialist, a progressive, a facist, a marxist, etc.. It also has to be motivated by a spirit which does not disdain what our forefathers did for 20 centuries, in solving problems by all legitimate means.

This approach is not going to be accepted by those who want to attend the cocktail hours and hobnob with the influential and famous. It has to be composed of those who care not at all for social acceptability, and everything about being loyal to God the Father in the Catholic Religion.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a photo of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, at Assisi, Italy, as seen from the Rocca Maggiore above the town. The photo is copyright by Luca Ales and used here under the Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 International license described here.

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Canon Law, Editorials, Faith

Cherry-Picking Canon Law is a mortal sin

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

One day, while I lingered at the Convent of Saint Francis of Assisi, at Bagnoregio, in the spring of 2016, one of the Franciscan Fathers invited me to come with him to a Cherry orchard owned by a benefactor of the Convent. The owner said we could pick all the cherries we wanted. And the Conventual Father just loved cherries. I had never picked cherries and wanted to do some work to repay the Friars for their hospitality to me, so I eagerly went along.

In a Cherry Orchard

Cherries, in the province of Viterbo, Italy, grow in masses on the branches of trees which are nearly 20 feet high. So many cherries sprout from each branch that without supports the branches usually break.  But unlike many fruits, picking cherries is difficult, because they are so small and each one ripens at its own pace. So each cherry has to be picked on the basis of a decision to pick it or not. And this has to be accurate, because an unripe cherry can cause great gastric distress after you eat it.

We picked so many cherries, the old Friar was nearly taken to heaven. He was so happy, it reminded him of his youth. Alas, after letting them age a day in the refrigerator, they were found to be not very sweet and too watery. I found them fine and ended up eating too many of them. But Italians are very particular about food quality, and the old priest ate no more than a handful, which was a great disappointment to him.

The Expression, to Cherry-pick…

And thus the colloquial expression, in English, to cherry-pick.  To cherry-pick means to chose what you want and leave the rest. The expression is used to show the mendacity or malignancy in choosing what you want from something which is intended to be taken as a whole.

For example, Protestants cherry-pick scripture to propose to their congregations a Christianity without Bishops, priests and Sacraments. This is because they decide to believe and observe and thus recognize only certain passages from Scripture, not all of them.

Cherry-picking Scripture is a mortal sin, because it presupposes that you are a rebel against the obligation of faith to believe in all of Sacred Scripture as inerrant and equally inspired by God.

Canon Law

Imagine a Church where you only had to observe certain Canon Laws and not others. I can imagine that if I went to any medium or high security prison in the world, and proposed a society where you could chose which laws to keep and which you did not have to keep, that my proposal would win the wild cheers of all the inmates, for obvious reasons.

To cherry-pick a code of law is obviously wrong. But perhaps not so obviously more immoral and evil than breaking the law. Because the one who chooses to break a law does not necessary decide or judge that the law should not be observed, only that what he wants at that moment is more important. But someone who cherry-picks a Code of Law is setting himself up as an authority over the authority of the law itself and rejects in principle that the entire Code and the authority which issued it is his superior, which he must obey.

To cherry-pick Canon Law therefore is a very serious mortal sin of rebellion against the Pope and against Jesus Christ, from Whom the papal munus comes. It is thus diabolic, without any exaggeration.

True or False Pope?

I am continually amazed how many commentators stop by and say, What is wrong with obeying a false pope? Is not obedience what matters? People do not obey Francis because of Francis, but out of obedience to the papacy, no?

If we think we can cherry-pick Canon Law, then it does not matter, because then the Catholic Religion is up for the grab of everyone, everyone can make it into what he wants, and we have a New Gnosticism, where everyone has his own inner guiding secret principles for salvation: while the external visible Church is merely the living space for the wantonness of each. Pope, Antipope, Jesus or the Antichrist, it would all be equally good.

This is why it is absolutely essential to the salvation of each of us and of all of us to get Canon 332 §2 right. Whether you are the Pope or a Cardinal, or a Bishop or a priest, or just a layman, it makes a difference. We cannot pick and chose canons, we have to obey all the Canons of the Church.

What does it matter that Canon Law says we must obey the pope, if we refuse to obey the pope by rejecting Canon 332 § 2, and listen to the Cardinals instead who want to have an authority which Canon Law does not give them, to demand universal acceptance of their unfounded uncanonical opinion?  Is that obedience to the Pope? Does Unam Sanctam no longer matter to Trad Inc.? and if we do not have to submit to Canon Law, why do we have to submit to Pope Francis? — Will someone in Trad inc explain that to me?

And where on earth or in Hell comes the idea that the Holy Spirit does not care about our decisions in this matter, or that He won’t back up the Cardinals and Bishops to do the right thing, if we ask them to in Synod or Council?

This is the spirit which motivated me to write my recent letter to Giovanni Cardinal Battista Re, whom Bergoglio announced as his new Dean of the College of Cardinals. I showed 8 sound canonical reasons why the Declaration of Pope Benedict, which he made 7 years ago, tomorrow, at 11:30 AM Rome time, did not separate him from the Papal Munus, and that therefore Canon Law — which judges everyone and everything — says he is still the pope.

It’s been 7 years, and still those who say Benedict is not the pope anymore do NOT have a canonical argument. They can cite no canon as it reads, and at most grab for a canon and try to make it say the opposite of what it says, as those whom Diane Montanga interviewed last year tried to do.  I am still waiting for Life Site to print a retraction for their lies and misrepresentations. I am still waiting for Trad Inc to denounce Life Site for an article of propaganda and misinformation. I am still waiting for 750 Cardinals and Bishops and priests and 500 students of theology and canon law to get back to me with JUST ONE sound canonical argument that demonstrates Benedict is no longer the pope.

Still waiting…

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CREDITS:  The Featured Image is a collage of images created by Google Image search, under the rubric of “Canon Law”, used here according to a fair use standard for editorial commentary.

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Editorials, Faith

God the Father — The Forgotten Person of the Most Holy Trinity

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

One of the most serious deficiencies in modern Catholic literature regards the lack of emphasis, as is due, on God the Father. I do not mean on God, as Father, or on God, as a father, but on the First Person of the Most Blessed Trinity: God the Father. I say this because nearly all modern errors seem to me to have arisen because we Catholics are weak in our devotion to God the Father.

(Here I use devotion in the sense of time spent praying to, not as regards loyalty or faith).

So, as a son of Saint Francis, whose entire vocation began with his decision to leave everything behind and take God as his father,  I want to give you some reflections on this Most Important of all Persons in Heaven and Earth.

The First Person

God the Father is the First Person of the Most Holy Trinity. — You probably have heard that 1000 times in your life. But what does it mean?

Yes, it does mean that when we name the Persons in the Most Holy Trinity, we name the Father, first of all of  Them. And it does mean that we do this, because Jesus spoke this way, on the day He was about to ascend into Heaven and gave the Great Mandate to the Apostles and His Disciples, saying:

All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. . (Mathew 28:19-20)

But it means more than that. And this part is not frequently explained to the faithful, due to the abysmal state of formation given priests in seminary. — I draw what I am about to say from Saint Bonaventure’s Commentary on the First Book of Sentences of Master Peter Lombard which is in its English translation about 850 pages long.

Because the First Origin

God the Father is the First Person principally because He is the First Origin. Or as the Fathers say, He is the Origin without an origin.

God the Father is the First Origin because from Him alone there proceed both of the other Divine Persons. — I say alone, here, in reference to 2 together — That is, there is no other Divine Person from Whom there proceeds 2 persons.  From the Son, there proceeds 1 Person — the Holy Spirit — and from the Holy Spirit there proceeds 0 Divine Persons. It counts down, 2, 1, 0. That makes the Father the First Origin and the Origin of Origins, because God the Son is the Origin of the Holy Spirit and God the Holy Spirit is the Origin of all living spirits and souls, as the Fathers say.

Paternity and Originality

The awesome Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity which God has revealed to us in the preaching of Jesus Christ, and into which we are reborn in Baptism when the life of the Holy Trinity comes to dwell in us by sanctifying grace, is something Which we should meditate on every day and at every moment of our lives, since such attention is the very essence of true religion and true adoration. — To no other nation has God made Himself known in such an intimate and totally correct manner: not even to the Jews of old, His Chosen People!

So let us contemplate God the Father briefly.

He is the Origin of origins, since from Him there proceeds the Eternal Son and the Eternal Holy Spirit.   They Each proceed from Him from all eternity, and there is never a moment when They were Not proceeding from Him. Yet Both and Each of Them has proceeded from Him perfectly and completely and there is no becoming nor anything in process of becoming in the processions of Each.

The Scholastics say that this is the great reason on account of which the Eternal Son taught us to name the First Person, the Father, so that we might understand that just as our own fathers are the first cause and principle of our own personal existence, in conceiving us, so the Eternal Father is the First Cause and Principle in the Holy Trinity.

This Firstness or priority, is not according to time. Each of the Divine Persons are equally co-eternal. It regards, as I said, that the Father is the Source of Two, which is more being the source of Persons, than the Other Two Persons enjoy.  This priority in being a cause or origin is called Authorship.  English is one of the few languages which is blessed to have the word, authorship — which means the quality or status of being the author of something. Authorship is the English translation of one of the senses of the Latin word, auctoritas, which is normally translated, authority. In many translations of the Fathers of the Church or even of Saint Thomas, the English translators err by rendering it as authority. Because if you say that the Father has more authority than the Son, you fall into the heresy of subordinationism, which held that the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity are not perfectly equal in dignity and power to one another.

But to say that the Father is First and Preeminent in Authorship is exactly true and rightly said. And this is why it is essential to our Holy Faith to give a special esteem to God the Father, in His Paternity — a word which means the quality or status of being a father.

Paternity and Authorship are concepts which explain one another and which cannot be separated. They also explain why men who have no sense of paternity, are men with deficient comprehension of their own masculinity. Because to be masculine according to the order of nature in man is to be an author, and not just a co-author, because it is that which the father contributes which decides whether the child is male or female. So in this, a human father, every human father, is more an author than the mother, and thus enjoys, in a manner analogous, but very remote, a primacy in authorship like God the Father.

This is the profound theological, philosophical, biological and mystical reason why only male human beings can become priests in the Catholic Religion. Because it is the duty of the Priest to take the place of the Son, Who in His masculinity reflects the Paternity of the Father from Whom He comes and according to Whom He is the Perfect Image and Word and expression of communion with God the Father.

This is also the reason that celibate and chaste men alone perfectly suit the priesthood of Christ, because just as the Father begets without a female or carnal principle, so the Priest reflects perfect communion with the Eternal Father when he takes to himself no wife, no companion and no sort of flesh.

Infinite in Wisdom and Charity

If we would like to, as it were, get to know the Person of God the Father, we need to contemplate that He is the eternal source of Infinite Wisdom and Charity. This is not only because He is God, Who is Wisdom and Charity, but because He generates Divine Wisdom in begetting the Son and Holy Charity in breathing forth the Holy Spirit.

You see, the Father is so Good, that He simply cannot give in measures. He gives all. He has the simplicity to give all and not hold back anything, and everything He does is holy and good and everlasting. He is not about casual friendships. He loves from eternity to eternity. He is not about half truths. He speaks forth infinite Knowledge. He is not about solitude. From Him come forth the other Two of the Trinity, Which finds its cause, as it were, in the Father alone.

A Father to imitate

It follows that we Catholics, being reborn as adopted sons of the Eternal Father when we were baptized into Jesus Christ and filled with the Holy Spirit, are called to imitate Our Father in Heaven. This is our essential duty. This is the sum total of our Catholic Religion. I explained this the other day, in my reflections on the Our Father.

This is why it is a GREAT offence when the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is not offered to God the Father and when this objective of the Mass is not clearly signified by the direction in which the priest offers. A priest cannot signify this if he faces in a direction which is inside the congregation. If some allowance can be made, it is only in those Basilicas which were built facing the East. Otherwise it can only be well signified, unambiguously that is, when the priest faces to the apex of the nave, away from the congregation, as all priests did for 1940 years, until Pope Paul VI allowed the diabolic innovation of facing the congregation.

We should, rather, imitate the Father in being preoccupied in speaking the Truth, His Son, and all other truths by holding fast to them and acquiring knowledge of them, as our duty in life requires and as our salvation needs. We should imitate the Father in being preoccupied in loving everyone with our whole heart, that is generously and truly and not in appearances, seeking the salvation of all.

We gravely fail our duty as adopted sons, therefore, when we lie or hate others. Worse of all, when we hurl lies at others to insult them, tear them down and destroy their reputations.

The concealment of the Primacy, Authority, Authorship and Priority of the Eternal Father is also the most grave sin of our age. Fathers who do not act like men,  fathers who do not teach their sons to be men and their daughters to be women. Fathers who do not rule their families in wisdom and truth. Fathers who do not come to the aid of the State by serving in public offices as true men and true fathers. Men who do not  act like fathers in caring for and protecting the Church. Men who do not act like men in all their affections and personal relations.

And all of us, in tolerating all these sins and abuses.

The Father must be obeyed

Finally, it is not a coincidence but rather a profound mystery, that it is the Father who revealed the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. This is because, since Infinite Truth in the Eternal Word and Infinite Love in the Eternal Spirit come forth from the Father, it is right that the Fathers of the Church attribute to God the Father, the giving of the Law principally, because it is through laws that fathers express their love and concern for their children, to both instruct them in goodness and protect them from evils.

Obedience to the Eternal Father is the true spirit of Christianity. And this is why the Church is Hierarchical, with a Pope, Bishops and Priests ruling the adopted children of the Father. This is also why Holy Mother Church, through Canon Law, and Our Lady, through Her example and apparitions, teaches us obedience and shows us which is our true Pope and which is a false usurper.

The false sons who rebel against the true Father in Heaven, therefore, are known by their ignoring of Canon Law and their usurpation of the offices of Pope, Bishop and priest. While the true sons of the Eternal Father are shown in those who humbly like little children accept Canon Law for what is it and always was, and words as the expression of determinate truth, not what-ever-I-want-to-be-truth.

Our Father, Who art in Heaven

Hallowed be Thy Name! — Our Lord, Jesus Christ, gave us the remedy for all these problems, we need to get back to praying to the Father and to praying the Our Father, to making the imitation of the Eternal Father our religion and in putting everything else in order and subordinated to Him. Stop calling anything good. Only one is Good, God alone.

As the First Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Origin of Origins, the Eternal Father, full of Wisdom and Charity, is the Personification of Goodness. If we seek true goodness we will find true blessedness. And we cannot find it elsewhere than in the bosom of God the Father, that is, in being for Him alone true sons, worthy to be taken into His lap and eternal Embrace!

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Church History, Faith

The Council of Trent anathemizes & excommunicates Amoris Laetitians

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

Its far to late to keep pretending that Amoris Laetitia — officially interpreted by Bergoglio by means of a personal letter he sent to the Bishops of Argentina, and published in the Act Apostolica Sedes, as allowing communion for public sinners — is NOT a heretical document, and that its faithful adherents by now are NOT formal pertinacious heretics.

Those who keep up this pretense, even if they call themselves Traditional Catholics are nothing of the sort.

The Council of Trent is clear, in its 13th Session and 11th Canon:

CANON XI.: If any one saith, that faith alone is a sufficient preparation for receiving the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist; let him be anathema. And for fear lest so great a sacrament may be received unworthily, and so unto death and condemnation, this holy Synod ordains and declares, that sacramental confession, when a confessor may be had, is of necessity to be made beforehand, by those whose conscience is burdened with mortal sin, howsoever contrite they may think themselves. But if any one shall presume to teach, preach, or obstinately to assert, or even in public disputation to defend the contrary, he shall be thereupon excommunicated.

If anyone thinks still that those who accept Amoris Laetitia do not deserve to be declared expelled from the Church, then they clearly are not Catholic, and are clearly opposing a sacrosanct, infallible Ecumenical Council on dogmatic and disciplinary measures which are valid until the end of time.

This Canon requires all of us who are Catholic to call Councils and Synods to condemn Bergoglio as a heretic and declare him and his collaborators outside of the Church. If you won’t act on that — I do not care who you are or what kind of threats you are under — you obviously do not have the faith which will save your soul. You are completely useless to Jesus Christ. This is a grave obligation for all Bishops. They will be damned if they go to their grave and not publicly call for such a Synod or Council. The salvation of all souls demands it.

So the next time someone tells you to “Recognize and Resist”, ask them when they decided to reject the teaching of the Council of Trent?

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a fresco of the Council of Trent in the Palazzo del Buonconsiglio at Trent, Italy, which is used here in accord with a Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 unported licencse, as described here.

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Anthropology, Faith, Philosophy

Evolution is an error, a myth and a heresy

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Br. Alexis Bugnolo

As a graduate of the University of Florida, at Gainesville, with a Baccalaurate in Cultural Anthropology, I perhaps know more than the common man about the theory of human evolution. But you won’t see me talk about it much, because I recognize that the theory of evolution is an absurd philosophical error, a unscientific myth, and a heresy regarding the truths revealed by God concerning Creation. — I use, “Creation”, here as the proper name for all which God has brought into being out of nothing.

Evolution: the philosophical error

Evolutionism is in the first place, and historically, not a scientific theory about biology, but a philosophical position of the insane. Its founder or author is Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903), a philosopher who followed in the footsteps of John Locke, the British philosopher, who in his work, An Essay concerning human understanding, in 1689, insisted that all human knowledge was a posteriori, that is had after the fact of observing things. He therefore denied that there as in the real world an order of causality which not only explained how A caused B to produce C, but by which every A which caused B to produce C does not even exist.

The absurdity or madness of the position is self-evident: you throw a jar at a stone wall and it breaks. It breaks because it hits the wall, and it hits the wall because you threw it. Even if John does not see these things happen, they still happen. Locke denied all of this.

This philosophical error is called Empiricism, and in its application to living things, Herbert Spencer denied that there is purpose in biology. He set forth his ideas initially in an essay entitled, Progress: Its Law and Cause, published in the Westminster Review in 1857.

Thus, according to Spencer animals do not eat because they are hungry, and hunger as a feeling does not exist to make you eat, and the stomach does not have the function of digesting, that is just what happens when you put food into it.  The eye does not exist to enable an animal see, nor the ear to enable it to hear, nor the foot to enable it to walk. That is just what all of these things do, without any purpose whatsoever.

That such a theory as Spencer’s would ever gain traction is the consequence of a lot of bad will. Because such a theory is on the level of what a drunk might tell you on a city bus, but no sane man would embrace it as it denies the very rationality of the world.

That everything has a purpose, or telos, is a fundamental truth of being. Because for anything to be it has to be of a certain origin, be of a certain form, be by a certain thing and be for a certain end or purpose. These are the four causes of a created being. The first is called the material cause, the second the formal cause, the third the efficient cause and the fourth the final cause, or telos. These philosophical truths were first enunciated coherently by Aristotle, in his work De Anima, and embraced by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bonaventure all all the subsequent Catholic philosophers and theologians, because they form the very architecture of reality.

If one denied that things have a purpose, then there would be no explanation why they were of a certain form, made out of a certain matter, or why they were made by a certain cause. The whole rationality and reason for everyone would crumble.

It should be obvious that the human mind which embraces Evolutionism or Empiricism has renounced reason itself. Because Reason is the faculty of the human intellect where by we give an explanation, a ratio, an account, for that of which we speak. It is the second highest degree of intellectual act possible, and those who cannot exercise such an act are either imbeciles or too young yet to think, or are so old that their brains have weakened to no longer allow their intellects to express themselves.

Evolution, the biologic myth

Evolution as a theory of development for the species of living things was proposed by Charles Darwin, who wanting to remove God from Biology (his words), took a trip to the Galapogos Islands in the Pacific and having returned to England wrote a book called, The Origin of Species, in which he proposed that the cause of the speciation of living things is natural selection. He published it on Nov. 24, 1859.

Like the philosophical error there are fundamental problems with Darwin’s theory. First of all, he attributed the differences in several species of birds he observed in his voyage to natural selection. But the birds he observed were not of the same species as he thought, so he radically misinterpreted the evidence he gathered. Second, his theory of natural selection presupposes by its very name that something is doing the selecting. He appeals to the concept of “the survival of the fittest”, but never says fit for what.

Moreover, he founds his theory on the very unscientific concept of what a species is, in biology. The concept of species in biology is a population of organisms which are able to interbreed and produce offspring of the same kind. But if that is the case, how can it ever come to pass that some of their descendants cannot breed with others of their descendants — a thing which is most necessary if one is to theorize the origin of new species from previous species. It is a self contradiction.

When you attempt to define species with the modern science of genetics, you do not solve the problem. Because according to the science of genetics, every species shares the same genetic code to about 99.99999999% as each of its members. The variations in the code which arise out of mistakes caused in the replication of DNA in the cells are errors which cause malfunctions nearly 99.99999999999999% time — I am using numbers illustratively here, that is not the precise percentage.

So, if it happens that a replication of the genetic code actually is beneficial, what is the cause of it being beneficial? Various answers can be given, depending on whether those responding want to be rational or not. But the rational explanation is that there is a conformity between the new characteristic and the whole ensemble of characteristics of the biosphere in which the living thing lives. And such a conformity implies a correspondence, which in turn implies a rational cause. Because if a created intellect attempted to ideate or think of such a solution, it would take intelligences far beyond what humans are capable of, thinking for eons of ages, because you would have to know every possible cause and agent in the biosphere to know what exact new characteristic would be advantageous. And that would take near infinite information and the processing speed of a near infinite computer to simply manage let alone comprehend.

On top of this problem is an even more fundamental error, namely, that the so-called theory of evolution is not scientific. Because to be a scientific theory it has to be able to be tested and it has to be able to predict in specific circumstances a future outcome, which can be observed. So far no one has ever observed the origin of a species. There is no evidence that any single species had its origin in the population of another. And every species ever discovered is found it its perfect form right from the beginning.

As one can see, when reflecting on Darwin’s theory,  it cannot be tested nor can it be used to make a testable prediction of a future outcome.  It is not scientific at all. It is rather a presupposition of what happens and why it happens, attributing to Nature a quasi infinite intelligence produced out of a casual occurence for which it gives no explanation but a mistake.  This is not scientific, it is mythologizing. It is a creed which holds things are true without any proof, and which demands you believe it without any reason. — Those who believe in Evolution — they even use the word, “believe” — hold it because it absolves them from admitting there is purpose in biology and an Intelligence  of infinite power behind all which exists, on account of which our human intellects can observe things, explain them and make rational predictions of future outcomes in the observable world and in things biological.

Evolution, the heresy

It should be obvious, by now, that Evolution, inasmuch as it says all the species of life which exist today, are the product of natural causes and not of a Divine intervention, is a heresy. It is a heresy, because, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, every denial of the literal meaning of any passage in Sacred Scripture is a heresy. And in Scripture, in the Book of Genesis, first of all, it says God is the author of every species of living thing, including mankind.

Here Saint Thomas is using, “heresy” in the theological sense. The Church has the authority to condemn all heresy, because She has the duty to uphold the truth of everything which God has revealed, and because She teaches that of every book of Scripture, God the Holy Spirit is the author, and there is no error of any kind contained, therein.

Not every such heresy, however, is subject to a canonical penalty, because the Church would need more canons than there are sentences in the Bible to penalize them all explicitly, and the purpose of Holy Mother Church is to tolerate ignorance, be patient with passion, and to forgive sin, since She seeks the salvation of all, more than the punishment of every sin — God will take care of that.

But the heresy of Evolution is a very dangerous and noxious heresy, because those who accept it deny the truth of Scripture and thus begin to destroy their own adhesion to the Deposit of Faith.  Also, as Saint Alphonsus says, every denial of a truth which one knows God has revealed, causes the one denying it to lose the supernatural habit of Faith, after which it becomes impossible for that person to ever repent and return to the state of grace, unless they confront that sin directly, because without Faith it is impossible to please God or arrive at the salvation he has promised.

I have seen the same thing in my work of apologetics over the decades. Every Catholic who has accepted the error of Evolution finds it impossible to repent of sin, because for them they do not really believe we have immortal souls, which shall be judged by our Creator according to our moral choices. They are imprisoned in the flesh and cannot conceive a world of the spirit. They look no further than death, because they believe life itself cannot transcend it. And they doubt the truth of the Resurrection as a divine action.

From these observations, I hope you can see, that Evolution is the refuge of the mad, the embraced of the immoral and the superstition of fools, who say, there is no God (Psalm 13:1 in the Clementine Vulgate, 14:1 in other versions)

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a photograph of Charles Darwin in 1854, and is in the public domain. For more information about it, see here.

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Ecclesiology, Editorials, Faith, News

Divine and Apostolic Right takes precedence in a State of Emergency

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

REBLOGGED from DEC. 23, 2019 — For Spanish and German translation see below.

We live in a very bizarre age, when professional gossipers (aka journalists) are the puppet masters of the masses, because 95% of everyone allows them to dictate the boundaries of reality, history, morality and religion. And until some noted journalist uses the word, “Heresy”, “Schismatic” or “Apostate” in reference to someone who merits the term(s), then no rational person would ever accuse a fellow Catholic of such a horrible offense on his own judgement, because as they say, “everyone knows that it is schismatic to refuse communion with a fellow Catholic in good standing. And good standing means, he has not yet been officially condemned by the Church!”

This is gaslighting, of course.  Gas-lighting is a term which everyone should familiarize themselves with. It is the tactic of those practiced in psychological manipulation used to get clients, subjects, inferiors to deny the reality they see and know and accept that the reality is what the manipulator claims it to be.

As soon as Bergoglio was “elected” the gaslighting began.  You are seeing things, He is the pope, you cannot talk that way about the pope. Dissent is a mortal sin. If you do not accept him you are outside the Church. You are not Catholic!

Lately, as the heresies and malevolence of Bergoglio explode out of all proportions to any previous heretic in the history of the Church, some Catholics who were formerly famous for their doctrinal and moral orthodoxy are going into apoplectic fits in their attempts to stifle recognition of the reality. ‘Recognize and Resist’, is their mantra. They are hell bent, literally, on remaining in communion with Bergoglio and don’t you dare rain on their fantasies by showing them facts of Canon Law (canon 1364, 1329 etc.) which show that by Divine right, heretics are outside of the Church as soon as they profess heresy.

These apologists of the revolution are just as hell bent on denying the reality of the failed renunciation of Pope Benedict (cf. ppbxvi.org for complete information).  They become discombobulated and lash out. They show that their attachment to “Pope Francis” is neither rational or reasonable, it is visceral. How visceral depends, I suppose, on whether they observe the 6th or 9th Commandments.

This complete psychological and intellectual and spiritual breakdown is a result of what I call the Iscariot Conundrum. I use “Iscariot” here in the sense of the Aramaic word for a man from the same town as the false Apostle, Judas Iscariot. Since like him, they have sold the true Christ for the 30 pieces of silver of public recognition by the Cardinals as a “faithful Catholic”* and since they did it for purely selfish, sentimental, non-rational and non-legal or non-dogmatic reasons, they explode with emotion the more you point out to them that they have built their house upon a false premise. So they lash out more and more and lose all traces of the fine Character they once exhibited, becoming in the process, ironically, the very likeness of dialogue which Bergoglio is, a nasty, name-calling Troll.

A State of Emergency

No less that Archbishop Gänswein, the personal secretary of Pope Benedict XVI and the Head of the Pontifical Household (which has only one guest, HINT HINT) said that what Benedict did in February 2013 was on account of a state of emergency.

His words and opinions are debated as to what they mean, but it would be ludicrous to deny the reality which is visible to all the world, namely, that THE APOSTOLIC SEE IS IMPEDED.

To say the Apostolic See is impeded, means that the Pope cannot act as Pope for some reason, either external coercion, or there is no pope, or the pope refuses to act out of some irrational or rational conviction. This ‘being impeded’ causes a state of necessity, because the visible head of the visible Church is for all practical purposes non-functioning. The state of necessity is necessity of the kind which is required for continued functioning of the Church.  Since the normal order of governance is obstructed, the observance of merely positive laws upon which it are based, by necessity, must be omitted.

Our Lord teaches us this general principle on the small scale, when, on one occasion He and His Apostles crossed a wheat-field during a time in which they had had nothing to eat (Mark 2:23), and some of them ate the grains of wheat which were near to being harvested, some Pharasees complained they were violating the Sabbath Laws against doing work on the Sabbath. Our Lord pointed out that the necessity of their hunger allowed them to not observe the law on harvesting. He replied with a forceful Semitic way of speaking, saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath!” (Mark 2:27)

The law against harvesting was instituted no less than by Moses (Exodus 23:12, Deuteronomy 5:12,14), who had a lot more authority in the Old Covenant (Moses basically wrote the entire thing, under God’s inspiration and direction) than the Pope has in the New Covenant (the pope cannot change the Bible, not even the Our Father — though a lot of clergy are confused on this point).

Also, it is clear, by the principles of logic (ex minore),** that if Our Lord says it is licit to appeal to a state of necessity, to suspend laws of the Old Covenant given by Moses, because men are hungry on a Saturday afternoon, then obviously it is licit to suspend laws of the Pope, in the New Covenant, WHEN THE SALVATION OF ALL SOULS ON EARTH UNTIL THE END OF TIME is put in grave and imminent danger. To deny this would be sheer insanity. This is poignantly true, when one faction in the Church wants to suspend the New Covenant and found a new religion, and the other faction must chose between observing certain man made laws and allowing the Covenant to be transgressed, or not observing them so as to prevent the transgression of the Covenant.

This principle of the abeyance of positive law in a state of necessity is sanctioned by no less than Pope Pius VI, in his Bull, Cum nos superiori anno, of Nov. 13, 1798, where he grants to the Cardinals the right to derogate from all non essential aspects of the papal laws on Conclaves, on account of the de facto suppression of the Church of Rome by the Roman Republic, led by French Revolutionaries.***

Extending this lesson to the affairs of the Church, it follows then, as good Christians, we ARE OBLIGED by divine faith to return to the general principle which Jesus laid down, namely, THE SALVATION OF SOULS IS THE HIGHEST LAW. For the Salvation of Souls the Eternal Father sacrificed His own Son, and His own Son accepted His ignominious death on a Cross. FOR THE SALVATION OF SOULS.

If there is anyone, therefore, in the Church, that holds that we must wait for the Pope (Benedict) to do something, or some future pope to do something, THEY ARE OUT OF THEIR MINDS and more correctly, THEY ARE PHARASEES who are raising up the positive laws established by the Church (which indicate what cannot be done without permission of superiors) to the level of rules which would require the Church to commit suicide waiting for some sort of divine intervention without human collaboration. A divine intervention without human collaboration, in the present case of the impeded See, HAS NEVER BEEN explicitly PROMISED. (I understand that there are some great promises from Our Lord and our Lady, but none of them refer explicitly to a promise to solve this problem.)

Apostolic Right (ius apostolicum)

The concept of Divine Right (ius divinum) is a concept of classical late scholasticism, very popular in the time of the Council of Trent and thereafter. It refers to things which have been decreed by God. The office of Peter exists by divine right, for example.

Apostolic Right (ius apostolicum) is not as well recognized. It refers to the decisions of the Apostles for the governance of the Church. It is of Apostolic right that the church in one city can be governed by several priests, for example.

Both Divine Right and Apostolic Right are superior to Canon Law. As an aside, what most Catholics do not know, is that for more than 1000 years, except for canons decreed in Councils, the Church had no canon law. Canon Law is not of Divine or Apostolic institution, though the First Council of Jerusalem c. 45 A.D. did hand down decisions and is the exemplar for all Councils and Synods in the Church.

Apostolic right also includes some things which are not observed in the normal course of affairs, because since the time of the Apostles the Sacred Hierarchy, for the good ordering of the Church in normal circumstances has laid down canons or established laws to conduct the affairs of the Church differently.

Take for example the election of Bishops. The Apostles appointed Bishops before they died. But when they had passed to eternal Glory, they left it to each diocese by Apostolic Right to chose their own bishop. And by “to each diocese”, I mean to the Catholics of each diocese, laity, religious and clergy. This is how the Church survived 10 Roman persecutions. No one was writing Rome to ask for an appointment, when their Bishop died.

Also, it is of Apostolic Right that every Bishop serves as ordinary of his diocese until death. There was no retirement. That is a novelty created by Paul VI to eliminate Catholics from the College of Bishops and replace them with sodomite revolutionaries. Canon Law implicitly recognizes that this concept of mandatory retirement is contrary to Apostolic Right, in that it does not require Bishops to resign, it says only that they should submit a letter of resignation upon reaching the age of 75.

It is also of Apostolic Right that the Bishops can convene in Synods and Councils. There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that every Synod in Church History, which is regarded as a true hierarchical act, was approved of by the Pope. The current positive laws require that the Pope consent, but Apostolic Right does not require that.  Apostolic Right is more rational, because when there is no pope or when the pope is a prisoner, how can the Bishops get permission?

But the general reason for the revival of Apostolic Right has to do with the inherent principle of subsidiarity in a perfect society. This principle was recognized by Pope Leo XIII. It holds that when the higher authority in a perfect society fails, then the lower authority has the right to take up the duty of the higher authority and act inasmuch it is necessary to act to preserve or defend that society. Since the College of Bishops as a whole succeeds the Apostles, when the See of Peter is impeded, each and every Bishop has the moral and Apostolic Right to exercise in a certain sense the authority of the Apostles to put the Church back in proper working order. This is an awesome responsibility reserved to extreme cases of necessity, such as is happening today, with both a public heretic ruling the Vatican and a Pope (Benedict) who thinks it is no longer his duty to govern the Church or vindicate his own rights as Christ’s Vicar.

In a State of Emergency, Apostolic and Divine Right revive on points which are now, in the regular course of Church affairs, regulated by canon law, presupposing an Apostolic See which is not impeded. These positive laws of the Church, which if observed, would lead to the destruction of the Church or the loss of souls are suspended in force. That is, it is no longer a canonical crime or moral fault NOT to observe them with due reason.

If there are any Catholic Bishops or Cardinals on earth, then they need to recognize this before it is too late, or the woeful warning of Our Lady of Akita will come to pass, that the faithful become deprived of the Sacraments of Penance and Eucharist and Orders, because no Bishop had the sense to see that he had the Apostolic or Divine right to act to preserve the Sacred Hierarchy during an impeded Papacy.

This is because, with the Apostles no longer on Earth, and the See of Peter silent, each and every member of College of Bishops who remains Catholic can licitly assume the duties of the Apostles for the propagation and preservation of the Faith.

Some of the things any Bishop, with or without jurisdiction, can do, by Divine or Apostolic right, during an impeded Papacy are as follows:

  1. Call for and Convene a Synod or Council to condemn the causes of the impeded See, and or condemn those who are perpetrating it. (Pope Julius II sanctions this in principle)****
  2. Call for and Convene a Synod or Council, to depose claimants to the papacy who do not hold valid canonical titles. (This was done at Sutri in 1046 and sanctioned by St. Peter Damian, Pope St. Gregory VII and Bl. Pope Victor III)
  3. Reprove a pope for resigning partially and neglecting his Apostolic Duties of Ministry. (This arguably is not as extreme as nn. 1 or 2, an thus ex maiore is also approved)
  4. Condemn heretics by name, condemn heresies. (All bishops have this duty and right by Divine and Apostolic right)
  5. Call for and Convene a Synod or Council to condemn the heresies and perversities being spread by the Enemies of the Church, whether inside or outside the Church.
  6. Ordain Catholic Bishops for Dioceses which have been taken over by a heretical bishop or where the Catholic Bishop has declared for heresy or apostasy. (Saint Athanasius of Alexandria did this on many occasions during the Arian Crisis)
  7. Ordain Catholic priests and deacons for the faithful of each Diocese who are deprived of the Sacraments due to heretical or schismatic clergy in their area. (Saint Athanasius of Alexandria did this on many occasions during the Arian Crisis)

In fact, during the first 1500 years of the Church, we see Bishops regularly doing many if not all of these things. They had the benefit of not being plagued in conscience by positive Church law, but the system worked. Now that the Apostolic See, nay the Vatican,  is completely impeded and taken over by heretics, the Bishops must act!

This is not the imaginary case of Sedevacantists who don’t like a pope nor the sounder case of Traditionalists don’t want to abandon liturgical traditions of their Rite: this is the case of a direct frontal attack on the the New Covenant: the Deposit of the Faith, Scripture and Tradition, through open denials of key dogmas and doctrines and disciplines which come from Jesus Christ and His Apostles.

Prayer and Petitions

Please pray for the Bishops of the Church, for if they do not act, the entire wealth, power, prestige of the Church will be robbed by a sect of marxist sodomites and 100s of millions of souls will perish without right doctrine and sacraments.

Please also talk to your Bishop, if he appears to be somewhat Catholic. This is crucial. I know Catholics who have contacts and who are doing this right now. But more needs to be done.

The Catholic laity, on account of the inaction of the Bishops, are being forced to accept Sacraments from heretics and schismatics and perverse sodomites. They have the Divine right to be cared for pastorally by Catholic clergy who are in communion with the true Pope.  And this right is being DEMONICALLY AND UNIVERSALLY TRANSGRESSED in all dioceses throughout the Catholic world in the present Crisis.

We have the Divine and Apostolic right to act with insistence and with full approval of Christ’s teaching and example.

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GERMAN TRANSLATION: https://beatimundocorde.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/divine-and-apostolic-right-german/

SPANISH TRANSLATION: https://fromrome.info/2019/12/25/el-derecho-divino-y-apostolico-toma-precedencia-en-estado-de-emergencia/

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* I use quotes here, to point out how nonsensical this approach is, devoid of any reasonable assessment of historical events, because the Cardinals accepted an invalid resignation and then invalidly elected an Arch-Heretic Psychopath, so it is no exaggeration to doubt that the Cardinals are willing or able to recognize what a Faithful Catholic is!

** Ex minore is a technical term of medieval logic which refers to illations (arguments) which are based on appealing to something which is true in a lesser case, and argues from that, that it must be true in a greater case. Our Lord is doing this all the time, as for example in His parables of the King preparing for war, the architect preparing to build a tower etc., as examples of how if prudence is necessary in earthly things, it is all the more necessary in questions of eternal salvation.

*** Agostino Paravincii Bagliani & Maria Antonietta Visceglia’s, Il Conclave: continutità e mutamenti dal Medioevo a oggi, Viella Editrice, Rome, 2018, pp. 60-61 and p. 62 in fn. 75.

**** This Apostolic Right was incorporated into Pope Julius II’s, Si summus rerum Opifex of Feb. 16, 1513, Fifth Lateran Council, which provided that if this law on Papal Conclaves were violated as regards a simoniacal election, the Cardinals not involved in the simony could have recourse to a Synod or Council to dethrone the uncanonically elected antipope.  Bagliani & Visceglia, op. cit, p. 40. This papal law was published previously as the Bull, Cum tam divino quam humano iure, January 14, 1505 (ibid., p. 39). This principle, acknowledged by Pope Julius II and the Fifth Lateran Council, is that which authorizes the calling of “imperfect” Synods in the time of necessity, such as ours.

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Faith, News

The Our Father: Remedy against the Church of Darkness

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

In the year of Our Lord, One Thousand, Eight-hundred and twenty, Bl. Anna Katerina Emmerich had a series of visions which spoke of a Church of Darkness and a dark Pope taking over the Church of Rome. As a remedy, Our Lady showed how if the faithful came before Her Basilica of Sainta Maria Maggiore at midnight and prayed with arms outstretched — after the manner of prayer Her Son prayed upon the Cross for the redemption of mankind — that soon the doors would open and the Church of Darkness be driven from the City.

In the details of that vision, there are 2 important facts: That Our Lady measures the minimum time She asks everyone to pray is three Our Fathers; and that the Saint accompanying the Blessed is Saint Francis of Assisi.

Saint Francis was very devoted to the Our Father. He requires the brothers of his Order to say 72 of them each day, in place of the 72 psalms which the clergy in his day said every day. But not only that, Saint Francis wrote the most sublime commentary on the Our Father every written, better even than that of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

These details leads one to conclude that Our Heavenly Mother is trying very gently to indicate the importance of the Our Father for the salvation of the Church today.

I have seen many treatises on Prayer, but in none of them have I seen an explanation of the importance of the Our Father. So I want to share some observations on this, to demonstrate that that single prayer is the most important in all the cosmos, and the most important for each of us, to arrive at our eternal destiny. Consequently, it is the essence of the Catholic religion.

Between the Alpha and the Omega

When you connect your starting point with your destination with a line, you have traced out the path of your earthly journey.  That path may not be straight, because this world is full of crooked things and obstacles for travelers.

But in celestial movements, when you connect starting points with destinations, the lines are always straight.

The same is true in the supernatural order of things.

Before the Creation there was nothing but God. And there is nothing in Creation that did not come from God, or was made out of or from the things which came from God. And in the End, when this world is destroyed, there will be nothing left, but what has arrived at God, in Heaven, and what has refused to arrive there, which will be cast into eternal Hell fire.

The line connecting God as the Beginning or Alpha of all things to God as the End or Omega of all things, is, thus, the cosmic journey of all creation. It is the very context of the being of all things, whether physical or spiritual, natural or supernatural. Not every creature is in motion along that itinerary, most of it is divinely elaborate landscape. But mankind was intended as a race to be the journeyman.

And this is why, Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God, taught us only 1 prayer: the Our Father. A lot of scholars and theologians and especially liturgists are embarrassed by this. They think Christ should have written a Missale or something, or at least put a Breviary into print. But He did not.

He did not, because God, being Infinite, know how to say the Infinite in the singular, in the tiny, in the details of everything which comes forth from His Mouth. This is what makes the words of Jesus Christ in the Gospel everlasting. There is just no end to the treasures to be revealed in them.

And the Our Father is no different.

Step back for a moment and consider the Our Father in its totality.  It is a prayer addressed to God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, the principle of the whole Trinity, since it is from Him alone that both the other Two Persons proceed. The prayer itself ends with petitions for things which are necessary for us to arrive at Heaven, our last End, God Himself — in Whom Saint Francis says the Saints dwell.

So the Our Father is, in its few phrases, THE prayer for the Cosmic journey I just spoke of, because it connects us to  God as our First Cause, our Alpha, and to God as our Last End, or Omega. There is no greater prayer of spiritual orientation than that.

And this is, I believe, the hidden message in the revelations made to Bl. Anna Katerina Emmerich. The Church has come to the present crisis because way too many of those in the Church, Clergy first of all, have lost their orientation and are wandering like fallen stars, out of their proper positions. They have forgotten to attend to what the words of the Our Father mean.

This is why I say, that the Our Father is the very sum and essence of the Catholic Religion, because our Holy Faith has nothing to do with anything more than orientating us to God and directing us to live with Him forever, by faith in God, penance for our sins, and a humble service of the Divine Majesty.  Just as you cannot properly pray the Our Father without turning to Him, so the Mass should always be offered with the whole congregation, priest included, facing the Father, ad orientem.

Moreover, just as there is no one who knows how to return to the Father except the Son Who has come down from the Father, so there is no sanity in religion without unswering adherence to all which the Son has established and how He established it.

All of this is put in question and denied in practice by those how hold that a heretic, apostate and uncanonically elected man is indubitably the Pope. That is like saying the road side snake oil peddler is your travel agent!

Words have meaning. If you deny that, you cannot even begin to pray the Our Father. Words have meaning, whether those words are ministerium and munus, or Pater Noster qui est in caelis….

That is also why it is cosmic insanity to change the words of the Our Father.

The Our Father is the most sublime prayer, when we say it, we should mean what we say, and because of its importance in the cosmic scale of things, IF WE DO NOT MEAN what we say when we pray the Our Father, we are truly lost.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is an image of Bloch’s, Sermon on the Mount, painted in 1980, and is thus in the public domain.

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Editorials, Faith

The Doom of Saducees

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Take heed therefore how you hear.
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given: and whosoever hath not, that also which he thinketh he hath, shall be taken away from him.
(Our Lord Jesus Christ, Luke 8:18)

by  Br. Alexis Bugnolo

If you have paid attention to the reading of the Gospel at Mass, throughout your life, then you have probably heard the name, Saducess, and know who they were: the party of Jewish scholars and priests and Levites, who held that the Jewish Scriptures were to be understood in the minimalistic degree: they denied the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, for example. Words did not have meaning for them, what was more important was what they, as a group, decided to be true.

Our Lord rebuked them on several occasions, and never walked with them. He did this to show that such an approach to Scripture is anathema to Himself and such an error of interpretation was fundamentally flawed. Being the Word of God, Incarnate, He could not, He cannot fail to despise those who ignore the meaning of words, and yet insist that their opinions rule the day. Being God He could not and cannot suffer idolaters of any color or creed.

The Saducees were doomed by their errors and disbelief. There is no record in Scripture that anyone of them ever converted to the Faith, which is a terrible warning to all those who down through the ages imitate their error.

However, today in the Church, since Feb. 11, 2013, the party of the Saducees has returned. They do not care what words Pope Benedict XVI used in Latin in his Declaratio read out-loud on that day. But they will tell you what it meant. Ask them for an explanation or reasons which establish that their interpretation is authentic, legitimate or true, and you will get either silence or insults or threats.

Yet, the very same party has the unmitigated gall to tell the rest of the Church to obey them in their conceited opinions, as if they were truth revealed by God which must be accepted without question on the authority of the ones revealing it. Do these men think they are God?

And yet they argue and govern the Church like godless demons, whose only interest is in insulting, scandalizing and finding more ways to corrupt the youth, to corrupt marriages, to foster sin, and to allow the Church to be whored with by every wicked and evil power on earth, as Saint John the Apostle foretold, in the Apocalypse, of the City of Rome in the end times.

So don’t tell me that ministerium means the same thing as munus. I am not a Saducee like you. I adhere to the party of Jesus Christ, which worships the Truth and Word Incarnate.

The doom of the Saducees is that by their error they preferred to blind themselves intellectually rather than risk to see the truth. The chose this, because the truth was the enemy of their religious faction, which was founded upon disbelief.  The Saducess in the Church today are also the same, everything they do begins with and ends with disbelief.

They disbelieve Canon Law so they can have a High Priest who sanctions disbelief in marriage, disbelief in chastity, disbelief in the Gospels, in Christ, in God, in our Lady, in celibacy, in monastic life, in normalcy, etc etc..

There is no sin more worth of the name of the sin against the Holy Ghost, that the sin of the Saducees. That is why, perhaps, none of the Saducees of old are recorded to have been saved.

Take heed therefore how you hear.
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given: and whosoever hath not, that also which he thinketh he hath, shall be taken away from him.
(Jesus Christ, Luke 8:18)

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CREDITS: Jesus, the Word of God, condemned by Caiaphas, the Saducee, a photograph © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0 of a fresco in the Capella dei Scrovegni, Padua, Italy.

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Faith, Spirituality

How to make a valid Confession

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

I could have entitled this article, How to make a good confession, but that title is so commonly used as to mean almost nothing. So in this article I want to talk about making a valid confession, on account of what that adjective means.

VALID

Valid comes from the Latin adjective, validus, which means having the strength to prevail to accomplish what was intended to be done. The word remains in some forms of speech, such as, He was a valid candidate for special forces training.

Valid therefore implies effectiveness and strength as well as real, in the sense of valuable and worth it.

A Valid Confession

In manuals of moral theology and of sacramental theology, the term, valid confession, is used to signify the reception of the Sacrament of Penance which is efficacious to obtain the forgiveness of sins. And this is generally held to occur under certain circumstances which are easily obtained: (1) confession of the sins, according to kind and number, (2) sorrow for having offended God, (3) fear of eternal damnation,  (4) resolution to sin no more and do the penance prescribed.

But Saint Alphonsus de Liguori counsels confessors that they should not so lightly judge a penitent well disposed, they should put him to the test.

And if the priest knew well the sources and causes of every vice, then he would be well prepared to put penitents to the test.

But not all priests are so familiar with all sins, because, sad to say, there is much about sins which only is known by the one committing them, even if the one committing them knows least of all the reasons not to commit them!

For that reason it is more important today, that you, the one confessing properly prepare yourself, because it will be most likely that the priest won’t know how to help you. It may even be that he does not want to help you prepare.

Sad to say, but true, the modern practice of the Sacrament of Penance is badly distorted from its Catholic foundations. Why it is not even called “Penance” any more. It is called, reconciliation, as term which implies that you have some comparable dignity to God to entreat with Him. Also the Sacrament is presented as a self-help dump-your-guilt-and-get-on-with-life ritual, which is as appealing to the normal human being as seeing a shrink: a vain form of self exhibitionism. If that is what you are seeking, do not read this Article. What I write here is for those who want to get to Heaven. Those who want to dump their guilt and get on with life in this world are in the chains of the devil and it is much better than they never receive the Sacrament in that spirit than abuse it with such a vicious mindset.

A Confession is more serious than a visit to the Hospital

But everyone should take the occasion of going to Confession as something much more serious than going to the Hospital or seeing your doctor. And you should approach the Sacrament with as much necessity and urgency as if you had a very painful toothache which drove you to see a Dentist. This is because not only of what it can do for your soul and body — save it from eternal damnation — but how powerful it can be for your eternal destiny. For some Saints one single confession set them on the path to holiness and transformed their life for ever. And this is the goal of this Sacrament, which in its own way, can be more efficacious personally to you than any other Sacrament after Baptism and Chrism (Confirmation).

Thus, all of us should go to Confession as soon as possible and with the right preparation. If we consider that if we do not get it right, our confession will merit us another mortal sin and another worse punishment in this world and in Hell, then we should prepare carefully. We should be more careful the more the priest who is hearing confessions is less experienced or foolish as to give everyone absolution. A thing which Saint Alphonsus dei Liguori says is a gross abuse, but a thing  for which Modernists bishops will severely punish any priest to attempts to deny anyone the Sacrament even when badly or not properly disposed.

The Causes of a valid Confession are the starting point

The causes of a valid confession are the starting point for a good examination of conscience, without which a good confession cannot be made. I say it is the starting point, because knowledge is not sufficient for a valid confession. You also have to be seriously  and honestly repentant.

The examination of conscience in modern times consists in giving the penitent a list of the 10 commandments written at the level of perhaps a 6th grader and asking yourself if you did anything on the list. This is atrocious malpractice.

Examining one’s conscience should rather look at the entire cause of the act, the decision to do the act and the reasons or motives which led to the act.

THE ACT

I mean by, the act, the sinful act. Many fixate on how many times they did it, but not on the gravity of consent in doing it. Was it premeditated or spontaneous, was it done with light or intense passion or emotion. Did the act harm others, was the act done in a circumstance wherein it disedified others. Usually one act is much more grave than it appears on account of whom it harms, when it was done, and the levity or gravity it was one with.

THE DECISION

Did you make it aware or unaware. Did you act under the influence outside you, or of emotions within, on the basis of faulty knowledge, mistaken judgements. It is not often, especially in modern times, that sins are made without thinking, due to the habit many have of practicing never to think of the morality of things, never to make judgements upon whether an act is evil or good. This is a grave vice, and is a sign that you are failing in faith or have lost the grace of God entirely. To live as an atheist, is to be an unbeliever. But to recognize evil as evil and good as good, is to recognize that God alone is Good and worthy of all love and obedience.

THE REASONS OR MOTIVES

If you with levity committed a mortal sin, that makes it very serious, because it shows that your entire conscience is darkened by a disdain or lack of valuation placed on things eternal, such as your own salvation, and on things divine, such as God’s Majesty and your duty to him. A mortal sin done with levity indicates, therefore, that the sinner is probably gravely failing in his duties as a Catholic.

If you committed mortal sin with great and intense passion, that makes it very serious in another way, because it indicates that your will is utterly depraved and lacks the charity for God, neighbor and yourself, to restrain violent movements. This is a strong indication that you were in mortal sin before committing the act, by reason of other sins or the same sin previously done but never repented of.

If you fell into the same sin, it indicates that you have not yet discovered the causes of your sinning in previous occasions, and most likely never resolved firmly to repent of them. Remember, it is not possible to resolve not to do something, if you as of yet do not understand why you did it. An examination of conscience has to be very graphically honest. Many fail here because they put the blame on some thing or some person or some occasion, when in truth a man sins only because his judgement is corrupted by attachments to creatures, in such wise, as he is open to the possibility of committing acts of idolatrous sacrifice — in this case of his own eternal salvation — to worship at their altars.

CONFESSION OF SINS

So a good examination of conscience must include the following:

  • Identify the kind and number of sins
  • Identify the evil loves or attachments on account of which you decided to sin
  • Identify the truths which you ignore or are ignorant of, which would have given your conscience light to say what you were about to do was evil

It is more important that you confess the kind of sin than the number, because you can always tell the confessor that the exact number of times is unknown or vaguely known. But you cannot conceal the kind of sin, though this does not mean you have to be graphic in your description.

SORROW FOR SIN

But more important than this first step, is the second: being truly sorry for your sin. This can only be achieved by a humble comparison of what you did and what you merit  for it. And in this step, do not even consider the Mercy of God, because your sin merits no mercy. And if you do not become truly sorry, you will never get the Mercy promised in the Sacrament.

  • Contemplate the eternal damnation which you merited for each mortal sin, or which you risk by each venial sin
  • Grieve in your heart and soul until you produce strong and stinging remorse for your sins, whether you cry or not. This can only be had by recognizing that sin offends a God of Infinite Majesty, and as high is His Majesty so, so profound is the punishment for rebellion against Him.

It is not nothing that the term for the proper kind of sorrow is called, contrition, from the Latin verb to crush to dust. You should strive in your Examination of conscience to crush your pride, topple your interior idols, and wring out your soul in tremendous sorrow for having done such evil, so easily, so carelessly, so quickly, so glibly. For this one needs to recognize profoundly that in truth we can do nothing meritorious, that the only thing which is really of our own making, in the moral order, is sin. That we are indeed in comparison to the Holy Angels a pile of crap, without God’s grace to transform us into holy sons of God. That of ourselves we can not repent or practice virtue without the help and grace of God.

Contrition, thus, implies the prayer of petition, humbly made, as by a beggar on death’s door, before the throne of an Infinite God of Justice who will take no excuse. Unlike the false images of mercy bandied about, you cannot obtain mercy unless you first exact justice upon yourself, in a just judgement of what you have done, and what you are worthy of.

FEAR OF DAMNATION

For this reason, contrition cannot exist or rise up in the soul without FEAR of eternal damnation. Fear of ETERNAL damnation and fear of eternal DAMNATION. All three are necessary. It has to be the sentiment and emotion of fear, the mere intellectual recognition will never produce contrition. It has to regard damnation, not just a slap on the wrist. And that means you have to already fear Hell. If you do not fear Hell, then you are probably in the state of mortal sin already, and this should be an alarm bell to your soul. And it has to regard the eternity of Hell, because the gravity of offending an infinite God is not perceived unless one recognizes the eternity of punishment for it as proportionate and just. And this means you should meditate on Hell before every Confession.

FIRM PROPOSAL TO CHANGE ONE’S LIFE

The final cause of a valid confession is that when you approach to confess you have already resolved never to sin again. If you do not have that intention DO NOT go to confession, because you will commit a mortal sin of deceit. This kind of mortal sin of deceit is very common, because so many confess to be relieved of the sense of guilt, not of the vice which produced the sin or the sin itself.

This proposal must include never to commit the sin again, to make reparation for the sin, to repair the injustice suffered by others on account of your sin or your bad example. Failing in any of these, and you probably are not really sorry for your sin, you just want to use the Sacrament to pretend you are not guilty for your sins any more.

And do not fool yourself. If you do not know why you sinned, if you do not recognize the errors which you embraced which allowed yourself to excuse yourself so as to commit the sin, if you do not know the moral law well enough to know the sins which led you to your sin, then you cannot possibly have a firm proposal.

This is the PRINCIPAL reason why one should find a holy priest to be one’s confessor, and a learned priest. The combination is very rare, but better a holy priest who is ignorant than a learned priest who is not holy. Because the latter will give you excuses, while the former will give you harder penances. It is when you are in the confessional with the priest, that you should ask for advice how to firmly propose not to sin again,  and beg him to convince you of that, otherwise do not accept Absolution, but rather tell him you are not prepared.

When we approach the Sacrament of Penance properly we obtain a miracle of grace, the forgiveness of our sins and the restoration of our souls to eternal life. If we ask Christ, in our hearts, at the time of absolution for the virtues to never sin again, especially those contrary to our sins, we can obtain these virtues back too, in proportion to our sorrow for sin and our sorrow for having offended Him who is infinite Love Itself.

The Sacrament of Penance properly received, therefore, is the greatest enemy of Satan.

Use it frequently, use it well.

A CORRECT ACT OF CONTRITION

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,
And I detest all my sins, not only because by them
I have merited everlasting damnation in Hell,
But most of all because I have offended Thee,
Who are infinitely Good and worthy of all my love.
Therefore, trusting in Thy Grace, I firmly resolve to sin no more,
to avoid the near occasion of these sins
and to do penance for them. Amen.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a photo taken by Br. Bugnolo of a wooden confessional at the Basilica of the Most Holy Savior, St John Lateran, here at Rome. The inscription reads: For those confessing in Italian.

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Editorials, Faith, News

Separated from the True Pope, you won’t remain Catholic for long

11 Comments

By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

Pubblicato in Italiano a ChiesaRomana.Info

Saint Paul warned us long ago: Beware, he said, for not all men have the Faith! He said this at the end of his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, to whom he revealed so many things about the last days and the Anti-Christ(s) to come. Here is the Douay Rheims English version of 2 Thess. 3, which the Modernists do not preach on any more. But which I want to speak of in this article. The Apostle writes:

For the rest, brethren, pray for us, that the word of God may run, and may be glorified, even as among you; 2 And that we may be delivered from importunate and evil men; for all men have not faith. 3 But God is faithful, who will strengthen and keep you from evil. 4 And we have confidence concerning you in the Lord, that the things which we command, you both do, and will do. 5 And the Lord direct your hearts, in the charity of God, and the patience of Christ. 6 And we charge you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw yourselves from every brother walking disorderly, and not according to the tradition which they have received of us.7 For yourselves know how you ought to imitate us: for we were not disorderly among you; 8 Neither did we eat any man’s bread for nothing, but in labour and in toil we worked night and day, lest we should be chargeable to any of you. 9 Not as if we had not power: but that we might give ourselves a pattern unto you, to imitate us. 10 For also when we were with you, this we declared to you: that, if any man will not work, neither let him eat.

11 For we have heard there are some among you who walk disorderly, working not at all, but curiously meddling. 12 Now we charge them that are such, and beseech them by the Lord Jesus Christ, that, working with silence, they would eat their own bread. 13 But you, brethren, be not weary in well doing.

14 And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and do not keep company with him, that he may be ashamed: 15 Yet do not esteem him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.

16 Now the Lord of peace himself give you everlasting peace in every place. The Lord be with you all. 17 The salutation of Paul with my own hand; which is the sign in every epistle. So I write.

18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.

Bad Company makes bad companies

God made us to know the Truth and the Truth will set us free, because God our Creator is the Truth. It follows then, that we exercise our minds and wills in that which is most essentially directed to our own perfection and destiny when we assent to any truth and will to find it and keep it and put it into practice.

But any member of the Clergy, religious or laity — any hermit — who would hide the truth from you, then, is clearly not being honest, is not doing that which the Creator wants. This is especially true if the truth they are hiding is a truth revealed by God or the importance of which depends directly from what God has said.

The enemies of Peter are the enemies of Christ

Christ said to Peter that whatsoever he would bind on Earth would be bound also in Heaven. All true Catholics accept that. All fake catholics ignore it.

The Catholic Church for more than a 1000 years took this doctrine as so central to true Christianity that it was willing to leave a schism with the Greeks in place and not back down on the duty of all Christians to regard the doctrinal and disciplinary decrees of the Roman Pontiff as obligatory, in virtue of these very words of Jesus Christ.

That is why, you cannot be honestly a Christian, if you are not honestly a Catholic who submits to the Roman Pontiff. And that is also why the enemies of Peter are the enemies of Christ, because if you refuse the one you are calling the other a liar or regarding Him as not God.

Peter has told us when Peter is and is not Peter

And lest anyone be confused, it is the Roman Pontiff who has established in Canon Law the terms by which all can objectively and easily know when a man is the Roman Pontiff and when he is not.  To ignore these rules of Canon Law is just as grave as to disobey the Roman Pontiff and go off into schism, because it is an act whereby you say, “Let’s make up our own way of being Christian, apart from submission to the Roman Pontiff.”

This is why we can be 100% absolutely and supernaturally certain that  Christ Jesus does not regard any man His Vicar on Earth, if that man’s claim to be pope is not in accord with the norms of Canon Law and papal law.

The corrollary is that, we can be 100% absolutely and supernaturally certain that Christ Jesus does not regard any Vicar of His on Earth no longer His Vicar, if that man’s renunciation is not in accord with the norms of Canon Law and papal law.

Because this is the Catholic Faith, I have extensively investigated both questions, the first in regard to Bergoglio, the second in regard to Benedict. I did not do this on a whim, I did it out of supernatural faith.

There is no doubt about this principle: A man is or is not pope, or is or is no longer the pope, based on the laws of the Church at the time he begins or ceases to be the pope. This legal principle was recognized in the antipapacy of Anacletus II and his defeat by Pope Innocent II, a defeat which was secured by Saint Bernard of Claivaux, who came to Rome to preach the facts of law about the disputed election of 1130 A.D..

All the books printed in the Catholic Church since 1130 up until Feb. 2013 were in agreement. Pope Innocent II was the valid pope, Anacletus was the antipope, because Pope Innocent was elected in accord with the law of his predecessor, who changed the terms of a papal election in the last weeks of his life. But Anacletus claimed to be elected to the prior norm.

For the Modernist, even if he claims to be a Trad ….

For the Modernist, there is not fixed nor lasting truth. What was true yesterday, may not and probably is not true today. Everything is in change and development. Everything mus be alive, they say, but they really mean, has to die.

All those who changed their concepts on what makes a true Pope, on Feb. 11, 2013, are deceived by Modernism or are modernists, even if they claim to be a Traditional Catholic. This includes all the publication of the so called Traditional Catholic Movement who hold that Benedict is no longer the pope. Because canon 332 §2 has not changed and it says a pope resigns when he resigns suo muneri, not  ministerio. The Vatican knows this and has tried to hide it, and I have proven that indisputably more than 6 months ago. (See the Index to Pope Benedict’s Renunciation)

Stunningly Ann Barnhardt, in her recent podcast, revealed that even Chris Ferrara, the famous attorney, who writes for several Trad publications, admitted to her, that she is probably right on the points of Canon Law regarding the failed renunciation. That was like back in 2016. But Chris still recognizes Bergoglio as the pope. The only honest assessment is that Chris is not being honest either with the public or his own conscience.

From my work here at Rome, I sense the same is true for all the experts. You just mention that Benedict is the Pope and they do not laugh, they attack. They want you to shut up, or to go away. These are signs of deeply conflicted consciences.

If it is not Catholic, it is not Catholic

Men who want to be seen as Catholics but who won’t be responsibly faithful to the duties of the faith, should not be considered faithful Catholics. Those who knowingly deceive the faithful about who is the true pope and who is not the true pope are NOT involved in a little or small controversy. They ARE ACTIVELY SCHISMATIC AND PROMOTING SCHISM.

Saint Paul warned us of such men, and he told us what to do about it.

The true Pope is the mystical Neck of the Church

If you are separated from the true Pope, you won’t remain a Catholic for long. Yes, these men who act like modernists — I do not imagine they are, but they are being constrained by their love of being accepted by errant men and errant men with money and power — have let go of essential truths of the Catholic Faith. But even you, if you follow those who deceive you in such matters, will soon lose your faith. The Church will become something like what the Anglicans have, an all-is-up-for-grabs Christianity, which keeps the names and outward appearances, but has long ago dumped doctrine, morality and faith.

The same thing we see happening with these fake Trads. They are now trying to reinvent the definition of papal infallibility and have totally ignored the teachings of Christ and the saints about papal indefectibility. They are bending doctrine to invent an excuse to remain in communion with an obvious fake and antipope, while refusing communion with the true Pope who defends celibacy. They even attack the true Pope to justify their falsehoods!

This is why all Schismatics lost the true Faith, because they are no longer in union with the mystical neck of the Mystical Body and hence no longer in communion with Christ the Head. Those who fall into such sins cannot be saved, because there is no salvation for those who die separated from Christ.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image of the Piazza of St Peter’s at the Vatican, is by Br. Bugnolo.

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Faith

It is a grave duty, to denounce Bergoglio for all his heresies and blasphemies

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

In the Catholic Faith there is only One Master, One Savior, One Teacher: Jesus Christ.

For that reason, no one can be a member of the Church who dares question or fault or criticize or correct Jesus Christ.

Hence, it is a grave duty arising from the essence of what it means to be a Catholic that we defend the Honor and Majesty of Jesus Christ.

Let no one tell you the contrary. Do not listen to those who tell you to be silent. The time has come to shout it out. Shame the clergy who claim that this man is without question a member of the Church. Those who say this are shameful hypocrites and godless traitors.

Canon 1364 says that heretics are ipso facto excommunicated. It is impossible that such persons be allowed to hold or to appear to hold any office in the Church. Those who claim we should “Recognize and resist” are saying you should ignore Canon 1364 and yet condemn Bergoglio for meriting to be punished by it.

Such a mentality is psychotic — that is, divorced from reality.

There is only 1 Catholic position: insist on a Synod of Bishops to condemn him for his heresies and errors and declare him no longer a member of the Church. Such an action does not attack the papacy or anything in the Church, because no heretic is judged as a member of the Church, nor for holding an office. For this reason the Code of Canon law makes no provision to exempt anyone, even the man who is the Roman Pontiff, from the penalties of canon 1364. — Not withstanding the fact that Benedict XVI is the pope, not Bergoglio.

Thus, it is merely a trick to keep him power, to ignore Canon Law and insist Benedict is not the pope, because they want an excuse not to make any move to condemn Bergoglio. Those who play these tricks of the mind, have no love for truth nor for you.

The time has come to condemn, and to convene an imperfect Synod.

To remain silent anymore is to consent.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is of a poster placed on placards here at Rome, protesting the tyrannical rule of Bergoglio. It is in the public domain.

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Faith, News

Bl. Emmerich: The Church of Light vs. the Church of Darkness

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By Br. Alexis Bugnolo

Pope John Paul II warned us of the present crisis in the Church when he approved the beatification of Anna-Katerina Emmerich, on October 3, 2004, exactly 15 years to the day on which Bergoglio presided over the ceremonies of idolatry in the Vatican Gardens, on Oct. 4, 2019.

Did the Polish Pope know something we did not? — I think the Polish pope had more Catholic sense than 99% of the Clergy today, because 1) he read the prophecies of Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich, and 2) he put trust in them.  We can see this in that he raised her to the dignity of the Altar, as a woman whose example of Christian virtues was heroic in an exemplary degree.

And not only that, he at least recognized that a papal renunciation could be invalid, and that a Conclave can be illegal (see here for more on this).

As for Bl. Emmerich, on the day of her Beatification, Pope John Paul II said the following (source):

Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerick told of “the sorrowful passion of our Lord Jesus Christ” and lived it in her body. The fact that the daughter of poor peasants who sought tenaciously to be close to God became the well-known “Mystic of the Land of Münster” was a work of divine grace. Her material poverty contrasted with her rich interior life. We are equally impressed by the new Blessed’s patience in putting up with physical weakness and her strong character, as well as her unshakable faith.

She found this strength in the Most Holy Eucharist. Her example opened the hearts of poor and rich alike, of simple and cultured persons, whom she instructed in loving dedication to Jesus Christ.

Still today, she passes on to all the saving message: Through the wounds of Christ we have been saved (cf. I Pt 2: 24).

And if you want to see first hand evidence that the Anti-Church was outraged by her Beatification, go to the Vatican Website through the link I just gave you, and click on the name of the Blessed and you will be taken to a biography which tries to make it appear that she was a globalist!

But what interests me today about the Blessed is that her revelations about the Church of Light and the Church of Darkness foretold exactly the spiritual reality of the Crisis of Apostasy in which the Catholic Church is at the present (see her prophecies, published in part, here and here). She speaks of a schism in the Catholic Church between these two Churches.

And indeed, this is exactly what we see today: 2  Churches.

The Church of Light, which is the true Catholic Church as She has ever been: with the same Faith and Sacraments and Canon Law as she had up to Feb 28, 2013. Whose pope, Benedict XVI,  was recognized by all Catholics as the Vicar of Christ.

The Church of Darkness, which is the Church of the Anti-Christ which is turning the Mass into a factory of Sacrilege, by giving the Most Blessed Sacrament to public sinners and by offering the Holy Sacrifice, not in communion with the true Pope, but with the false imposter and usurper, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

The Pope of the Church of Light is as Bl. Emmerich says, old, weak, with failing voice and paralyzed by inaction. He is surrounded by enemies on all sides and has few to trust in.

The pope of the Church of Darkness, as Bl. Emmerich says, is dark and has a sinister face and is inviting every heretic and apostate to Rome to build up a new church filled with idolatry and every form of immorality and blasphemy and error.

Hidden Truths in Emmerich’s Prophecies

Read carefully what Bl. Anna-Katerina (this is the proper German form of her name) says and think about it.

She says in the part regarding the prayer requested by Our Lady, that the faithful should come to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and pray for the exorcism of the Church of Darkness. But the doors of the Church are closed. This means, that the Basilica will fall under the power of the false pope, and that his sect will exclude the true faithful from the Church.

And this is exactly what has happened and what is happening. The masses offered in that Basilica are offered for Bergoglio the anti-pope, not for Benedict the true pope. Priests and faithful like Don Minutella are “excommunicated” from the Church of Darkness for warning the faithful about it and its lies.

Notice too, that Our Lady through Bl. Emmerich asks the faithful to pray the Our Father. And precisely this spring, here at Rome, with the publication of a new Italian version of the Roman Missal, will Bergoglio demand that all start saying the false heretical version of the Our Father of his own creation.

Notice too, in her writings, that she say she came to the Basilica accompanied by Saint Francis of Assisi. This saint was seen in a vision on the night of July 16, 1208 by Pope Innocent III, saving the Church of Rome by holding up a corner of the Lateran Basilica on his shoulders, even while it was shaken by threats all around. Pope Innocent III was very devoted to St. Alexius of Rome, whose feast here in the city is on July 17. The Pope rebuilt the Basilica of St. Alexius on the Aventine and consecrated it on the very next day. So this vision of a poor man, on the vigil struck him to the core. The next day, Saint Francis paid him a visit and asked for the approval of his new community, the Friars Minor. The pope granted verbal approval immediately. The Saint’s Order has done more than many others greak works to defend the Church throughout the Centuries, with more Canonized saints than most others, excepting the Benedictines, perhaps.

So Bl. Emmerich is telling us something profound, namely, that the prayers requested are to save the Church of Rome from toppling to the ground. This is also seen in the prayers requested, because in the Rule of Saint Francis those who are not priests are to say 72 Our Fathers each day, in place of the 72 psalms which the priests say. This indicates that the faithful whom Bl. Emmerich sees come to the Basilica in vision, are laypeople not clergy. And this in turn indicates to us that the vision she had was of an apostasy of all the Clergy of Rome from the true Church.

Visions of Hope and Victory

Her visions give us hope, however, since in them she sees the doors of the Basilica open and allow the faithful enter and pray. This means, if we can rally enough faithful to pray each Midnight, whether before the Basilica, or around the world, that Our Lady is promising us the conversion of at least some of the clergy of the Diocese of Rome back to the Church of Light, and thus back into communion with Pope Benedict XVI.

In her visions, Bl. Anna-Katerina Emmerich saw the dark and sinister false pope break the Church in two and take the floor and back wall with him and flee Rome. This means that the Church of Light will have victory in this battle, and regain Rome, and that we should therefore make every sacrifice and effort to win that victory as soon as possible, with the means Our Lady indicated exactly 200 years ago.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a screen shot of http://annecatherineemmerich.com/which is one of the best sources in English for the writings of Bl. Emmerich. It is used here in accord with fair use standard to draw attention to their website for those who want to learn more about the Blessed.

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APPEAL:

Br. Alexis Bugnolo has pledged to lead the prayers at Midnight, here at Rome,
in front of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. As a Franciscan hermit
in the Diocese of Rome he sees it as his duty before God.
See FromRome.Info’s Youtube Channel for the nightly recordings.
If we can get 1000 persons to sign up for that channel as subscribers
YouTube will allow LIVE BROADCASTS.
So please spread the word, and if you would like
to help Br. Bugnolo get some better equipment, please make a contribution here below.

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Faith, Team Bergoglio

St. Irenaeus prophesied how Bergoglio will seduce the clergy

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

Saint Irenaeus of Lyons is one of the great Fathers of the Church of the end of the Second Century. He lived from 130 to 202 A.D., approximately. He was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor. He studied under Saint Polycarp, one of the most famous disciples of Saint John the Apostle. This makes what he says about themes found in the Book of the Apocalypse, very authoritative.

In his summa against error, entitled, Against Heresies, Book II, Chapter 31, he describes the faction of the Antichrist, when speaking against the heretics of the School of Valentinus and the practitioners of the black arts such as Simon Magus and Carpocrates. See what he says:

. . . these men are in this way undoubtedly proved to be utter aliens from the divine nature, the beneficence of God, and all spiritual excellence. But they are altogether full of deceit of every kind: apostate inspiration, demoniacal working, and the phantasms of idolatry, and are in reality the predecessors of that dragon3265 who, by means of a deception of the same kind, will with his tail cause a third part of the stars to fall from their place, and will cast them down to the earth. It behoves us to flee from them as we would from him; and the greater the display with which they are said to perform [their marvels], the more carefully should we watch them, as having been endowed with a greater spirit of wickedness. If any one will consider the prophecy referred to, and the daily practices of these men, he will find that 408 their manner of acting is one and the same with the demons.

Here, Saint Irenaeus makes a direct reference to Apocalypse chapter 12, verse 14. And since it appears we may be living in the very age of that great apostasy, we should pay close attention to the words of this Father of the Church.

Notice he explicitly identifies the means whereby the Dragon of the Apocalypse will cast down a third of the clergy in the final age: through apostate inspiration, through demoniacal working and through the phantasms of idolatry.

Apostate inspiration, is the claim to be inspired when teaching things which amount to apostasy from Christ.

Demoniacal working, is the action of demons, who are fathers of lies and murderers from he beginning.

Phantasms of idolatry, is the appearance and manifestation of acts of idolatry.

You could not describe Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his closest followers better than this. Indeed, the mere fact that the clergy justify adhesion to Bergoglio is a demoniacal working, the deceit of the big lie, because they claim Pope Benedict resigned, when he did no such thing.

They ignored that Bergoglio is an apostate when he appeals to inspiration from  the god of surprises, which is not a name of the One True God ever given in Scripture or in the writings of the Saints, but is rather the name fit for a trickster spirit, the god of this world, Lucifer.

And finally it is undeniable that Bergoglio is promoting the propagation and worship of images of idols, and thus is involved in the phantasms of idolatry.

These three means are the exact methods Bergoglio is using to seduce the clergy, by promising them surprises in heretical novelty, by speaking like a demon on a daily basis and by employing the phantasms of idolatry as the litmus test of communion with himself!

In short, Saint Ireneaus has prophetically identified the servant of the Dragon and the party of the Dragon at the end of time, 1800 years before their appearance. Moreover, at the end of the section, just quoted, he makes it clear that Apocalypse Chapter 12 is a prophecy of things to come, not, as has been said by Modernists for 60 years since Vatican II, only a book written to encourage Christians in the First Century. They had to deny it, because it speaks of them!

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CREDITS:   The text of Saint Irenaeus is taken from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, here: with the sole addition of bold face text and the alteration of a comma to a colon, after the words, of every kind, to correspond to the rules of punctuation in English.

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Canon Law, Faith, News

You have a right to question your priest

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

It is a principle of natural law, that anyone who presents himself as anything, has the duty to give reasons which justify his claims in public. This in past ages has never been much of an issue with regard to Catholic priests or Bishops. It was sufficient to know that he was a priest or a Bishop.

But with the planned and organized and generation-long effort by Masons in and outside the Church to corrupt the priesthood of Jesus Christ in the Church, it is no longer always and everywhere safe to presume the priest you know is Catholic, that is correct in doctrine, even when he is a Catholic priest.

So you should ask your local priest questions and not merely act as dumb sheep, if he appears to deviate from right doctrine or orthodox practice.

And no, I am not talking about him mistakenly leaving the cruets on the Altar rather than on the credence table. I am talking about issues which regard whether he has accepted the religion of Globalism or whether he is a Catholic.

If he says in a homily, that Greta Thurnburg is a Saint. Then you do not need to discuss anything with him, you need to denounce him as a heretic to your Bishop. I counseled one laymen on this matter recently, and after writing his bishop, the priest was removed as pastor from his parish.

No, I am speaking about ambiguous speech.  If a priest says we must be accepting to habitual sinners and goes on and on about this, then you should question him, because he may be a habitual sinner himself with intentions of corruption your sons and/or daughters.

If he says he hates honest politicians like Donald Trump or Matteo Salvini, you should question him about his politics. Because if he is a Marxist he is an apostate on account of this, that he rejects the entire soteriology of the Church.  Soteriology is the theology of salvation. Salvation consists in our supernatural conformity, body and soul, to the will of God, through the Sacraments, with the merit of eternal life in Heaven. It does not consist in fulfilling the political platform of the local left wing party.

In fact, if your priest admits he votes for the Left, you should question him, because with a few questions you will be able to reveal that he is either a heretic or an apostate, and then you can denounce him to your Bishop and leave the parish for another one.

If he preaches against the prolife movement, against those who want right doctrine or praxis, if he says that truth does not matter or says things which are confused, you should question him. I remember years ago, I was visiting a Church on Holy Trinity Sunday, and the priest said: At the baptism of Jesus a voice was heard, the voice of the Holy Spirit saying, “This is my beloved son, listen to him”.  In charity I assumed the priest was drunk on some physical liquid, and so I denounced him by letter to his bishop. In a week or two he was removed from the parish.

I know of a real case, in the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts, where a priest spoke in favor of contraception and abortion during a homily. The whole parish rose up and physically ran him out of the parish. The Bishop graciously responded by removing the priest as pastor. They questioned him before the ran him out, but they did the right and Catholic thing. God bless both them and their Bishop.

So it is important to speak with your priest, when he starts acting strange. Because if you don’t, it will lead to more serious scandals and the lost of faith of your brother and sisters in Christ. And do not hesitate to denounce bad priests, because this is a blessing for all: for by denouncing bad priests, you make the life of every other good priest in the Diocese easier, by removing a stain, a cross and a plague on the local Church.

If you have a question about the strange behavior of a priest, and seek advice, publish your story in a comment, but remove all identifying information as to place and person, so as to protect the reputations of all involved.

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CREDITS: The featured image is of Fra Angelico’s,  The arrest of Christ, and is in the public domain, being a faithful reproduction of an original work of art which is mroe than 200 years old.

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Editorials, Faith

How to discern when ‘Catholic’ media is Catholic?

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

On line media is in constant competition for viewership. Catholic online media is the same. That is simply a fact of the medium.

But what most Catholics perhaps are not sensitive too, is that when seeking information about the Catholic Faith or the Catholic Church the verity of the source of the information is just as important as the information. Some websites and Media operations are just not worthy of trust. Many use the name ‘Catholic’ but are not worthy of it.

What does “Catholic” mean?

As a word, “catholic” is derived from the Greek adjective meaning universal, that is, that which pertains to everywhere, every place.  It was in the second century, A. D., at Antioch, in the Roman Province of Syria, where this Greek word was first used in reference to the Church founded by Jesus Christ. The meaning of the term in reference to the Church has always been the same: the institution which wherever it is in the world, holds the same faith of Christ. (“Faith of Christ”‘ is the traditional term for the Catholic Faith; in which ”of” does not refer to the faith of the person but the Faith taught by the person).

But today I am going to use the term “‘Catholic” in a slightly different sense, because online “Catholic’ media are not part of the Catholic Church, though some of these outlets are official works or apostolates of certain Dioceses of the Catholic Church.

Instead, here I will use the term “Catholic”‘ in the common and popular sense used in American English, to refer to the orthodoxy of the information presented. Here I used the term “orthodoxy” not in reference to the Greek schismatics, but in its proper etymological sense of ‘right teaching’.

To be Catholic a Media site has to meet certain criteria

First, a Catholic site must meet certain criteria to be worthy of being judged “Catholic”.  As I just said, I am not using the term, “Catholic”, in reference to whether the website is sponsored or approved by an ecclesiastical institution or diocese. I am using it in reference to right teaching in matters of faith or morals etc.

By “criteria”, which is the plural of “criterion”, I mean rules or principles by which a thing is judged to be what it is or claims to be. It is only sane an rational, that if something is to be judged it be judged by objective norms, not by opinion, not by claims, not by emotions etc.. Is the website or journalist you read for information about the Catholic Faith or the Catholic Church (here I used “Catholic” in the original sense at it was used at Antioch in Syrian in the second century A. D.) truly Catholic (here I use “Catholic” in the sense of conforming to right teaching or orthodoxy)?

Because if it is not truly Catholic, but is seeking your attention and or financial support, then you are being defrauded. Now, no one can insist you not let yourself be defrauded, but common sense tells us that we should not let ourselves be defrauded, because self-preservation, the fundamental moral principle of all human action, demands that we protect ourselves from fraud and from being defrauded.

This consideration is raised to the level of the infinite, when we consider that if we let ourselves be defrauded or mislead in regard to the Catholic Faith or to what the Church teaches or as regards how as Catholics we should act in regard to God, His Church, or any other matter, then we risk consenting to our eternal damnation by accepting lies in place of truth, lies which turn us away from saving truth, lies which confirm us in error and vice, lies which, when accepted, merit for us eternal damnation, because it is a mortal sin to knowingly accept a lie, and it is a mortal sin of imprudence to put yourself in constant danger of accepting lies.

There is a moral obligation then, to use discernment

Discernment is the act whereby we apply what we know is true or just to a matter which needs to be judged as to whether it conforms to the proper truth or justice to be had in a particular matter or affair.

For example: at the supermarket, you discern whether to buy a product or not based on its apparent quality and whether the price is proportionate to that and your need for the product. Yes, there are individuals who go to the supermarket and just buy anything they see for no reason at all. They have no discernment, and some of them have a psychological disorder known as the compulsive buyer.

I suppose there may be a disorder called the compulsive reader or listener syndrome, but I have never heard of it.  Reading and listening should be an activity which employs more discernment than shopping for food. Not only because the act itself must be undertaken with understanding, which is an act of the intellect, the power of judging, but also because what is read or listened to — here I am not speaking of music or simply video per se — should be the truth or at least a true criticism of error or a true presentation of facts.

Just as one may be occasionally fooled by street corner hustlers, who say one thing, simply to get something from us, and what they say is nearly always entirely a lie, so we should be cautious in matters of our Catholic Faith, because we live in an age of hucksters and false apostles and calculated and contrived deceit of the most nefarious kind.

So if you are to protect yourself, you need to use discernment. And if you have any true charity for those in your family or who know you and might follow your example in anything, then keeping yourself free from error, by not allowing yourself to be deceived, is essential to protecting them too from error and lies which could lead them astray.

A Reputation is founded upon facts and deeds

Here we must keep in mind that it is one thing to make a claim and another to exhibit the comportment or behavior which is consonant with that claim. Many websites do not actually claim to be “catholic’ in any sense of the word, but nevertheless constantly publish information about the Catholic Faith or the Catholic Church.

Before Vatican II, it was the Catholic Clergy who directed or ran nearly all Catholic media. That is what it meant for it to be Catholic. Being trained in institutions which were Catholic in both senses of the word, the clergy who ran them were competent to execute the duty entrusted to them.

Nowadays, however, very few media outlets are run by clergy. Moreover, since Vatican II, the anti-Church forces in the Church have nearly entirely destroyed the formation process of the Catholic clergy, to such an extent that it is a rare priest and bishop who knows the Catholic Faith well enough to be even able to speak as a Catholic at all times, let alone think as one, or run a Catholic media outlet.

Having self-proclaimed Catholic journalists or apostolates take over what these Catholic  Clergy used to accomplish is obviously not the best solution nor even a solution. It puts the important apostolate of spreading the truth of the Gospel in the hands of men who were never trained or examined or proven to be worthy of that trust. And it makes the Catholic Faith appear to be something like the Anglican church, that is, a collection opinions which are up for grabs.

There is also a lot of deep pride and egoism in men and women who were never in a formation program and never learned what it means to mortify your ego and live for Christ Christ and obey His Church in the proper sense of those words. And not a few websites exhibit this. Egoism is a form of idolatry, so everyone needs to beware of this disorder, since it makes a person subject to being taunted this way or that, as the Devil may want them to do, to achieve his greater plans against souls and the Church.

So you should pay attention to what is being said and whether it conforms to the Catholic Faith. And when a source of information habitually deviates from the Catholic Faith on any point, you need to take care not to be led astray.  Some Catholics have the intellectual gifts and preparation that they can discern this and avoid the error while plucking a few grapes of truth from a source of information which is thus vitiated. But most Catholics do not have this ability. We need to be honest and confess this.

This is even more true, when we recognize that as human beings, we are wont to trust in others, and that in the present crisis in the Church our habit of trusting in others can be and is being abused by unscrupulous men, clergy and lay alike.

The duty of Catholics who publish

Catholic websites and media outlets have a graver duty to publish the truth than anyone else, because to publish a lie which is read by thousands is to commit a mortal sin in regard to each and every person who reads what is published. Catholic journalism and Catholic social media apostolates, therefore, are a fast track to hell if run by those without discernment and zeal for the truth. This is why not a few of them are patently diabolic, because while they are capable of knowing the truth, and have been presented with the truth, they fail to publish it or even worse attack it.

The Devil in Social Media…

I recall the example of a Catholic Diocesan Newspaper which was asked by a humanitarian organization to run an advertisement on behalf of defending and helping Catholics being persecuted in the Mid-East by ISIS.  The director of advertising refused, because he said it would create confusion about the Gospel message of forgiveness. A more diabolically contrived response was never had.

You see, there is a global effort now underway to undermine everyone’s grasp on reality and on real religion, because reality itself is seen as the enemy of the agenda which needs to be pushed. The ones pushing such a diabolic conspiracy have oodles of money and are willing to spend it to control Catholic Social Media sites, so they print and publish lies and stop printing and publishing the truth.

Catholic media which are run by organizations or corporations are directly vulnerable, because it is sufficient that the enemies of the Faith gain control of the organization or corporation to direct or control the information they put out. EWTN is a classic example. Before Mother Angelica had her stroke, the station was solidly catholic. After she had her stroke, laymen took control and these laymen were then suborned by unfaithful Bishops to alter the kind of information put out.  EWTN then began to purchase other Catholic media outlets and the same kind of control of information spread. When asked in 2016 to run advertisements to help persecuted Christians, EWTN refused because they said it would have disastrous consequences to their apostolate world wide.  I guess they mean by apostolate, their sources of funding or control.

Catholic media which are run by individuals are vulnerable inasmuch as the funding they seek or receive is controlled or not by those who want error promoted and truth suppressed.

You can easily know if a source of information about the Church or the Faith is compromised by simply compare what they are saying with the documents which are published by the Church or in ages past.

A classic example of fraud, today, is that which is perpetrated by those who promote the opinion of universal acceptance of a papal election. They boldly share images of the text in question, of the Thomistic author they cite as an authority, which text clearly uses the word “canonically” in reference to elected, and then proceed to apply the principle to the case of the present crisis in the Church as if the word “canonically” was not in the text.

When confronted with the documents of the Church which say that a pope resigns when he renounces his munus, they ignore the word munus, and place a X in its place, which they will replace with whatever word they like as it suits them for that day, and claim that a resignation is valid, whenever a pope says the word “renounce” X.

These are just two current examples of fraud which show clearly that such individuals or sites are not Catholic and that in reading them you are being defrauded of the truth and led astray. It is not just a question of intellectual dishonestly, it is dishonesty which intentionally misrepresents the truth of Church teaching or history. And as a Franciscan hermit, I can tell you that such a habitual practice of deceiving in matters of religion is no small vice. It is deeply evil, and there is something behind it more than just egoism.

So I exhort one and all, use discernment when you go online to learn more about the Catholic Faith or the Catholic Church. Look for sites which quote documents and are faithful in their reading and application of the truth which the Church has always taught.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a photo taken by Br. Bugnolo of the Papal Throne at the Basilica of Saint Lawrence, Rome. Just as the throne is at the center of the Sanctuary, so should we put the truth at the center of our minds and love of it at the center of our hearts.

CLAIMER: Here at FromRome.Info we are dedicated to always presenting the truth and the facts. If you notice any error whatsoever, please leave a comment and call us to correct it. What we say is not important. The truth is what matters.

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Editorials, Faith

Heresy, Heretics and Imperfect Councils

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by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

A good number of laymen who never studied theology, or studied it at B rated institutions are at it again on social media, over the question of whether a heretical pope is still the pope.

So let us make some distinctions, so as not to get lost in the fog of controversy.

Saint Robert Bellarmine classifies the true and Catholic position as the 5th opinion, namely that a formal heretic loses all office in the Church ipso facto, that is, by the very adhesion to heresy. This is the position of all the ancient Fathers. And it is the only Catholic position. It is enshrined in Canon 1364 of Pope John Paul II’s Code of Canon Law of 1983.

Remember, heresy is both a false proposition in of itself, an erroneous judgement in the mind and a deviant profession of the mouth.

  • It is a false proposition, whether written down or comprehended in the mind. And example of this is:  Jesus Christ is not God.
  • It is an erroneous judgment of the mind as if when you were to think: I judge that Jesus Christ is not God.
  • It is a deviant profession of the mouth, as if you were to write or say aloud:  Jesus Christ is not God.

As a canonical crime, however, one deals only with the external profession. Thus no one can be judged by the Church to be a heretic without an external profession of heresy. The profession must be witnessed or recorded on paper or other medium.

If you know anything about Church History, however, you know that very few men have been condemned by name as heretics in the entire history of the Church. Why is this? Because the Church, which was founded to save souls, recognizes that every deviant profession might not come forth from a mind which adheres to error. It might come forth from a mind which is ignorant, or from a will which wants to offend others. So not every deviant profession represents formal heresy (of the kind which is a sin, though canon law presumes that such deviant profession is presumed to be imputable, until proven otherwise in a due process). Nor does every deviant profession represent pertinacity. Pertinacity is the quality of adhesion to the error such that even when shown that it contradicts revealed truth, the one holding the error remains steadfast in its profession.

Pertinacity is determined canonically after 3 reproofs before witnesses. In the great Councils of the Church even notorious public and certainly pertinacious heretics were asked 3 times to recant.

But if the Church has a process for deposing heretics from their offices, does not that mean that St. Robert Bellarmine was wrong when he said the 5th opinion was the true thesis?

Here we must remember that there is a distinction between what is true in itself and what is true inasmuch as the Church can know it. As soon as one commits the sin of heresy, even in secret, you lose the gift of faith and commit a mortal sin. You are separted from God. This is true whether any man ever knows of your sin or not, before the General Judgement on the Last Day.

However, in the Church, since some men have a better ability and some a worse ability to detect heresy, there has to be a public process for determining who is a formal pertinacious heretic, so as to officially deprive them from office. For otherwise, there would be chaos in the Church. Here the Church has recourse to the teaching of Jesus about fraternal correction, first in private, then with witnesses, and finally before the whole Church. This also confirms the principles of the cessation of power is not presumed. You cannot therefor presume a heretic has lost his office on the basis of your personal discernment. You are not infallible and you cannot know hearts.

In the case of notorious professions, which are made in public and spread on social media, every Catholic has the right to condemn the profession as heretical. You need not go to the person in private or correspond with him in private. His Bishop should and his superiors should. But not everyone has to. Because the common good requires that every public heretical profession be immediately confuted by a public orthodox profession.

At the same time, none of this denies that by the Catholic Faith each of us is capable of discerning heresy which is formal, even if in the person it may not be pertinacious. This ability is simply the application of comparing revealed truth with the perverse profession to manifest that it is perverse and deviant.

Likewise, since the salvation of souls is the greatest law, every Catholic has the right to separate himself from heretics, whether by avoiding them at all times or avoiding them in their Churches. So no one can be forced to receive the Sacraments from someone they know has made a deviant profession. And in this, the individual cannot be coerced, and the Church has never coerced them in such matters, because it has happened that heretics have  been men who once occupied offices of power in the Church before.

Nor are you obliged to obey your superior in anything when his heretical spirit becomes manifest. Canon 41 gives you this right broadly. So the right to resist illegitimate commands is sufficient, in the law, to defend the rights of the faithful from a superior, who is heretical, before he is condemned as such by the Church and declared to have lost his office.

For this reason, IT IS THE GRAVE DUTY OF EVERY CATHOLIC to publicly denounce deviant professions, whether they be made by laymen, clergy or even those they think are the pope. Without the public denunciation, the faith is not guarded, the consciences of the faithful are not stirred to action, and souls are put in danger, because without the true Faith it is impossible for anyone to be saved — though admittedly God requires the faith that is willing to believe Him in everything (the perfect kind formally), more than the faith which knows every revealed truth and accepts all of them (the perfect kind formally and materially)

Therefore, there is an absolute necessity to call Synods and Councils to condemn the most notorious heretics and heresies. And if the man whom you think is the pope is one whom you consider a heretic, then you should not be silent, you should urge a council. And a council of Bishops, anywhere on the planet, has the Apostolic right and duty to hear the case, because if he is a heretic, he is no longer the pope, but it remains the duty of Bishops to discern and judge that fact.

Finally, if you take pleasure condemning others for heresy, because it suits your fancy, you probably do not have right discernment and you surely risk damnation for risking the mortal sin of falsely or rashly judging others, not to mention damaging or destroying their reputations. Likewise, if you know a man is a heretic and refuse to correct him, when he shows an ability to be corrected, you sin against charity. If he is harming souls and you remain silent, then you are complicit in that harm. And if you think you do not have to seek a canonical condemnation of a heretic, because you judge all in authority heretics, then you might be committing all those sins I just mentioned. This is what distinguishes Catholics from sedevacantists. We believe that the Church will never be overcome by any single or by every heresy together, because there will always be at lest one Bishop willing to condemn them. And to him we turn for their condemnation.

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CREDITS: The Featured Image is of an ancient Greek Icon, depicting the Saints who defended the Creed of Nicaea, which is written in Greek on the scroll they are holding in hand.

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