+St. Catherine Laboure+

 “And He said also to the multitudes, “When you see a cloud rising from the west, presently you say, ‘A shower is coming, and so it happeneth: and when ye see the south wind blow, you say ‘There will be heat,’ and it cometh to pass. You hypocrites! You know how to discern the face of heaven and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time?” (Luke 12: 54-56)

“A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign: and a sign will not be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet. And He left them and went away.” (Matt. 16:4)

“And now I have told you before it come to pass; that when it shall come to pass, you may believe.” (John 14: 29)

It is believed by the majority of Traditionalists that despite the devastation we see in Rome and all around us, all is yet well with the remnant, and we can expect the departure of Francis and anticipate the installment of a new pope that will restore the Church to Her former glory. The Scripture quotes above show the folly of such fanciful thinking, promoted by those gurus calling themselves Catholic priests and lay leaders who ignore the reign of the abomination of desolation and delay the Latter Days to some more convenient time. They would have us believe that the successor of “pope” Siri — a heretic cardinal, who according to Giuffre’s own accounts, whimped out when put to the test — is our best hope to save the Catholic Church! Well let us instead heed the fateful words of a true cardinal and champion of the faith, Henry Cardinal Manning, and abandon the counterfeit for the genuine article. Then we will know what to expect from these signs we see, in order to avoid Our Lord’s condemnation as hypocrites. For once Rome apostatized from the faith, there is no happy ever after for the Church until the great and terrible consequences of this apostasy have run their course. Hear what Manning says regarding the fate of Rome in our day:

“The writers of the Church tell us that in the latter days the city of Rome will probably become apostate from the Church and Vicar of Jesus Christ; and that Rome will again be punished, for he will depart from it; and the judgment of God will fall on the place from ‘which he once reigned over the nations of the world.’ For what is it that makes Rome sacred, but the presence of the Vicar of Jesus Christ? What has it that should be dear in the sight of God, save only the presence of the Vicar of His Son? Let the Church of Christ depart from Rome, and Rome will be no more in the eyes of God than Jerusalem of old. Jerusalem, the Holy City, chosen by God, was cast down and consumed by fire, because it crucified the Lord of Glory; and the city of Rome, which has been the seat of the Vicar of Jesus Christ for eighteen hundred years, if it become apostate, like Jerusalem of old, will suffer a like condemnation. And, therefore, the writers of the Church tell us that the city of Rome has no prerogative except only that the Vicar of Christ is there; and if it become unfaithful, the same judgments which fell on Jerusalem, hallowed though it was by the presence of the Son of God, of the Master, and not the disciple only, shall fall likewise upon Rome.” (The Present Crises of the Holy See Tested by Prophecy, p. 87-88).

Manning does not apologize to his readers for being the bearer of bad news, nor does he sugar coat his predictions, all based on the teachings of the Church, including the approved writers and theologians of his day. He shoots straight from the hip and finds his mark among those Traditionalists who have ignored papal teaching for decades. In his The Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ he tells his readers:

“A sorrowful tone, therefore, I readily acknowledge. If it is more so than befits the subject and the time, I acknowledge also the fault, and I trust only that it may be venial.  But to desponding I cannot feel guilty… I should indeed be sorry to write a line in a tone to discourage even one simple faithful soul; but I would do even this for a moment, if in so doing I could purify our confidence of the low, human, unreasoning, unilluminated, and almost boastful and defiant tone too commonly heard. Let no one say, then, that these Lectures have a desponding tone. Sorrowful, I admit; but desponding, it could not be… Sorrowful, I am aware they are; and who can be otherwise than sorrowful, when he sees the havoc of infidelity and anarchy… Such a sorrow every Catholic ought to breathe; and if he does not partake of it, he ought carefully to examine himself, to find the reason of his exemption from a sorrow which seems inseparable from a love of the holy Catholic and Roman Church. I do not know how anyone can treat the trials of the Holy See as an abstraction.

“The Catholic Church cannot be silent; it cannot hold its peace; it cannot cease to preach the doctrines of Revelation, not only of the Trinity and of the Incarnation, but likewise of the Seven Sacraments, and of the infallibility of the Church of God, and of the necessity of unity, and of obedience to the Holy See as to a sovereign principle of truth: and because it will not be silent, and cannot compromise, and will not obey in matters that are of its own Divine prerogative, therefore it stands alone in the world; for there is not another Church so called, nor any community professing to be a Church, which does not submit, or obey, or hold its peace, when the civil governors of the world command.

“We are fond of imagining triumphs and glories for the Church on earth, that the Gospel is to be preached to all nations, and the world to be converted, and all enemies subdued, and I know not what, until some ears are impatient of hearing that there is in store for the Church a time of terrible trial: and so we do as the Jews of old, who looked for a conqueror, a king, and for prosperity; and when their Messias came in humility and in passion, they did not know Him. So, I am afraid, many among us intoxicate their minds with the visions of success and victory, and cannot endure the thought that there is a time of persecution yet to come for the Church of God.”

Comment: Well we all know “what” else; without presently obeying the continual magisterium they wish to establish one they believe will be to their liking and exonerate them. They indeed seek a worldly king who will remove the present shame of their existence from them, a living sign that God has not abandoned them. They wear their hatred of the Jews as a badge of honor, scapegoating them for their own sins, contrary to the teachings of the Roman Pontiffs. But ironically, they have fallen into the same errors as the very ones they despise, refusing to understand the ancient Scriptural prophecies as they were intended and longing instead for vindication.

Manning continues from this same work: “The prompting of our natural hearts, when we hear of the sufferings of those we love, is to speak with an impatient sorrow; as Peter, when Jesus took His disciples and told them that the Son of Man  ‘must suffer many things, and be rejected by the ancients, by the high-priests, and the Scribes, and be killed ; and after three days rise again. And He spoke the words openly; and Peter, taking Him, began to rebuke Him’ (St. Mark viii. 31). We too are ready to say, ‘This be far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be unto Thee’ (St. Mark viii. 33). Yet Jesus did not accept this manifestation of a too natural love. His words of rebuke have a divine energy, intended to teach us not to trust our human affections in judging of His supernatural dispensations. ‘Go behind Me, Satan, because thou savourest not the things that are of God, but that are of men’ (St. Matt. xvi. 22).”

Comment: And Traditionalists say: “this shall not be unto us, and to the Church in these times.” They have never divested themselves of the false liberal charity that already prevailed prior to Vatican 2. Their worldly idea of the Church is demonstrated by the Siri conjecture, which has no relation whatsoever to Pope Pius XII’s infallible constitution governing papal elections. They think themselves so favored by God that they will not have to suffer the persecutions of those who gave their lives for the faith behind the Iron Curtain, or during the Protestant Reformation. No, we hear instead that God would never take their Mass from them even though He foretold such an event through His prophet Daniel, as confirmed by the early Church Fathers. He would never leave them without a pope even though his disciple St. Paul warned the faithful of this event and the Church Herself acknowledged it.

In his The Temporal Power…, Manning, quoting Donoso Cortes, then predicts precisely what we are experiencing in these times: “In giving up the empire of faith as dead, and in proclaiming the independence of the reason and of the will of man, society has rendered absolute, universal, and necessary the evil which was only relative, exceptional, and contingent. This period of rapid retrogression commenced in Europe with the restoration of paganism — philosophical, religious, and political. At this day the world is on the eve of the last of its restorations, the restoration of socialist paganism(!) … Society is dying… It is dying because error is killing it, and because society is now founded upon errors. Know, then, that all you hold as incontrovertible is false.” And not recognizing the utter deterioration of the spiritual order, Traditionalists cannot see this as a naturally following consequence of that deterioration.

Manning then proceeds to explain to his readers exactly what to expect during this time of trial. In Lecture One of the just quoted work he writes: “We have here a prophecy of four great facts: first, of a revolt, which shall precede the second coming of our Lord; secondly, of the manifestation of one who is called “the wicked one;”thirdly, of a hindrance, which restrains his manifestation; and lastly, of the period of power and persecution, of which he will be the author.” The revolt had already begun in the days of the Apostles, for St. Paul tells us: “The Mystery of Iniquity already worketh.” Manning traces its progression down through the ages, touching on the many heresies and schisms and culminating in the advent of Rationalism and Pantheism. The wicked one he identifies as Antichrist proper, pointing out that the ancient Fathers teach he is a man, not a system. The hindrance, he says, is who St. Paul refers to as both a person and a thing, the See of Peter and the person who occupies it at that time. The period of power and persecution need not be explained, because we are living it.

Then Manning notes: “This leads on plainly to the marks which the prophet [Daniel] gives of the persecution of the last days. Now there are three things which he has recorded. The first, that the continual sacrifice shall be taken away; the next, that the sanctuary shall be occupied by the abomination which maketh desolate; the third, that ‘the strength’ and, ‘the stars,’ as he described it, shall be cast down. And these are the only three I will notice.” Regarding the cessation of the Continual Sacrifice, Manning comments: “The Holy Fathers who have written upon the subject of Antichrist, and have interpreted these prophecies of Daniel, say that about the end of the world, during the reign of Antichrist, the public offering of the Holy Sacrifice, for a little time, will cease” (and a “little time” by God’s reckoning is not the equivalent of human time).

Comment: And so we have two sets of prophecies — one from St. Paul, the other from Daniel — which leave no room for doubt about what to expect in these times. We have the great revolt, which started with the early heresies in the times of the Apostles, culminating in the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution and the exodus of Catholics from the Novus Ordo church in the 1960s-1970s. We have the arrival of the wicked one, who Manning says is Antichrist, during the reign of he who withholdeth. The wicked one helps move he who withholdeth out of the way, to eventually take his place (Montini’s betrayal of Pope Pius XII). Roncalli begins the gradual taking away of the Continual Sacrifice with his additions to the liturgy and the use of “for all” in the missalettes for the faithful. Then there is Montini’s rise to power, the official cessation of the Continual Sacrifice and the abominable desolation of everything Catholic. The strength, which is the papacy, and the stars which are the bishops and other hierarchy are simultaneously struck down. Those wishing to remain faithful are harangued and persecuted, and their attempts to save the Mass and Sacraments are futile.

The occupation of the sanctuary by the abomination of desolation is described by Manning as he witnessed it in his day. “What is the great flood of infidelity,

revolution, and anarchy, which is now sapping the foundations of Christian society, not only in France, but in Italy, and encompassing Rome, the centre and sanctuary of the Catholic Church, but the abomination which desolates the sanctuary, and takes away the continual sacrifice? The secret societies have long ago undermined and honeycombed the Christian society of Europe, and are at this moment struggling onward towards Rome, the centre of all Christian order in the world… [This is] the casting down of ‘the Prince of Strength;’ that is, the Divine authority of the Church,

and especially of him in whose person it is embodied, the Vicar of Jesus Christ. God has invested him with sovereignty, and given to him a home and a patrimony on earth. The world is in arms to depose him, and to leave him no place to lay his head. Rome and the Roman States are the inheritance of the Incarnation. The world is resolved to drive the Incarnation off the earth. It will not suffer it to possess much as to set the sole of its foot upon. This is the true interpretation of the anticatholic movement of Italy and England: “Tolle hunc de terra.” The dethronement of the Vicar of Christ is the dethronement of the hierarchy of the universal Church, and the public rejection of the Presence and Reign of Jesus.”

Comment: Notice that the abomination must come first, as the order of Holy Scripture dictates, before the Sacrifice is taken away. And yet Traditionalists, vocal as they are about the taking away of the Latin Mass, which has never happened universally in the history of the Church, do not and will not recognize its ultimate cause: the reign of Antichrist as the abomination! They pretend this monstrosity can be quasi-legitimate in direct contradiction of papal teaching and can even “convert”! To satisfy their own wants and needs, they are willing, unbelievably, to even ignore the clear signs provided to the faithful by Our Lord, thus earning His well-deserved epithet of hypocrites. Moreover, they refuse to recognize that to overthrow the papacy is to likewise overthrow the entire hierarchy — cardinals, bishops and priests. They reject the reign of Christ’s Vicars in His stead as King while promoting the Kingship of Christ.

And again from Manning’s The Temporal Power…“The Prophet Daniel, in the twelfth chapter, says that in the time of the end ‘many shall be chosen and made white, and shall be tried as fire; and the wicked shall deal wickedly, and none of the wicked shall understand, but the learned shall understand;’ that is, many who have known the faith shall abandon it, by apostasy. ‘Some of the learned shall fall,’ that is, they shall fall from their fidelity to God. And how shall this come to pass? Partly by fear, partly by deception, partly by cowardice; partly because they cannot stand for unpopular truth in the face of popular falsehood; partly because the overruling contemptuous public opinion… so subdues and frightens Catholics, that they dare not avow their principles, and, at last dare not hold them.”

Comment: In other words, Traditionalists — who cannot bear to contemplate the possibility that they have lost their Mass and live in the times of Antichrist because they are ridiculed for these beliefs — will pay for their cowardice by losing the faith. They will accept and have accepted the all-so-popular opinions based on pragmatism (which they call common or even Catholic sense), a system of philosophy condemned by the Church, and abandoned the principles of Scholasticism. They embrace whatever they believe makes “sense” to them, because “all that complicated doctrinal language is so hard to understand.” (Forget that many of them have no problem understanding computer coding or complicated scientific theories.) But the language of Pope St. Pius X in his Oath Against the Errors of Modernism is not at all difficult to decipher: “The external arguments of revelation, that is divine facts, and especially miracles and prophecies… have been especially accommodated to the intelligence of all ages and men, even of these times” (DZ 2145). Yet no one can read the signs of these times and discern the prophecies regarding Antichrist.

Cardinal Manning concludes Lecture 2 of his The Temporal Power… with the following:

“…The Antichrist, and the antichristian movement, has these marks: first, schism from the Church of God; secondly, denial of its Divine and infallible voice; and thirdly, denial of the Incarnation. It is, therefore, the direct and mortal enemy of the One Holy Catholic and Roman Church the unity from which all schism is made; the sole organ of the Divine voice of the Spirit of God; the shrine and sanctuary of the Incarnation and of the continual sacrifice.”

Comment: Schism, yes; for Traditionalists do not follow lawful pastors, who can be considered lawful only if ordained by bishops in communion with and personally approved for consecration by the Roman Pontiff. They have set up their own church much as the Old Catholics before them and up to now, have been quite happy to exist without a pope. It has been pointed out for many years, on this site and by others, that Traditionalists refuse to obey the teachings of past Roman Pontiffs and the Sacred Canons. They thereby deny the Incarnation by denying Christ’s divinity, for they implicitly deny that the Church cannot err in the teachings delivered to Her by Our Lord through the Vicar of Christ, His divinely appointed, living voice on earth.

In Lecture 3 of his The Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ Manning writes:

“Some thirty Pontiffs fell upon the field. By their blood they purchased the city of Rome and held it as their own.  All the power of ten persecutions, and all the legions of Rome, and all the emperors of the world, could not drive out the Pontiffs from the city which they held for the Son of God. It is theirs by conquest, and by the laws of warfare. It belongs to them by right of endurance, and of patience, and of inflexible courage, to which the world has no equal… [T]hirty popes were compelled to leave Rome; four were imprisoned; four were unable to set foot in Rome; seven reigned in exile in Avignon; making in all forty-five, or one-fifth in the line of the Sovereign Pontiffs. …Nine times the city, in which is the throne of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, has been in the hands of usurpers; yet it has been held with such invincible tenacity of endurance, and such perpetual power of recovery, as to establish as a moral certainty that God, who chose it for the throne of the Vicar of His Son, has done so by a definitive act of His power, which He alone can rescind, and which He never will.”

Comment: And yet we are to believe that Siri, a coward who refused to shed his blood for Christ and His Church, could be numbered among the true popes and credited with “inflexible courage.” Preposterous. Let us draw out the conclusions of Traditionalists’ refusal to recognize the Antichrist and his times, because it will give the lie to their pretensions and demonstrate the absurdity of their position. They recognize that the Mass has been abolished by the Novus Ordo. No matter that the NO consecration formula for the wine was “restored” to their liturgy by Benedict 16; one cannot put socks on a pig. No matter, either, that Traditionalists believe that the Mass has not ended because it is celebrated by their “priests.” As Manning and the Roman Pontiffs teach, there can be no Church — no functioning hierarchy — without the Roman Pontiff. Traditionalists merely create an illusion akin to that foisted upon members of the Novus Ordo church they love to revile.

They cannot deny that Paul 6 abolished the Continual Sacrifice, not only by introducing the NO but by reigning as a false pope whose actions are null and void. His election has been proven invalid now for decades, and all the actions of past papal usurpers have been nullified by the Church. His destruction of the Mass and Sacraments and modernization of the churches, the changing of the calendar and extending the hand of friendship to Freemasons and the Communists alone should have alerted others to the fact he could not be a valid pope. For no one could ever present as a heretic and sit in the Chair of Peter.  But that does not matter to Traditionalists. Nor do they consider who they will call Antichrist if Paul 6 is not the Man of Sin. Who is left in the universal Church to revolt and leave her? Them? That has already occurred. What bishops are left to abandon Her — theirs? No teaching of the Church can ever support their claim they became valid priests, far less bishops. What true pope could be taken out of the way now to admit the Wicked One? And what future abomination in Rome could desolate the Church more than has already been done?

What Traditionalists seek to do is to acknowledge their own “pope” in order to escape the fulfillment of prophecy; to claim that Siri has continued the line of popes in unbroken succession. This despite any compromise they are forced to make regarding his affiliation with the church of Rome or any departure from papal teaching and law they see fit to justify. If they succeed, and they are persecuted by apostate Rome, they will claim that they are fulfilling all the prophecies of the Church’s destruction. But they were never the Church. They are trying to do what they so often have accused others of doing – rescuing the Church, playing the hero, riding in on the white horse which Cardinal Manning says is reserved for Christ alone. Manning writes in his The Present Crisis of the Holy See Tested by Prophecy:

“But there is One Power which will destroy all antagonists; there is One Person who will (Dan. 11: 35) break down and smite small as the dust of the summer threshing-floor all the enemies of the Church, for it is He who will consume His enemies ‘with the Spirit of His mouth,’ and destroy them ‘with the brightness of His coming.’ It seems as if the Son of God were jealous lest anyone should vindicate His authority. He has claimed the battle to Himself; He has taken up the gage which has been cast down against Him; and prophecy is plain and explicit that the last overthrow of evil will be His; that it will be wrought by no man, but by the Son of God; that all the nations of the world may know that He, and He alone, is King, and that He, and He alone, is God.

“The events of every day are carrying men further and further in the career on which they have entered. Every day men are becoming more and more divided. These are times of sifting. Our Divine Lord is standing in the Church, ‘His fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly cleanse His floor, and He will gather the grain into His barn, and will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ It is a time of trial, when ‘some of the learned shall fall,’ and those only shall be saved who are steadfast to the end.”

Comment: This is the trial Traditionalists fail to acknowledge. They are the learned who fall. Even those who patiently wait Our Lord’s resolution of these terrible times wait in fear and trembling, praying they do not slip and fall into these same errors. They have no guarantee of their salvation as some have accused; any Catholic claiming this would be a liar. But by abstaining from those things the Church condemns and Traditionalist’s indulge in, they hope at least to preserve Her as She always was, according to the Christ’s teachings safeguarded by the Roman Pontiffs.

We have no part in this save to pray and watch; this is what Our Lord instructed us to do. We cannot interfere with God’s will; it is for us to be crucified with Him and suffer without complaint until the bitter the end, just as He suffered on the Cross. Then and only then, after our time in the darkness of the tomb, shall we see His Church rise once again; or, by the mercy of God, be escorted to Heaven.