We Have Lived to See a World after Roe v. Wade.

Today, the feast of the Sacred Heart, and the Nativity of John the Baptist, who recognized from his mother's womb the unborn Savior, we have lived to see a world after Roe v. Wade.  The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, and explicitly struck down Roe and Casey v. Planned Parenthood.  Abortion, then, has been divested of its hitherto impenetrable armor as an allegedly constitutionally guaranteed right.

Legacy media outlets are already hyperventilating about the vulnerability, in light of Dobbs, of other purported rights invented by the Supreme Court over the last 60 years -- and not without good reason.  In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, Justice Thomas states that the high court needs to reconsider all its substantive due process precedents, including Griswold v. Connecticut (striking down laws against contraceptives), Lawrence v. Texas (striking down laws against certain private, consensual sex acts) and Obergefell v. Hodges (creating a "right" to same-sex marriage).  There can be no doubt that the same reasoning that formed the basis for striking down Roe also applies to these other cases.  Justice Thomas argues that the substantive due process doctrine has been the principle engine of what he calls "the Court's constitutionally unmoored policy judgments," the nullification of state laws that do not conform to those policy judgments, and immeasurable human suffering -- in this case, in the form of more than 63,000,000 abortions.  "Accordingly, " he says, "we should eliminate it from our jurisprudence at the earliest opportunity."  Dobbs certainly renders the spindly edifice of court-manufactured "rights" even more rickety and precarious.  

Amid the celebration of this most necessary legal victory for the cause of life, there are two things we need to not lose sight of.  The first is that, as Justice Kavanaugh notes in his concurring opinion, Dobbs does not make abortion illegal in the United States.  What it does do is restore the regulation of abortion to the states.  The hottest battleground in the war on abortion has now shrunk to those states, like California and New York, that are still governed by ghouls who are determined to keep the abortion industry going.  Other states have criminal abortion statutes whose effectiveness Dobbs has now triggered.  Idaho, for example, has a criminal abortion statute that will take effect in 30 days.  With the usual exceptions, which apply to physicians, the statute makes it a felony to perform or attempt to perform an abortion.  The statute explicitly excludes from its ambit pregnant women undergoing abortions.

The second thing we need to not lose sight of is that the partisans of abortion are not going to let it go gentle into that good night.  These are the people who did not scruple to leak the entire draft of the decision in an obvious attempt to flip the high court, and who publicly called for harassment and violence against members of the court.  Do not forget the huge industry, not only in performing abortions but also in trafficking in the body parts and cell lines stolen from aborted babies.  Besides which, do not forget the occult dimensions of abortion.  Abortion is nothing other than the modern-day iteration of the cult of Moloch.  All laws that purport to legalize abortion merely provide a legal cover for human sacrifice.  We should expect to see attempts to subvert or somehow end-run or abrogate this ruling.  We should also expect to see hysterical demonstrations, violent protests, and especially more violent attacks on Catholics and their churches over this ruling.  

In my opinion, today's ruling is not decisive, but does mark a change in the prevailing wind.  We may (and probably will) still be in for rough times, but there is a change in the atmosphere.  Is there the smallest possibility that this is a fruit of the consecration of Russia on March 25th?  

What we really need, to send abortion back to the abyss from whence it came, is for abortion to become unthinkable.  That is going to depend upon a change of minds and hearts.  The battle, then, is only beginning.  But Dobbs is a necessary and crucial victory, and worth a public singing of the Te Deum at the very least.

Atomization

 

Have you noticed how much society, and especially the policies of governance in both Church and State, have tended to the atomization and isolation of persons?  Is it really all a coincidence?

- Discouraging extended families from living together

- Sticking old people into nursing homes

- Encouraging people to work long hours, to the detriment of health, family and social life

- Making it impossible to support a family on one salary, again, to the detriment of health, family and social life

- Flooding towns and cities with more newcomers than they can comfortably handle, destroying the social cohesion and the character of these communities 

- Pricing people out of the housing market, so that they can no longer afford to live where they work

- Implementing policies that lead to a skyrocketing price of fuel, now that millions are forced to commute

- Taxing people to death, so that they become wage slaves

- Making usury the cornerstone of the economic system, thus further enslaving the populace

- Proliferating social media, so that more and more people are content with virtual contact rather than actual contact

- Making it ever easier to order all goods online, rather than having to go out and get them

- Demonizing Catholics who are devoted to traditional Catholicism

- Deliberately making the Mass of tradition so scarce that people have to travel long distances, even hundreds of miles, to find it

These things all drive wedges between people.  Family relationships, friendships, parish life, and civic activities flourish best when everyone lives in one neighborhood and are able to maintain a standard of living that is fitting to their state in life.  It's very difficult to make these things work when everyone has to work longer for less money, and to spend huge chunks of their time traveling; and when traveling becomes expensive as well as time-consuming, people start cutting back.  This usually means, in our Puritan society, eliminating first the  social and recreational activities that otherwise would foster camaraderie and save people from a one-dimensional life centered on work.  It is another form of slavery.

With The Bug, of course, this all became more obvious, plus, our already strained lives were strained even further.  Now we had:

- Healthy people forbidden to leave their homes

- People forbidden to exercise their constitutionally-guaranteed right to assemble

- The creation of an atmosphere of fear and suspicion

- People urged to view each other as vectors of contagion

- People urged to go around with their noses and mouths covered, when God intended our faces to be visible and our noses and mouths to be exposed to the open air

- Increasingly intrusive interference with people's daily lives

- Divisions between those fearful of catching disease and those who were not fearful

- Divisions between those willing to abide by the mandates, and those who saw them as completely unreasonable and ineffective

- Divisions between the jabbed and the unjabbed

- Hospitals and nursing homes forbidding or severely limiting visitors, thereby cutting patients and residents off from their true advocates with the health care system

- The distrust of the medical profession resulting from its ruthless, one-size-fits-all implementation of restrictions and protocols

- Obsession with scientism and abandonment of the supernatural

- The shutting out of people from their own churches and the cutting off of them from the Sacraments

It should be obvious, after the globally coordinated response to The Bug, that we have fallen into the hands of a worldwide, interlocking directorate of parasitic wickedness, for the benefit of which we are kept fearful and isolated.  Fear and isolation certainly do not serve the common good.  They do, however, make it easy for us to be bullied into acting against our own best interests, and even to consenting to participate in great evils, such as aiding and abetting the oppression of our fellow men who are not willing to be bullied.  

Ultimately, in back of it all, is a dark power that seeks to make us lose our souls by rebelling against God and turning on our fellow man.  That is why the churches were shut down, and we were cut off from Mass and the Sacraments, which are necessary to keep us in the life of grace.  It also has to be why many of the dark machinations are carried out in plain sight.  To give full consent of our will to evil, we have to recognize it as evil and resolve to do it anyway.  We can make all the excuses we want for it, and even come up with some really good ones; but really, in the end, deep down, we cannot fool ourselves.

Or God.

The Abdication of Francis: Wishful Thinking

 

Rumors are picking up that Pope Francis is about to abdicate.  So many people are so tired of Pope Francis and his sledgehammer style of governance that they seem quite ready to believe it, and are speculating on when this event nobody knows will happen is to take place.  Pope Francis himself has hinted in the past that he has not ruled out the possibility of following the example of his immediate predecessor and stepping down.  

Me?  As much as I look for the light at the end of the dark tunnel of this pontificate, I don't buy it, and I don't hope for Francis to abdicate.

Why don't I hope for Francis to abdicate?  Number one, I don't think papal abdications are, on balance, a good thing for the Church.  Up to now, they have been extremely rare, and rare they should remain.  The latest abdication, after all, brought us -- Francis.  Number two, the abdication of this Pope, who has been swelling the college of cardinals far beyond its normal size in order to pack it with his cohorts, would be an ominous sign: a sign that the fix is in (humanly speaking) for Francis 2.0.  

But in any case, I don't see it happening.  It has indeed been terrifying to see a man in his mid-eighties and in obviously poor health double and treble down on effectively excommunicating the whole Church.  But he appears determined to carry on.  From whence could he continue his campaign of smashing up everything recognizably Catholic, if not from his present position?  His prestige would fall to zero if he stepped down.  No, I think the papacy will have to be pried from Francis' cold, dead fingers.  

Could I be wrong?  Sure.  My crystal ball is at the cleaner's.  But I don't think I am wrong.  It is going to be up to God to deliver us from the hirelings into whose hands we have fallen.  

Confirm Thy Brethren

Pope Francis never stops trolling us.  From bringing in syncretism and pagan worship to dropping 16-ton weights on the Mass of tradition to elevating wicked bishops to the college of cardinals to describing the Holy Spirit as "the author of division, ruckus and a certain disorder," the present sovereign pontiff is the scourge that leaves no square inch of our flesh unbloodied.  So much of what he does and says is the exact opposite of what a Pope should do and say.  He quite fails to confirm the brethren.

Or does he?  

I think 2020 kicked off a period of exceptional undeception.  The evils of the modern world have always been visible; but we who have never known anything else have failed, in whole or in part, to recognize them for what they are.  2020 began to prove to us how naked and defenseless we really are in both Church and State before the forces of malignity in the world.  Once a cadre of unelected bureaucrats and oligarchs began to interfere with our everyday lives, we could see how useless our "democratic" systems of government are in the face of true threats to our "constitutionally guaranteed" freedoms.  With the closure of churches and deprivation of the Sacraments, we have seen that the Church of the New Advent, Updated and Streamlined for the sake of Modern Man, has got nothing for us in a true crisis.  God, in His mercy, evidently wills that this present generation not die in its errors.

I submit that His most powerful instrument is Pope Francis.  What greater proof could there be than this catastrophic pontificate that the Barque of Peter is in dire need of a course correction?  Francis is the ultimate undeceiver.  He is not a one-off.  He is a typical boomer cleric: arrogant, brutal, filled with hatred and contempt for tradition and those who love it.  There are loads of priests and bishops just like him, and so it was inevitable that one such would make it onto the Throne of Peter.  The full horror of the project launched into the open at the Second Vatican Council was never going to really make itself fully known and felt by us until we got such a Pope.   

Pope Benedict XVI, though handicapped by the desire to compromise with the Big Ideas of the postconciliar church (as it calls itself), nevertheless tried, gently, to turn the ship around.  But, coarse as we are, gentleness did not suffice, so God permitted the advent of a destroyer.  By the trials that he has inflicted on us, Pope Francis actually removes all reasonable doubt as to the following:

- "Aggiornamento" is really surrender to the world, the flesh and the devil.

- The novelties of the Council, such as religious liberty, ecumenism and collegiality, constitute a colossal betrayal and led directly to abominations like Assisi, Pachamama and Abu Dhabi (with their proponents citing to the Council), as well as to the paralysis of prelates in the face of such evils.

- The Mass of Paul VI is the expression of something that bears the name of Catholicism but that is in opposition to what came before it.

- The Mass of Paul VI performs, and is performed, precisely as intended.

- By the entirely unworthy men this Pope promotes, we can see that there is no dichotomy between someone's private life and his public life.  Sexual deviancy leads inevitably to deviancy in everything.

In short, all the evils the traditionalists in the '60s and '70s predicted -- for which they were laughed to scorn -- have come to pass.  Pope Francis leaves us no room to fudge or evade or reinterpret this fact into something positive.  

In a strange and backhanded sort of way, and whether he intends it or not, Pope Francis is confirming the brethren.  He is confirming them in the inescapable fact that they have gone terribly wrong, and that they need to retrace their steps and get back on the right road.

Pope Francis acts as someone who loves to sow confusion.  But, in light of all the foregoing, how confused are we really?

Spend the Month of June Making Acts of Reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Pray the Rosary every day (which we should all be doing anyway).  Recite the Litany of the Sacred Heart every day during the month of June.  Offer up trials and tribulations, however small, in reparation for the outrages committed against the Sacred Heart during the month that is especially dedicated to Its honor.  Go to confession.  Attend Mass and receive Holy Communion on First Friday.  If you've never made the Nine First Fridays, now would be a good time to start.  If you have made them, it couldn't hurt to make them again.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Christ, have mercy on us.

Lord, have mercy on us.  Christ, hear us.

Christ, graciously hear us.

God, the Father of heaven, have mercy on us.

God, the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.

God, the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.

Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, Son of the Eternal Father, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, formed by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mother, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, united substantially with the Word of God, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, of infinite majesty, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, sacred temple of God, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, tabernacle of the Most High, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, house of God and gate of heaven, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, burning furnace of charity, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, abode of justice and love, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, full of goodness and love, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, abyss of all virtues, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, most worthy of all praise, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, King and center of all hearts, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, in Whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, in Whom dwells all the fullness of Divinity, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, in Whom the Father is well pleased, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, of Whose fullness we have all received, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, desire of the everlasting hills, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, patient and rich in mercy, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, enriching all who invoke Thee, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, fount of life and holiness, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, propitiation for our sins, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, loaded down with opprobrium, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, bruised for our offenses, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, made obedient unto death, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, pierced with a lance, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, source of all consolation, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, our life and resurrection, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, our peace and reconciliation, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, victim for our sins, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, salvation of those who trust in Thee, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, hope of those who die in Thee, have mercy on us.

Heart of Jesus, delight of all Saints, have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord!

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord!

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

V. Jesus, meek and humble of Heart.

R. Make our hearts like unto Thine.

Let us pray:

Almighty and everlasting God, look upon the Heart of Thy most-beloved Son, and upon the praises and satisfaction which which He offers Thee in the name of sinners; and to those who implore Thy mercy, in Thy great goodness, grant forgiveness in the Name of the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee forever and ever.

R. Amen.