1955 Mass reform

The grinch who stole Holy Week, or more honestly put, the attention whore who tried to upstage it - Sunday 25th to Saturday 31st of March - Holy Week

As we all should be aware, but most are not, the Holy Week reforms of the 1950s were quite sweeping. Berfore Holy Week, Rorate Caeli once again re-posted an article on " The Reform of Holy Week in the Years 1951-1956". It is well-worth reading, especially in connection with the news recently that some traditional orders had been allowed to celebrate the pre-1950s Holy Week on a 3-year experimental basis starting this year.

Traditionalists are nothing if not resourceful and it didn't take long before there was a resource for the pre-1950 Holy Week with English translations, aptly called Pre-1955 Holy Week (although I grant that it may well have been present before the announcement). Rorate Caeli also provided us with a clarification on who exactly may chant the Passion. These two interventions by Rorate Caeli were quite helpful to me personally, as I finally came to realise taht the Passion is not actually the Gospel reading for Good Friday, but that we actually have a Passion reading followed by a Gospel reading, at least in the traditinal liturgy, pre-1950s edition in any case. Rorate Caeli was also kind enough to provide us with pictures of Palm Sunday from the pre-1955 Holy Week celebration.

Anybody who knows anything about Christianity knows that Easter is the biggest event of the Church year (yet it seems that professional journalists writing for major state-sponsored publications don't have a clue about what Easter is all about, to nobody's surprise, and they are probably even proud about it). We shall also know that Holy Week is the most august week of the year. It is for this reason that the secular anti-Catholic world generally steps up its attacks on the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church. It is also the week that the world's most popular attention-whore gets up to his usual attention-seeking antics in order to seemingly steal attention away from the Church's commemorations and celebrations.

This year was no exception, but having noticed that his Maundy Thursday foot fetish doesn't get the attention it used to , Bergoglio decided to get a little help from his now 93-year old atheist friend Euginio Scalfari. Every time he speaks to that an he can be guaranteed a few scandalous headlines and this time was no different. Just in time for the Holy Week Celebrations, in which Christ instituted the Holy Eucharist and died to save us from the fires of hell and allow us too spend eternity with God, Bergoglio told his friend that there is no hell, and that those who die in sin simply vanish, while those who repent before end up spending eternity in the presence of God. This interview was timed to coincide with Maundy Thursday, and naturally overshadowed his feet-washing ceremony, which was once more carried out in prison and against the rubrics of the Novus Ordo, rubrics which he himself amended, it has to be mentioned.

The reactions were not long in coming, and predictably, much of the Catholic press tied itself up in knots, blaming the poor atheist fool Scalfari, instead of pointing to Bergoglio as the culprit. The Vatican issued a non-denial denial, informing us, as we all know, that Scalfari does not record his interviews so it cannot be ascertained whether what was reported was the exact phrasing that Bergoglio used. In other words, they were saying loudly and clearly that Bergoglio is a heretic, as we all know, but we can use the he-doesn't-record-interviews card to get us out of a very serious doctrinal situation. They could really have done little else, for had they said that Bergoglio had actually admitted that he doesn't believe in hell, then they would efffectively have been confirming what we all know, that the man is not Catholic. Had they come out and denied that Bergoglio said that, then they would have had to explain how it is that a man who, as far as I know, hasn't faced many accusations of total misrepresenation in his work before - save for when he speaks to Bergoglio - could get such a fundamental thing so wrong.

Bergoglio himself did not come out and deny it, so we can rest safely in the knowledge that Bergoglio told his atheist friend that. It must be noted that this is not the first time that Bergoglio has denied that souls end up in hell, as Scalfari has reported on this before, and even in Church documents Bergoglio has written something to the tune of everything been on its way to Heaven. His defenders have pointed out that Bergoglio mentions the devil quite a lot, and so he must be misquoted if he has said that the devil does not exist. That is a logical fallacy if ever there was one, as it is entirely possible to believe that the devil exists and yet believe that nobody ends up in hell; that the devil would spend eternity in hell with his demons. In any case it was dishonest of them as they could easily have found multiple instances of Bergoglio telling us that those who die in mortal sin never end up in hell, assuming that anybody can even die in mortal sin, which Bergoglio does not seem to believe - save for traditional Catholics who use doctrine as stones to throw at people while sitting in the judgment seat of Moses. That's his phrasing, not mine, of course.

On the topic of attacking the Church's doctrines, Bergoglio could not resist taking a barb at the notion of truth, insisting that priests ought not to make "idols of certain abstract truths". This was in a separate speech, mind you, proving beyond doubt, if anyone is still not convinced, that the man is in constant heresy mode, and not just when speaking to his atheist anti-Catholic friends who, if you are to believe his enablers, have nothing better to do than...

The Roman Rite gets in a good punch once in a while, vicious attacks on traditionalists not withstanding - Sunday 25th of February to Saturday 3rd of March

There are very many neo-Catholics who look down smugly on traditionalists. They want to claim that they still hold to the Catholic faith but do not soil their hands by mixing with those who question disastrous multiple (im)prudential decisions by the Holy See since Vatican II.

In "An attack on older Traditional Catholics in the Catholic Herald", Joseph Shaw chronicled a new type of Catholic - the "self-hating self-righteous not-really-trad Trad" as evidenced by Michael Davis, writing for the Catholic Herald. In his piece he managed to cobble up just about the most extreme caricatures of traditionalists, while claiming that he is a traditionalist, but of the friendly type. He trashed the older generation of traditionalists while praising the novus traditionalists of whom he obviously counts himself.

My regard for the Catholic Herald went down the drain with the Libyan war, which they cheered as enthusiastically as the war propaganda room of NATO. Things have not improved under Bergoglio but have only gotten worse. Occasionally we have a piece which is provocatively truthful, but for the most part whenever they cover anything remotely political you can count on it being anti-Russian propaganda, and when  it comes to Church news, their reporting is often less than stellar, and they often gloss over the most offensive utterances of Bergoglio for nobody-knows-why. I am therefore not surprised that their new American editor found time to write such a vitriolic piece attacking traditionalists.

Sticking to that newspaper, we had a piece by Francis Philips titled "How many of us would truly resist an evil regime?" Its focal point was a woman who died not long ago, but who is best known for serving as a secretary for Goebbels, Nazi Germany's propaganda general. I only bring this up to highlight the lack of self-reflection to which we can all fall victim. As I wrote previously, the Catholic Herald and I have fallen out, so it may well be that Miss/Mrs. Philips has been writing about the diabolical scheming of Bergoglio in the most resistant of ways. I suspect she hasn't. It could also be that she has been shouting from the rooftops and denouncing the British government as it has attacked the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, the facts of nature, and armed Islamists who have killed hundreds of thousands in the Middle East while driving out millions from their home. I suspect she has done none of that either.

In essentials, modern U.K. is every bit an evil regime as was the Nazis - most visibly with its callous disregard for human life and its incessant attack on the family -, but Francis Philips has done little to resist it. In essentials, the Bergoglio regime is even worse than the Nazis, since the Nazis - we are led to believe - wanted the death of our bodies, whereas Bergoglio seems hell-bent to see our souls damned for eternity. She has done even less to resist that, I suspect. So the question is open as to how many of us would resist an evil regime, but we can be relatively certain that Miss/Mrs. Philip wouldn't recognise one unless it popped up in her schoolbooks.

Without a hint of irony she asks us "How many of us would resist an evil regime?" That one can be so blind as to one's surroundings should concern us all.

I shall stick to the "evil regime" of the U.K. and illustate my point. We had yet another case of a child being pulled off child support by a judge against the wishes of his parents. This is a death sentence with a twist though, as the judge cited Bergoglio as justification for his decision to have the child die. This comes, of course, hot on the heels of the Charlie Gard story in which the judges denied a child the chance for experimental treatment because they wanted the child to die in a U.K. hospital. The diabolical Bergoglio effect on full display.

Moving onto the Church in the U.K., we are told that the number of Catholic weddings falls by two-thirds since 1990. So much for the sprintime of Vatican II. I doubt the quality of marriages is as high as it was before the Council either.

With yet another blasphemous Vatican stamp, this time with a homo-erotic presentation of some approximation of some Christ-like figure, Fr. Ray Blake asks "Where is the Vatican going?"

Finally, to finish of the theme of the United Kingdom, we have some good news, with Graeme Garvey mapping the English Catholic martyrs on a map that is now available online. The map is non-interactive, but I can do nothing but applaud the efforts of this layman and hope to emulate his efforts in one way or another down the road, in paying homage, however unworthily, to our Catholic forebears and the sacrifice they paid.

There is normally enough bad news in BergoglioChurch to leave one depressed for a week, and hardly a week goes by without a paedophilia/pederasty/homosexual scandal from a higly-placed cleric. It's depressing, and it's oftentimes demoralising and I wish I could just ignore it but we have to face NOChurch as it is. This week was no exception, as a former diocesan vocations director priest in the U.S. was arresed for homosexual sex assault on a 17-year old boy/man. I'll spare you the details.

Cardinal Cupich was up to his old Bergoglio-approved sin-promoting ways, and Fr. Gerald Murray took him to task for it.

Since the U.S. does not have the same simoniacal church tax system  that the Germans have, and that Sweden has - although to a less nefarious degree - one has the option of refusing to support a bishop who one knows is causing harm to the faith. In " Excellent Idea For Annual Bishop/Cardinal Appeal" , the author argues for withholding money from one's diocese if one has...

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