Not too long ago, English historian Tom Holland, an authority on the world of Late Antiquity, explained the conflict between the political Left and Right in the modern world as essentially a civil war between two branches of Christianity: the implication being that what we term The Left (progressivism, socialism, communism, “wokeism”, etc) is nothing more than a variant of Christianity – albeit one entirely  devoid of a supernatural dimension.^[1]

Our Lord Jesus Christ established the Holy Catholic Church to safeguard and propagate the truths and graces He wants all men to accept so that they may honor God and save their souls. As a general matter, it is this fact, rather than our particular liking of Catholic teachings and practices, that leads most faithful Catholics to belong to the Catholic Church. As such, the most important thing we need from the Church’s hierarchy is the faithful transmission of those truths and sacraments that Jesus entrusted to His disciples.

120 years ago, on August 4, 1903, the pontificate of Pope Saint Pius X began. Two months later, on October 4, 1903, his first encyclical, E Supremi,^[i] was published in order to describe the pontifical program represented by the motto “Instaurare Omnia in Christo” (To restore all things in Christ), used as a subtitle for the text. Revolving around the first verse of the second Psalm of King David, the beginning of the document was dedicated to the situation of the Church in the modern world:

“The nations have raged and the peoples imagined vain things (Psalm 2: 1) against their Creator, so frequent is the cry of the enemies of God: Depart from us (Job 21: 14). And as might be expected we find extinguished among the majority of men all respect for the Eternal God, and no regard paid in the manifestations of public and private life to the Supreme Will – nay, every effort and every artifice is used to destroy utterly the memory and the knowledge of God.”

“The results that have followed the Council seem cruelly opposed to the expectation of all, to begin with that of Pope John XXIII, then that of Paul VI . . . The Popes and the conciliar Fathers were expecting a new Catholic unity and, on the contrary, we have gone towards a dissension which, to take again the words of Paul VI, appears to have passed from self-criticism to self-destruction.” (Cardinal Ratzinger, 1985, quoted in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s They Have Uncrowned Him, p. 231)

New from Remnant TV...

Something different tonight — Michael Matt shares clips from a vintage documentary on the Second Vatican Council, and asks a few easy questions:

As the late Solange Hertz so eloquently writes:

God revealed to us that misfortunes otherwise inexplicable are the work of the author of evil: “An enemy has done this!” (Matt 13:28). Whoever does not believe in the oft-ridiculed “conspiracy theory” of history quite simply does not believe in the existence of the devil, who moves both men and events. Great numbers of his dupes labor to promote satanic causes without necessarily being aware of the source of their inspiration. This is the essence of conspiracy, literally a “co-inspiration.” Harnessing masses of witless sinners by appealing to their vices and appetites, fallen angelic intelligences do indeed influence the course of history. The less their victims know the better. ¹

Smoking ceremonies are not ‘inculturation’ … and it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise. A July 13 article from Pillar Catholic, which was presented as an ‘explainer’ of indigenous smoking ceremonies, completely missed the mark by failing to look behind the sympathetic facade to see the real harms being perpetrated by the use of pagan rituals. Particularly disappointing was the manner in which commentary from the emeritus Archbishop of Philadelphia, Archbishop Chaput, was used to sanction anti-Catholic ‘inculturation’.

“The Holy Spirit does not always prevent the necessary consequences of our negligence.” (Fr. Alvaro Calderon, Prometheus: The Religion of Man, p. 201)