On Bringing the ‘Friendlies’ Back into the Fold

A thoughtful essay on evangelising a certain sort of fallen away Catholic. I've got a group I'm working on, namely my Cuter and Shorter Half and our children, I ask my readers to join their prayers to mine for my family's return to Our Holy Faith.

From One Peter Five

At this point in Catholic history, the Catholic Church needs strength. This can be done in many ways, such as strengthening the clergy and laity. We also need to bring in converts.

We do have one more resource at our disposal: the ex-Catholic.

There is no shortage of ex-Catholics on our planet. People are leaving our faith daily. We do get converts, but far more leave. In addition to dwindling numbers, we also have the problem of quality. We have quantity, but our quality is lacking in many regards. A lot of this has to do with poor catechesis, priestly scandals, and nominalism.

The vast majority of fallen away Catholics adopt no faith at all. A lot become atheists and agnostics, but most become nones. In other words, they just stop going to Church out of habit and don’t really think about it. The second largest group who leave become Evangelicals. They find spirituality in a different group that they couldn’t find in Catholicism. Among ex-Catholics who become Evangelical, there are two main categories. These are the hostiles and the friendlies.

The hostiles believe that Catholicism is false, that the Church preaches false doctrine and a false Gospel. Catholics will not go to Heaven by following Catholic teaching, and these hostiles will try to get every Catholic they can to leave and adopt Evangelicalism.

The second group is the friendlies. Although they have left the Church, they still respect it and the people who attend it. They view Catholics as their brothers and sisters in Christ with whom they respectfully disagree on a few minor points. They are more than willing to stand side by side with the Catholics in the culture war and against immorality in our society. In many ways, they’re allies.

Of all of these groups, I believe that the friendlies have a high probability of being brought back. I’m not saying the other groups don’t matter. I’ve tried hard to reach out to nones and hostiles as well. With friendlies, it’s different, as it doesn’t take someone well trained in apologetics and polemics to bring them back. It takes a solid and faithful Catholic who knows what he believes.

Why did most of the friendlies leave the Church for Evangelicalism? There are a few reasons, but the biggest reason is that they saw the high degree of nominalism in the Church. They would sit in the pews every Sunday surrounded by many nominal Catholics. Many of these Catholics go to church, take communion, have coffee afterward, and go home to live like the world from Monday morning to Saturday evening. They have no friends at church, and they’re just going to fulfill their Sunday obligation while their faith slips away day by day. Because of the lack of spirituality, they don’t pray or read the Bible or any other religious books. It’s just barren Sunday morning after barren Sunday morning.

Enter the Evangelical friend, who invites the friendly to “church,” and everything he was lacking in Catholicism enters his life. He has friends who love to talk about God and faith. He has a pastor with solid preaching straight from the (Protestant) Bible. He gets weekly Bible studies, and because of this, he starts to read it on their own – something he’s never done before. Whenever he’s in need, he can just fire off a text to ask for prayers. He has things he could never have imagined in his old parish.

Most devout Catholics know that communities like this exist in our Church. They simply can’t be found in every parish. In fact, they can’t be found in most parishes. As a Catholic, I wouldn’t recommend the vast majority of Catholic parishes in my diocese. However, I know that there are good ones, including the parish I attend. These poor ex-Catholics just happened to find themselves in one of the bad parishes, with a poor priest and no strong faith community.

I mentioned that of all the ex-Catholics, these people are the easiest to bring back, but it takes work. It involves befriending them and having many discussions with them, and not just about religion. It also takes a lot of prayer. If you haven’t found a reason to pray the rosary recently, now you have one. Also, God gave us two ears and one mouth. We should use them in proportion and let these friendlies open up to us. Eventually, they’ll open up about the nominalism that was so discouraging and the strong faith community they’ve since found. At this point, we should tell them we’re just as frustrated with nominalism as they are. Most importantly, we have to remind them that despite the horrible nominalism we’re surrounded with that discourages us to no end, it doesn’t give any of us the right before God to leave His church for a group founded by a man a few hundred years ago.

Deep down, the friendlies know that if the Catholic Church was established by Christ, they have no business worshiping elsewhere. They might have a few additional doctrinal questions, and that is where knowledge of Scripture and Tradition comes into play. Be ready to give biblical answers to their questions.

One thing that is extremely important is to be ready to offer these friendlies a community. When they leave their Evangelical groups, they’re going to lose a lot of friends. This will no doubt be difficult. To ease the pain, we should try our best to introduce them to a solid Catholic community to replace what they left.

Many of us know people like this who can be brought back. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. We need these people more than ever to help fight the corruption in the Church. With the help of a good sponsor, they will become zealous Catholics who will help our quality-versus-quantity problem.

The year is drawing to a close. Make 2019 the year in which you bring an ex-Catholic back to the Church. Find one, befriend him, pray for him, and guide him. Most importantly, live the Christian life. When this is done, it stands in sharp contrast to our greatest enemy, which is nominalism.

The Three Fruits of the Advent of Our Lord

St Bernard of Clairvaux is one of my favourite Saints!

From Rorate Caeli

Advent, the first season of the liturgical year, marked by the chanting of "Rorate caeli", starts today, at First Vespers of the First Sunday in Advent.

Celebrate it merrily with your loved ones, and especially with devotion with the Church of all times, in Truth, as St. Bernard it explains below: 

If we devoutly celebrate the coming of the Lord we do no more than that which we ought to do, for He has not only come to us, He has come for us, Who has no need of our own goods. The enormity of the grace which He gives us demonstrates quite clearly our previous indigence.

For if one judges the gravity of a disease from what it costs to heal it, one is forced to recognize the amount of disease to heal from the amount of medicine to which one must have recourse.

Why would there be a diversity of graces if there was not a diversity of needs? It is difficult to enumerate in a single discourse all the miseries to we which are subjected, but three are now clear in my spirit as needs which are common to all and which one may in some way behold as our main miseries.

There is not a single person amongst us who does not seem to have, at some time, the need for counsel, aid, and assistance, for that triple need is general to the whole human race; and for all that we are, living in the shadow of death, in a weak body and under the spell of temptation, if we wish to seriously reflect, we shall see that we are the victims of this triple evil.

Truly we are weak to seduction, indolent in our action, powerless to resist.If we wish to discern between good and evil, we always mistake ourselves; and if we wish to do good, we are beaten and vanquished.

This was what made the advent of the Lord necessary and what made His presence a need for all men in the state in which they were. God wishes that, by the abundance of His grace, He not only comes but inhabits within us by Faith, to dissipate our shadows by the impact of His light; He wishes to remain within us to aid our feebleness, He resists with us to cover and protect our fragility.

Truly, if He is in us, what will induce us to err? If He is with us, what will we not be able to do in Him who fortifies us? He is a faithful counselor, who cannot deceive us or be deceived, he is a powerful aid who prevents fatigue, an efficient protector who may put Satan himself under our feet and annihilate his power, because He is nothing less than the Wisdom of God Himself, who may, when he wishes to do so, instruct the ignorant.

He is the virtue of God, who supports unceasingly those who fail and takes them away from any danger. My brethren, every time we have the need for counsel, let us appeal to this Master; in all our actions, let us call this powerful aide; in all assaults which we must stand, let us place the salvation of our souls in the hands of this sure Defender.

He is come to the world precisely to find Himself within men, with men, and for men, to dissipate our shadows, to alleviate our strains, and to deliver us from the dangers which imperil us.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Seventh Sermon of the Advent of Our Lord

The Ethics of Jolly Old Elfland

Steve Skojec on the perennial question, what to tell your children about Santa Claus?

From One Peter Five

Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, Dec 21, 1935

“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic.”

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I will never forget how I felt as a child, trying to fall asleep so that Santa could at last do his joyous work. On Christmas mornings, there were always a few gifts from him, wrapped up in different paper than any of those given by my parents. One year, I wrote a letter and got one back in handwriting I was convinced did not belong to anyone in my house. Another year, I sat in rapt attention before the giant, wood-encased television at my grandmother’s house on Christmas eve, watching as the weather man said there was something they were picking up on the radar that they simply couldn’t explain. I knew it was him. I had the certainty that only faith could give.

Years later, however, as a young father, I had developed an unfortunate strain of zeal that bordered on the puritanical. In my desire to instill in my children the unvarnished truths of the faith, I neglected to cultivate in them a proper sense of wonder. When our oldest daughter was about six years old, I informed her (rather unceremoniously) that Santa Claus was not real.  At the time, I believed I was doing her a favor. Surely, she was better off knowing the true story of Christmas without the added distraction of the strangely aggrandized myth of St. Nicholas. After all, I had been told again and again over the years that he was nothing more than an artifact of our disastrously consumer culture. And when I was growing up, hadn’t I known other families who received their gifts on Christmas morning from “the Baby Jesus”? They seemed perfectly well-adjusted.

What I wouldn’t come to understand until quite a few years later was this:  in vanquishing the jolly old elf from my daughter’s imagination, I had chased away with him a large portion of the sense of awe that properly pertains to the miracle of Christ’s birth.

To a child, magic is not at all an outlandish thing. They live every day in a world of endless possibilities. Around any corner, there might be a fire-breathing dragon; under every bed or in the dark corners of any closet, a horrible lurking monster. The living room sofas and their scattered pillows are merely islands of safety amidst a sea of molten lava. Fairies are no doubt real if you stay up late and go out deep enough into the woods to catch one. Countless hours are spent discussing amongst themselves just which three things they’ll wish for when they finally come across an ancient, genie-filled lamp.

To the Christian parent in a world awash in resurgent paganism — from wicca to witchcraft to the heathen followers of the Norse pantheon — such flights of childish fantasy can at times seem tinged with danger. For the same reason certain exorcists warn mothers and fathers about Harry Potter as a possible gateway drug to the modern-day occult or the spiritual death trap of brightly-packaged Ouija Boards available at any toy store, the 21st-century follower of Jesus looks askance at any myth that seems poised to further diminish the Christian ethos.

Still, I propose that we reconsider our quotidian suspicions — though often justifiable — when it comes to Old St. Nick. Why should our children not contemplate this mysterious (if almost entirely mythologized) saint, ever unseen but as consistent as clockwork, who loves us so much that he gratuitously brings gifts to the children of the entire world, accomplishing superhuman feats of logistics and undetectable intrusion all in the course of one cold and starry night as we ready ourselves to celebrate the birth of our Heavenly King? We know that he expects the best from us, but we sense, as we imagine his twinkling eyes and barely-concealed smile beneath the downy drifts of his magnificent beard, that he wishes for all the world to find whatever small goodness we have done and nurture it into a roaring flame of virtue, like a glowing ember found beneath the ash pile of our misdeeds and sins. Santa Claus embodies what is most attractive about fatherly goodness; he is stern not from cruelty or anger, but because he earnestly desires our right action. He is loving and kind not because he is soft and emasculated, but because he wants to share the goodness of his great bounty with us, and so ennoble us by his gifts.

In the blossoming young mind, the almost unbearable excitement of the Santa Claus story, properly cultivated, can’t help but set the stage for the incredible mystery of the Infant Christ, who comes to us as an unmerited gift to grant us every good thing; Whose very blood was shed to show us the great mercy of God and the infinite bounty of heaven.

In 1904, Chesterton wrote of his own ever-growing belief in the idea of Santa Claus:

What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experience of most of my friends. Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life until he fills almost the whole of it. It happened in this way. As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation; I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. I had not even been good— far from it. And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed towards me. Of course, most people who talk about these things get into a state of some mental confusion by attaching tremendous importance to the name of the entity. We called him Santa Claus, because everyone called him Santa Claus; but the name of a god is a mere human label. His real name may have been Williams. It may have been the Archangel Uriel. What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing. And, as I say, I believe it still. I have merely extended the idea. Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void. Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can afford no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.

The gratuitous nature of goodness is the message of Santa Claus – that we are here through no merit of our own and live lives filled with breathtaking beauty and undeserved blessings. These things are true, even if there are no such things as flying reindeer to deliver them by sleigh, or a workshop full of elves somewhere above the arctic circle busily crafting them for our enjoyment. The truth is, there are better things even than these – nine choirs of flying angels bearing God’s gifts, and an eternal kingdom full of saints drawn from the lowliest places of the earth, praying for our salvation somewhere above the heavens.

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is, of course, because such technology does things never before imagined; it exists outside the realm of our known horizon of possibilities. Faith is not unlike this. We believe in a God of miracles, if not magic. A God who created the cosmos and breathed life — with an intellect and free will — into nothing more grand than a handful of dust. A God who could turn water into wine, heal the sick, make the lame walk and the blind see, and raise the dead. We believe in a God who could somehow fit His omnipresence within the body of a human child, a child who grew to suffer and die for our sake on a cross. This child, our Christ, Who also rose from the dead, became truly present in bread and wine, giving the gift of Himself to those who believe in Him every day on altars all around the world.

I recall a parish tradition from my youth that I found quite touching. There was an elderly gentleman who would play Santa Claus each year and visit the children engaged in religious instruction one Sunday as Christmas approached. But once the children had had the chance to meet Santa, he didn’t disappear until the following December. At the end of the Christmas Midnight Mass, he would appear at the back of the Church and make his way slowly up the aisle, kneeling in a long moment of silent adoration before the Christmas creche before making an equally somber departure. I’m not an advocate of such innovations in the liturgy, but I admit that I always found this one well-meaning and pious.

The story of Santa Claus need not diminish the great mysteries of Christmas when it can exist alongside of them and point us in their direction. We believe in a God who is good, who gives freely, who is everywhere, who always watches – who knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! It’s not such a stretch to see that Santa Claus can be viewed as a type of Christ, and if we allow our children to believe in him, we should do what we can to ensure that he points them toward the mystery of the Incarnation and the true meaning of Christmas.

Originally published on Dec 15, 2014.

On Being Spiritual but not Religious

Mr Holdsworth takes on the 'spiritual but not religious' crows'

A loose transcript:

You like many other people will likely experience something like an encounter with the divine in your lifetime. Most people, when they experience it, struggle to find words to describe it. Nothing seems adequate to convey how stirring the experience is. It’s experiences like that, I think, that can cause people to look at religions, with their rules and doctrines, as a pale shadow of the thing that they experienced. I imagine that’s why more and more people are describing themselves as spiritual but not religious. Religion is seen as something that suffers from stale formulas that do little to express the rapture of spiritual revelation. In a sense, they’re right. If you were to encounter God, religion would seem like a reduction that comes drastically short of the real thing. It’s like comparing the experience of looking at a map of the ocean to the experience of standing on the threshold of that vast expanse. But here’s the thing. While a map may not be the ocean, it’s still indispensable if you want to know something about it. Religion is a lot like that. It’s not God and it may seem pedantic and trivial in comparison, just as a map is to the ocean, but it can be vital to helping you navigate your spiritual life. Being spiritual but not religious doesn’t mean you won’t have religious ideas or even doctrines, it just means that you’ll have very juvenile ones that thinkers and theologians have tried but abandoned. If God exists and if we want to respond to those profound experiences, than we have to do something with them. We have to interpret them and try to understand what is being asked from us, if anything. The difference between a religious and non-religious response is a matter experience and objectivity. On your own, you have very little of either of those things but in the context of a community or a tradition, you benefit from a collection of experiences and knowledge. Without that collective of knowledge, your operating within your own narrow perspective and assumptions and if the divine does exist, than I imagine it would challenge my own assumptions and present qualities that would be surprising and unexpected. If it wasn’t, I’d be afraid that it was merely my own invention or a projection of MY preferences. But if I encounter something that isn’t conveniently compatible with my own assumptions and way of living, then I can be more sure that it isn’t something that I invented or projected. Every religion proposes doctrines that will challenge your assumptions and preferences. In the spiritual but not religious scenario, there isn’t anything that will force you to do this.
There’s a much higher risk of picking and choosing ideas and assumptions that happen to suit your preferences. If you are the only one who defines the doctrines of your personal spirituality, then you’re not really connecting with something outside of yourself… you’re just worshiping your own assumptions. Or put another way, you’re just encountering and potentially worshiping… yourself. Good religion will draw your attention out of your own selfish perspective towards God and a community of people. Being spiritual is something that happens by default. It’s an accident of your existence. Religion is what happens when you put your spiritual reality to work.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year -- for Many Souls in Purgatory

Please share this far and wide. One of the Spiritual Works of Mercy is to pray for the poor souls. Here's a good way to do it!

From Rorate Caeli

It's been a long-held popular belief that Christmas is the day when the most souls are released from Purgatory. 

Please send the names of your deceased loved ones before Christmas Day. As long as they're in our inbox they're enrolled in the Society perpetually (if you've sent them in before, don't send them in again). 

Enroll them in time for Christmas then consider making your Christmas Mass offertory intention for the relief of all the souls enrolled in the Rorate Caeli Purgatorial Society.

Priests: The Souls still need more of you saying Mass for them! Please email me to offer your services. There's nothing special involved -- all you need to do is offer a weekly or monthly TLM with the intention: "For the Souls enrolled in the Rorate Caeli Purgatorial Society."

How to enroll souls: please email me at athanasiuscatholic@yahoo.com and submit as follows: "Name, State, Country." If you want to enroll entire families, simply write in the email: "The Jones family, Ohio, USA". Individual names are preferred. Be greedy -- send in as many as you wish and forward this posting to friends as well.

Please consider forwarding this Society to your family and friends, announcing from the pulpit during Holy Mass or listing in your church bulletin. We need to spread the word and relieve more suffering souls.

Please pray for the enrolled Souls and the 89 holy priests saying Traditional Masses for the Society:

"For all the souls enrolled in the Rorate Caeli Purgatorial Society: Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and the souls of all the Faithful departed rest in peace. Amen."

Then ...

Almighty and ever living God,

we ask Thy blessing upon the priests

who offer Masses for the Purgatorial Society.

Give them a greater awareness of the grace

that Thou dost pour out through the Sacraments,

and by their devout celebration of the Sacred Mysteries,

increase in them a love for Thee.

Give strength to Thy priests, O Shepherd of the flock;

when they are in doubt, give them the assurance of faith,

and in Thy goodness confirm them as heralds of Thy Truth

to all who seek to follow in Thy path.

We ask this through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Eternal Priest,

Who lives and reigns with Thee in the unity with the Holy Ghost,

God, for ever and ever. Amen.

High-Ranking Prelates Are Promoting Homosexuals “Beyond all Measure”

Does Your Eminence have anything new to tell us? This is old news.

From Gloria.tv

Cardinal Gerhard Müller has no information about “homosexual networks” in the Vatican – except that Pope Francis said so.

Talking to CatholicNewsAgency.com (November 30), he acknowledged however that there are high-ranking prelates who defend and promote homosexuals “beyond all measure”.

Müller adds that the same prelates are indolent and careless when confronted with attacks against the Catholic faith, “Who follows them gets away with everything, but those who refuse their 'assisted thinking' are persecuted."

Müller summarises this with the slogan “St. Paul away –Wucherpfennig okay.”

Father Ansgar Wucherpfennig was accepted by the Vatican as rector of the theological College St Georgen in Frankfurt, Germany, although he blesses gay couples and favours female priests.

Pope Francis: “Don’t Be Anxious About Closing Churches”

Well, I guess if the vocations crisis is a 'fruit of Vatican II' and brings 'enlightenment' (here), closing Churches must be a good thing, right? 

From Gloria.tv

The fact that many churches are closed down should be welcomed in the Church "not with anxiety" but as a "sign of the times" that invites us to "reflection" and "requires us to adapt", Pope Francis told a conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University (November 29) in a written message.

It is unclear though what the scope of such a "reflexion" would be.

Francis writes that the churches were necessary "until a few years ago" but are no longer "due to a lack of faithful and clergy".

He suggests that the churches may also be closed because of a different distribution of the population between cities and rural areas. This theory would imply that somewhere else there would be a big need to built new churches. But this is not the case.

There is little doubt that the present downfall of the Catholic Church is the main reason for the closing of the churches. Francis does not mention it with one word.

Merry Christmas From Ayn Rand (Sort of Satire)

Ayn Rand may be the only thinker ever to carry laissez-faire capitalism to it's logical conclusion. It lead her, inevitably, to atheism and a fierce hatred of all organised religion, but especially Christianity. Of course, despite her fame as a 'right-wing' ideologue, the  founder of the pseudo-philosophy of 'objectivism', and a primary 'philosopher' of anarcho-capitalist libertarianism, her background may have had something to do with her anti-religious stance.

She was educated in Marxist history at the Petrograd State University in the Soviet Union (now St Petersburg State University in St Petersburg, Russia). I'm sure her thorough grounding in the evil philosophy of Marxism was a major factor in forming her anti-religious philosophy.  The materialistic school of history denies the existence of any spiritual component in human affairs, whether God, the soul, or the existence of an objective morality, just as laissez-faire capitalism inevitably does.

Over the next 25 days leading up to Christmas, each day I'm going to post a 'Christmas card' bearing a quote from Rand. The texts are actual quotes from her on a Christmas card background.

The Vatican: They’re Doing This On Purpose

Hilary White tells it like it is! What's going on is no accident. Francis has every intention of remaking the Church in his own image, and woe betide those who don't agree!

From The Remnant

That quote [pictured] is from Der Speigel. But it is Spiegel’s Correspondent in Italy, Walter Mayr, who characterizes that statement as self-critical. Based upon all the evidence to date and what I think may be coming, I suspect that is a misreading of the statement.  The Pope wasn’t being self-critical, he was telling you the plan.

Our friend Pat Archbold has been producing a series of articles explaining in detail how the Bergoglian Purge is being carried out and what is coming next. He has given me a clearer understanding why we are going to have to walk away. Return to prayer - in fact to learn a deeper kind of prayer than we have ever known.

It's certainly not a time to be turning to the structures and institutions of the Church to protect and aid us.

I don't often say this about other people's writing, but these are a must-read. Read them here, here, here and here 

"...Even I didn't expect the absolutely brazen way they have gamed the synod system.  At this last synod, not only did they do away with all the rules in advance and pack the synod with the pliant, but they actually published a synod document that was substantially about a topic that wasn't even discussed at the synod, synodality itself.  You must hand it to these folks, they are the honey badgers of heretics, they just don't care."

In Part II, Pat writes about what he means when he says "no quarter will be given".

"What I mean is they are taking a series of steps intended to give faithful Catholics, particularly traditional Catholics, no place to go other than where they want us. In short, they are executing a series of plays from their playbook intended to put traditional Catholics in a position in which they must capitulate or be disobedient to some degree. It is the disobedience they seek."

"When they want you gone, they can make you gone.  They aren't even going through the motions any more and any and all sense of due process or rights under canon law have been dispensed with."

Part III, on the torpedoing of traditional or even merely "conservative" female contemplative religious:

Step by step they have been destroying avenues for religious to practice traditional Catholicism. They are simply not giving traditional Catholics with a vocation anywhere to go, except where they want you to go. They are diligently and systematicallycutting off all avenues of escape. This is critical in understanding my thesis about how they may in the future cause the split in the Church for which Pope Francis has openly pined.

Today I had a conversation with a lady who is involved in a Thing to set up some kind of praying sort of community-ish thing for ladies and others. She was asking me whether I had ever heard of a bishop anywhere in the world who would be approachable, someone who is on the side of the Angels and understands what's at stake, to ask for support and/or protection. Maybe even start a process to become a Private Association of the Faithful, canonically speaking.

It was difficult to restrain the urge to answer, "Don't you know there's a war on? The bishops are the guys on the other side."

In real life, I said:

"It's not impossible. But it's imperative to understand that the bad men are in charge and there is a bloodbath planned for ALL faithful Catholics. They're purging EVERYONE. If you find a bishop who's going to support you, he'll be purged, likely for having supported you.

Nice Lady: Elaborate please on bloodbath and purge. What is plan for laity?

Me: Lock-out. Anyone associated in a formal way with the institutions of the Church - bishops, priests, deacons, monks, nuns, even "private associations of the faithful" ... everyone - will be either forced to toe the line or be purged. Anyone free of formal association will be locked out.

Nice Lady: How soon?

Me: Right now. The message of the Vatican to the USCCB at Baltimore was essentially that. 'Do it our way, go in our direction, or we'll crush you.'

Bishops and priests are already being removed who are obviously not going to go along, and not just in the US."

The goal is to ensure that Catholicism of the kind St. Philip Neri recognised will become a private practice. The public Church will no longer be Catholic doctrinally, in the same way it is largely no longer Catholic liturgically. You can have your New Catholicism any colour you like, so long as its Bergoglian.

Catch Hilary's regular column in the Print Edition of The Remnant Newspaper--Subscribe Today!

They're herding anyone who is locked into the institution over the cliff. And the cliff is the New Paradigm, in which the requirement will be the effective renunciation of Christ and His Holy Church. Going along with the New Paradigm requires abandoning the Catholic Faith, the very concept that there are absolute moral realities given to us by God. This is what Amoris Laetitia was about. And that is precisely what is being presented as the choice to seminarians and priests in the various places where the Purge is set to start: Malta, Buenos Aires, Mexico... etc. Go along or get out has been the message, approved in so many words by Rome, from the bishops there to anyone objecting.

This is what they're doing with that document - the first but not the last - presenting us with a choice, 'You will go over the cliff or be purged out of the institution."

Don't forget, Cupich has laid down the pattern already. All the way back in 2002, as bishop of Rapid City, he locked traditionalist parishioners out of their church on Good Friday. They were invited to attend the Triduum at a NO parish, or stay home. Their choice.

They're using our desire to follow the rules and be good and lawful to effect the purge.

Those nuns in France thought there were still rules, that the Church was still governed by the rule of law. They thought there were proper procedures, that they were protected by canon law. So they followed the rules, played along. They accepted the exile of their superiors, answered the questions of the vistitators, launched legal appeals. So did the FFIs. So did the ones attempting to create traddie Trappists in Germany. All crushed.

Maybe something worth asking about those nuns who are right now squeeing with girlish glee and running to be the first ones to get a glass of Kool Aid: "If you're fine, if you're safe and cozy and awaiting dewy-eyed with anticipation, the next missive from Rodriguez Carballo, and the other criminals in Rome… if the Bergoglian Vatican isn't coming at you with their weaponised visitators...

...what are you doing wrong?”

This is the point that Pat is making in his series: there are no rules now. The procedures don't matter. Canon Law doesn't matter. Certainly the moral law hasn't mattered for quite a while. As Fr. Rosica so memorably put it, we're in the hands of a man who cares about nothing but his own will and the power to have it obeyed.

“Our Church has indeed entered a new phase,” writes Rosica. “With the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”

Henry Sire, author of the Dictator Pope, who has just been summarily thrown out of the Knights of Malta for telling the story of the Bergoglian coup, describes it pretty well to our friend John Zmirak:

JZ: I’ve read in news reports that because of this book, you’ve been expelled from the Order of Malta. Can you please share with us how the Order informed you of this? What justification did they give?

HS: I was first suspended in March 2018, pending a judicial procedure to decide upon my expulsion. Two weeks ago I received a letter from the Grand Chancellor with a decree of the Grand Master. It announced that the Order had decided to cut through the procedure, skipping the hearing before a tribunal to which it was supposed to lead, and toexpel me by simple fiat. The decree also falsely states that my expulsion was voted for unanimously by the Sovereign Council. In fact it was not submitted to the Council’s decision at all. The justification given is, of course, that my criticism of Pope Francis is incompatible with my membership of the Order.

The change imposed on it by Pope Francis consists in his having forced the previous Grand Master, Fra Matthew Festing, to resign in January 2017. That was after he had tried to dismiss the Grand Chancellor Baron Boeselager. Why? For his responsibility in the Order’s distributing condoms in the Far East as part of its charitable work. Boeselager was reinstated on the Vatican’s insistence. He is now in absolute control of the Order. Thus, the superior who tried to uphold Catholic moral teaching has been punished by Pope Francis. The man who violated it has been rewarded.

I will of course appeal. Before the decree arrived, I was in the middle of conducting a very effective defense, with the help of my lawyers. It was based on the glaring irregularities committed by the Order in initiating my prosecution. The decree of expulsion is fully of a piece with that irregularity. So are the lies which have been used to justify it. It is important to expose the lawless domination that Grand Chancellor Boeselager is exercising over the Order.

This is how the lawless honey badger heretics roll. And why it's important to just turn away from the institution for the time being. As a priest put it to me recently: We must "concentrate on trying to bring into existence centres of intense prayer in full orthodoxy liturgical spiritual and doctrinal," to "not even to try" to involve the structures of the Church and at all costs "avoid interference from the hierarchy."

Pat Archbold told me today: "The message is clear across the board. Canon law cannot protect you, constitutions cannot protect you, due process cannot protect you. 'I am the law, I am the process.' Bishops hear this loud and clear."

Dictator pope, indeed.