Two years ago this morning the one and only living Vicar of Christ on Earth (whether he liked it or not) died of renal failure. Isn’t it interesting that Antipope Bergoglio mashed the throttle – attempting to suppress the Mass in the Venerable and August Rite of Gregory the Great, the attempt at Sodo-blessings – once the Pope was dead. It’s almost like the Pope was a RESTRAINER. You know, like the RESTRAINER in 2 Thessalonians 2. Hmmmmmmm…. 🤔

Here’s a picture of the absolutely Luciferian treatment of Pope Benedict’s corpse, being loaded into the back of a beat-up grey cargo van. But the thing that really jumped out at me about this picture when I saw it this morning was THE DOME. My lands. I’ve seen pictures of the dome of St. Peter’s taken within the past week, and folks, it’s black. The fact that the dome is oxidizing is not in and of itself any kind of miracle, BUT the fact that it turned black so rapidly after Pope Benedict died. It … gives one pause:

And now from Dr. Mazza, apropos of yesterday’s fifth anniversary of Antipope Bergoglio beating that Chinese lady in St. Peter’s Square.

Dr. Mazza:

And as for Bergoglio beating the Chinese lady, when you watch the longer version of the video it becomes clear he stopped shaking hands to deliberately avoid HER. I say because she was Chinese and he was afraid to get Covid (running rampant in China exactly 4 years ago).

August 8, 2019 La Stampa interview: “What do you fear most for our planet?” Bergoglio: “The disappearance of biodiversity. New lethal diseases. A drift and devestation of nature that can lead to the death of humanity.”

Yup. Antipope Bergoglio was almost certainly informed and enjoined as an integral cooperator in the CoronaScam by his WEF NWO Freemasonic Luciferian buddies.

Introit

Wisdom 18:14 – 15.

When a profound stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, Your all-powerful Word, O Lord, bounded from heaven’s royal throne.

Ps 92:1

The Lord is King, in splendor robed; robed is the Lord and girt about with strength.

V. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.

R. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

When a profound stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, Your all-powerful Word, O Lord, bounded from heaven’s royal throne.

Nativity (detail), Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, ARSH 1305.

Dear Ann,

A blessed and merry Christmas to you.

Thank you for your blog posts and videos, many of which I have found very helpful in understanding the current insanity in the Church and the world. I am particularly thankful for your recent posts on clerical celibacy and continence.

In the novus ordo Church, even before Antipope Frankenstein the Merciful, there is a common notion that allowing a priest to be laicized, so he can marry a woman, is a merciful concession to human weakness.

BULL-S***.

I am a priest, I am normal, and I am strongly attracted to women. I can understand the idea that allowing a priest to continue in his ministry after he has fallen into sexual sin (and therefore also sacrilege) with a woman and repented is a merciful concession to human weakness. By the grace of God I have never fallen into such sin as a priest, but I can easily understand how it’s possible.

Laicization and marriage is completely different. Repentance, and therefore true mercy, which requires repentance to be effective, is totally absent. In its place is substituted the cleaning up of a canonically irregular situation. A priest violates his grave obligation of continence by getting it on with a woman, and possibly also violates his obligation of celibacy by invalidly attempting civil marriage with her; and the response of the ecclesiastical authorities is to dispense him from his obligations and allow him to marry her validly in the Church.

Um, no. That doesn’t help. It actually hurts. A lot.

Although it may mean his future copulation with his wife isn’t mortally sinful, it does nothing to purge him of the guilt of his previous mortal sins of fornication, sacrilege, and abandoning his priestly ministry. On the contrary, by receiving a nice signed and sealed rescript from Rome, he is encouraged to believe that he has done the right thing, and is now “right with the Church.”

Of course that’s not true. As alter Christus, he was espoused to the Bride of Christ, and has now abandoned Her for some trull that he found more to his liking. His repentance now will almost require a miracle. He will very probably burn in Hell for all eternity, with the blessing of his bishop and the Pope. And how they will avoid burning in Hell for helping him get there, I don’t know.

My moral theology professor in seminary, Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., told us that “A priest who leaves for a woman is the scum of the earth.” I see more and more how right he was. Such priests–and they are many–simply declare that they love copulation more than they love God and His Mother. God have mercy on them.

I wish I could draw some pithy conclusion from this, but I can’t, so I’m going to have a beer, read some P.G. Wodehouse, and go to bed. May God bless you and your work. And may He have mercy on His poor Church.

Signed,

Father

Warmest wishes to one and all for the happiest and holiest of Christmases. As Tiny Tim said so earnestly, God bless us, everyone.

If you don’t know the three verses to Adeste Fideles in Latin and deep comprehension in English, I seriously recommend learning. Nothing brings Alpha Bravo to misty eyes in church quite like verse three (Ergo qui natus). If there is a tenor or soprano singing above the faithful… I’m toast. 😭😭😭

May the Infant Jesus and the Holy Family bless and keep you all.

Adeste fideles læti triumphantes,
Venite, venite in Bethlehem.
Natum videte
Regem angelorum:
Venite adoremus (3×)
Dominum.

O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!
O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem;
Come and behold Him
Born the King of Angels:
O come, let us adore Him, (3×)
Christ the Lord.

—-

Cantet nunc io, chorus angelorum;
Cantet nunc aula cælestium,
Gloria, gloria in excelsis Deo,
Venite adoremus (3×)
Dominum.

Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation,
Sing, all ye citizens of Heaven above!
Glory to God, glory in the highest:
O come, let us adore Him, (3×)
Christ the Lord.

———

Ergo qui natus die hodierna.
Jesu, tibi sit gloria,
Patris æterni Verbum caro factus.
Venite adoremus (3×)
Dominum.

Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, born this happy morning;
Jesus, to Thee be glory given!
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing!
O come, let us adore Him, (3×)
Christ the Lord.

Thanks for the patience with all of the reposts this week. Unpacking takes ten times longer than packing, and doing it in the run-up to Christmas is… logistically challenging. It’s Christmas Eve, and that means the traditional viewing of “Scrooge” from ARSH 1951. With the recent push for so-called “Noahide Laws” which would categorize significant portions of the Bible and the Holy Mass and any proselytizing of Jews as “antisemitic hate speech”, this piece hits even harder this year. Let us pray with Holy Mother Church:

“…for the faithless Jews: that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord.

Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.“

I have written on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” before, but it has been several years, and I think a recapitulation is in order given current events.

The ARSH 1951 film “Scrooge” starring Alastair Sim is the definitive film version of “A Christmas Carol”.  It is traditional viewing for me on Christmas Eve night, and has been since childhood.  For those of you with any ties to the Kansas City area, the old independent Channel 41 would show “Scrooge” at 10:00pm on Christmas Eve annually, followed by either Luciano Pavarotti’s ARSH 1978 Christmas concert, or (sigh) the non-Christian Mormon choir singing Christmas Carols.

But “A Christmas Carol” took on a whole new life and depth of meaning for me when, after my in-depth study of Diabolical Narcissism several years ago, I realized that the reason why “A Christmas Carol” is such a compelling story, is because it depicts an all-out miracle.  The “transformation” of Ebeneezer Scrooge is nothing less than the supernatural healing of a full-blown Diabolical Narcissist psychopath.

The pre-conversion Scrooge character is a classic DN.  He is a cerebral narcissist – highly successful in his profession, a miser, caring for nothing but “his work” – which just happens to be usury (Usury? In London? Nooo….), sitting alone in his room every night, lovelessly single, devoid of human empathy, haughty, critical and disdainful of everyone and everything, looking down on and actively resentful of normal, loving people – embodied by his clark, whom he psychologically abuses, Bob Cratchit, and his family.

Love, joy, gratitude and generosity disgust and enrage Scrooge. He hates occasions of happiness, and actively seeks to disrupt and destroy them, especially holidays.  The people around him walk on eggshells to his face – but either pity or dislike him behind his back.  In the “Ghost of Christmas Future” act, Scrooge is genuinely surprised to discover that almost everyone is glad that he is dead – the exception being Bob Cratchit himself, the most direct recipient of Scrooge’s abuse.  Bob Cratchit is thus a metaphor for Christ.

Not only does “A Christmas Carol” firmly establish in its opening act the total lovelessness of Scrooge, the total self-purgation of all charity from his soul, but it even shows HOW IT HAPPENED, and the exact moment when Scrooge made the conscious choice to expel all love from his soul and to never love again.

That moment happens when young Scrooge’s beloved sister, Fan, dies in childbirth.  Ebeneezer Scrooge’s mother, it is revealed, also died in childbirth, and Scrooge’s father blamed him for her death, and “never forgave him”, abusing him, and them sending him away.  As is so common, Scrooge, already wounded, repeated the very error of his father and blamed Fan’s newborn infant son for her death.  Even worse, Scrooge, whether implicitly or explicitly, also declared war on God – Love Himself – by rejecting love and consciously emptying himself of it.  The very moment of this decision is shown at the 32:54 timestamp.

Immediately, Scrooge descends into psychopathic usury, and, as we have discussed, even descends into that horrific sexual perversion – ASEXUALITY, by dumping his fiancée and living a life of LOVELESS, MISERABLE, ELITIST SOLITUDE.  Even his only “friend”, Jacob Marley, he held in indifference and even contempt.

The other point here which is TOTALLY lost on the modern world is the fact that EBENEEZER is quite possibly the most HEBREW name ever, and that EVERYONE understood when Dickens wrote the book that Scrooge was one of the many JEWISH USURERS in London.  So, this story isn’t merely about the healing of the heart of a miserable old narcissist, A Christmas Carol is the story of the miraculous conversion to Christianity of a JEW.

The story closes with the words, “And it was always said that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

That, friends, means that Ebeneezer Scrooge, an ethnic Jew and atheist (as almost all ethnic Jews today are), received baptism and became a believing Christian.  It is left to the reader to understand that the Cratchit Family were his “sponsors” in this.  It is also obliquely implied at the beginning of the story that Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, married a Christian girl – “it was the making of me”, and thus invites Scrooge to their home for Christmas dinner.

So, if you can spare the time this year, do sit down and watch this, and see if the “Christmas morning” scene wherein Scrooge is miraculously healed of his Diabolical Narcissism, and radiates genuine love and joy, doesn’t pack a bit more of a punch.  Because for a Diabolical Narcissist psychopath to be thus healed is a greater miracle than levitation, bilocation, or most any other physical miracle.

A Merry Christmas to one and all!  God bless you, everyone!

This day you shall know that the Lord will come, and save us: and in the morning you shall see His glory.

(Given the filth we find ourselves involuntarily immersed in as the Bergoglian Antipapacy descends into a full, open manifestation of its true satanic nature, I think this piece is particularly apropos for this Advent and Christmas. I think it might help folks be able to process how Infinite, Perfect Love, Goodness, Truth and Beauty can come down on the Altar at every Mass, and stay reposed in all the tabernacles of the world despite everything.

Please accept my deepest, warmest wishes for a happy and holy ARSH 2024 Advent and Christmastide to one and all, and my undying gratitude to all of my benefactors and supporters. Let me leave you in real time, December 23, ARSH 2024, with what is coming two short days from today. HANG IN THERE!)

“This day you will know that The Lord will come, and save us: and in the morning you shall see His glory.  Alleluia, Alleluia. Tomorrow shall the iniquity of the earth shall be abolished: and the Savior of the world shall reign over us. Alleluia.”)

In my video in which I burned the Koran, I bookmarked the various pages with strips of raw bacon. Why did I do this? Is it because I actually believed that I was thumbing my nose at a non-existent pagan moon deity? Nope. People, there is NO SUCH THING AS “ALLAH”, so therefore what sense would it make for me to “offend” or “bait” a non-existent entity?

And a book is just a book. The paper is made out of tree cellulose and the ink is made out of petroleum and probably some sort of soy derivative. The bacon itself was composed of muscle tissue, fat tissue and connective tissue. The components of these tissues are water, protein, fatty acids and collagen. Break it down further and we’re talking carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in various configurations. Touching a piece of bacon, or any piece of pork or pigskin to a book does not result in anything except making a bit of a greasy mess of the book. No pagan moon deity is roused from slumber and filled with murderous wrath. Do you know why? Because THERE IS NO PAGAN MOON DEITY.

So why did I bookmark my koran with bacon? Because it was WITTY. Because it pointed up the absurdity of the West’s groveling before musloid superstitions – specifically the U.S. Military’s rules and protocol for handling korans, namely handling with the right hand only, and preferably with the hand or hands gloved.

Yeah, because the people who actually use toilet paper and DON’T wipe their butts with their bare left hands are the ones with the “dirty hands”. You betcha, General Petraeus.

Question: Why don’t we issue the gloves that our military are supposed to wear when handling korans to the musloids themselves, and then the musloids can use the gloves to wipe their butts, and then won’t have to go through life with feces-encrusted metacarpi? Is it just me, or does that not make a LOT more sense? I was going to crack wise at this point about “exiting the Stone Age”, but you know, I don’t think Stone Age peoples wiped their bottoms with their bare hands. I think they used vegetation.

This is also why I don’t go for any of the “shoot the musloids with pork bullets” stuff. Whether or not a bullet was coated in pork blood or grease has nothing to do with anything, and I really don’t think that it is healthy or constructive for Christendom to stoop to the level of musloid superstitious stupidity by giving any credence to these ridiculous myths.

Pork grease doesn’t condemn people to hell. “allah” doesn’t condemn people to hell. There is no “allah”. People, at the end of the day, send themselves to hell through their rejection of Jesus Christ manifested in their deeds and choices in this life. Yes, Christ is the Judge of all man and their deeds, but His Mercy is also infinite and available to all men. Men go to hell because they reject Christ and His Infinite Mercy. Whether or not a person was in physical contact with pork or a pork byproduct at the moment of death is utterly meaningless.

I run into this kind of foolishness amongst Christians fairly regularly (insomuch as some of these sects, which, let’s face it, are so utterly far afield that they can’t really be considered Christian in any honest sense, even though Our Lord’s name and a cross may be displayed prominently on the neon sign out front). I had a client tell me once that anyone who is cremated goes to hell because there has to be a body to be resurrected at the Final Judgment. If there is no body to resurrect, the person is disqualified from Christ’s Mercy and isn’t “saved”. Period. No matter what.

Riiiiiiiiight. Because GOD ALMIGHTY is completely hamstrung by the physical laws of the universe. He has no power over matter or energy. He knits every person together in their mother’s womb, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, but He can’t put a person back together. Riiiiight. And so, for example, all of the people who were killed in the jets that hit the World Trade Center and were incinerated just go straight to hell no matter what, according to these geniuses. Because the same Jesus that they claim to love and know so well would do that. Nah, it doesn’t matter what anyone did, believed or professed in life. Nah. If you’re on a plane that gets flown into a skyscraper you’re hellbound and down because your body was involuntarily cremated. And that goes for all of the soldiers and pilots who have been killed in war and had their bodies burned to ash. Sorry, boys! Infinite love and power only goes so far!

Here is a little rule of thumb I use to help me think through such questions: GOD IS SMART, SO DON’T EVER TREAT HIM LIKE HE IS STUPID.

ONLY PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT THEY ARE SMARTER THAN GOD HATE HIM (or, for that matter, love Him like He is a golden retriever) FOR BEING “STUPID”.

Do you see how this ties back to the musloid pork superstitions? Islam is intrinsically stupid because its founders and especially its followers were and are stupid, and so it is not surprising that the musloid fake deity, “allah”, is also stupid. This also goes for the Mormon cult and the Scientology racket.  Same dynamic.

The musloids’ argument is that if a soldier fighting in jihad for “allah” should be shot with a pork-laced bullet, he goes to hell – even though he had no control whatsoever over the pork bullet or his death. Because the allegedly all-powerful “allah” is powerless against the crazy magic voodoo ju-ju of . . . pork products. See how that works? It’s called stupid. Slackjawed, mouthbreathing stupid.

And now a name and event that every single person should know: Thomas Vander Woude. On September 8, ARSH 2008 Thomas Vander Woude, aged 66, was working in his back yard with his seventh and youngest child, Joseph. “Josie” was 20 years old at the time, and did everything with his Dad. Josie was born with Down Syndrome. After finishing up cleaning the family’s swimming pool, Josie walked through the back yard toward his Dad who was also doing yard work. When Josie stepped on the 2X2 foot cover of their septic tank, the cover collapsed and Josie fell into the nearly-full, eight-foot deep tank. Thomas saw this and immediately ran over to the tank. He tried to pull the panicked Josie out, but couldn’t. Thomas Vander Woude then slipped himself into the septic tank to help his son. A workman who was at their house at the time saw what happened and told Mrs. Vander Woude who called 911 immediately. Both the workman and Mrs. Vander Woude then ran outside to help. Thomas was in the tank, treading the sewage, trying to lift Josie up so that the workman and his wife could get a grasp on him and lift him out. It wasn’t working.

Thomas Vander Woude then made the decision to take his last breath on this earth, dove under the surface of the sewage and pinned himself under his son so that Josie’s head was above the surface and he could breathe until the rescue crews arrived. Thomas Vander Woude drowned, without struggling, in human sewage saving the life of his developmentally disabled son. His last moments were in the total blackness of the bottom of a septic tank, with a combination of urine, feces and wastewater rushing into his mouth, down his windpipe and into his lungs. I am hard-pressed to imagine a more physically filthy demise. Or a more terribly beautiful one. The tears that are welling up in your eyes right about now are the proof of that.

So, what do you think? Was Thomas Vander Woude’s death “ritually clean”? How do you think a musloid imam would address this situation if put before him hypothetically? Do you think that “allah” would allow a man into “paradise” who drowned in human sewage saving a son that islam considers to be non-human and would have been murdered at birth? But then, there is no “allah”, only a sick, twisted political cult comprised of sick, twisted, perverted men.

Christ, on the other hand, is Real. Not only is He real, but He was there, in the septic tank with Thomas Vander Woude. Christ knows all about diving into tanks of shit, because that is exactly what He did for us. He was literally born in shit, in a cave that acted as a shelter for livestock. The floors were covered in shit, as were the walls. Don’t think that wasn’t symbolic and carefully planned by Him. You don’t think He could have worked it out so that there was one room left at the inn? Sure He could have – but He specifically chose the shit. He chose the shit because humanity fell into the septic tank, and we are all, every single one of us, drowning in our own shit. We just call it “sin”. We ourselves are not shit – shit is merely the byproduct of our sins, which we freely choose, but it isn’t what we are and it certainly isn’t how we were made, nor what we are intended to be.

The funny thing is, most of us don’t feel Jesus underneath us, holding us up. It just feels like we are standing on a solid base. You know why? Because like Thomas Vander Woude, Our Blessed Lord isn’t struggling. He isn’t squirming or flailing as He sucks our shit into his lungs. He’s just down there, supporting us, holding us up, drowning in our shit, with more solidity than the foundations of the earth, so that we can have life and have a chance to be saved. I reckon the challenge in day-to-day life is to never delude one’s self into thinking that we are standing on the bottom of the tank and holding ourselves up. We aren’t. That’s Our Blessed Lord down there, whether or not we perceive it, or even believe it.

Remember this the next time you hear some musloid waxing philosophical on ritually clean death and admission criteria to “allah’s paradise”. And don’t belittle Christ, His Incarnation and His Sacrifice by encouraging such stupidity of thought. The fates of men’s souls aren’t trivia, and it sure as heck isn’t a game of tag played with pork products. Shooting someone with a pork-coated bullet doesn’t make you the judge of mankind, determining who goes to hell and who doesn’t. That task belongs to Christ and Christ alone, since it is Christ and Christ alone who has willingly drowned in the shit of every human being. And for that we should feel nothing but gratitude, and we should manifest that gratitude every day of our life.

—————————————–

**The word “shit” is used very intentionally and without apology in order to convey the brutal reality and enormousness of the Incarnation and Passion. People used to understand this – before Superfun Rockband church, and, let’s just say it, the Novus Ordo, turned Christianity into an effeminate, intellectually insipid pablum of narcissistic self-absorption, materialism, sentimentality and mind-numbingly bad “entertainment”.

Thomas and Josie Vander Woude.

(Last night was the longest night of the year, peak darkness, and a long-time reader was reminded of this post from a while back, which I happily reprint. –AB ’24)

I’ve been watching the images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, and when I wrote the piece on the catastrophic rise in newborn deaths presented by Dr. John Campbell the other day, and how men like Campbell, and really anyone outside of the One True Faith and the One True Church risk slipping into the false belief that evil – the darkness of the abyss – is all that there is, something occurred to me.

In looking at deep field images from both the Hubble telescope, and now the considerably more-powerful James Webb Space Telescope (I will always spell the name ‘James Webb’ out, because Webb was rightly and justly insistent upon purging “homosexuals and sex perverts” from the Federal Government as security risks, and thus there is a drive to re-name the telescope, which we should all fight by ALWAYS spelling out the name JAMES WEBB), and it seems to me that the entire sky – which is referred to as “the firmament” in scripture – is SOLID LIGHT.

As our ability to see deeper and deeper into the universe increases at an astounding rate, it is now estimated that there are 2 TRILLION galaxies in “the observable universe” – and as I just mentioned, the definition of “observable” is expanding literally daily. To put that in perspective, there are “only” 100 to 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

When we look at these Deep Field images, in which a telescope is pointed at a MINISCULE patch of sky – smaller than a patch of sky that would be covered if you took a single grain of sand and held it up at arms length against the sky – and just open the shutter and let the exposure cook for a few hours (12.5 hours on the latest James Webb Deep Field) or days (22 days for the most famous Hubble Deep Field), what we see is that there are SO MANY GALAXIES, that the sky is essentially a solid three-dimensional tapestry of light – albeit dim, but the whole universe in every direction is a solid mosaic of galaxies, some nearer, some farther.

If I were in charge, I would point the James Webb Space Telescope at a random patch of “the abyss”, open the shutter, and let the exposure cook for… a YEAR. And you know what I suspect we would see? SOLID. LIGHT. I strongly suspect that the “blackness” of the “abyss” of space would be completely eliminated by the light of the galaxies. I think the “blackness” of the “abyss” of space is really just a misunderstanding on our part as human beings – but a misunderstanding that is actually referenced multiple times in scripture:

Psalm 138: 11-12
And I said: Perhaps darkness shall cover me: and night shall be my light in my pleasures.
Et dixi :
Forsitan tenebrae conculcabunt me; et nox illuminatio mea in deliciis meis.
But darkness shall not be dark to thee, and night shall be light as day: the darkness thereof, and the light thereof are alike to thee.
Quia tenebrae non obscurabuntur a te, et nox sicut dies illuminabitur; sicut tenebrae ejus, ita et lumen ejus.

Psalm 18: 2-7
The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands.
Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei, et opera manuum ejus annuntiat firmamentum.
Day to day uttereth speech, and night to night sheweth knowledge.
Dies diei eructat verbum, et nox nocti indicat scientiam.
There are no speeches nor languages, where their voices are not heard.
Non sunt loquelae, neque sermones, quorum non audiantur voces eorum.
Their sound hath gone forth into all the earth: and their words unto the ends of the world.
In omnem terram exivit sonus eorum, et in fines orbis terrae verba eorum.
He hath set his tabernacle in the sun: and he, as a bridegroom coming out of his bride chamber, Hath rejoiced as a giant to run the way:
In sole posuit tabernaculum suum; et ipse tamquam sponsus procedens de thalamo suo. Exsultavit ut gigas ad currendam viam;
His going out is from the end of heaven, And his circuit even to the end thereof: and there is no one that can hide himself from his heat.
a summo caelo egressio ejus. Et occursus ejus usque ad summum ejus; nec est qui se abscondat a calore ejus.

And, of course, the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, proclaimed at the end of almost every Mass in the Traditional Rite:

John 1: 5
And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend It.
Et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.

I believe that we are, right now, the first people to be able to make this connection to the notion that the Night Sky is an allegory of God Himself TO THIS EXTENT, especially the words “and the darkness did not comprehend it.” The light in the sky is there, always and everywhere, the entire firmament is a solid, saturated field of galactic light ALWAYS shining upon the earth, but we can’t see it unless we look. HARD. It is OUR OWN HUMAN LIMITATION that keeps us from seeing the objective reality of what literally surrounds us – unceasing, omnipresent light from every direction.

This is a near-perfect allegory of our perception of God.

Even the mechanical means of seeing into the depths of the physical universe are allegorical. A telescope must be still, and simply open its shutter in silence and let the light enter and accumulate on the exposure plate. The longer the exposure, the more light hits the exposure plate, is collected, and seen. How is this not an allegory of PRAYER?

I’m cheerfully pessimistic, if I may be permitted the phrase, that we are in a run-up to what I refer to as “The Big Show.” There is an Antipope in the Vatican, who gives every indication of being THE False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist. Nearly half of the human population has been injected with a poison sterilant. Demoniacs are demanding that parents physically mutilate their children in service to sodomites. We are probably months away from a literal, physical “Mark of the Beast”, and nuclear war would be received as almost a merciful relief to many people.

It thus seems to me that technologies like the James Webb Space Telescope are a wonderfully merciful part of the Divine Providence meant to BOLSTER OUR FLAGGING FAITH so that as we ride this bull, we can look up at the night sky, into what our eyes and brains can only process as “the abyss” and instead say and truly mean, “The Heavens declare the glory of God. The Light SHINES EVERYWHERE AND ALWAYS in the darkness, and the darkness does not, and will never encompass or extinguish Him.”

As always, I hope this helps.

Today is the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle! This is the last Feast before Christmas.

John 20: 19-31

At that time, when it was late that same day, the first of the week, and the doors were shut, where the disciples were gathered together for fear of the Jews, Jesus came, and stood in the midst and said to them: Peace be to you. And when He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. The disciples therefore were glad, when they saw the Lord. He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you. When He had said this, He breathed on them, and He said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained. Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, who is called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him: We have seen the Lord. But he said to them: Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe. And after eight days, again His disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said: Peace be to you. Then He saith to Thomas: Put in thy finger hither, and see My hands, and bring hither thy hand, and put into My side; and be not faithless, but believing. Thomas answered and said to Him: my Lord and my God. Jesus saith to him: Because thou hast seen Me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed. Many other signs also did Jesus in the sight of His disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, you may have life in His Name.

Here’s an amazing tidbit from Fr. Z. In the original Greek, the word for “hand” actually sometimes refers to the hand plus the wrist plus the lower forearm. In Ancient Greek, when you are speaking of just the hand proper, additional words can be added to make that precision. Given this, the reality of what exactly happened to St. Thomas might be far, far more intense that what we imagine.

Our Lord has breathed upon the other ten Apostles, minus the absent Thomas, thus imparting the Holy Ghost upon them, and giving them all the power of binding and loosing, thus instituting the Sacrament of Confession.

Then, Our Lord appears to them again on the eighth day, and Thomas arrives, and puts his fingers into the finger-sized nail holes in Our Lord’s hands. Then he puts what the Greek indicates is his entire hand, wrist and lower forearm all the way into the lance wound made by Longinus in Our Lord’s thoracic cavity, at Our Lord’s command.

It is conceivably possible that Our Lord breathed the Holy Ghost upon Thomas WHILE THOMAS WAS HOLDING OUR LORD’S LUNG IN HIS HAND, and that Thomas literally touched Our Lord’s BEATING SACRED HEART, and PALPATED THE STAB WOUND in Our Lord’s Sacred Heart.

Now, consider being Thomas and doing this, but also consider being one of the other Apostles standing there watching this happen, watching Thomas stick his hand and forearm into Our Lord’s side.

And if you’re thinking to yourself, “That isn’t possible…”, well, neither is walking through walls. The resurrected body of Our Lord is in an entirely different category. It isn’t held to the laws of the physical universe that bind us as we await our resurrection that He purchased for us.

People wonder why and how the Apostles were able to do what they did, and all but John were killed for the faith, and John was miraculously prevented from being killed, despite multiple efforts. Well, I reckon if we saw one of our friends stick his hand into Our Lord’s thoracic cavity up to the forearm, hold His breathing lung, and touch His Sacred Heart, we might be… confirmed and quickened, to put it mildly.

Click over and read Fr. Z’s full piece.

So, Happy Feast of St. Thomas! I hope you never think of it quite the same way again.

St. Thomas, pray for us.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us, on the Petrine See, unnecessarily vacant these 721 days and counting, and on Your One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.

(It’s that time again. It’s hard to pass up this opportunity every year to demonstrate how important translation accuracy is, especially in the domain of the One True Faith, and recapitulate Linus’ subtle instruction on moral fortitude. On a personal note, the final 10% of the move is happening now, and man, that last 10% is the toughest. There’s always one more drawer, one more cabinet, it seems. But I’m almost done. And yes, I’ve got screaming-fast internet at the new place, so Podcasting will resume after Christmas. I can’t wait! –Alpha Bravo ’24)

That really is a sweet little clip. The child who voiced Linus had such a quintessentially warm American accent, even down to the little lisp. Magic in a bottle – from the voices to the soundtrack. It was made in ARSH 1965 and stands as a marker of the end of the Christian American culture, only recognized now in retrospect.

Here’s a super-cool observation on this clip that you might not have noticed before.  Note that when Linus gets to the words of the Angels to the Shepherds, “Fear not…”, he drops his security blanket, the motif for his (and our) fears and insecurities, and leaves it on the ground for the duration of his proclamation of The Word of God. Cool, huh?

But, a nit to pick, and a great lesson for all in how important an accurate translation of the Bible is. Most Bibles today read Luke 2:14 as:

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

The last clause is mangled, as anyone who knows the Gloria in Latin (as one should, because it is said at a plurality of Masses throughout the year) can see.

The Vulgate Latin, which is St. Jerome’s synthesis of the original source texts commissioned by Pope St. Damasus I, triple cross-referenced against each other in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew in preparation for the eventual setting of the canon of scripture at the Councils of Rome in ARSH 382, and Carthage in ARSH 397, reads thusly:

“…gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis”

In English, in the Douay-Rheims translation thus reads:

Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to men of good will.

These are two completely different ideas. Radically different. The first translation has peace and goodwill together as co-subjects, as unqualified universals: “peace, goodwill TOWARD men”. The Vulgate clearly has goodwill not as the COMPOUND SUBJECT along with peace, but as the QUALIFIER. To men OF GOOD WILL. Good will isn’t the subject, it is the OBJECT OF THE PREPOSITION.

The Peace of Our Lord is a massively qualified, and extremely rare and precious thing. When the priest says at Mass, “Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum” (The peace of the Lord be always with you), he isn’t just saying “nice things” as filler. This is a profound and precious prayer.

Why would God, in His Perfect Justice, wish good will towards those men who are at war with Him, and thus His Church? Is not the Second Person, God Incarnate in the Manger in Bethlehem, the Judge of mankind? Is not the Baby wrapped in swaddling clothes He who will sort the sheep from the goats? Is He not the One who is come to sift the wheat from the chaff? Did He not say:

“Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.”

Cornelius of Lapide says in his commentary on Luke 2:

But all the Latins, and, among the Greeks, Origen, S. Chrysostom, and Cyril, read, and with better reason, for ευ̉δοκία good will, ευ̉δοκίας—of good will, making the hymn consist of two members. For as glory is given to God as to Him who is glorified, so peace is given to men of good will as to those whom the peace of Christ belongs and befits; and in this way the concatenation of the whole sentence hangs better together. The peace on earth cannot be supposed to be other than that which belongs to men of good will.

Oh, but if we are under attack by Freemasonic-Communist-homosexualist infiltrators, pushing their heresies of “universal salvation” and Indifferentism, and we want God reduced to an abstract philosophical construct, an “I’m okay, you’re okay” joke of a deity, an effete, toothless “idea” that is merely an excuse for Freemasonic neo-pagan self-worship and narcissistic performance opportunities, then, by all means, mangle and rearrange the Word of God. As the infiltrators tell their victims, “It doesn’t really matter what the original texts said or did not say – all that matters is what today’s translation means to you . . . “

Luke 2:14 is a quick, easy way to check the veracity of any translation of the Bible. Break yours out and check right now. And then, when you find it incorrectly translated, as you almost certainly will, ask yourself what other verses have been mangled. And then ask yourself what you’re missing in the seven books that Luther removed. Uh-oh.

Then, just GET A DOUAY-RHEIMS and use the Church’s authoritative English translation without fear or worry that you are reading Freemasonic-Communist-homosexualist agitprop.

Have a blessed Ember Week in Advent and then… Christmas!

This day you shall know that the Lord will come and save us: and in the morning you shall see His glory.

Introit and Gradual of the Mass of the Vigil of the Nativity

Addendum over the transom:

Kaneohe Marine Corps Airstation; Oahu, Hawaii circa ARSH 1966

This except completely unironically pic.twitter.com/oIEHQwPqvN

— luigi (@orthodoxluigi) December 19, 2024