Is Trump With Us, or Is the New Boss same as the Old Boss?

“Trump is allowed to greenlight more egregiously unconstitutional assaults against our liberties than even Obama.”

“Donald Trump has commissioned uber Zionists Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem with the task of expunging the First Amendment protection of the freedom of speech for those who are vocalizing opposition to Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza—or any other murderous policy emanating out of Tel Aviv, for that matter.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/04/chuck-baldwin/trumps-fourth-greatest-betrayal-so-far-and-pete-hegseth/ 

Are Americans Still Americans?

Paul Craig Roberts

This question came to mind from reading Edward Curtin’s essays, “At the Lost and Found,” (Clarity Press, 2025), in which he shares with readers his intellectual encounters with the rising criminality of the governments of the United States since the 1960s. Edward Curtin is a decent person with a sense of justice and a moral conscience, traits more common in his time than today.  I found his moral responses reassuring, and wonder if recent generations would respond in the same way.

Curtin, I suspect, was a member of the old moderate left, which was concerned with fairness and pushing a reform here and there.  Today this left remains only in its elderly remnants.  The modern left is not reformist.  It is revolutionary, committed to using law, government, and media to overthrow traditional society and replace it with a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel in which merit is regarded as a white racist tool. 

Today the left, as epitomized by the Biden regime, pushes DEI over merit, sexual perversity over love between a man and a woman, sexualization of young children, demonization of white people as racists, and ideology over truth. Today for the left the truth resides in the ideological agenda, not in facts.

Despite the digital revolution, the Internet, social media, email, and texting, the acquisition of truthful information has become ever more difficult.  The reason is that for almost all parties concerned, it is the agenda that is important, not the facts.  A consequence is that, unlike in the past, today we live in narratives orchestrated to serve agendas. As Curtin puts it, “we are living in a pretend society” in which truth is not present.

Curtin’s essays, like my own, vary in quality, but every decent person will enjoy escape from social media into thought about what is happening to us.  I am not going to attempt to organize Curtin’s essays around a theme.  I am going to limit my comments to two of his essays. 

The first is about what has become of Christmas.  As my readers know, for several decades it has been my habit to republish my Christmas essay, “The Greatest Gift of All,” to remind people that Christianity gave us freedom and meaning in our lives.  In the Massachusetts town in which Curtin and his wife live, Christmas fireworks are a feature.  As he and his wife inside their home sit holding and trying to calm the family dogs, “sentient animals with deep feelings,” who are quaking uncontrollably, Curtin thinks of “children in Gaza quivering in fear as the Israelis bomb them night and day in savage attacks” and thinks of “the visceral sense of what those Palestinians  must be feeling as they hold their trembling children” who are declared by Israel’s leader to be “useless objects.”  

It is America’s shame that the entire government of the United States, including President Trump, the media, and the brainwashed and indoctrinated hapless American population  accept the destruction of a people, even enable it with weapons and money and deportation of persons with sufficient moral conscience to protest the genocide of a nation.  Curtin has every right to raise the question, what kind of people have Americans become?

The second essay is about Curtin’s “Known Knowns,” which consists of the massive lies that the US government has based its rule upon, regardless of whether Republican or Democrat, since the 1960s.  In a mere 8 pages Curtin presents the history of the US government’s degeneration into evil kept in power by lies.

He begins with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and goes on to Allan Dulles who engineered slaughter of one million Indonesians, the orchestrated Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal orchestrated by the CIA to drive Nixon from power, the neoconservatives’ Iran-Contra scandal, the orchestrated Persian Gulf War, the Clinton regime’s bombing of four countries in four months –Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, the 9/11 false flag attacks on the World Trade Center, the George W. Bush regime’s fake “war on terror,” used to strip Americans of civil liberties and to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama who institutionalized the warfare state and bombed seven countries, Trump who allowed the deadly Covid vaccine to be imposed on us and subjects the conscience of America to the support of Israel’s genocide of Palestine, and Biden who engineered the anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, renewed war with Russia, and imprisoned American citizens for exercising their constitutional rights.

From the standpoint of the American Establishment, the problem with Curtin’s indictment is that it is true.  

In today’s America, to tell the truth is becoming an indication of treason for which whistleblowers, allegedly protected by federal law, are being imprisoned. This is not changing under Trump.  Instead, it is expanding.  If you criticize Israel, you are deported.  Thus, under the Trump regime, if you speak the truth about Israel, you are considered an enemy of the state.

Americans really do need to think about how they arrived at this position.  Curtin’s essays will help you.

In recent years, the crowds for outdoor papal Masses have dwindled in number compared to other popes and even the first five years of Pope Francis. That changed in death as Pope Francis’ death and funeral, thanks be to God, saw tremendous numbers of the Faithful and curious turning out for the various rites and processions. It wasn’t anywhere near the number for St. Pope John Paul II’s funeral rites, but impressive nonetheless.

The funeral rites for Pope Francis were splendidly planned and carried out. As far as I can tell, post-Vatican II traditions for the funeral rites were followed except for the pope’s body viewed in the casket rather than outside of the coffin. 

The novelty, not seen in anyone’s lifetime, was the procession from St. Peter’s to St. Mary’s. Thanks be to God for the splendid Roman day. The streets were lined with the Faithful and curious. 

The only fly in the ointment for me was that the coffin was on the back of a Dodge Ram pick-up truck and not of a recent model at that! Certainly the Vatican could have done better with an actual hearse with the capability of showing the casket. 

At any rate, southern rednecks loved the pickup truck but I doubt it will evangelize them and lead them to the true Church. 

For the record though, I believe that both Pope Pius XII and St. Pope John XXIII died outside of the Vatican and their bodies, brought by a splendid hearse, traveled the streets of Rome to return to the Vatican and far more people lined the streets. But that was a different time in the history of the Church, pre-Vatican II, when most Catholics were Catholic and attended Mass weekly. 

“The death of the wicked is very evil…” (Psalm 33:22)

Bergoglio’s Burial:
The Funeral and Interment of ‘Pope’ Francis

(image credit: James Veysey/Shutterstock)

The funeral of the man known as ‘Pope Francis’, the Jesuit apostate Jorge Mario Bergoglio, took place in St. Peter’s Square of Vatican City on Saturday, April 26, 2025. The main celebrant was ‘Cardinal’ Giovanni Battista Re, Dean of the College of [Novus Ordo] Cardinals.

Bergoglio’s obsequies and interment took place five days after his death on Apr. 21.

Official Vatican Information and News Coverage

• Novendiali in memory of the Roman Pontiff Francis
• Pope Francis’ mortal remains carried to St.

Donald Tusk has pledged to build the region’s most powerful military force under a new national doctrine

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has announced a new national doctrine that seeks to turn Warsaw into an “economic miracle” protected by the “strongest army in the region,” in a speech marking the 1,000th anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Poland.

Speaking on Friday in Gniezno, the city where the first King of Poland, Boleslaw the Brave, was crowned a millennium ago, Tusk outlined the three “pillars” of the National Piast Doctrine, named after the country's first historical ruling house.

“We will have the strongest army in the region. Don’t say it’s impossible. Yes, our army must be able to overcome any threat. From the east, west, south – it doesn’t matter,” Tusk said of the first pillar in his address. He promised to “take advantage of this tragic, dramatic experience of this war that is going on beyond our borders.”

The second pillar of the doctrine is to build “the strongest economy in the region.”

“Poland is strengthening its position among the absolute leaders of economic growth in Europe,” Tusk said. “Today we are really one step away from the fact that not only in Europe but all over the world people will say with admiration: ‘Oh, Poland, this is an economic miracle.’”

Political influence in the EU and globally forms the third pillar of the doctrine, Tusk said, stressing the importance of maintaining strong ties with Warsaw’s “most important ally,” Washington.

Polish President Andrzej Duda reportedly even urged Washington to move part of its nuclear arsenal stored in Western Europe or the United States to Poland. US Vice President J.D. Vance said he would be “shocked” if President Donald Trump ever supported such an idea.

Poland has been among Ukraine’s main supporters since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2022, providing more than €5.1 billion ($5.7 billion) in aid, over 70% of which was military, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute. The country has also taken in a large number of refugees from its neighbor, although public attitudes have reportedly cooled amid the influx of arrivals.

Warsaw will ”brutally” protect its economic interests and intends to profit from future aid to Ukraine, including from post-conflict reconstruction, Tusk said earlier this month.

Polish officials have increasingly called for militarization to address the alleged threat posed by Russia. Moscow has rejected these claims, stating that NATO and EU leaders are merely “fearmongering” in order to push their populations into supporting such measures.

Francis in Full(press for full article)

Bishop Robert Barron became quite frank about Pope Francis' papacy. He begins his critique with listing the great things Pope Francis accomplished, especially being a pastoral pope and a pope of the streets with the language of the streets.

But then he turns to what needs to be refined and reset:

And yet, what one reads in almost every assessment of the late pope is that he was, at the very least, “controversial,” “confusing,” “ambiguous.” Some commentators would go so far as to say that he was heretical, undermining the ancient traditions of the Church. I do not at all subscribe to that latter position, but I sympathize to a degree with the former characterizations. Pope Francis was a puzzling figure in many ways, seeming to delight in confounding expectations, zigging when you thought he would zag. He famously told the young people gathered for World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro to “hagan lío” (make a mess), and sometimes he appeared to take pleasure in doing just that. 

One of the messier moments of the Francis pontificate was the two-part Synod on the Family, which took place in 2014 and 2015. The fact that Walter Cardinal Kasper, a long-time advocate of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, spoke at the outset of the gathering indicated rather clearly the direction that Pope Francis wanted the synod to take. But he was met with stiff resistance from bishops, especially from the developing world, and when the final document appeared, the famous Amoris Laetitia, the question seemed oddly unresolved, open to a variety of interpretations. When the pope’s apologists pointed to an obscure footnote buried deep in the document as providing the requisite clarity, many in the Church were, to say the least, incredulous. And when four cardinals petitioned the pope to resolve a number of puzzles (dubia­, in the technical jargon) that Amoris Laetitia had raised in their minds, they were basically ignored. 

There are indeed many beautiful insights in Amoris Laetitia, but they were largely overlooked due to the controversy and ambiguity that accompanied the document. Indeed, in the wake of its publication, a sort of “doctrinal anarchy” was let loose, as various bishops’ conferences gave the document varying interpretations, so that, for example, what remained a mortal sin in Poland seemed permissible in Malta. If a primary responsibility of the pope is to maintain unity in doctrine and morals, it is hard to see how Pope Francis met that obligation throughout that synodal process and its aftermath. 

And he oddly did not seem to learn from this situation. In 2023, after the first round of the Synod on Synodality (more on this anon), Pope Francis’s doctrinal chief, Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, issued the statement Fiducia Supplicans, which allowed for the possibility of blessing those in same-sex unions. To say that a firestorm broke out in the Catholic world would be an understatement, and the opposition was led, once again, by Catholic leaders from the non-Western sphere. In an astonishing display of unity and courage, the bishops of Africa said that they would not enforce the teaching of Fiducia in their countries, and the pope backed down, permitting them to dissent from the document. That all of this unfolded immediately after a gathering of four hundred leaders from around the Catholic world, who were never consulted on the matter, simply beggars belief. Once again, the pope struggled to maintain the unity of the Church.

At times, too, the pope’s admirably generous instincts appeared to lead him into saying doctrinally imprecise things or countenancing problematic behaviors. An example of the first would be his endorsement, on a number of occasions, of the proposition that all religions are legitimate paths to God, like differing languages speaking the same truth. Now, given his clear enthusiasm for evangelization, I want to be generous in my interpretation of his words, construing them perhaps along the lines of the Second Vatican Council’s assertion that there are elements of truth in all religions. But I think it is fair to say that the pope at least gave the strong impression of religious indifferentism.  

As an example of his countenancing of problematic behaviors, I would point to the (in)famous Pachamama incident at the Synod on the Amazon in 2019. Though there remains a good deal of confusion about the purpose of the placement of the Pachamama statue in the Vatican Gardens during a prayer with the pope, it is certainly fair to say that it generated much controversy and that the various attempts to explain it only made matters worse. Once more, the pope found himself in the middle of a self-created and completely unnecessary kerfuffle, the man supposed to guarantee unity at least implicitly undermining it.

No one doubts that Pope Francis was rhetorically gifted, not in the academic manner of John Paul II or Benedict XVI to be sure, but in the manner of a parish priest adept at popular homilizing. And his speech very often had an edge. Here are a few of his gems: “Mr. and Mrs. Whiner”; “liquid Christian”; “pickled-pepper-faced Christian”; “weak to the point of rottenness”; “Church who is more spinster than mother.” And I believe it is fair to say that his rhetorical venom was, more often than not, directed at conservative Catholics. Here are a few more zingers: “the closed, legalistic slave of his own rigidity”; “doctors of the letter!”; “Rigidity conceals the leading of a double life, something pathological”; “professionals of the sacred! Reactionaries”; and, most famously, “­backwardists.” 

I know that these withering criticisms often deeply discouraged orthodox Catholics, especially young priests and seminarians, whom the pope once referred to as “little monsters.” On one occasion, during the first session of the Synod on Synodality, the pope spoke to the assembled delegates. This sort of direct papal intervention was extremely rare, for, to his credit, the pope did not want excessively to sway or dominate the discussion. He spoke, in a sarcastic tone, of young clerics in Rome who spend too much time at the clerical haberdashery shops, trying on hats, collars, and cassocks. Now, there may indeed be some immature priests and students who are preoccupied with such things, but it struck me as exceedingly strange that this was the topic the pope chose for this rare opportunity to address some of the top leadership of the Church. 

To me, it indicated a curious fixation on, and demonization of, the more conservatively minded. And what made matters even more mystifying is that Francis had to have known that the Church is flourishing precisely among its more conservative members. As the famously liberal church of Germany withers on the vine, the conservative, supernaturally-­oriented church of Nigeria is exploding in numbers. And in the West, the lively parts of the Church are, without doubt, those that embrace a vibrant orthodoxy rather than those that accommodate the secularist culture. Many of the pope’s expressions and stories were indeed funny, but one would be hard pressed to characterize them as invitations to dialogue with conservative interlocutors. 

By way of conclusion, I would like to say a few words about synodality, which I believe Francis himself would identify as his signature theme. I was privileged to be an elected delegate to both sessions of the Synod on Synodality. For two months, I listened to and spoke with representatives from all over the world, and I learned a lot about how Catholics respond to challenges in remarkably diverse cultural milieux. I very much enjoyed the conversations, both those formal exchanges around the table, and even more so, the informal chats during coffee breaks. I came to understand the pope’s Jesuit-inspired process of prayerful discernment. 

I also came, I must admit, to appreciate the limits of synodality. Though every dialogue was lively and informative, very few of them moved toward decision, judgment, or resolution. Most were stuck at what Bernard Lonergan would call the second stage of the epistemic process, namely, being intelligent or having bright ideas. They didn’t move to Lonergan’s third level, which is the act of making a judgment, much less to his fourth stage, which is that of responsible action. So respectful were we of the “process” of conversation that we had almost a phobia of coming to decision. 

This is a fatal problem for Christians entrusted with the evangelical command to announce Christ to the world. The upshot is something that I believe is repugnant to what Pope Francis has consistently said he wants the Church to be: extroverted, mission-oriented, not stuck in the sacristy. I wondered at times during the two rounds of the synod whether synodality represented a tension within the mind and heart of Francis himself. 

Of all of the popes in my lifetime, Francis is, by far, the one I knew the best. I was with him for three Octobers: the two already mentioned, and a third for the Synod on Young People in 2018. During those wonderful months, I saw him practically every day and had a few occasions to speak to him. I also encountered him on an ad limina visit and at a handful of other audiences. I always found him gracious, funny, and approachable; once we had a short but intense spiritual conversation. I considered him my spiritual father and sincerely mourn his passing. Requiescat in pace.

When we read the various accounts of the Resurrection in the four Gospels, Acts and Pauline Epistles we can easily be puzzled by some apparent discrepancies in the details.

Pope Benedict in his book, Jesus of Nazareth (Vol II) says, We have to acknowledge that this testimony [of Scripture] considered from an historical point of view, is presented to us in a particularly complex form and gives rise to many questions. (P. 242)

The Pope goes on to explain what he considers to be the reason for this complexity and apparent divergence in some of the details.

What actually happened? Clearly for the witnesses who encountered the risen Lord, it was not easy to say. They were confronted with what, for them, was an entirely new reality, far beyond the limits of their own experience. Much as the reality of the event overwhelmed them and impelled them to bear witness, it was still utterly unlike anything they had previously known. (p. 242).

The Pope then reminds us that Jesus’ resurrection was experienced by them as something far beyond the resuscitation of a corpse. Rather, Jesus had taken up a wholly new and transformed humanity that was beyond anything they could fully describe or had ever experienced.

With all this in mind we are better able to appreciate the ecstatic qualities of the resurrection accounts and appreciate why all their details do not perfectly line up. The accounts have a rather crisp, “lets get to the point” quality; especially the accounts of the first day of the appearances. Frankly, one would be surprised if every detail in the account of an astonishing event were exactly the same. One might even suspect a story that was too controlled and wonder as to a kind of brainwashing or conspiracy having taken place. But as they are, these accounts have every hallmark of the accounts of people who experienced the events truly, but, due to their ecstatic and disorienting quality, recall the details differently or emphasize different facets.

It is important to recall that the Scriptures record the things Jesus actually said and did but they are not written like history is today: Today we attempt or think we write history as an exact chronological and comprehensive analysis of an event or era. But the Scriptures are selective, story-based accounts rather than our modern journalistic approach to history. They will often collect the sayings and deeds of Jesus around certain theological themes, rather than follow an exact time line. The Gosples do not intended to be an exhaustive account of everything Jesus said and did in exact detail (cf Jn 20:30; 21:25). Rather the Evangelists select what is suited to their theological purpose. And yet, despite these distinctions, we must be clear that the gospels are historical accounts, in that they recount the things Jesus actually said and did (cf Dei Verbum # 19)

Now, for the record, there are some apparent, and also real discrepancies in the accounts. The word “apparent” is important though, because not all the discrepancies are real or substantial if we take a closer look at them. Some who wish to cast doubt on the historicity of the Resurrection often wish to make more of these differences than necessary. Many, if not most of the differences can be dealt with quite easily and we are able to ultimately stitch together a reasonably clear account of the resurrection, if we are disposed to do so.

So, lets consider some of the apparent conflicts that emerge in the accounts:

1. How many women went out to the tomb that morning, one (Jn 20:21) two (Matt 28:1), or three (Mk 16:1)?
2. Did Magdalene alone go to just Peter and John (Jn 20) or did the several women go to the Apostles (Matt 28; Mk 16)?
3. How many angels did they see there that morning, one (Matt 28:2; Mk 16:5) or two (Lk 24:4; Jn 20:12)?
4. Did the women run to the other disciples and tell what they had seen (Mt 28:8; Lk 24:9) or did they say nothing out of fear (Mk 16:8)?
5. Did Jesus see them first in Galilee (Mk 16:7; Mt 28:9) or in Jerusalem (Jn 20; Lk 24:36)?
6. Among the Apostles, did he appear to Peter first (Lk 24:34), all eleven at once (Mt. 28:16), or the eleven minus Thomas (Jn 20:24)?
7. Did Jesus appear to them in a room (Jn 20:19) or a mountaintop (Mt 28:16)?
8. Lastly, did Jesus ascend on Easter Sunday (Lk 24:50-53; Mk 16:19) or forty days later (Acts 1:3,9)?

At one level some react that some of these details are picky. Who cares really who many women went or how many angels? Perhaps,  but it does not seem wise to simply dismiss the differences this way. Some of the differences ARE quite significant. For example, did Jesus appear to them first in Jerusalem? Luke and John are quite clear that he did. But why then do Mark and Matthew completely ignore this and record that the angel instructed the women to have the disciples go to Galilee where they will see him? Now, as has been stated, these differences can be addressed in a thoughtful manner, but they should not be simply dismissed as of no account.

In what follows I propose to address these differences and give possible resolutions. I am also aware, and expect to hear from some who consider any attempt to resolve these matters “simplistic.” You of course are free to propose other solutions and demonstrate how attempts at a resolution fall short. This is what comments are for. If something seems wrong state why and give evidence or an alternative point of view. So, on to possible solutions.

1. How many women went out to the tomb that morning, one (John 20:21), two (Matt 28:1) or three (Mk 16:1) and how many angels were there, one (Mk 16:5, Mat 28:2) or two (Lk 24:4, Jn 20:12)? One solution here is to recall that neither John’s Gospel nor Matthew’s absolutely deny that three women went to the tomb that day. They simply do not mention three whereas Mark does. John especially wishes to focus on Mary Magdalene and may have found it unnecessary to mention the others. Additionally, Matthew and Mark’s mention of one angel need not be seen as an absolute denial that there were two as described in Luke and John. Another solution is simply to acknowledge the discrepancies in the accounts but underscore the fact that the number of women and the number of angels is not the central point. The point is that the tomb was discovered empty by one or several women and they were instructed to tell the apostles what they saw and heard.
2. Matthew (28:8) and Luke (24:9) indicate that the women went and told the disciples of the empty tomb but Mark (16:8) says they were afraid and said nothing. True but in the verses that follow in the appendix to Mark’s own Gospel (Mk. 16:10) Mary Magdalene does in fact tell the apostles. Rather than conflicting with the other texts, Mark may merely supply additional detail about the startled nature of the women, that at first they were startled and said nothing but soon after went on, as Mark in fact says, a did tell the apostles.
3. Mark (16:7) and Matthew (28:9) indicate, according to the angel’s instructions, that Jesus would see them in Galilee but Luke (24:36 and John 20) describe the first appearances in Jerusalem. In addressing this difference we must recall that the gospels are not written as chronological or complete histories. The evangelists selected events from among the many things Jesus said and did and may also have altered the order. John (20:30 & 21:25) explicitly states that his account is selective. Hence we ought not conclude that any one gospel completely details all the resurrection appearances. It is true Mark and Matthew speak only of appearances in Galilee. Thus these accounts might only include the angelic instructions to go to Galilee since that they did not intend to describe appearances elsewhere. In other words it is possible to speculate that the angelic instructions were more elaborate and included instructions as to being prepared to meet Jesus first in Jerusalem. Matthew and Mark however paired these details down in their accounts since they did not intend to include the Jerusalem appearances in their accounts. This may not satisfy our notions of historical accounts wherein we expect and want a complete accounting of all the details. But, as has already been noted the Scriptures simply do not record history in this way. Rather they are selective accounts that open windows on history but do not claim to exhaustively report it. Note also that Matthew and Mark are not clear as to the time frame of the appearances they describe. Luke and John however, set the first appearance in Jerusalem and are rather clear that the day is the same day as the resurrection. Hence we reasonably conclude that the first appearances took place in Jerusalem and later appearances took place in Galilee. In other words the Jerusalem appearances do not conflict with the Galilean appearances in any way. Rather they simply add details that Mark and Matthew, for reasons of their own, chose not to include. Such a conclusion is speculative to be sure. It does, however, help us to see that the accounts do not absolutely contradict each other.
4. Among the Apostles, did Jesus appear to Peter first (Lk 24:34), all eleven at once (Mt. 28:16), or the eleven minus Thomas (Jn 20:24)? There seems to be a good case for the fact that the Lord appeared first to Peter even though we do not have a direct account of this appearance in the scriptures. The Gospel of Luke makes mention of it, And they [the disciples traveling to Emmaus] rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven gathered together and those who were with them, who said, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!”(24:33-34). Paul also records it [The Lord] was raised the third day in accordance with the scriptures…he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time…Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles (1 Cor 15:3ff). So it seems a pretty good case can be made that Peter did see the risen Lord before the other apostles. This quote from Paul also helps us recall that the gospel accounts are selective in terms of which resurrection appearances they report. Thus, as we read the various accounts, we get from each of them only a part of the full picture (see John 20:30). According to Paul there were appearances to Peter, to five hundred disciples, and to James. The details of these appearances are left to our imagination. It also follows that we do not need to see the accounts of John and Matthew cited above as conflicting. They may well be describing different appearances.
5. Did Jesus appear to them in a room (Jn 20:19) or a mountaintop (Mt 28:16)? Again, we need not place these texts at odds with one another. Most likely they are describing different appearances. Since the time frame of John is clear that the appearances in the upper room took place on Resurrection Sunday and then a week later we can presume that these appearances took place first. The mountaintop appearance was in Galilee and the time frame is not clear. It may have been days or weeks later.
6. Did Jesus ascend on Easter Sunday (Lk 24:50-53; Mk 16:19) or forty days later (Acts 1:3,9)? At first glance the texts from Luke and Mark do seem to imply that the ascension was the same day as the resurrection. However, a closer look will show that they are rather vague as to the time frame. Mark begins the passage leading up to the ascension with the word “afterward.” How long after the previous appearance is uncertain. Luke’s passage is also vague regarding the time. However Acts (1:3,9) also written by Luke is quite specific that the time of the ascension was forty days later. Thus, Acts need not be seen to conflict with the gospel accounts; it merely supplies the details that are lacking in them. This case is made stronger when we note that Luke is generally accepted to be the author of both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles and it seems unlikely that Luke would directly contradict himself.

So here then is a short tour of some of the apparent discrepancies and possible ways to resolve them.

In the end we simply have to accept that the Gospels do not record history in the same systematic and strictly chronological manner we moderns prefer. But they DO record history. It is for us to accept the evidence and accounts as they are given. The fact is that to develop a precise time frame and blow by blow chronological description may not be fully possible. However, careful study of the texts can help somewhat in this regard.

In tomorrow’s blog I would like to propose a somewhat chronological account that attempts to weave the many strands into one narrative. Such an attempt as we will see involves some speculation given the nature of ancient historical accounts. But it can help us to sort our the many details by trying to order them. So stay tuned for tomorrow.

The post Are There Discrepancies in the Resurrection Accounts? If so, can they be resolved? appeared first on Community in Mission.

You can only support the current manifestation of late-stage capitalism, if you believe that massive inequality of wealth is necessary to wealth creation, or if you believe that the total amount of wealth is unimportant so long as a very small minority are extremely wealthy.

“Trickledown economics” is at heart simply a statement of the idea that massive inequality of wealth is necessary to wealth creation. There is no evidence for it.

The truth is, of course, that the poor ultimately benefit only from the economic activity of the poor. But not nearly as much as the rich benefit from the economic activity of the poor.

Taking money off the poor does not lead to an increase in wealth creation. If you look at the billions the Labour government is seeking to remove from the disabled, that is not only money taken away from them, it is money taken out of the wider economy.

It seems astonishing that the Labour Party has forgotten the entire message of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake. But then, the Labour Party expelled Ken Loach for opposing the genocide of Palestinians.

Those on benefits have a much higher propensity to spend than the more wealthy elements of society as they have no choice; they need to spend all their income to survive and enjoy a minimal acceptable standard of living. This income is spent on the local goods and services they need, again to a much higher degree than that of wealthier people.

Much of this spend benefits the landlord class, but it is almost all within the UK economy and it has a multiplier effect on economic activity. All of this is pretty obvious. By simply taking this money out of the economy (and it has no real relationship to taxes and revenue) the government is reducing the overall size of the economy.

This austerity is the opposite of pro-growth. It is absolutely anti-growth. It achieves the precise opposite of the alleged goal of Labour’s economic policy.

All this is designed to reduce the fiscal deficit, allegedly. But reducing economic activity will reduce revenue. It is a death spiral. If the aim were actually to reduce the fiscal deficit, taxing those who have money would be far more sensible than taking money from those who do not.

But actually that is not the object at all. The object is to convince the neoliberal finance system that this is a safely neoliberal government, willing to hurt the poor and leave the wealthy untouched.

That system brought down Liz Truss for failing to acknowledge orthodoxy on the fiscal deficit. The strange thing is that Truss was actually right on the non-importance of this shibboleth. Where she was wrong was in a desire to decrease still further taxation on the wealthy, rather than increase spending on the poor; but her attitude to deficit was not wrong.

A higher deficit only leads to an increase in interest rates if you wish to seek to maintain the value of your currency in international markets. But like so many of these economic targets, the justification of this is a matter of convention more than reason. I have seen massive swings in the value of sterling over my lifetime, which have had little impact on the UK’s steady economic decline, although a habitual tendency to over-valuation has contributed to the wipeout of British manufacturing industry.

We now have Rachel Reeves wedded to Gordon Brown’s doctrine on fiscal spend, that led to the horrors of PFI and paved the way for austerity. Yet when the Establishment want to bail out the bankers, unlimited money can simply be created, and when they want to boost the military, unlimited public spending is immediately possible.

New Labour’s economic policy is Thatcherism, pure and simple.

The truth is we do not really need economic growth. The UK economy produces enough wealth for everybody to live free of poverty and in real comfort. The problem is the distribution of that wealth. We live in a society where, astonishingly, 1% of the population own 54% of the wealth.

You can argue about the precise statistic but the massive inequality is clear. The cause of poverty is inequality. The answer is to reduce inequality in a variety of ways – not only by progressive taxation but also by changing the ownership structures of enterprises.

The purpose of reducing poverty and increasing comfort for the majority is to spread happiness. Eternal economic growth is not a necessity for this. Happiness is not merely derived from possession of stuff, and owning more stuff is not the panacea.

Happiness arises from comfort, good relationships, active and engaged minds and a balanced society. A society which prioritises the libertine wealthy over caring for its disabled can never be balanced and can never be happy.

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The post Starmer’s Thatcherite Economics appeared first on Craig Murray.

As 320 Palestinians were massacred last night, most of them women and children, we live in a world where it is accepted as legal that Trump2 is genocidally Zionist because he received a $100 million donation from Miriam Adelson to be so.

In addition to which Adelson is the second largest donor to AIPAC, which openly pays hundreds of other elected and potential US politicians to be genocidally Zionist too.

This is Western democracy.

My previous article demonstrated how the argument – now used against Mahmoud Khalil – that the First Amendment only applies to US citizens, was also employed by the Biden administration in extradition proceedings against Julian Assange.

It surprises me how very often the Assange case proves revealing of the internal workings of power in the USA.

When the CIA wished to bug Julian Assange on Ecuadorean diplomatic premises in London, and to look into the possibility of kidnapping or murdering him there, they decided to operate through a cutout for such a diplomatically fraught move.

That CIA cutout was Sheldon Adelson, multi-billionaire late husband of Miriam Adelson. Adelson’s fortune had come from a Las Vegas casino and property empire.

You are probably aware this is not, in general, the most respectable and free-from-organised-crime area of economic activity.

US President Donald Trump awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Doctor Miriam Adelson at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 16, 2018. – The Medal is the highest civilian award of the United States. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

There is a lazy stereotype that the control over crime in Las Vegas lies with the Italian mafia.

In fact from the days of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, Las Vegas organised crime has had close ties to Israel from its very establishment as a state, and in recent times Israeli mobster gangs have controlled narcotic distribution in Las Vegas.

Allow me to point out that the first of those two links is to the Jewish publication The Tablet, and the second is to an American Jewish magazine called Forward, and not the British far-right publication of the same name.

Adelson hired a private security company named UC Global, headed by a former Spanish marine named David Morales, to conduct the illegal surveillance for the CIA. As one of subjects of the illegal surveillance, I gave evidence last year to the court case in Madrid in which David Morales, head of UC Global, is criminally charged.

This case seems to ramble on forever, but last week there was a new development as David Morales was charged with forging documents in the case, for which a new trial is opening. He allegedly fabricated emails from the Ecuadorean Ambassador commissioning the spying.

The CIA commissioned the activity from Adelson during the first Trump presidency, but notably the Biden administration condoned this and defended it during the Assange extradition proceedings.

It is yet a further example of the meaningless nature of democracy in uniparty America, of the power and reach of the ultra-wealthy, and of the fascist links between big business and secret state agencies.

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The post The Rot at the Core of “Democracy” appeared first on Craig Murray.

There is a logical fallacy that dominates European neoliberal “thinking” at the moment. It goes like this.

“Hitler had unlimited territorial ambition and proceeded to attempt conquest of all Europe after annexing the Sudetenland. Therefore Putin has unlimited territorial ambition and will proceed to attempt conquest of all Europe after annexing Eastern Ukraine.”

This fallacious argument gives no evidence of Putin’s further territorial ambition. For evidence of Putin’s threat to the UK, Keir Starmer risibly refers to the Salisbury “novichok” affair, perhaps the most pathetic propaganda confection in history.

But even if you were to be so complacent as to accept the official version of events in Salisbury, does an assassination attempt on a double agent credibly indicate a desire by Putin to launch World War 3 or invade the UK?

Hitler’s territorial ambitions were not hidden. His desire for lebensraum and, crucially, his view that the Germans were a superior race who should rule over the inferior races, was plain in print and in speeches.

There is simply no such evidence for wide territorial ambition by Putin. He is not pursuing a crazed Nazi ideology that drives to conquest – or for that matter a Marxist ideology that seeks to overthrow the established order around the world.

The economic alignment project of BRICS is not designed to promote an entirely different economic system, just to rebalance power and flows within the system, or at most to create a parallel system not skewed to the advantage of the United States.

Neither the end of capitalism nor territorial expansion is part of the BRICS project.

There is simply no evidence of Putin having territorial goals beyond Ukraine and the tiny enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is perfectly fair to characterise Putin’s territorial expansion over two decades as limited to the reincorporation of threatened Russian-speaking minority districts in ex-Soviet states.

That it is worth a world war and unlimited dead over who should be mayor of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking city of Lugansk is not entirely plain to me.

The notion that Putin is about to attack Poland or Finland is utter nonsense. The idea that the Russian army, which has struggled to subdue small and corrupt, if Western-backed, Ukraine, has the ability to attack Western Europe itself is plainly impractical.

The internal human rights record of Putin’s Russia is poor, but at this point it is marginally better than that of Zelensky’s Ukraine. For example the opposition parties in Russia are at least allowed to contest elections, albeit on a heavily sloped playing field, whereas in Ukraine they are banned outright.

Still less convincing are the arguments that Russia’s overseas political activities in third countries require massive Western increases in armaments to prepare for war with Russia.

The plain truth is that the Western powers interfere far more in other countries than Russia does, through massive sponsorship of NGOs, journalists and politicians, much of which is open and some of which is covert.

I used to do this myself as a British diplomat. Revelations from USAID or the Integrity Initiative leaks give the public a glimpse into this world.

Yes, Russia does it too, but on a much smaller scale. That this kind of Russian activity indicates a desire for conquest or is a cause for war, is such a shallow argument it is hard to believe in the good faith of those promoting it.

I have also seen Russian military intervention in Syria put forward as evidence that Putin has plans of world conquest.

Russian intervention in Syria prevented for a time its destruction by the West in the same way that Iraq and Libya were destroyed by the West. Russia held back the coming to power of crazed Islamic terrorists, and the massacre of Syria’s minority communities. Those horrors are now unfolding, in part because of the weakening of Russia through the Ukraine war.

But for those nations that destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to argue that Russia’s intervention in Syria shows Putin to be evil, is dishonesty of the highest degree. The United States has had a quarter of Syria under military occupation for over a decade and has been stealing almost all of Syria’s oil.

Pointing at Russia here is devoid of reason.

Strangely, the same “logic” is not applied to Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not argued by neoliberals that his annexations of Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon mean he must have further territorial ambitions. In fact, they even fail to note Netanyahu’s aggressions at all, or portray them as “defensive” – the same argument advanced much more credibly by Putin in Ukraine, but which neoliberals there outright reject.

The economies of Western Europe are being realigned onto a war footing, led by the utterly transformed European Union. The enthusiastic proponents of genocide in Gaza who head the EU now are channelling an atavistic hereditary hatred of Russia.

The foreign policy of the EU is propelled by Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. The fanatical Russophobia these two are spreading, and their undisguised desire to escalate the war in Ukraine, cannot help but remind Russians that they come from nations which were fanatically Nazi.

To Russians this feels a lot like 1941. With Europe in the grip of full-on anti-Russian propaganda, the background to Trump’s attempt to broker a peace deal is troubled and Russia is understandably wary.

The UK continues to play the most unhelpful of roles. They have despatched Morgan Stanley’s Jonathan Powell to advise Zelensky on peace talks. As Blair’s Chief of Staff, Powell played a crucial role in the illegal invasion of Iraq. He was also heavily implicated in the death of David Kelly.

Wherever there is war and money to be made from war, you will find the same ghouls gathering. Those involved in launching the invasion of Iraq should be excluded from public life. Instead Powell is now the UK’s National Security Adviser.

I am not a follower of Putin. The amount of force used to crush Chechnya’s legitimate desire for self-determination was disproportionate, for example. It is naive to believe that you get to be leader of the KGB by being a gentle person.

But Putin is not Hitler. It is only through the blinkers of patriotism that Putin appears to be a worse person than the Western leaders behind massive invasion and death all around the globe, who now seek to extend war with Russia.

Here in the UK, the Starmer government is seeking actively to prolong the war, and is looking for a huge increase in spending on weapons, which always brings kickbacks and future company directorships and consultancies for politicians.

To fund this warmongering, New Labour are cutting spending on the UK’s sick, disabled and pensioners and cutting aid to the starving overseas.

This is a picture of Keir Starmer meeting with Israeli President Herzog, six months after the ICJ interim ruling quoted a statement by Herzog as evidence of genocidal intent.

The Starmer government was voted for by 31% of those who bothered to cast a vote, or 17% of the adult population. It is engaged in wholesale legal persecution of leading British supporters of Palestine, and is actively complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

I see no moral superiority here.

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My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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The post The Moral Balance appeared first on Craig Murray.

We were searching for a site in the northern Bekaa valley recently bombed by Israel. Hadi knew near which village it was located but, as we drove between large expanses of fertile, well-cultivated fields, it was plain his information was vague.

We pulled up at a garage to ask the way. Lebanon has not gone the way of Western economies in making consumers perform the very service for which they are paying, and in Lebanese service stations they still have attendants. A scruffily dressed old man sat on the front step of a dilapidated and very basic kiosk constructed of concrete blocks. He came over to the driver’s window.

First Hadi ordered fuel, and the old man filled the car, washed the windscreen and took payment. His hair was white and his beard short, but not from the obsessively neat trimming that is universal in Beirut. When he returned with change, Hadi asked him if he knew where to find the bomb site.

The old man replied with questions. I did not understand the Arabic, but from the body language there was a marked shift in the interaction between the two, from the man serving Hadi to the man interrogating Hadi. He lost his shuffle, notably straightened his back and stood taller.

They were talking through the driver’s window, and with a very definite movement the man moved forward and rested his forearm on the sill, intruding his head into the vehicle assertively. He looked at me with searching eyes, and looked at Niels sitting in the back seat with his camera equipment. His questioning of Hadi became terse.

I looked into his eyes. He had the distinct, piercing gaze that I used to note in the special forces officers I occasionally came across in my Foreign Office career. He then walked away from the car, took out his phone and made a call.

After a while he handed the phone to Hadi, who looked both serious and worried. Hadi listened, handed the phone back to the attendant, said goodbye and thank you, and reversed out of the garage. Hadi told us we were not permitted to go to the bomb site.

We had just encountered Hezbollah. The important thing to understand in this encounter is that it is not that the man was an undercover Hezbollah operative posing as a garage attendant. He was a garage attendant who was a Hezbollah operative.

Hezbollah is not an organisation comparable to the IRA, in which a relatively small number of members operated within the context of a community in which they enjoyed very large sympathy. Hezbollah operates in a community in which almost everybody is an activist and pretty well every adult is prepared to pick up a gun or an RPG and knows how to use it.

This is a key to understanding how Hezbollah became the only military force that has ever been able to defeat the IDF in pitched ground warfare. In this respect, Hezbollah’s crucial advantage compared to Hamas is that it has had practical access to weapons deliveries to build its arsenal, whereas Hamas has been greatly constricted by Israel’s control of goods entering Gaza.

Ending the weapons supply to Hezbollah has been a key US/Israeli strategic objective this last year, and they have in large part achieved it. I shall return to that.

On a personal level, this encounter with the garage attendant was fairly typical of my interactions with Hezbollah in my four months in Lebanon. They had detained me in a rather frightening manner on first encounter, and in general treated me with a suspicion which is understandable given my British diplomatic background.

I saw literally thousands of buildings in Lebanon that Israel had destroyed. The most haunting part of the entire experience was the frequent event of finding the clothing and toys of small children among the rubble: I still have bad dreams about it.

However this was the second of the two occasions when we were able to identify that Israel had struck an actual Hezbollah military installation, rather than a civilian building. Both times Hezbollah prevented me from going to see. In terms of maintaining the security of the military site, this strikes me as shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Having been denied access to that particular bomb site, we drove on into the village and met with some locals Hadi knew. In this small village there had been over 70 Israeli bombings, 8 of them since the ceasefire.

They took me to one large house which had been completely destroyed, a pile of rubble spread over a large area. Twelve members of the same family had been killed in this house, seven of them children. The head of the family had left in late afternoon to go to the butcher’s to buy dinner, when his home and family was destroyed behind him.

The explosion was so enormous that the body of one of the children was found in the neighbouring orchard of olive trees, clean across the road, about seventy yards away. Many of the olive trees had been shredded and debris from the house was strewn across the field and beyond.

The next house was not greatly damaged, but there a father and his two daughters were killed by the shock wave as they sat on their terrace drinking coffee.

There are so many important points to make about Hezbollah, but let me start with these three.

The first is that support for Hezbollah among their own Shia communities in Lebanon is extremely strong. They are far more than a military organisation. They are Lebanon’s largest legitimate political party.

At the 2022 election Hezbollah received 19.9% of the vote, and their close ally the Amal Movement received another 10.5%. The party with the second highest vote behind Hezbollah, the neo-fascist Lebanese Forces, received 11.6% of the vote.

[The Lebanese Forces political party should not be confused with the Lebanese Armed Forces, with which it has no connection. The Lebanese Armed Forces remain under effective US control and fired not a shot against the Israeli invasion and occupation. But like so much in Lebanon, the situation should not be simplified and the majority of the rank and file of the LAF are Shia Muslims sympathetic to Hezbollah, and a large majority of the rank and file of any denomination would be happy to fight the Israelis were they ever allowed to do so.]

Under Lebanon’s extraordinary constitution, Lebanese Forces with 11.6% received 19 seats in parliament while Hezbollah with 19.9% received 15 seats. Of which again more later.

But when it comes to political legitimacy, it is worth noting that the combined Hezbollah/Amal vote percentage is equal to the Labour Party percentage at the last General Election in the UK. There is no argument that Hezbollah are not a legitimate democratic political force.

The second point is that it is absolutely wrong to see Lebanon in purely sectarian terms. Hezbollah has supporters and allies across all religions in Lebanon and, in a country where politics is officially and constitutionally organised on religious lines (a “confessional” constitution), there are minor parties of all religions aligned with Hezbollah, of which several had ministers until appointment of the new Cabinet last month (of which again, more later).

Perhaps a quarter of those at the funeral for Nasrallah were not Shia Muslims.

The third point is that Hezbollah is much more than a political party with a military wing. In a country in which central government has all but collapsed (Lebanon has no income tax), Hezbollah provides hospitals, schools, banking, pensions and welfare benefits.

When Niels and I witnessed refugee returns to evacuated areas following the “ceasefire”, a very substantial percentage of the population were waving Hezbollah flags or Lebanese flags, with some waving both. Hezbollah is an integral part of Lebanese society, entirely born within the country out of the resistance to Israel’s 1982 occupation, and is in no sense alien or anti-Lebanese.

The elephant in the room is that in the UK and other Western states, this highly complex social and political movement is designated as a terrorist organisation in its entirety. Ironically, the justification for this given in Westminster in 2019 was that Hezbollah was destabilising the Middle East and prolonging the conflict in Syria – where the very Western powers that proscribed Hezbollah have just assisted another proscribed terrorist group into power.

The truth is that terrorist proscription by the NATO powers of organisations in the Middle East is simply a tool for taking whatever decisions are expedient at that moment to promote the interests of apartheid Israel. The “terrorist acts” of Hezbollah that led to proscription of the entire organisation in 2019 consisted of fighting ISIS, Al Qaeda and Al Nusra in Syria.

We all suffer from the temptation of assuming that others share our prejudices. I assume that like me, many in the West find it difficult to empathise with Hezbollah because of its Islamic philosophy and – I know this is petty – appearance.

Hassan Nasrallah was the most important and steadfast leader of resistance to the mass murderous Zionist project of the last forty years. He was also, by all accounts, a hugely charismatic figure to Arabic speakers. But his very appearance made it easy for him to be represented to Western audiences as an alienating, even evil, character, due to the state-promoted Islamophobia in the Western world which has been universally projected in the media this last quarter century.

But here honesty is required. I myself do not like to see political leaders with a religious function and am simply against theocratic rule. I am entirely in favour of freedom of religion, but utterly opposed to religion ruling any state.

There is an element of smoke and mirrors here. In the glorious mosaic of Lebanon, Hezbollah exist jumbled with those of other sects and religions, and in practice rub along very well.

Nasrallah spoke like all committed Islamists of his desire to seeing a united Muslim rule over Muslim lands, with the state under firmly religious leadership and Sharia law. But in practice Hezbollah are highly tolerant.

In those large areas of Lebanon where they both have physical military control and dominate the elected local authority, Hezbollah do not ban the sale of alcohol by the Christian minority or enforce hair covering, even on Muslims.

This is an area where my prejudices were disabused. I did not expect to find this.

All this caused me some difficulty in Lebanon. I was frequently asked whether I supported Hezbollah. As I was spending much of my time in those areas attacked by Israel – which largely are the Hezbollah areas – in general the question came from Hezbollah supporters.

I would always reply that I supported absolutely the right of occupied people to conduct armed resistance, and the duty to do everything possible to prevent genocide. Both are established principles of international law. But I did not support Hezbollah per se, and would not vote for it were I Lebanese, because it is an openly Islamist organisation and I am opposed to theocratic rule and religious legal codes.

Being in Lebanon did however allow me to overcome some of the gulf of my cultural understanding. The practice of calling those killed by Israel “martyrs” and frequently referring to them as such in conversation, is alien to a Western ear where the word has largely outdated religious connotations.

When you live amongst a community where everybody has friends or relatives who have been killed in the decades-long aggression of Israel, the revering of the fallen as martyrs, and their omnipresence in everyday thought, starts to make much more sense.

Similarly to Western eyes the widespread display of large images of the “martyrs” is peculiar. These are along every roadside and atop every ruin. There are always posters at the site where the person was killed, and frequently dozens of other posters of that individual at sites of importance to them.

I overcame my incomprehension of this practice by thinking of it in reference to my own culture, that these were posters of people put up to mark where they fought and died to defend their wee bit hill and glen. In those terms it made sense to me.

I am extremely conscious that religious faith has played a very positive role in both Palestine and South Lebanon in enabling people to endure the unendurable and to maintain Resistance against impossible odds. But it is not possible to ignore the fact that there remain substantial differences between my world view and an Islamist world view.

This has been brought into urgent focus by the attitude of many Sunni Muslims to the overthrow of Assad in Syria. In my world view, this has been a disaster for the Palestinians. It has seriously and perhaps permanently damaged the flow of arms and other resources to Hezbollah, the Palestinians’ most important ally. And it has enabled the Greater Israel project to expand substantially into Syria.

Try now to imagine that you are a Sunni Muslim scholar who believes that only by becoming Sunni Muslim can people obey God. You believe that the benefit to mankind of bringing Sunni Muslim rule to most of Syria outweighs the loss of part of Syria to Israel. You believe that Palestinian martyrs killed by Israel are going immediately to Heaven anyway, so in spiritual terms there is no real loss to the “martyrs”.

That really is the position of many of the leaders of the Saudi- and Gulf-sponsored Muslim religious community. Just like there are a great many shades of Christian, there are a great many shades of Islam and there are many Muslims, including Sunni Muslims, who would not share that viewpoint. But to a religious Islamist it makes perfect sense.

I cannot find it again because it was deep in replies on a thread, but I had a very interesting exchange with a Muslim intellectual on Twitter on precisely this topic. He accused me of “orientalism” for denigrating an Eastern spiritual viewpoint in favour of a Western secularist narrative, in seeing the installation of HTS as a reverse for Palestine. He pointed out that Hamas, a fellow Sunni Islamist movement, had welcomed the triumph of HTS.

The exchange was welcome for its honesty and intellectual acuity. I said I did not believe Edward Said would have welcomed the accompanying expansion of Israel into Syria or cutting off of supplies to Hezbollah. He called in a nephew of Said to bolster his view that my viewpoint is orientalist.

I have thought about this deeply; I do not think my viewpoint can fairly be described as orientalist. The truth is that all mainstream Western thought would have entirely concurred with the view that the expansion of rule by a particular religious sect was more important than associated temporal reverses that did not affect the faith of the people: but Western thought was exactly that 500 years ago.

I do not see my view as orientalist. I see it as anti-medievalist.

The fall of the Assad regime was deeply desired by Western neoliberals and Zionists in order to replace it with a Western democratic model, and they are desperately pretending that is what they have got in al-Jolani. As atrocities against Shia, Alaouites and Christians in Syria mount, the one thing that cannot be disputed is that al-Jolani is steadfastly Zionist, as he allows Israel daily to occupy more of Syria and destroy more of its infrastructure, without a single shot fired in response.

There is no doubt that the position of the Resistance to an expansionist apartheid Israeli colonial project has worsened considerably since my arrival in Lebanon in October. While Israel could not progress a ground offensive, the almost total absence of any air defences for Lebanon meant it could murder and destroy with impunity from the air.

Israel embarked on a campaign of devastation of purely civilian areas by aerial bombardment. Of that I am an eye witness. I can say from personal inspection that the claims that the tens of thousands of homes destroyed had any military use are a massive lie.

With no defence against a relentless bombing campaign, and with most of their leadership eliminated, Hezbollah were obliged to accede to a suicidally unbalanced “ceasefire agreement”. It is plain on the actual face of the agreement that only one side will cease fire.

All Lebanese groups are to cease fire without qualification whereas Israel is only to cease “offensive” operations. Israel of course claims all its attacks as defensive. This is absolute nonsense, but despite over 500 violations of the ceasefire agreement, killing hundreds of people, Israel has not been held accountable because Hezbollah acceded to a ceasefire guaranteed by a “Mechanism” which is chaired by a United States General.

I think my discussion on this point with the UN Spokesman in Lebanon was extremely important, especially where he explicitly states that the Ceasefire Agreement was drafted by the USA. This link takes you to the key point in the interview.

The members of the “Mechanism” overseeing the ceasefire are the United States, France, Israel (sic), and the Lebanese government of General Aoun, a total US puppet.

Furthermore while the Ceasefire Agreement provides for a zone south of the Litani river from which Hezbollah must remove its weapons, it also calls for Hezbollah disarmament throughout the whole of Lebanon, which the Israelis and Americans have used to justify numerous continuing Israeli strikes in the Bekaa Valley, the Syrian border and even Beirut.

Hezbollah are not a formal party to the Agreement but it was sanctioned by them before signature. Personally I find it difficult to imagine that Nasrallah would ever have accepted such a position.

At the same time, Hezbollah’s domestic political position has been also greatly weakened. They were obliged to accept effectively the US imposition of General Aoun as President, which they had been resisting for over two years. They also then found themselves accepting his nomination of the openly anti-Hezbollah Nawaf Salam as Prime Minister.

I referred earlier to Lebanon’s “confessional” constitutional arrangements, and said I would give more detail. The President must be a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite.

But it does not stop there. The governing agreement specifies the division of ministerial positions too. Not only between Sunni, Shia and Christian, but to include several other groupings, of which the best known is Druze and there are others, particularly various specific sects of Christianity.

Hezbollah has operated through the Amal movement in providing the Shiite ministers, but it is a key fact that it has always had important allies among Christian anti-Israeli occupation factions who have filled important ministerial posts.

The loss of Hezbollah power within Lebanon is to be found within the detail of all these ministries. In claiming to appoint a “technocratic”, apolitical administration, Aoun and Salam have in fact excluded most of Hezbollah’s support.

It is in practice almost impossible to find a Shiite in Lebanon who is not pro-Hezbollah, but Aoun and Salam have certainly done their best. More pertinently, they have almost totally excluded Hezbollah and anti-Zionist sympathisers from the ministerial representation of Sunni and the assorted minority and smaller Christian groups, while simultaneously boosting the de facto influence of the fascist Lebanese Forces sympathisers.

Hezbollah has not been this politically weak in the Lebanese institutions for 20 years, which is why the show of mass popular support at Nasrallah’s funeral was so important to them. However, given Lebanon’s electoral system with its deliberate Christian bias, piling up popular support is of little use to Hezbollah electorally. There are Christian MPs in parliament elected with under 500 votes, while Hezbollah could put on another 100,000 votes without significantly increasing their representation.

Crucially the “Ministerial statement” of the aims of the new government excluded resistance to Israel as an objective – a key change – and specified the state’s monopoly on carrying arms, a reference to the full disarmament of Hezbollah.

Finally, of course, Hezbollah’s archenemies, HTS, are now in power in Damascus. Hezbollah fought off repeated Al Qaeda/Al Nusra/ISIS attempts to invade Lebanon and also intervened against these forces within Syria. Al-Jolani coming to power represents a major disruption to Hezbollah’s supply lines from Iran.

The US and Israel are attempting to turn up this pressure by frequent aerial attacks on border crossings from Syria and on Hezbollah individuals within Lebanon. Recently they took the additional measure of banning pilgrimage flights to and from Iran, which greatly angered the Shia community and was aimed at cutting off a route for physical supplies of cash.

What is uncertain is what secret accommodations General Aoun may have reached with Hezbollah, over whether their physical disarmament throughout Lebanon under SCR 1701 and the Ceasefire Agreement is a genuine process or a show. Politically, Aoun and Salam have strongly planted their banner for real disarmament of Hezbollah.

What appears beyond dispute is that the Israelis receive a continued flow of intelligence from Lebanese sources on Hezbollah personnel movements and sites, and the US-sanctioned intense Israeli bombing campaign shows no sign of abating.

We can add to this sad fact that Israel was able to use the Ceasefire Agreement to occupy parts of Southern Lebanon which Hezbollah had successfully defended during the war, and that Israel has destroyed by demolition thousands of homes and other civilian buildings under cover of the ceasefire to add to those destroyed during the war.

Indeed Israel demolishes more buildings in Southern Lebanon every day still, and has now destroyed over 90,000 buildings in Lebanon in total. As I predicted, Israel is building 5 permanent military outposts in Southern Lebanon and has made plain it has no intention of leaving.

The US puppet government in Beirut, like the US puppet government in Damascus, plainly has no intention of any realistic action against de facto Israeli annexation of its land. While Hezbollah has signalled a reversion to past tactics of guerilla warfare, I have serious doubts about both its current capacity, both political and military.

Of the enduring heroism of the people of South Lebanon I have no doubt, and I also have no doubt that as Israel is maintaining an illegal occupation, their legal right of armed resistance in unimpeachable.

It is however foolish not to acknowledge that with Israel expanding into Lebanon and Syria, with US puppet regimes in Syria and Damascus, with genocide about to restart in Gaza and spreading into the West Bank, and with an apparently crazed level of open Zionist support from Trump that is in fact only more honest than the pro-Genocide positions of the large majority of Western governments, the current position looks bleak indeed.

The only grounds for hope is that I cannot imagine that the people of the region are going to tolerate Israeli collaborationist regimes in Damascus, Beirut and Ramallah much longer. Indeed with slight variations you might say the same of the entire Arab world.

I hope you will forgive this being a very personal post as I try to make sense of my experiences and assimilate much new knowledge into my view of the world.

I went to Lebanon knowing literally nobody in the country, and with an introduction to just one person who helped us through immigration, but whose assistance thereafter did not work out. I did so accompanied by Niels as cinematographer, despite my never really having worked in video before, and my not being very accomplished at it. On top of which we had no financial resources except for our crowdfunding, which was not going well.

I now realise just how deeply ignorant I was about Lebanon before arriving.

The truth is, I wanted to go to Gaza but could find no way to get in. I had then had applied to Israel for the required permission from COGAT to enter the West Bank, but had been refused. So Lebanon was the one place under Israeli aggression where I could actually hope to get in to document and report on Israeli atrocities.

This venture was also born out of a rather desperate feeling that I must try to do something. I had been involved in the genesis of the ICJ case and in international campaigning for Palestine, but felt so helpless watching murdered children in Gaza every day on social media, that I felt compelled to do more.

With war against the Israeli invaders raging in Lebanon, I admit I also had a compulsion to share at least some of the danger of those putting their lives at stake. In truth, I felt something of a fraud to be writing about it from home if I was not prepared to experience it.

Well, at times Lebanon really was dangerous for us, but I am extremely proud of what Niels and I achieved. The six mini-documentaries reached millions of people and I think genuinely informed the Western public. I think the interview with the UN was extremely revealing and important and wish I had been able to get a rather wider audience for it. On top of which we produced numerous shorter video pieces, written articles and interviews with alternative media outlets across the globe, as well as doing a lot of Arab mainstream media.

In the end we had to leave because it proved simply not possible to meet the substantial costs of the venture by individual subscriptions and donations, and I ran out of money. It was a bold experiment in being able to do the kind of real, on-the-ground journalism that legacy media has abandoned, but to continue would require more fundraising ability or organisational ability than I possess.

There is no doubt that we suffered – and still suffer – massive social media suppression, and this limitation of reach is what crippled fundraising efforts. Essentially we were asking the same people for donations again and again, which is both impractical and, I admit, I found personally difficult and undignified.

So I shall continue reporting from my base in Scotland, travelling the world as occasion demands. My knowledge has been hugely expanded by my time in Beirut. I will now largely revert to written rather than video format. The struggle for justice goes on, and my commitment to it remains.

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From: Peter Kwasniewski from “Tradition and Sanity” traditionsanity@substack.com
Date: Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 9:04 AM
Subject: Pius X to Francis: From Modernism Expelled to Modernism Enthroned (Part 3: Conclusion)
To: lifetreemail@gmail.com

Pius X to Francis: From Modernism Expelled to Modernism Enthroned (Part 3: Conclusion)
Examples of Ratzingerian dialectics and Bergoglian evolutionism
PETER KWASNIEWSKI
FEB 13

LISTEN TO POST · 22:25
In Part 1, I looked at the origins of Modernism and formulated a definition, with the help of Cardinal Mercier. In Part 2, I traced its fundamental problem back to a false philosophy that undermines supernatural faith in a definite divine revelation and discussed how the Oath Against Modernism was dismantled by a pope, Paul VI, who seemed suspiciously eager to embrace at least some of the ideas condemned by it. In this concluding part, I will look at some examples of how the evolutionism characteristic of the Modernist view plays out in the current pope and in his predecessor. Lastly, I will connect the dots between what I shall call Black, Scarlet, and Lavender Modernisms.

Francis as doctrinal evolutionist

One of the characteristic features of Modernism is its reliance on an evolutionary model of thought, in which truth is not static but dynamic: the Church does not possess the Truth at any given moment, but is ever searching for it, and ever stumbling upon new aspects of Truth that can even amount to a reversal of what the Church used to hold as true.¹

We can see this approach vividly in Pope Francis, who maintains that the Church was actually wrong for 2,000 years in her support of the use of the death penalty, since we “now know” that the death penalty is contrary to human dignity, and therefore always and everywhere inadmissible (but this can be true only if it is per se malum, something evil in and of itself; for if it were not, it would sometimes be admissible). Or rather, it is perhaps more accurate to say that for a Modernist, the Church at a more primitive period of the development of human consciousness was right to promote the death penalty — it was bound to look legitimate to culturally immature people — but now in our stage of higher consciousness, which involves the apprehension of universal human rights, the brotherhood of all men, the non-divine source of political authority, and the universal benevolence of the Creator-God, we can see that the death penalty is wrong. Or so it may be for our particular phase of consciousness; evolution could lead us once more in a surprising direction, you never know.

Another example is the false teaching of the eighth chapter of Amoris Laetitia, which overturns the hitherto unbroken exclusion from reception of the sacraments of Catholics who are living in an objective state of adultery. The Modernist, however, would say that notions of mortal sin, objective sinfulness, worthiness, preconditions for sacramental reception, have all “evolved” under the influence of an ever-more comprehensive grasp of God’s merciful love, which “stops at nothing” (as they would say) and “is never earned or lost by our actions,” etc. Note that there is always a grain of truth in the midst of these errors, for otherwise they would have not the slightest plausibility for any intellect, however dim.

The universalism espoused by Francis in Abu Dhabi, in Singapore, and in many other places is yet another example: the Church once taught that it alone possesses and teaches the true religion given to us by God for our salvation, but “now we know” that God speaks to man through all religions and goes beyond them all, so each is a path to salvation for those who follow it sincerely. At best, Jesus is the “privileged path” of salvation, as Bishop Robert Barron said.² One can detect here the influence of the subjective, emotional, and pragmatic theory of religion Pius X diagnosed in Pascendi.

One could multiply such examples of modern teachings, present already before the Council but emerging into the open afterwards, that bear this evolutionary stamp. Br. André-Marie writes:

Where Kant made all things static, Hegel introduced a dynamic element into his metaphysics (like Heraclitus). For Hegel, all things evolve in the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. History, truth, thought, indeed all reality is explained by this principle. In the history of thought, the Hegelian dialectic gives rise to “Historical Consciousness,” an acute awareness of change as a constant, describing all reality as in continual development. It further produces “Historicism,” the theory in which general laws of historical development are the determinant of events. In this theory, all things are subject to progressive evolutionary processes.³

Cornelis Jacobsz, Dialectica (source)
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Hegelian dialectic in Ratzinger

Indeed, we can see how even Benedict XVI’s theory of the “hermeneutic of continuity” imports or retains an element of Hegelianism. In the famous address he gave to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, he spoke not of a “hermeneutic of continuity” (although he used that expression at other times),⁴ but of a “hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us.”

As Brian McCall explains, this is not quite as promising as it might sound:

Benedict XVI is arguing that the object of belief can change over time as long as the Church remains the same subject proposing those developing beliefs. It seeks revisions of teaching over time through a process that keeps the structure of the Church in place.⁵

So, although Benedict in the same speech rejects what he calls the “hermeneutic of rupture” that makes of the Church during and after the Council a totally different entity with totally different beliefs from the Church before the Council, he goes on to say that in regard to more contingent matters such as the Church’s relationship with the modern world, there is in fact a blend of rupture and continuity — certain ruptures are necessary in order to secure a deeper continuity, as it were. Or in his words: “It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists.”

Let me give some examples of how this Hegelian dialectic works in Ratzinger.

1. In his book Principles of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger called the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, a “countersyllabus” to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors.⁶ The Thesis is Pius IX’s Anti-Liberalism; the Antithesis is modern Liberalism; the dialectical process is the struggle to integrate modernity into Catholicism; the resulting Synthesis is a Higher Liberalism that is somehow also Catholic.
2. In the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and the accompanying letter to bishops, Con Grande Fiducia, we have a Thesis: the Tridentine Roman rite; an Antithesis: the Novus Ordo; a dialectical process: “mutual enrichment”; and an eventual Synthesis: a future Roman rite that is both old and new, with the supposed “best qualities” of each.⁷
3. In the position Benedict XVI takes about heaven, hell, and purgatory in the encyclical letter Spe Salvi, we can reconstruct the latent structure this way. Thesis: the historically dominant view that the human race is a “massa damnata,” in other words, a race justly destined for perdition due to original and actual sin, from which a minority is saved. Antithesis: the universalism of Origen, David Bentley Hart, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Bishop Barron: either everyone will be saved, or at least it’s reasonable to hope that that will be the case. The dialectical process is the ever-widening inclusiveness of salvific grace. The final Synthesis: most people are saved, though the few who are terribly wicked, like Hitler and Stalin, are lost; they cannot sit at the same heavenly banquet.⁸
4. Regarding human evolution, the Thesis is that man was created directly by God and woman by God from the first man, and the whole human race takes its origin from this pair. The Antithesis is that human beings are nothing but a cosmic accident, the unplanned outcome of material particles interacting by chance. The Synthesis is theistic evolution, where God somehow upholds and directs the random material process until at some point He intervenes to establish “first humans,” whose parents were non-humans.

We see this kind of dialectical pattern throughout Joseph Ratzinger’s writings; it is very true that as different as he is from Cardinal Walter Kasper, they share a profound core of Germanic philosophy but apply it in different ways. Kasper, for example, describes the shift from the apostolic period to the post-apostolic period of the early Church councils as a “continuity in discontinuity,” where the original kerygma or message of salvation was translated into Greek categories of thought in order to be “adapted to the mentality of the day”; and he says that this is what every age must do: translate the Gospel into a new language, discarding no longer relevant or meaningful concepts and adopting novel ones to fit the requirements of the times.

Now, I have spent a good deal of time talking about the history, personalities, and philosophical method of Modernism because if we do not see these things clearly, we will not be able to recognize the wide range of forms — at times, sophisticated and subtle — that Modernism assumes in our own day. There are out-and-out Modernists like Kasper, but there are also many who have been influenced or formed by Modernism perhaps without even realizing it, or who believe they can somehow “salvage” or “rehabilitate” its “positive aspects” while still maintaining Catholic orthodoxy and tradition (Ratzinger, I think, would fall into this category, as would most so-called Catholic conservatives).

As I have been at pains to show, Modernism is not a tidy, closed system that must be held or rejected in full; rather, it is a mish-mash of ideas about how faith and religion operate, how salvation occurs, how Scripture is formed, how dogmatic definitions emerge and are refined, how the law of development of thought — the expansion and refinement of the moral conscience — compels the modernization of human beings and their institutions, including the Church. It’s unlikely that one will find all of these views equally in all who might be called Modernists or semi-Modernists; it’s even more unlikely that everyone who holds such views will be aware of their origins and their implications.

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Three waves of Modernists

Nevertheless, there are those individuals who are very well aware of what they are doing and how they intend to determine the future of the Church. I suggest we think of them in three categories: the Black Modernists of 120 years ago; the Scarlet Modernists of 60 years ago; and the Lavender Modernists of today.

The Black Modernists of 120 years ago were men of the cloth, like Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, who embraced rationalism, scientism, historicism, revisionism, and relativism. These men and their writings and conferences made it possible for an attitude of distrust, suspicion, and contempt toward tradition to make headway in the Church. Their views prompted a growing restlessness for Church reform and often for liturgical reform — a movement that Pius XI and Pius XII tried to moderate and placate in their pontificates, with mixed results.⁹

It was John XXIII who, though personally of a more traditional piety, made the fatal mistake of convening an ecumenical council at a time when the neo-Modernist agenda had picked up steam once again (we can see this by examining mid-twentieth-century theologians like Rahner, Congar, Chenu, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Häring, De Lubac, and Ratzinger, among many others), and then compounded his error by allowing these periti and their bishops to cancel out the preparatory documents of the Council, staging a “coup” that determined its fundamental direction and cast of mind.

At this point, sixty years out from the end of Vatican II, we could speak of Scarlet Modernists, in the sense of bishops and cardinals of that period who, usually of impeccable personal morality and a strong sense of duty, were sympathetic to more progressive or liberal points of view at the Council — and even more can we speak of bishops and cardinals consecrated or created in the decades immediately after the Council, who would most fully implement its vision, normalizing milder forms of the ideas condemned in Pius X’s Pascendi — a version that might be called “soft Modernism,” which is the theological soundtrack to “beige Catholicism” (to use a phrase of Bishop Barron’s).

This Modernism is, in fact, nothing less than the Creed of the Anti-Church, the operative principles of the churchmen and ecclesiastical structures that are masquerading as the Church of Christ and living parasitically off of her historical capital and financial assets. We can recognize the Anti-Church by its self-contradictory traits: the dogmatic undogmatism, the rigid laxism, the exclusive inclusiveness, the systematic antischolasticism and eclecticism, the anti-traditional spirit that has by now practically become a substitute tradition, since it has been around long enough to win a certain veneer of respectability (note that the politicized canonizations of several Vatican II popes were a crucial step in transmitting the pretense of divine approval).

Intellectual errors followed by ecclesiastical restructuring — including the episcopate-destroying pursuit of “collegiality” and “synodality” — and the betrayal of the sacred liturgy have led to the moral vacuum, or worse, the demon-infested vacuum, that we now know as the clerical sexual abuse scandal, which it would be more proper to call the “abuse pandemic.” The sexual abuse epitomized in former Cardinal McCarrick and now sustained by his well-placed collaborators in the USCCB and at the Vatican is of course bound up with the vice of sodomy, which has always flared up in the worst periods of Church history: times when knowledge, virtue, and commitment to Christ had dissipated, when the Faith was like a tiny spark nurtured by a faithful remnant, out of which reform and renewal eventually came by God’s great mercy.

This is why I speak of today’s “Lavender Modernists”: they have much in common with the two preceding types, the Black and the Scarlet, but they are altogether worse, for they combine intellectual infidelity, institutional ambition, liturgical corruption, and moral depravity. And in this way, they are the promulgators and precipitants of the Great Apostasy.

The ultimate model and cause of fidelity: Jesus Christ fastened to the Cross; behind him, pious Aeneas carries his father from burning Troy; in the foreground, dogs serve as symbols of loyalty — Jacob Matham, after design by Hendrick Goltzius (source)
The response of faithful Catholics

How, then, do we combat this multi-generational parasite of Modernism? In a time of such confusion and wickedness, one thing is absolutely clear: we must hold fast to the settled and articulate tradition of the Church:

in her doctrine, which we find in all of the ecumenical Councils that taught dogmatically and in the Catechism of Trent and all the good catechisms of the past;
in our moral life, according to the constant teaching and example of the saints;
above all, in the Church’s authentic age-old rites of worship, be they Eastern or Western.
This is what we are asked to do: remain faithful to the inheritance we have received, prior to the period of anarchy. The one and only safe path is to stick to what we know to be certainly true; to implore God’s help and intervention daily; to entrust ourselves to the Virgin Mary; and never to abandon the Church of Christ for imaginary greener pastures elsewhere. What good could any move away from the Catholic Church accomplish? It would only remove good people from what they need the most and where they are most needed — the visible Body of Christ — and would only contribute to the growing anarchy.

What is needed is steadfast attachment to the Bride of Christ in spite of her marred countenance on earth, unswerving loyalty to her eternal Head, total acceptance of the doctrine He entrusted to her in its integrity. In short, we need to do what St. Pius X taught us to do over a hundred years ago. Truth is perpetually youthful, with a radiant countenance of beauty and delight; it is error that grows prematurely old, gnarled, and hideous.

There is more need than ever for the counterwitness of Catholics who speak the truth with love, and live it with joy. These will be the torchbearers who bring the light of the Faith into the remaining decades of the twenty-first century and beyond, while the Modernist sect (for that it what it is) implodes upon itself. After all, as our Lord said in no uncertain terms: Veritas liberabit vos, the truth will set you free (Jn 8:32). He Himself is that truth — Ego sum via, et veritas, et vita (Jn 14:6) — and His Church is the “pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).

Because of the flight from God that began with Adam’s rebellion and worms its way into the children of Eve, we will not be surprised if the world prefers the slavery of subjectivism to the truth that sets us free: “The time is coming when people will not endure sound doctrine, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Tim 3:3–4). Surely it is not too much to ask of loyal Catholics that they not follow suit; that, instead, they seek out, study, and promote sound doctrine in all faith and humility; that they turn away from fashionable modern myths to embrace a heritage of perennial truths; that they accumulate teachers who, unashamed to be lowly pupils in the school of Christ, feed upon every word that comes from the mouth of God, and nourish their disciples with the same life-giving food.

A sober examination of the Church on earth at this time discloses the existence of a major “schism.” Yet, contrary to the propaganda of the progressives, it is not faithful and traditional Catholics who are in schism, but those members of the hierarchy and of the laity who, under the intoxicating influence of Modernism, have abandoned the rock of truth and the ark of salvation. We cannot expect them to be humbly admitting their errors and repenting of their sins. This, surely, is an apocalyptic storm from which only an omnipotent God can deliver us, in answer to the prayers He calls forth from our weary but unvanquished souls. As Archbishop Viganò says:

The Church is shrouded in the darkness of modernism, but the victory belongs to Our Lord and His Bride. We desire to continue to profess the perennial faith of the Church in the face of the roaring evil that besieges her. We desire to keep vigil with her and with Jesus, in this new Gethsemane of the end times; to pray and do penance in reparation for the many offenses caused to them…. We know…that even the “synthesis of all heresies” represented by Modernism and its updated conciliar version can never definitively obscure the splendor of the Bride of Christ, but only for the brief period of the eclipse that Providence, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed, to draw from it a greater good.¹⁰

Our growth in holiness through trials, our recommitment to prayer, our study and proclamation of the truth, our grateful adherence to all that God has lavished upon us in our Catholic Tradition — may all this be the evidence in our own lives that He has indeed drawn from the crisis a greater good.

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1
For a superb treatment of the defined dogmatic truths to which Modernism is opposed, see Lamont and Pierantoni, Defending the Faith, 103–13, 268–69.

2
See “Is Jesus Christ the ‘privileged way’ to salvation—or the only way?,” LifeSiteNews, December 17, 2018.

3
“What Did St. Pius X Mean When He Called Modernism ‘the Synthesis of All Heresies’?,” Catholicism.org, September 9, 2007.

4
For documentation, see “The Ongoing Saga of ‘the Hermeneutic of Continuity,’” New Liturgical Movement, November 26, 2013—written at a time when I still believed that Francis might continue in the same line as Benedict, and also that Benedict’s own line was unobjectionable. The passage of time together with further study has clarified much.

5
McCall, A Voice in the Wilderness, 109.

6
“If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text [Gaudium et Spes] as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus…. [T]he Syllabus established a line of demarcation against the determining forces of the nineteenth century: against the scientific and political world view of liberalism. In the struggle against modernism this twofold delimitation was ratified and strengthened…. Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789” (Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987], 381–82).

7
See my lecture “Beyond Summorum Pontificum: The Work of Retrieving the Tridentine Heritage,” Rorate Caeli, July 14, 2021.

8
See the Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi (November 30, 2007), nn. 44–46; cf. my article “On Hell: Clarity Is Mercy in an Age of ‘Dare We Hope,’” OnePeterFive, August 7, 2019.

9
Modernists were not uniformly in favor of liturgical reform or experimentation. Since their concern was to deny the literal meaning of dogmas and to emphasize subjective religious and ethical experience, it was easy enough for them to revel in the religious symbolism the traditional rites provided. At the same time, Modernism’s general evolutionary framework, in which mankind’s present condition and future state are seen as superior to the past, readily lends itself to liturgical aggiornamento. Ironically, we see in the official policy of the Society of St. Pius X an inversion of the Modernist problem: the focus is placed so strongly on “doctrine” that liturgical deformation, such as the Pius XII Holy Week (a trial run for the Novus Ordo), is accepted without protest. It’s as if they maintain that a pope can be an absolute monarch with no responsibilities to the Church’s tradition of worship, as long as dogma is untouched; he could create a new liturgy de novo and it would have to be accepted if no doctrinal objections could be made to it. Such is the essence of liturgical nominalism and voluntarism; and such a view is not Catholic.

10
A Voice in the Wilderness, 157; 256.

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