A Letter from Rome...

Angelus by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)

TODAY EVERY CHRISTIAN finds himself almost constantly in the middle of a war. The war of a Christian is fought above all with spiritual weapons. Spiritual weapons have an immeasurable scope, because there is no natural good that can compare to even the smallest spiritual good. Theologians say that all of the material goods of the world are inferior to the smallest degree of grace. Grace is obtained by those who pray, and prayer is able to uproot mountains, as the Gospel tells us (Mk 11:23).

Among the spiritual weapons that are most dear to Christians is the prayer of the Angelus Domini, or simply “The Angelus,” a prayer that summarizes a theology of history. This prayer recalls the greeting that the Archangel Gabriel directed to the Blessed Virgin Mary on the night that changed the course of human history. Following the Annunciation by the Angel and the response of the Virgin, “Fiat mihi secundum Verbum Tuum,” the Incarnation of the Word took place.

New from RTV. . .

In this RTV Sunday Sermon from South Saint Paul, Father (a diocesan priest) publicly stands with Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò who has courageously stood with Joseph Cardinal Zen, champion of the persecuted underground Catholics in China, who has resisted the recent Vatican betrayal of Chinese Underground Catholics.

“In the Garden, Jesus saw the tepidity, malice, and corruption of an infinite number of Christians, the lies and deceptions of proud teachers, all the sacrileges of wicked priests, the fatal consequences of each sin, and the abomination of desolation in the kingdom of God, in the sanctuary of those ungrateful human beings whom he was about to redeem with his blood at the cost of unspeakable sufferings.” – Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich

I started to read and meditate on The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ in preparation for Lent. For those not familiar, it is purported to be the recorded visions of the Augustinian nun, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), who was the recipient of many mystic gifts and visions. She also is believed to have received the full stigmata, of which she reported suffering the physical effects of Jesus' punctured hands, feet, side, and forehead. I was particularly struck by her vivid descriptions of Jesus in the Garden of Olives, or as I prefer the “Garden of the Divine Agony.”

Goodbye, boys. I'm sorry, but you were too good for our brave new world.

A fairly devastating article appeared in The Washington Times yesterday, February 23, 2020. Entitled Boy Scouts of America's bankrupt moral standards embrace leftist ideals and written by Robert Knight, it chronicles the fall of the Boy Scouts of America. (Check that. Not the "fall" but the "targeting for elimination" of the Boy Scouts of America.) 

I’ve never been a Boy Scout, nor are either of my young sons. But I can certainly sympathize with Mr. Knight when he confesses that both anger and sadness motivated him to write his courageous article—an article which, by the way, in the days to come could well win the man a one-way ticket to the gulag or the concentration camp or the respect camp or whatever they’ll call the detention camps for political prisoners in the future.

Alphonse Ratisbonne came here as a hardened Jew. The Virgin appeared to him just as you see her. He fell down a Jew and rose a Christian.  

The Blessed Mother and the Church

According to traditional Catholic theology, there is an intimate and profound relationship between the Blessed Mother and the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. By the will of God, the universal mediation of Mary is ordinarily necessary for the salvation and sanctification of men, just as the mediation of the Church is also necessary. And, if the Church has been entrusted with the task of guarding and spreading the truths of the faith in their integrity and purity, the Blessed Mother has been given the mission of fighting and conquering the devil, the supreme inspirer and advocate of all errors and heresies.^[1]

New From Remnant TV...

With America apparently ready for a homosexual president and a Frist Gentleman in the White House, Michael Matt discusses the downward moral spiral of Western Civilization since the close of the Second Vatican Council.

Of all the conservative commentators, only Rush Limbaugh—a guy with stage 4 lung cancer—is willing to discuss even the possibility that Mayor Pete’s marital status might present a political obstacle. If Limbaugh is homophobic now, says Mr. Matt, well then Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were raging homophobes just a few years ago.

THE POST-SYNODAL “apostolic exhortation” Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazon) (QA) has finally appeared.  QA says a great deal about very little. It is largely composed of blathering about four “dreams” to be realized (social, cultural, ecological and ecclesial), the obsessive theme of “inculturation,” and the glories of the Amazon, along with assorted ecological observations having no relation to papal authority, including references to the Amazon’s “dazzling diversity of woodlands” which “serves as a great filter of carbon dioxide, which helps avoid the warming of the earth.” And let not the faithful not forget that “the good functioning of ecosystems also requires fungi, algae, worms, insects, reptiles and an innumerable variety of microorganisms…” There are also a number of ludicrous quotations from poetic paeans to the Amazon jungle, including this gem:

New from Remnant TV...

From the Editor’s Desk, Michael Matt covers the latest Vatican attack on President Donald Trump. 

Team Francis kicked off this election year with a Vatican conference that targeted Trump by name and the United States in general as THE number one impasse to the construction of the globalists’ new world order.