Ruminations about world events and coming site changes

by T. Stanfill Benns | Jul 25, 2026 | Blog

+Feast of St. James, Apostle and Martyr+

Introduction

For the past several months I’ve been ruminating about the precarious situation of the world today. I’m sure other people are having the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings. The one thing that keeps coming to my mind is, “Here is the faith and patience of the saints.”  I’m not sure any of us understood how much faith we would need and how patient we would have to be. And I say that because it seems like we are so far from what we remember of what we had of the Church that it is almost impossible to describe it to anybody who didn’t once experience it. Especially younger people. I have great difficulty, even with modern-day technology, in conveying that sense of the Church as us older Catholics experienced it. And I think that’s very important to understand, because without that true sense, it is very hard to grasp what has really happened to the Church.

I’m going to be making some changes to my site and basically go to blog-only format soon. I’m not sure how long this is going to take. It’s going to require some maneuvering, but like many people, I’m kind of trimming things down — economizing and minimizing as I grow older, which is something that all of us wind up doing at this stage of the game. I don’t want anyone to think that the site won’t be available to them. It certainly will. But I think that I have provided all the proofs, or nearly so, about what happened to the Church. And I know there are plenty of broadcasters and podcasters, YouTubers and all kinds of people out there that are going to have different takes and different ideas. They are the ones who seem to be garnering most of the audience these days. And of course we are all free to publish these proofs — for as long as the powers that be allow it, that is.

Over the years — and this website is now 20 years old — I believe I have offered readers very solid reasons for why I believe as I do concerning the end times and what we’re going through now. And I don’t know that I can say that for everybody else. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can’t say that for everybody else because they often don’t have anything from Church teaching or Holy Scripture to back up how they are looking at certain things, especially when it comes to Antichrist and who is Antichrist and where we are etc. I’m not saying I’m the only one that can get it right. I’m not. I’ve made a lot of mistakes during my career — I corrected one in my last blog. I always try, when I realize I’ve done this, to make sure that readers know I’ve made a mistake and that I’ve corrected it. It’s almost always good-faith errors because either I wasn’t paying attention or I just copied something wrong. But I still have the obligation to correct them. And those who question something as not correct have the obligation of notifying me.

But mistakes aside, there are a lot of popular broadcasters out there that have some very convincing takes on things. And it worries me because the one thing I don’t want lost in all of this is what Scripture tells us and what we know from approved sources of what will happen in the last days. The spiritual must always supersede the material. I know a lot of people have various ideas as far as where Enoch and Elias fit in and the identity of the Antichrist. But in some ways, these have been made so fantastical that it almost seems as though they’re myths or legends and we know this is wrong. I am no different than everyone else — I’m speculating on a lot of these things myself. I just read again somewhere where we would be expected in these days to be able to read the signs of the times. And that is why nothing has been put down for us — we can speculate all we want, but only the actual fulfillment of the event will prove those speculations to be true.  And even then, we are on dangerous ground here. How easy would it be to falsify the appearance of Enoch and Elias, a fake Antichrist, or the sudden appearance of a long-lost pope or bishop? We live in an age where deception has become the rule, not the exception, and the trusted principle of “when in doubt, don’t” must be invoked more and more frequently.

Antichrist’s coming and St. Jerome

Sometimes I think maybe all of us have it wrong. Something could come out of all of this that none of us are expecting. But all we can do is judge by what little we CAN believe and what we are CERTAIN that we see and take it from there. And I’m sure I’m not going to be too far off from some people’s thoughts on this. I’ve been reading St. Jerome lately; his commentary on Daniel. I know a lot of people have said, “Well, we don’t really know how much to trust about what’s in Daniel because we don’t know what applies to the Old Testament times or what applies to the New Testament times, or whether it applies to both.” There are differing opinions among the approved commentators on what does apply. But usually they agree that the Old Testament is kind of a prefiguration of everything that’s going to happen in the New Testament where the end times are concerned. They just differ on how much.

For we find this in the Douay-Rheims commentary on Apoc. 22:10: “We have no certainty when we apply these predictions to particular events. For as St. Jerome takes notice, the Apocalypse has as many mysteries as words, or rather mysteries in every word” (Now much of what appears in Apocalypse can be referred back to Daniel, so cross-referencing Daniel helps us better understand Apocalypse. In Dom Bernard Orchard’s A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, Reverend R. C. Fuller wrote, “All are agreed that the Old Testament as a whole prefigures the New Testament; some of the Fathers and early Church writers went further than this and interpreted everything in the Old Testament, even every phrase and word, as typifying the New Testament.” And I think that more and more we can see this is true the further we get down the end-times road.

In a lot of ways, I think that we have not given enough credit to what is written in the Old Testament and how it applies to the New Testament. And that’s because we’re not Scripture scholars and we are not like the Protestants, who often seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New. Also, reliable Scripture commentaries are hard to find. A lot of things were destroyed, I believe, when the Novus Ordo came in. I know I rescued several boxes of books from St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado that were being taken to the trash. I don’t know how often that happened but I know that it did happen. So what all we lost, we’ll never really know. I just hope it’s not things that could be really critical to what we’re going through now, but I ‘m afraid it could very well be.

I have a copy of St. Jerome’s commentary by Archer on the Book of Daniel, Catholic versions being unavailable. Although it is not imprimatured, I think it’s a very valuable work, because St. Jerome pretty much goes into everything that applies to us today. He more or less says that almost everything in Daniel that has been attributed to Antioch Epiphanes should be attributed to Antichrist. He was an early Father of the Church, so we can take his word for it. And we’re bound to believe what he says over any modern commentator simply because he is a saint and a Father of the Church. His work doesn’t amount to a unanimous opinion, which we would have to adopt as our own, but nevertheless, he was known for his expertise on Holy Scripture, and according to Rev. Graham’s work on Where we Got the Bible, he was the saint responsible for the creation of the Septuagint. We are living in a time when the final fulfillment of Daniel will be realized. If we take this book and Apocalypse in a collective sense, it is clear that not only does it predict the rise of spiritual Antichrist, THE Man of Sin, but also the head of Antichrist’s system, collective Antichrist — the Wild Beast — at work throughout the ages (Apoc. 1: 1). Spirtual Antichrist, the Man of Sin, has come and gone, but who he served, and the system they created together lives on. These are Satan and his sons, who encompass the camp of the saints at the very end: “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you shall do… He is a liar and the father thereof” (John 8: 44).

Russian conquest?

What also what disturbs me is some of the trends that to be in the works now. And one of them is a gravitation towards Russia as a “non-Communist” country — a dictatorship — and its Orthodox state religion. Statistics show a massive influx of converts to this sect. I understand how that might attract some people, because our own Church is no longer visible, although Christ keeps it alive as the Invisible Head. We’re its members — members of his Mystical Body and the Church militant on earth.  And what complicates matters further is our own government’s move towards a totally non-Christian religion and joining together with it in defense of this country, which is frightening. There may be other nations that perceive this administration’s favoring of Israel as a threat to their beliefs and their military position, simply because of some of the statements that Israel has made about what they intend to do if anyone should come after them.

Some people are thinking that in the event of an all-out war, Russia could possibly invade the United States on the pretext that they’re delivering us from a government that basically has violated our own Constitution, which it has. I don’t know if that is going to happen. I don’t see how people figure that Russia would be an improvement, whether in its religion or its political aspect, over what we have. There is always the possibility that Communist rule could be resurrected and we would then live in a Communist state, (although what we have in way of government now is not too far removed). We have to remember here that Russia also plays footsies with Communist China. That influence cannot be dismissed and would no doubt have bearing should we ever find ourselves in Russia’s orbit.

So let’s say Russia gets involved in the Middle East, they help Iran go after Israel, which I’m not sure they would do because they think it’s not in their best interests. But let’s say they do that, and the United States rushes in and starts a war with Russia, and given our depleted oil reserves and dwindling military weapons reserves, we go into this war on the puny side. It is quite possible Russia has a lot more weapons-wise than we realize they actually have, and they’ve been holding it back in their war with Ukraine because they figured that eventually they will go after Europe, or the Israel /US thing will come up. Let’s assume that Russia wins this war. So Russia comes to what’s left of America and acts friendly. Well, that’s the best-case scenario. But what’s Russia going to want out of America? Are they going to want to annex us? After all, Alaska is a connection to Russia. Will they require us to convert to Orthodoxy something a scared, hungry and battered people might find acceptable, given the alternatives?

Conquest from within?

At that point in time, the American government would no longer exist, and some actually believe that that might not be a bad thing. They could be correct. But what can people expect if our current leaders continue down the path they are on? Just recently, a case has gone before the Supreme Court where one city was prohibiting Jewish people from meeting in their homes and praying. They wanted to invite 12 people into one home to pray, and the city said, “You can’t do that because it’s not a church,” or something to that effect. So this Jewish man took it to the Supreme Court, and now the court will decide whether you can pray in your own home. When I lived in Colorado, I had a discussion with our county co-administrator, I guess you could call her, and she said, “Oh, yeah, if they wanted to, they could forbid people to use anything on their property as a church and invite people in.” This was during COVID, so I don’t know whether that had something to do with COVID or what that was, but that was alarming to me. And it’s like, well, you know they have that power. We’ve seen it exercised.

And then I read a blog that said that if they ever impose Noahide laws — which seems like it could happen — they could order us to remove crucifixes, holy pictures and statues from our homes. The first Noahide law is — and I’ve spoken about this before — “You can’t have idols in your home.” So are they going to take away all our statues? Are they going to take away the crucifixes? Are they going to forbid us to do these things because they consider Christ an idol since he wasn’t their Messiah? This is not unlike the persecution the early Christians faced. Rome fell as an empire because of wars and invasions, an unstable economy, too great a reliance on slave labor, military overspending and overexpansion of their empire, government corruption and political instability, migration issues, loss of their moral and cultural identity, and a weakening of their military owing to a lack of recruits and diminished loyalty to the empire. History is repeating itself in new Rome, and enough of the lies have been exposed that people can now see it moving inexorably forward.

Natural disasters will probably play a part in this downfall of our country as well, as mentioned in previous articles. There are maps out there that show that if we ever had any kind of a major shaking up — whether it be an EMP or pole shift or a nuclear bomb dropped somewhere, for that matter— it could trigger earthquakes that would destroy the West Coast, parts of the East Coast, and leave only the Midwest and some of the East Coast intact in this country. Our own government has had the ability to trigger earthquakes for decades, and the Chinese experimented on their own population with this technology in the 1970-80s. There seems to have been an increase in earthquake and volcanic activity recently, but scientific reports deny this. And that would be all the more reason to wonder if suddenly there was an uptick in earthquake activity. It’s also very likely that we’ll see more destruction in this country than we could possibly imagine, even civil war. And that’s sad, because we love our country, regardless of what’s going on right now. We just want it to be Catholic.

Conclusion

One thing that I can say about certain podcasters today is that they have done a good job of exposing the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy to the best of their ability, something Catholics have been aware of for almost 300 years. And we know as Catholics that it is a conspiracy to seduce the nations, destroy religion and control the world. I think the hardest thing for all of us, but especially young people to understand is how badly we’ve been betrayed and lied to all these years. For young adults it’s a shocker, because they generally do not know how long this evil has been around. But now they see it’s undeniable influence and results in their world, and so they ask, “Now what do we do and who are we supposed to believe?” How do we help them to cope? How do they digest all this? It’s a really sad situation. And the only solution is to set aside all the noise, all the media outlets, all the cacophony of opinions around us and concentrate only on daily duties, our prayers, and strengthening our faith. But young people brainwashed all their lives by materialism and false religious practices and beliefs have a tough time accepting this and practicing it, as do many older adults. They are not attuned to physical or spiritual suffering for Christ’s sake and may not be able to withstand the coming persecutions.

And they will come. At some point we may very well be asked to abandon our homes and our possessions — give up our lives — as did the early Christians, Catholic martyrs throughout history. We must prepare ourselves for that by refusing to be drawn into the intellectual traps and the use of AI to create visual phantasms to further deceive us regarding the events we see unfolding. All I can advise is what Holy Scripture advises: “But prove all things, hold fast to that which is good. (1 Thess. 5: 2); also, “Stand fast: and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:14). And when in doubt, refrain from acting until the doubt can be cleared, by those means approved by the Church. And if they cannot be cleared, one must always continue to refrain from acting, most especially when it concerns a doubt regarding the validity of the sacraments, something which is absolutely necessary for salvation, that is, when there is risk of losing one’s soul. (Rev. Dominic Prummer, Handbook of Moral Theology, 1957).

Faith and patience may sometimes make us miserable and anxious in the short term, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it will make us saints forever in Heaven.

Join us in a novena of reparation for IDF sacrilege in Lebanon

by T. Stanfill Benns | May 2, 2026 | Blog

+Feast of St. Athanasius, Bishop+

Prayer intention for May, Month of the Blessed Virgin Mary

“For all those who impiously blaspheme thee Blessed Mother, not knowing what they say… obtain for them from Almighty God the grace of conversion.” (Raccolta)

Novena of Reparation for IDF insults to the Holy Face

St. Therese of Lisieux had a special devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus and the Infant of Prague. Jesus’ Holy Face was smashed by IDF (Israeli) soldiers recently invading Lebanon, and for this a reader has begun a crusade to make reparation. He requests that all may: “Please unite with us in a Novena to St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face to end the Zionist/Epstein cabal, torturing and murdering children and smashing the Holy Face. We will pray May 6-14, Ascension Day.

MIRACULOUS INVOCATION TO ST. THERESE

O glorious Saint Therese, whom Almighty God has raised up to aid and counsel mankind, I implore thy Miraculous Intercession. So powerful art thou in obtaining every need of body and soul our Holy Mother Church proclaims thee a “Prodigy of Miracles . . . the Greatest Saint of Modern Times.”

Now I fervently beseech thee to answer my petition [mention here] and to carry out thy promises of spending Heaven doing good on earth . . . of letting fall from Heaven a Shower of Roses.
Henceforth, dear Little Flower, I will fulfill thy plea “to be made known everywhere” and I will never cease to lead others to Jesus through thee. Amen.

Petition: O dear St. Therese, so devoted to the Infant King, beg the Holy Child to cast down this Satanic cabal now enslaving the world and free the suffering innocents they hold captive, that He may then reign in their stead as our King.

St. Therese Prayer in honor of the Infant of Prague

O Eternal Father, Thine only Son, the dear Child Jesus, is mine, since Thou hast given Him to me. I offer Thee the infinite merits of His divine childhood, and I beg Thee, in His name, to open the gates of heaven to a countless host of little ones, who will forever follow this divine Lamb. Amen.

Beware of the influencers condemning Zionism

In lamenting the Noahide law issue last week, I provided a link to a Substack feed for a Jana Bennrun. I hope readers understood it was only for attribution purposes. After corresponding with her, I must ask readers to please not subscribe to her feed, view her videos or read her articles. Her anti-Catholic animus emerged quite quickly following the release of my last blog.  But I have to say I am not surprised. As with Candace Owens (who given her Novus Ordo alliance would obviously have issues with Bennrun too), I keep trying to make inroads regarding the views presented by these people, educate them a little and see if it is information they lack or whether they are working a different agenda. So far it has always been the latter. And that tells us something.

Working from different platforms — but all headed, seemingly, in the same direction — they are using their exposure of Zionism as a means of attempting to gather “Christians” into a malleable mass able to abolish Zionism and Freemasonry, and they are doing this from many different fronts. This without crediting the Church for being the first to warn against these evils.  And not only do they fail to credit the Church, or, in some cases, even view these entities from a spiritual perspective, they pointedly ignore the fact that the organizations THEY belong to are the original promoters of both evils — Zionism with the Novus Ordo and Freemasonry with the Protestants, agnostics and atheists. They fail to mention that Zionism and Freemasonry are simply different tentacles of the octopus, thoughtlessly brushing this inconvenient truth aside.

I would like to officially point out to those referring to themselves as Christians and pretending to defend the faith that they don’t even know what the word faith really means. If it wasn’t for the Catholic Church, they would never have been able to even call themselves Christians in the first place! They have contributed to the creation of the very monsters we find ourselves fighting today, so they should be on the Internet warning others about them. But while they repeatedly broadcast their devotion to truth and proudly proclaim that they are promoting it, it is only THEIR particular brand of the truth they are promoting. They steadfastly refuse to plunge into the very depths of the abyss of errors to acknowledge the fact that it is the Church that long ago warned about all these things and prescribed the remedy — the acceptance of pre-1959 Catholicism as the one, true Church. For really it is authority over others that they want, the right to direct others and be seen as the defenders of the Christian faith, a faith and a body that can never think and believe as one without the papacy.

Even in these last throes of our final existence on earth they cannot, will not see it, and we know why. Yet we keep approaching them, correcting them, just in case. Wherever we see evidence of this psyop, we will call it out. For deliberately or unwittingly, they are all working for the creation of a one-world religion to replace the one, holy Catholic apostolic Church which once gloriously ruled from Rome. It is reminiscent of the attempt to create the tower of Babel, the first attempt at world government. Babel is Hebrew for Babylon and its end will be the same. In the meantime, these podcasters and Internet stooges will continue to “babble-on,” contributing some good information with the rest of the slop they sling, just enough to make it palatable for those not wise to what they are up to. Are we angry, as they claim, because we have been “dethroned”? No, because there is no need to be. Christ promised to be with us until the very end — US, the one true Church — and He is ever true to His promises.

A diabolic, schizophrenic generation

We have referred to this quote before but it bears repeating here because it explains how even prior to the psychological warfare unleashed on U.S. Catholics in 1953 by the CIA, a mental state existed among Catholics that made them even more susceptible to being led astray. In 1945, C.J. Woolen wrote an article for the December Homiletic and Pastoral Review entitled “A Schizophrenic Generation.” The article held that already in post-war America a condition existed among Catholics that effectively minimized sin and evil living by attributing its cause to a mental illness which Woolen calls the “split mind,” or schizophrenia, known also today as the dissociative state. The predilection for this schizophrenia, he observes, is present in us all and needs only a conscious assent to take hold and completely replace any pre-existing ego state. Described effectively enough by St. Augustine in his City of God, the citizen sojourning in this vale of tears simply makes the decision to set his sails for a different port — the River Styx adjacent to Satan’s kingdom rather than Heaven’s safe harbor. A sort of convenient amnesia following this radical change masks any uncomfortable pangs of conscience, making the transition a smooth one.

Woolen noted that this condition was known even to the pagans, and quotes from Aristotle’s The Republic to prove it is the age-old struggle between good and evil, literally as old as Adam. In modern times, man’s final descent into the pit of deliberate unknowing began with Liberalism then Americanism and concluded with secular humanism, the belief that man can become a god himself, perhaps even greater than the Triune God. The Liberals were the first to master the art of dissembling for public consumption while intending by narrow mental reservation not to believe or comply with certain teachings of the Church. Will Herberg in Protestant, Catholic, Jew coined a great term for it: “…religious narcissism,where the individual and his psycho-spiritual state is made to concentrate on its own navel.”

In other words, “It is not man who serves God, but God who is mobilized to serve man.” And faith is only a “sure fire way to get what we want.” Religion, then, is not a standard by which Catholics order their allegiance to America, family, the community, their jobs etc., but vice versa. Civic and social allegiances dictate the role religion will play in most people’s lives. This results in what Herberg described as an incurable “civic idolatry.” This lifestyle, led by those he labels as “other-directed” individuals constitutes an inversion of the natural order that perfectly accommodates the schizophrenic mentality. And isn’t that what we see today, both in the extreme MAGA mentality and mindless allegiance to the Zionist cause?

“The Christian, if he is to be faithful, has no choice but to be heroic,” Woolen stated towards the end of his article. The numbing process of denial, psychiatry, prescription and psychotropic drugs are modern choices for dulling the pain of living in a materialistic world where fidelity to the Catholic ideal means loss of earthly goods, the patient enduring of pain, admission of guilt and indifference to human respect. Catholic Action, coupled with the “world exorcism,” Woolen advised could have provided the solution decades ago, but that time has long since passed. No faithful bishops, as a united whole, cared to relieve the sheep of this terrible danger to their souls. There are now only lay people to plead for this exorcism for it seems the only solution to our present state. But perhaps there is yet a way to practice Catholic Action, although it would need to be done with great care, one-on-one, and in very limited cases.

Hope for a slim Protestant minority?

Several readers have expressed the belief that a select minority of Protestants could be brought to the true faith if there was some way it could be explained to them in a way they could accept and understand. They have even observed that certain Protestant families seem to them to be more “Catholic” than some of the Traditionalists they know. One reader even pointed out that some of them probably are the products of fallen away Catholic families, which means they have still retained a modicum of Catholic sense. And it seems that in a way God has given us an open door to appeal to those who seem attracted to the faith, or at least are curious as to why we do not attend “church” or accept the “pope” in Rome. I say this because many of the things that were most strongly objected to in the past no longer exist, and this gives us an opportunity to explain why. But the daunting nature of this task is easily seen when the following is carefully considered.

Pope and hierarchy — This would be the most difficult obstacle to overcome. Any convert to Catholicism must first accept unequivocally, with firm, irrevocable assent the Scriptural primacy of the popes, the binding nature of nearly two centuries of their teachings until the death of Pope Pius XII and understand that those teachings fully bind us yet today. It should be demonstrated from papal teaching that nearly every evil we suffer from today was long ago condemned by the popes and had world leaders obeyed, we would not now be suffering from the evils that afflict the world today. It must be carefully explained that shortly before he died, Pope Pius XII entrusted the spread of the faith to the laity, who in the absence of the hierarchy were commanded to assume all their duties. Then VAS would be brought in and the false election explained, meaning that valid hierarchy no longer exist.

No extraordinary jurisdiction — This leads in directly to the mission Christ conferred only on the Apostles by valid ordination/consecration and the valid transference of jurisdiction in a continual unbroken line, until the coming of Antichrist. Christ confers jurisdiction only through validly consecrated bishops approved by the Pope who then “lend” (delegate) their jurisdiction to the priests.

The Latin Mass and Transubstantiation — As long as the Mass existed, Transubstantiation existed: Catholics received the true Body and Blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine. But the Prophet Daniel tells us the Continual Sacrifice will cease, and sacrifices among the Jews were not continual. The early Fathers of the Church, also the Doctors, authoritatively teach that this refers to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And it has ceased because there is no one able or worthy to offer it because valid consecration of the bread and wine requires that the one consecrating is validly ordained and possesses jurisdiction.

Sola Scriptura — Tradition, “…the word of God transmitted orally from Christ to the Apostles concerning faith and morals — not written but transmitted orally from Christ to the Apostles and from them to their successors down to us“— must be accepted as de fide. “The principal instruments by means of which divine tradition has been conserved are the professions of faith, the sacred liturgy, the writings of the Fathers, the practice of the Church, the acts of the martyrs, and archaeological monuments. Its organ is the living magisterium of the Church, (the Roman Pontiff and the bishops, united with and subordinate to him),” (Dictionary of Dogmatic Theology, Pietro Parente, Antonio Piolanti, Salvatore Garofolo, 1951).

The Sacraments — All the sacraments will exist eternally because they were instituted by Christ, but only marriage and Baptism are available to us today. Infant Baptism only must be insisted upon, unless new converts are adults not certainly baptized.

Honoring the Blessed Mother, the Angels and the Saints — This is part and parcel of Tradition and the teachings of the ordinary and extraordinary magisterium.

Justification, Purgatory, et al — Only the saints are certainly in Heaven. We cannot assume that anyone else is in Heaven or Hell.  Faith without works is dead. Without good works and sincere intent to obey the commandments and the teachings of the Church, we cannot be saved. We must diligently pray for the souls in Purgatory, as the correct version of Holy Scripture, the Douay-Rheims, states. Even the Jews prayed for their dead.

Home church — One article reports that, “As of 2023, an estimated 6–12 million Americans worship regularly in house churches — a number that has grown steadily since the early 2000s as believers seek the relational depth modeled in Acts 2:46, where the early church met “from house to house.” And the article also notes that home or house churches are especially appealing to younger people.

The numbers of this movement are important because it directly contradicts any notion that worshipping privately from home is eccentric or cultistic, and the movement is predicted to be growing by 8-10 percent annually. The establishment of house churches is a natural companion to homeschooling, and statistics show that 3,408,000 children were homeschooled in the U.S. in 2025. This provides a broad base to work from, and gives hope that in the midst of the false Christianity now prevailing, some sincere individuals might consider Catholicism. But a Catholic structure and supervision of these converts would need to be diligently attended to by the individuals instructing them.

Holy Office Instruction

The above is only a brief summary of what would need to be established in order to build a framework for conversion. We must remember that catechumens were often instructed for two years or even longer in the days of the early Church, and yet were considered to be baptized Catholics by desire if they died during that time period. Unlike those days, some of these Protestants today have already been validly baptized, but the instruction was lacking. Others would need conditional Baptism. But at least it would be a concerted effort to save their souls, an heroic act of charity. Below is a summary from an Instruction of the Holy Office regarding The Ecumenical Movement, how any contact with non-Catholics from a conversion standpoint must be conducted.

“All should be on guard lest, on the false pretext that more attention should be paid to the points on which we agree than to those on which we differ, a dangerous indifferentism be encouraged, especially among persons whose training in theology is not deep and whose practice of their faith is not very strong. For care must be taken lest in the so-called irenic spirit of today, though through comparative study and the vain desire for a progressively closer mutual approach among the various professions of faith, Catholic doctrine, either in its dogmas or in the truths which are connected with them, be so conformed or in a way adapted to the doctrines of dissident sects, that the purity of Catholic doctrine be impaired or its genuine and certain meaning be obscured…

Also, they must restrain the dangerous manner of speaking which generates false opinions and fallacious hopes incapable of realization, for example, to the effect that the teachings of the encyclicals of the Roman Pontiffs on the return of dissidents to the Church, on the constitution of the Church, on the mystical body of Christ, should not be given too much importance, seeing that they are not all matters of faith, or what is worse, that in matters of dogma even the Catholic Church has not yet attained the fullness of Christ, but can still be perfected from outside…The whole and entire Catholic doctrine is to be presented and explained. By no means is it permitted to pass over in silence or to veil in ambiguous terms the Catholic truth regarding the nature and way of justification, the constitution of the Church, the primacy of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, and the only true union by the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ” (Rome, Dec. 20, 1940, AAS 42-142).

And these are just the primary considerations. But before any Catholic engages in Catholic Action, let those who see an opportunity to assist Protestants interested in the faith first be firmly grounded in the interior life, as the popes have taught, and let their own house be in order. That is, let those who have families make certain that all their needs are first attended to, both spiritual and material, for as St. Augustine taught, charity begins at home. And as the Holy Office instruction reminds us, “Nothing more effectively paves the way for the erring to find the truth and to embrace the Church than the faith of Catholics when it is confirmed by the example of upright living.”

This topic needs much discussion and prayer before it can even be considered as something that could be put into actual practice. Please feel free to make any comments or suggestions.

Jesus teaches us how to preserve peace of heart

by T. Stanfill Benns | Jun 21, 2024 | Blog

+St. Aloysius Gonzaga, S.J.+

St. Aloysius statue on altar of Our Lady of Lourdes in the church of Saint Matthew in Stitar, Croatia on August 27, 2015

 

The Mystical Body of Christ in the End Times, Pt. 1

by T. Stanfill Benns | Dec 11, 2022 | Blog

ROME, ITALY – AUGUST 28, 2021: The detail of fresco of Holy Trinity in the church San Francesco Saverio by Sebastiano Conca (1680 – 1764).

+Third Sunday in Advent+

In the series on marriage, the fact was stressed that those who violate Canon Law and are married outside the Church are no longer members of the Mystical Body of Christ because they have become at least material heretics. This is true because one cannot belong to a Church which pretends to be Catholic but has no pope and cannot legitimately procure one. The definition of a schismatic fits Traditionalists to a “T.” A schismatic is defined by Rev. Ignatius Szal as: “…one who, having received baptism and still retaining the name of Christian nevertheless refuses obedience to the Supreme Pontiff,” (while yet recognizing him as the head of the Church) “or refuses to communicate with those members of the Church subject to him.” In the strict sense, Szal noted, the following elements also are essential for schism to exist:

“One must withdraw directly (expressly) or indirectly (by one’s actions) from obedience to the Roman Pontiff and separate oneself from ecclesiastical communion with the rest of the faithful; one’s withdrawal must be made with obstinacy and rebellion; in relation to those things by which the unity of the Church is constituted; yet despite this formal disobedience the schismatic must recognize the Roman Pontiff as the true pastor of the Church” (Communication of Catholics with non-Catholics, Catholic University of America Canon Law dissertation, 1948).

Traditionalists are individuals who are baptized and retain the name Catholic. They recognize the pope as the head of the Church and pay him lip service. They will not acknowledge that those who pray at home legitimately object to their position and they dismiss them as cranks. They deny the necessity of the papacy by recognizing men as bishops who are not even validly consecrated according to the laws and infallible teachings of the Church, which Traditionalists stubbornly and consistently refuse to acknowledge as binding. They have denied the necessity of the papacy for the Church’s existence, indirectly withdrawing themselves from such obedience by refusing to honor the Church’s teaching that doubts regarding the validity of the Sacraments require them to remove themselves from these bishops. More to the point, Canon Law actually requires that they denounce them.

Those now members of Traditionalist sects could study and arrive at certitude regarding their actual position and convert, but this doesn’t often happen. All of us at one time were material heretics if we ever attended the Novus Ordo or a Traditionalist chapel. And yet, thankfully, even though they must consider themselves as such, there has been no formal decision made in their case, giving time at least for repentance. As explained in the marriage blogs, there are ways to mitigate this censure and prepare ourselves for absolution as best we can, as detailed in Canon Law. It requires public penance and a three-year probationary period as a pray-at-home Catholic, but it is the best we can do to return to the Church without valid bishops or the pope to receive us. We must humble ourselves and rely entirely on God’s mercy. Without the hierarchy we are in much the same position as those who have no one to baptize them, or who are truly invincibly ignorant and love God according to their best lights, but remain in other non-Catholic sects. We must become members of Christ’s Mystical Body by desire, praying He always will count us as such if we obey His laws, the teachings of His Vicars, do penance for our sins and do our best to help others find Him.

That Catholics do not go to greater lengths to make certain they are at least members of this Body by desire can be attributed to the fact that they refuse to adopt the pray-at-home position and know so little about the beauty and the living reality of this Body, representing Christ’s continued existence and operation on this earth among men. Some of this material has been covered already in our site articles HERE and HERE. But more needs to be said about the living reality of this Body that binds Catholics to Christ and to one another. This is the union that will exist unto the consummation, for as Pope Pius XII infallibly defined in Mystici Corporis Christi: “If we would define and describe this true Church of Jesus Christ — which is the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church — we shall find nothing more noble, more sublime, or more divine than the expression ‘the Mystical Body of Christ’ — an expression which springs from and is, as it were, the fair flowering of the repeated teaching of the Sacred Scriptures and the Holy Fathers.” Christ and His Vicar are the invisible and visible heads of this Body, but when there is no visible Head, Christ alone rules His Church. Below we will read more about the workings of this wondrous Body from approved theologians.

The Theology of the Mystical Body by Emile Mersch S.J., 1951

“…Christ ‘s humanity was both an empirical thing and a mysterious reality… The Church will likewise be an empirical thing and a mysterious reality.

“First it will be an empirical, concrete, visible, tangible thing like all human realities that prolong themselves in some form of continuation, for it is a human institution, a human society. And it is a society quite visibly and tangibly. Its sociology and Canon Law can be written down, it has its clearly defined members and its definite seat. It is the Church of Rome as Jesus Christ was Jesus of Nazareth. As a society it is perfect in its kind with a firm and well-delineated structure as befits a thing that is the perpetuation of the God-man. Secondly the Church will be an invisible reality; a life of thought, love and grace that is infused into souls; a divinization and an adoptive sonship which in the unity of the only-begotten Incarnate Son is diffused throughout all mankind so deeply as to be inaccessible to natural consciousness; and which in the depths thus reached unifies mankind in itself and attaches it to God.

“The two aspects of the Church — the visible and the invisible — are often called the soul and the body of the Church. This manner of speaking may have disadvantages and they are brought out in our day, but it greatly facilitates certain explanations. Hence we may profitably devote some consideration to it. The body of the Church as we see at once is the external aspect — the empirical society which is the Church of Rome. The word body does not have here the precise sense it has in the term mystical body. FOR THE EXPRESSION ‘MYSTICAL BODY’ DESIGNATES THE MYSTERIOUS AND INTERIOR ELEMENT OF THE CHURCH. Even for those who identify the Church Militant with the Mystical Body, it does not designate the external aspect of body except so far as it is the outward manifestation of the interior soul which consists in such a mystery.

“The soul of the Church must clearly be the factor that makes this society a living Organism. It is the first general principle of a collective and unified life in all the members. This factor can be nothing else than the grace which causes all these members to be living members of Christ —the divinizing grace that is infused into all by one and the same Christ. Or else we may say that it is Christ, the Son of the Father regarded as the principle of life and the whole supernatural Organism. Because of this confusion, a certain universal principle and a genus of such as have grace as Saint Thomas says a universal principle for bestowing grace on human nature” (end of Mersch quotes). 

The Mystical Christ, (Rev. John C. Gruden, S.T.L., 1938)

“Bishop Myers clarifies this difference between the Church and moral bodies in the words: ‘What makes Christ’s Mystical Body so very different from any moral body of men is the character of the union existing between Christ and the members. It is not a mere external union; it is not a mere moral union, it is a union which, as realized in Christ’s Church, is at once external and moral, but also in that primarily internal and supernatural. It is the supernatural union of the sanctified soul with Christ and with all other sanctified souls in Christ. The term Mystical Body is used to convey the idea that the Church is not merely a social organization, but an organism, a communion, a body: the living spiritual or supernatural body of Christ.

“The term mystical or mystic calls attention to the fact that in mere natural or moral bodies the relationship between the members and their head and the relationship between the members one to another is moral only or juridical, whereas the relationship between Christ and the members of the Church, members of His body, is quasi-physical and organic. The bonds that unite Christians to Christ and to one another are organic, physical, sacramental, although supernatural and invisible. The Church is not only ‘a complicated but smoothly functioning administrative machine’ it is more than that; Christians and Christ form a body of a special kind, neither physical nor moral, which lives and grows by a vital force descending from the head, Jesus Christ, to the members. ‘Christ the head, in His members’ says Bishop Myers ‘constitute a unique entity which is designed by a unique name: the Mystical Body of Christ’” (p. 64-65).

“The following are the leading ideas necessary for a correct grasp of the relation which obtains between the Mystical Body of Christ and the communion of saints:

“A. The Mystical Body (p. 160-161)

1. The Mystical Body of Christ is the Church militant, the “Church” or “ecclesia” in the strict sense, a visible society, both human and divine, with a visible hierarchical organization established by Christ, and with a visible, juridical, or moral head, the pope, the vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter in the see of Rome.
2. Its invisible, principal, juridical and sole mystical head is Jesus Christ, the God-man, gloriously reigning in heaven. The Incarnate Word is also its exemplary cause, that is, the union of the visible with the invisible elements, of the natural with the supernatural, of the human and divine, in the supernatural organism of the Mystical Body is patterned after the model of the hypostatic union between the human and the divine nature in the person of the incarnate Word.
3. The formal internal cause, the Soul of this unique organism, is the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity who proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit dwells in this body as its informing principle consolidating all the members of the visible society into a unified organism, joining them by mystical, quasi-physical, or sacramental bonds to their mystical head, Jesus Christ.
4. The members of this body are all baptized earthly pilgrims (viatores) who have not separated themselves from it either by the loss of faith or excommunication.
5. The immediate end or purpose of the Mystical Body is to be the medium of salvation for men of all nations and of all times, to be the means whereby the merits of Christ’s redemption are applied to them, to be the sacrament or the mystery through which divine life is imparted to them that they may secure for themselves the life of glory in the world to come. The remote or final end is the same as that of all creation, that is, to manifest the glory of the only begotten Son who is the substantial image of the Father. Jesus Christ is glorified in his brothers, members of his Mystical Body, and God the Father is glorified “in his beloved Son.”

“B. The Communion of Saints

1. The communion of saints is an invisible society, a “Church” or “ecclesia” in the broad sense, a moral body.
2. Its invisible, moral, or juridical head is the glorified or exalted Christ.
3. The formal cause of the communion of saints is grace, the work of the Holy Spirit to whom sanctification of creatures is ascribed by appropriation. The Holy Spirit also personally dwells in individual souls belonging to the communion. He is present in the communion of saints as a spirit, but not as its soul, for he is not its informing principle. The Holy Spirit may, indeed, be spoken of as the soul of the communion of saints, if the term “soul” be used in the broad sense, as equivalent to “spirit.”
4. The members of this communion are the saints in heaven (saints in the strict sense, comprehensores), and the souls in purgatory, in other words, the Church triumphant and the Church suffering. Members of this communion are also the saints in the broad sense, that is, all the faithful, even though they be sinners who actually belong to the Church militant. There are, however, others who are outside the pale of the Catholic Church, who have not been baptized or who, even though baptized, profess a false religion through invincible ignorance. Pagans and Protestants may belong to this class. They, too, may be in the state of sanctifying grace, hence there seems to be no reason for excluding them from the “communion of saints.”
5. The object of the “communion of saints,” its proximate purpose, is not to be the medium of salvation, but rather a means of participation by all the members in the spiritual treasures held in common. This participation imports the distribution, interchange, and application of the spiritual gifts, graces, and fruits of meritorious works to all the members in need of the same. The remote or final end is the praise and glory of the Father through the Son.
6. At the end of time the Mystical Body will have achieved its fullest development, it will have attained “to the full measure of the stature of Christ,” and in the glory of heaven the pleroma of Christ will be fully realized. Then the Mystical Body of Christ, the kingdom of God upon earth, the Church militant, will be transformed into the kingdom of God in heaven, or the Church triumphant, namely, that communion of saints in which not only the souls of men, but their bodies also, will, “through Christ our Lord,” share in the glory of the Triune God (Eph. 4:13).

“The Church is a living organism, a body; the mystic body of Christ; hence, if the analogy of the human body as applied to the Church is to be regarded as more than a mere figure of speech, the Church must be informed by an animating principle, a soul. Besides the many or multiple external visible elements, clergy and laity, hierarchical structure, sacraments, sacramentals, etc., the Church must possess an inner element which, intimately united to the visible elements, must be the formal cause of the unity and identity of the organism, formal cause, too, of its own peculiar life which is supernatural and divine. In the Church must dwell a spirit which is not only “spirit” but “soul” in its restricted meaning, which, intimately or quasi-substantially, united with the visible and invisible elements of the Church, “elevates” them to a higher level of being and makes of them the Church; a spirit which through intimate union with the visible and invisible elements be- comes the formal cause of the union between the head and the members and ultimately the source of the manifold life and activity of the “organs,” as well as of the ordinary “members” of Christ’s Mystical Body.

“The theory of two Churches, however, is not exclusively Protestant. Svetlov, a modern Russian “orthodox” theologian, defends it. From the comparison of the Church with the human body he concludes that the invisible Church can exist independently of the visible Church. The human soul, he argues, can live without the body and independently of it. Similarly the soul of the Church, that is, the invisible Church, can exist independently of the body or the visible Church. Here we have an instance of the wrong use of the analogy of the human body. Analogies have their value, but they also have their danger. The value of analogies is that they clarify concepts; their danger is that they may be pushed too far. The Church may not be compared to the human soul existing independently after its separation from the body, but rather to the living human body informed and vivified by the soul.

“The true picture of the Church presented in Sacred Scripture and tradition is that of a unique visible organism, with a human and a divine side, visible and invisible aspect, comprising natural and supernatural elements. The invisible elements which, figuratively speaking, we call the soul of the Church, form together with the visible elements, its body, one undivided and indivisible whole, informed and vivified by the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit.This living visible organism, of which the Holy Spirit is the soul in the real but mystical sense, is the Mystical Body of Christ, or the mystical Christ (p. 167).

“Henry Cardinal Manning…writes: ‘The Church is a mystical person, and all its endowments are derived from the Divine Person of its head, and the Divine Person who is its Life. As in the Incarnation there is a communication of the divine perfections to the humanity, so in the Church the perfections of the Holy Spirit become the endowments of the body. It is imperishable, because he is God; indivisibly one, because he is numerically one; holy, because he is the foundation of holiness; infallible both in believing and in teaching, because his illumination and his voice are immutable, and therefore, being not an individual depending upon the fidelity of the human will, but a body depending only on the divine will, it is not on trial or probation but is itself the instrument of probation to mankind. It cannot be affected by the frailty or sins of the human will, any more than the brightness of the firmament by the dimness or the loss of human sight. It can no more be tainted by human sin than the holy sacraments, which are always immutably pure and divine, though all who come to them be impure and faithless. What the Church was in the beginning it is now, and ever shall be in all plenitude of its divine endowments, because the union between the body and the Spirit is indissoluble, and all the operations of the Spirit in the body are perpetual and absolute.’

“This function of the Holy Spirit in the Mystical Body of Christ, a function so important and so vital, should not be overlooked in any adequate definition of the Church. We suggest as the briefest definition: “The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ animated by the Holy Spirit,” or “The Church is a living, supernatural organism whose Mystical head is Christ, gloriously reigning in heaven (the exalted Christ) and whose soul is the Holy Spirit.” (End of Gruden quotes)

And this from Mystici Corporis: “To this Spirit of Christ, also, as to an invisible principle is to be ascribed the fact that all the parts of the Body are joined one with the other and with their exalted Head; for He is entire in the Head, entire in the Body, and entire in each of the members. To the members He is present and assists them in proportion to their various duties and offices, and the greater or less degree of spiritual health which they enjoy. It is He who, through His heavenly grace, is the principle of every supernatural act in all parts of the Body. It is He who, while He is personally present and divinely active in all the members, nevertheless in the inferior members acts also through the ministry of the higher members. Finally, while by His grace He provides for the continual growth of the Church, He yet refuses to dwell through sanctifying grace in those members that are wholly severed from the Body. This presence and activity of the Spirit of Jesus Christ is tersely and vigorously described by Our predecessor of immortal memory Leo XIII in his Encyclical Letter Divinum Illud in these words: ‘Let it suffice to say that, as Christ is the Head of the Church, so is the Holy Spirit her soul.’“

If we are making amends and doing penance as Canon Law prescribes — praying and studying our faith to be forgiven for the sins of schism and material heresy — we can hope to qualify as those not wholly severed from the Body. We can yet be counted as members of Christ’s Body and the continuation of His Church on earth. In the next part of this study, the intended continuation of Christ’s Mystical Body will be explained and readers will see that what has happened to the Church in these times, the loss of the papacy, Mass and Sacraments, will actually assist the faithful in seamlessly transitioning to the New Jerusalem in Heaven.