Audio version by author above:

Some years ago, an Irishman by the name of Francis Corden bequeathed to me many books, among them were thirteen books of Irish phrases which go by the title of Travelers from an Antique Land. Francis died ten years ago on August 15th, 2016, the feast of Mary’s Assumption into heaven. He said the rosary every day and attended the Latin Mass. He and his brother Bernard, both bachelors, lived in a nice, exquisite, little town named Tryon, in the foothills of North Carolina. When Francis was in his early twenties, around the year 1955, he recited the Pioneer’s Prayer, giving up alcohol in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He died sober, giving him about sixty-one years of sobriety at the time of his death. Your author got sober that same year on January the 6th, the Feast of the Three Kings. One of my last letters to Francis read something like this, “Francis, I now have several months of sobriety.” He was buried at a church named St. John the Baptist. When I became a traditional Catholic in 1990, in Louisville, Ky., the name of my church was St. John the Baptist. Francis’ birthday was July 6th, the same day as my father’s birthday. These facts I call “Irish coincidences.”

Twice I have been to Ireland, and in 2014 I climbed Croagh Patrick, St. Patrick’s Mountain, which is in the northwest of Ireland. It is only 2,507 ft., but the winds are unrelenting. St. Patrick fasted, like Moses, for forty days and nights, seeking from God the conversion of the Irish people.

I hope that you enjoy these classical Irish phrases as much as I have:

1. Sleep is the image of death

2. There is no oppression as crushing as age

3. As life is consumed, so life consumes us

4. Never has a man tasted food who will not taste death

5. Death will not be bought off

6. Every fool is dangerous

7. If you are not driven by love, you will be driven by hatred

8. He who loses his honor loses his shame

9. If water is the most abundant thing, woman is second

10. How a ship looks is not how she sails

11. Sweet is the mouth in its silence

12. Woe is he who is indifferent to God’s bounty

13. God never closed one door without opening another

14. The truth stands when everything else falls

15. Look forward to evil and it will come; look forward to good and it will be had

16. God is in all places: in essence, in authority, in presence

17. Tis often that a rogue says a long rosary

18. Better poorly armed than unarmed

19. A man of courage never perished

20. It is easier to pull the lion’s beard when he is dead

21. The hill that is the highest is the coldest

22. The mills of God grind slow, but they grind the mill fine

23. If you lose an hour in the morning, you will be searching for it all day

24. Everything comes with the mention of it except the fox and the corpse

25. Your own fireside is best

26. Where there is shame there is grace

27. Someone escapes safely from even the greatest war

28. The perverted are sustained by perversion

29. Better a fistful of skill than a sack full of gold

30. Failure to practice is the enemy of skill

31. Though you have nothing but a goat, be in the center of the fair with him

32. Never have you had better neighbors than boundaries

33. Don’t talk to the feet if the head is in attendance

34. Ancestry has no rights in a land taken by force

35. Leave the country or be in accordance with the customs

36. However long the fox runs, in the end he is caught

37. Whatever a person’s great deed, without honor it is not a great deed

38. Woe to him who has contempt for the young

39. Opinions are more numerous than people

40. In Ireland in Patrick’s time, priests of gold and chalices of wood. Of late in this puny world, priests of wood and chalices of gold

41. The friars pray for whomever owns the fattest sheep

42. Fame is more enduring than life

43. No one knows where the other person’s shoe pinches

44. There is no prosperity when there is no discipline

45. The madman is convinced that it is he who is sane

46. He who covets everything loses everything

47. Never have the wolves devoured one another

48. Disrespect for the body, honor to the soul

49. The smile of the Englishman, the snarl of the dog

50. If you want to be praised, die; if you want to be criticized, marry

51. It’s the thunder that frightens, but the lightning that kills

52. A country without a language, a country without a soul

53. Whatever his wisdom, no man can avoid mistakes

54. That which is rare is wonderful

55. Though the day be long, the night approaches

56. Oh God, set aright each person who is going astray!

57. A man poor by his own will, a man poor by the will of God, a man poor even though the world be his

58. Who knows that it is not his own sword that is destined to kill him?

59. The blind man cares not which one is disfigured

60. It is easier to tie a knot than to untie it

61. Reparation is demanded for each bloodshed

62. God is patient, but He is not forgetful

63. Treachery returns to the treacherous

64. The back pays a hard price for the belly

65. A word is carried by the wind, but a blow is carried by the bone

66. Dress a goat in silk and he’s still a goat

67. The young have no more claim to life than the old

68. He who betrays is he who kills

69. No man can tell how well off he is until such time that he is worse off

70. If you are looking for a friend without fault, you will be without a friend forever

71. Man in his maturity is politic and orderly; women never are

72. Love uncovers loveliness

73. Knowledge comes only with living together

74. A good wife is half of life

75. Women are restless and subtle creatures

76. Two people shorten the road

77. Do not take your enemy for a friend

Audio version by author above:

In 1979 your author was seven years old, and I distinctly remember seeing the news coverage on the television about the new pope, John Paul II, making a visit to Auschwitz. Too young to know much about any history, I remember saying to myself, “This is probably a stunt whereby the pope is sucking up to the Jewish people.” The pope referred to Auschwitz as the “Golgotha of the modern world,” a phrase which should tell us all we need to know about the pope and the nature of his visit. As the late Bishop Richard Williamson once told us in seminary, “Auschwitz is for the Jews what Calvary is for us Catholics; Auschwitz has become their redemption, their savior.”

Some Auschwitz history:

Over ten years ago I visited Auschwitz with friends. It was February, with snow on the ground, a flock of black crows pecking in the snow, which added to the mystique and eeriness. Auschwitz is sometimes referred to as Auschwitz-Birkenau because it is a large enclosure which encompasses two camps, Auschwitz I and II. We quote from a pamphlet written by the late Anthony S. Fraser, son of Hamish Fraser (d. 1986). Hamish Fraser was a communist who fought against the Catholics in Spain in 1937. He entered a Catholic Church and fired rounds into the tabernacle, causing him to reflect, “Why am I shooting at this box on the altar, am I shooting at a Person?” This incident led to his eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1948. His son, Anthony, ran a small publication, Apropos, which he printed until his death in 2014. Apropos # 7 has an article titled “The Truth about the Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz.” He explains the difference between the two camps:

Auschwitz-I: Most of the buildings of Auschwitz I are brick constructions built long before the Nazi period, for they formed an Austrian army barracks in the days (up to the end of WWI) when this part of Poland was part of Austria-Hungary. When Poland regained its independence, the barracks were naturally used by the Polish army. In 1940 the Nazis chose it as (ostensibly) a camp for prisoners of war and political prisoners. Thousands of Soviet nationals died there, as well as tens of thousands of Poles….(p. 7)

Auschwitz-II-Birkenau: Later, and largely to provide for the extermination of the Jews, the camp was complemented by the setting up of Auschwitz II Birkenau (4 kilometers to the north-west of Auschwitz I). This new camp, a totally Nazi construction, most of whose blocks were wooden hutments, gives from one’s first glance a very different impression from that of a small provincial barracks. As far as the eye can reach, all we see is a hideous prospect of brick chimneys, all that is left of the hutments in their perimeters of barbed wire, and the apocalyptic vision of heaps of rubble, the ruins of giant crematorium furnaces.

Here is a link for the article mentioned above, "The Truth about the Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz"

Leon Degrelle (d. Mar. 31, 1994) was the leader of the Belgian “Rexist” movement before the Second World War. During the War he commanded the Belgian volunteers on the Eastern Front, and fought in the 28th Walloon Division of the Waffen S.S. He authored several books: I Was a Prisoner, My Revolutionary Life, Hitler Democrat, and Hitler: Born at Versailles, to name a few. General Degrelle sent a 12-page letter to the pope on the subject of his visit to Auschwitz. Historical Review Press printed the hard-to-find pamphlet. He dated the letter, “In exile 20th May, 1979,” reminding the pope that he too was a brother Catholic, and that he felt compelled to write and express his grievances over “the legend of massive exterminations.” He wrote:

The legend of the massive exterminations at Auschwitz exploited the collective psychosis which, owing to uncontrolled gossip, had unhinged numerous World War Two internees. Since 1945 the whole world has been assailed by this legend. Hundreds of lies have been repeated in thousands of books in an increasingly virulent rage…I have been told Holy Father, that you were in the Resistance during the Second World War…Some add that you were interned at Auschwitz. Like so many others, you left it, since here you are Pope: a Pope who, from all the evidence, did not smell too much Zyklon B gas! Having been on the spot, Your Holiness must know better than anyone else that the mass gassings of millions of people never took place. Sectarian propagandists hark back so much to these great collective massacres, but did you - as a prime witness - personally see just one being carried out…?

(of the internees, 25 percent were political or members of the Resistance, and 75 percent were conscientious objectors, sexual perverts, or common criminals.)…Two-thirds of the internees who died during the Second World War perished at this time, victims of Typhus, dysentery, starvation, and of the interminable delays in the pulverized channels of communication. This is established by the official figures. At Dachau, for example, following the same statistics of the International Committee, 54 internees died in January 1944 and 101 in February 1944. In 1945, however, 2,888 died in January and 3,977 in February! Of the total of 25,613 internees who died in this camp in 1940, 1941, 1943, 1944, and 1945, 19,296 perished during the last seven months of hostilities! At that time the aerial terrorism of the Allies no longer even served a military purpose, since Allied victory had been assured from the beginning of 1945.1

Degrelle was a military man, and because of his military background he was interested in the math behind the gassings. Degrelle breaks down the numbers:

It is ridiculous to imagine, and above all to pretend, that 24,000 people could have been gassed at Auschwitz each day - in batches of 3,000 at a time - in a room 400 cubic meters (1,312 sq. ft.) Still less could this have happened, in batches of 700 or 800, in buildings with a floor space of 25 sq. meters and a height of 1.9 meters, as has been claimed with regard to Belzec…As has been related to us with great pleasure and a thousand spicy details, one would then have been able to extract all the gold teeth and all the filled teeth, the latter being prudent hiding-places for diamonds! This would supposedly have been done to each batch of 6,000 rigid jaws (3,000 people) which death had drawn together, and to 48,000 jaws each day - if one believes the official figure of 24,000 gassed every day in Auschwitz alone! …That meant 48,000 jaws to deal with and more than 760,000 teeth to scrutinize daily. Simply confining oneself to the 6,000,000 dead Jews which propaganda ceaselessly repeats to us over and over again (some have doubled or tripled the figure) …These extractions, and these alone, with ten hours of uninterrupted labor, would have taken up to 1,875 working days of the whole team (eight men).2

Degrelle mentions other historical absurdities, such as the repeated story that the “Kapos,” the German-appointed helpers in the camps, would search the anuses of the Jewish victims for hidden gold or jewelry. It was also said that the wombs of the female victims were searched with the same goal in mind. In summary, the Jewish victims were gassed with Zyklon B, removed from the chambers, only to have their teeth plucked, to have their anuses searched, etc. And all this was done by a team, presumably of about ten unhappy workers, for a period of 10-12 hours per day, all throughout the year. If ten workers worked ten hours a day, 365 days of year, covering four bodies per hour, the total would be 146,000 people in a single year. While this is a substantial number, it is not close to the actual alleged figure of 2-4 million Jewish casualties at the camp. The math simply does not add up!

Audio version by author:

In the London Catholic Gazette of February 1936 was published a sensational article under the heading: The Jewish Peril and the Catholic Church. The monthly organ of the Catholic Missionary Society of England was quoting speeches delivered in a series of secret Jewish meetings in Paris. A few weeks later, the Parisian weekly La Revell du Peuple published a similar account, adding that the statements had been made at a recent convention of the B’nai B’rith (secret Masonic order in which no Gentile is admitted) held in Paris.

The article smacks closely with The Protocols of Zion. We reproduce, in full, the quotation from the pamphlet:

“As long as there remains among the Gentiles any moral conception of the social order, and until all faith, patriotism, and dignity are uprooted, our reign over the world shall not come.

“We have already fulfilled part of our work, but we cannot yet claim that the whole of our work is done. We have still a long way to go before we can overthrow our main opponent: the Catholic Church -

“We must always bear in mind that the Catholic Church is the only institution which has stood, and which will, as long as it remains in existence, stand in our way. The Catholic Church, with her methodical work and her edifying and moral teachings, will always keep her children in such a state of mind, as to make them too self-respecting to yield to our domination, and to bow before our future King of Israel.

“That is why we have been striving to discover the best way of shaking the Catholic Church to her foundations. We have spread the spirit of revolt and false liberalism among the nations of the Gentiles so as to persuade them away from their faith and even to make them ashamed of professing the precepts of their religion and obeying and the Commandments of their Church. We have brought many of them to boast of being atheists, and more than that, to glory in being descendants of the ape! We have given them new theories, impossible of realization, such as Communism, Anarchism, and Socialism, which are now serving our purposes. The stupid Gentiles have accepted them with the greatest enthusiasm, without realizing that those theories are ours, and that they constitute our most powerful instrument against themselves…

“We have blackened the Catholic Church with the most ignominious calumnies, we have stained her history and disgraced even his noblest activities. We have imputed to her the wrongs of her enemies, and have thus brought these latter to stand more closely by our side. So much so, that we are now witnessing, to our greatest satisfaction, rebellions against the Church in several countries. We have turned her Clergy into objects of hatred and ridicule, we have subjected them to the contempt of the crowd. We have caused the practice of the Catholic Religion to be considered out of date and a mere waste of time.

“And the Gentiles, in their stupidity, have proved easier dupes than we expected them to be. One would expect more intelligence, and more practical common sense, but they are no better than a herd of sheep. Let them graze in our fields till they become fat enough to be worthy of being immolated to our future King of the world…

“We have founded many secret associations, which all work for our purpose, under our orders and our direction. We have made it an honor, a great honor, for the Gentiles to join us in our organizations, which are, thanks to our gold, flourishing now more than ever. Yet it remains our secret that those Gentiles who betray their own and most precious interests, by joining us in our plot, should never know that those associations are of our creation, and that they serve our purpose.

“One of the many triumphs of our Freemasonry is that those Gentiles who become members of our Lodges, should never suspect that we are using them to build their own jails, upon whose terraces we shall erect the throne of our Universal King of Israel; and should never know that we are commanding them to forge the chains of their own servility to our future King of the World.

“So far, we have considered our strategy in our attacks upon the Catholic Church from the outside. But this is not all. Let us now explain how we have gone further in our work, to hasten the ruin of the Catholic Church and how we have penetrated into her most intimate circles, and brought even some of her Clergy to become pioneers of our cause. (the bold is ours)

“Apart altogether from the influence of our philosophy, we have taken other steps to secure a breach in the Catholic Church. Let me explain how this has been done.

“We have induced some of our children to join the Catholic body, with the explicit intimation that they should work in a still more efficient way for the disintegration of the Catholic Church, by creating scandals within her. We have thus followed the advice of the Prince of the Jews, who so wisely said: ‘Let some of your children become canons, so that they may destroy the Church.’ Unfortunately, not all among the convert Jews have proved faithful to her mission. Many of them have even betrayed us! But, on the other hand, others have kept their promise and honored their word. Thus the counsel of our Elders has proved successful.

“We are the Fathers of all Revolutions - even of those which sometimes happen to turn against us. We are the supreme Masters of Peace and War. We can boast of being the Creators of the REFORMATION! Calvin was one of our Children; he was of Jewish descent, and was entrusted by Jewish authority and encouraged with Jewish finance to draft this scheme in the Reformation.

“Martin Luther yielded to the influence of his Jewish friends, and again, by Jewish authority, and with Jewish finance, his plot against the Catholic Church met with success.

“Thanks to our propaganda, to our theories of Liberalism and to our misrepresentations of Freedom, the minds of many among the Gentiles were ready to welcome the Reformation. They separated from the Church to fall into our snare. And thus the Catholic Church has been very sensibly weakened, and her authority over the Kings of the Gentiles has been reduced almost to naught.

“We are grateful to Protestants for their loyalty to our wishes - although most of them are, in the sincerity of their faith, unaware of their loyalty to us. We are grateful to them for their wonderful help they are giving us in our fight against the stronghold of Christian Civilization, and in our preparations for the advent of our supremacy over the whole world and over the Kingdoms of the Gentiles.

“So far we have succeeded in overthrowing most of the Throne of Europe. The rest will follow in the near future. Russia has already worshipped our rule. France, with her Masonic Government, is under our thumb. England, in her dependence upon our finance, is under our heel; and in her Protestantism is our hope for the destruction of the Catholic Church. Spain and Mexico are but toys in our hands. And many other countries, including the U.S.A., have already fallen before our scheming.

“But the Catholic Church is still alive…

“We must destroy her without the least delay and without the slightest mercy. Most of the Press in the world is under our Control; let us therefore encourage in a still more violent way the hatred of the world against the Catholic Church. Let us intensify our activities in poisoning the morality of the Gentiles, let us spread the spirit of revolution in the minds of the people. They must be made to despise Patriotism and the love of their family, to consider their faith as a humbug, their obedience to their Church as a degrading servility, so that they may become deaf to the appeal of the Church and blind to her warnings against us. Let us, above all, make it impossible for Christians outside the Catholic Church to be reunited with the Church, or for non-Christians to join the Church; otherwise the greatest obstruction to our domination with be strengthened and all our work undone. Our plot will be unveiled, the Gentiles will turn against us, in the spirit of revenge, and our domination over them will never be realized.

“Let us remember that as long as there still remain active enemies of the Catholic Church, we may hope to become Masters of the World…And let us remember always that the future Jewish King will never reign in the world before the Pope in Rome is dethroned, as well as all the other reigning Monarchs of the Gentiles upon earth.”

For the audio version by the author, play or download the above MP3.

Some years ago, an ignorant man said to us, “You Catholics belong to a cult.” The counter-reply was straight-forward, “Of course we Catholics belong to a cult you nitwit. The word cultivate is from the Latin, cultus, which means to uproot. Pagan nature, engendered by Original Sin, must be uprooted and supplanted by grace. Hence the words culture and cultivate.” There are obvious signs which one must look for when he determines the amount of decay in a civilization: 1. The cremation of the dead 2. the multiplication of tattoos 3. the use of foul language 4. the loss of good habits (*Orestes Brownson says that once a society loses a habit, it never returns) 5. society’s neglect of the True Religion (and by True Religion we mean the traditional Catholic sacraments practiced by all the faithful prior to Vatican Council II). 6. The rise and spread of Freemasonry and Freemasonic ideals

The word “cemetery” is Christian in origin, and Fathers Rumble and Carty produced a pamphlet in 1960, informing us of its history:

It (cemetery) was unknown to the the pagans and hardly intelligible to them in its Christian sense. It is a Greek word, ‘koimeterion,’ which meant ‘dormitory.’ But the Greeks themselves used the word only for sleeping apartments, never for burial places. For those they used the word ‘thekai,’ or the ‘place of the graves,’ or the word ‘taphoi,’ ‘the burial grounds.’1

When the Church rose up from her persecutions and advanced from the catacombs to the light of day, Christians began burying their relatives in the bosom of the earth. St. Augustine in the late fourth century reminded Christians about death, “Death is not death for us, but sleeping: for those we call dead are keeping vigil until their resurrection.”2 Because the early Christians revered death as a form of “sleeping,” they chose the word '“koimeterion,” but gave it “an altogether new and nobler sense.”3 The graveyard became a “dormitory” which the living Christian was free to visit so that he might commune spiritually with his sleeping (dead) companions. In 257 A.D. the Roman emperor Valerian forbade Christians to assemble in their cemeteries, but by the year 312 A.D. Christians were allowed by the emperor Constantine to bury and visit their dead in peace.

Cremation: Full Steam Ahead

The French Revolution (1789-’92) gave impetus to the concept of cremation. The masonic teachings of both Danton and Robespierre, both French freemasons, led to the Reign of Terror (1793-’94). One freemason, M.A. Faucieux, wrote the following for the Revue des Sciences Ecclesiastiques (1886):

The Brethren of the Lodges should employ all means to spread the practice of cremation. The Church, in forbidding the burning of bodies, is asserting her rights over the living and the dead, over the consciences of men as well as over their bodies, and is merely seeking to preserve among the people the old beliefs in the immortality of the soul and in the future life - beliefs overthrown today by the light of science.4

The first crematorium was built in Italy, in 1878, prompting Mr. Ernest Watt, Chairman of the N.S.W. Cremation Committee, to exult in his pamphlet, “A Plea for Cremation,” “It is somewhat remarkable that cremation on modern lines should have been first put into actual practice in a Roman Catholic country.” Radio Replies corrects Mr. Watt’s error by stating that the Italian government authorized cremation in 1873, causing the first crematorium to be opened in Milan in 1874. The Italian “Grand Orient” freemasons, Mazzini and Garibaldi, four years earlier, in 1870, had overtaken the Holy City of Rome, enforcing their freemasonic ideals. Following Italy’s example, “Crematoriums appeared in America (1876), in Germany (1878), in England (1885), and thenceforward spread gradually throughout the world.”5

Pt. II: Fr. Wathen’s Essay on Cremation

Fr. James Wathen produced an essay titled “The Resurrection and Cremation” (April 3, 2005). We do not quote the entire article, but reproduce the nine points in their entirety:

1. Human beings are composed of body of soul. The human person is a single being, even though he has a composite nature. The soul can live without the body, but the soul is in an unnatural state without the body; and because the soul is immortal, the resurrection of the body is inevitable, as there would be no utility in the soul’s living in eternity, either in Heaven or in Hell, separated from its body.

2. All the sacraments are sensible signs and causes of grace, sensible, meaning that they all have a material component, which pertains to the physical side of the recipient: water in the case of Baptism, holy chrism and the imposition of hands in the case of Confirmation, the anointing with the oil of the sick in the case of Extreme Unction, and so on.

3. The material element of the sacraments was used by Christ for the sacraments because human beings are composed of body and soul. The person receiving the sacrament knows that he is doing so, and must believe in the interior effect of the outward sign. A sacrament cannot be given to a deceased person, nor administered remotely. The minister must be where the recipient is, so that they are in immediate, sensible contact.

4. That the soul is a purer substance than the body does not mean that the body is not good; it is simply a lesser substance than the soul. The soul is not a human being, except when the person has died. Having died, he lives because the soul, being a pure spirit, cannot die. The life of the disembodied spirit cannot bethought of as a human life because it is unable to perform many human acts, namely, physical ones.

5. Through the Incarnation, the Son of God became a man. He did not become a human being, or a human person, because He is a divine Person, and the divine Being. As the divine Being, this divine Person is united to the Father and the Holy Ghost in the infinite Godhead. In the Incarnation, the Second Person of the Godhead united Himself to a human nature, created by God, so that Jesus of Nazareth was both God and Man. As man he had a complete human nature, a human soul and a human body. Part of the marvel of the Incarnation is that it is not a temporary thing. The Second Person of the Trinity did not merely don a human nature in order to perform a mission on earth, with the intention of dispossessing Himself of it once His mission was concluded. The Incarnation will last forever; and in the Mystery of Easter we celebrate the fact that the God-Man, Christ, reunited Himself to His Body, and transformed it into something which could never have been conceived or expected. He so reformed His Body that it is now spiritualized, being in no way subject to physical limitations.

6. The Resurrection and the glorification of His Body is very much a part of the redemptive mystery and triumph. For this reason, we must see the whole biblical tradition of the reverence toward the dead, the thoughtful burial of their bodies, and the continual remembrance of their burial place as a preparation and presage of the burial of Christ. The burial of the body as an act of reverence is as much a part of the tradition of the people of God, the people of “the city of God,” to use St. Augustine’s expression, as the burning of the body is a part of the pagan tradition. Christ’s crucifixion is said to have taken place on the burial site of Adam and Eve. The children of Israel carried the bones of the patriarch, Joseph, with them out of Egypt and continued to carry them for forty years until they entered their Promised Land, the land whence their forefather, Jacob (who was also called Israel), Joseph’s father, departed hundreds of years earlier (Exod. 13:19). Anyone who has his body burned positively departs from the biblical and Christian tradition, and joins himself to the pagan one. It should be made clear that cremation is a pagan act; it is an unspoken rejection of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, whether the individual knows it or not. The only reason a Catholic might not know it is that his priests are indifferent to all the traditions of our holy religion; they therefore can think of no reason to forbid or discourage cremation. But again, modern priests can think of no reason to forbid many sinful things.

7. In this life, Christians used to be instructed that their service to God is a human service, given a divine dimension by the fact that at Baptism they were given a share in the divine nature through the reception of divine grace. As St. Peter wrote: “By Whom [Christ] he [the father] hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature: flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world” (2 Peter 1:4)

8. This grace was given when we were ingrafted mystically into the sacred humanity of Christ, our Savior and Redeemer (Rom. 11:19). And, as he writes to the Galatians: “For you are all the children of God, by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ” (3: 26,27) Through this union with Christ, our souls were eternally transformed, marked, and empowered, so that we were no longer mere human beings, but “Christians,” and priests, capable of offering the Body and Blood of Christ, and ours with Him, to the eternal Father in Heaven.

9. By Baptism, we become adopted children of God, and heirs of all that Christ gained through the triumph of His Passion, Death, and Resurrection (cf. Rom. 8:17). By Baptism we become temples of God (1 Cor. 3: 16), bearers of the Blessed Trinity, and visible members of Christ, our mystical head.6

For the audio version by author, play or download the above MP3.

There is only one thing more insane than a man paying five thousand dollars to acquire a pamphlet, and that is the man who holds onto the pamphlet rather than sell it for five thousand dollars. The truth is, had I not loaded this pamphlet and other books into my Jeep on a hot July day, they would have been thrown into a grey dumpster. The man who gave them to me, Gerald B., is eighty-eight years old, a traditional Catholic from the cornfields of Indiana. He became a hardcore Catholic back in the 1970’s when things became liberal and chaotic. I went to his house to collect some vintage cassette tapes, but when I asked his granddaughter, “what about the books?” she said nothing. The books were going to be thrown into the dumpster. I have uploaded a picture of the dumpster in front of Gerald’s house for those who doubt.

His house reminds me of one that might be owned by a hobbit, a house which he built himself. Gerald is now an old man, nearly blind, awaiting death, as we all must. He is a traditional Catholic and only attends the Latin Mass. Due to his location and health, most days he is physically unable to make it to Mass, but you can be assured that he says the rosary daily. For many years he produced cassette tapes on behalf of the late Fr. James Wathen (d. 11-7-2006), a traditional Catholic priest who authored several books, among them, The Great Sacrilege (1971), one of the first books written in protestation of the New Mass. Gerald told me that in a twenty-five-year period he had produced and shipped over 30,000 cassette tapes. Impressive indeed.

By now the reader must be asking himself, what is the name of the pamphlet? The title is The Auschwitz Lie: An Unbiased Eyewitness Report of the Real Life in a Concentration Camp There were no Gas Chambers! The question must be asked, why is it that a pamphlet printed in 1974, and reprinted in 1998, is valued at almost $5,000? There are two copies online, Abe Books and Biblio, and each seller is asking a ridiculous $5,000. I have not yet read the pamphlet, only the introduction. Dr. E.R. Fields says the following in the “Introduction” about the author:

Thies Christophersen was the first German to publish a major work proving that the Holocaust story was a cold-war era Soviet disinformation hoax created after they occupied the Auschwitz industrial complex in Poland. Published in 1973 it sent shockwaves through the ranks of the Holocaust hucksters. Christophereson was born on Jan. 27, 1918. As a lieutenant in the German Army, he was severely wounded in the Battle of France in 1940. Later, as an agricultural expert, he devoted himself to experimental farming. He spent the entire year of 1944 working at Auschwitz on the development of synthetic rubber. This was during the period alleged to be the height of the holocaust. He would later state: ‘After the war, I heard talk of the massive massacres of Jewish prisoners. I was profoundly stupefied to hear these allegations.’

When the pamphlet was printed in 1973 there were 100,000 copies printed in various languages. He went on a speaking tour throughout the United States, and due to persecution in Germany, he moved to Belgium in 1983, “from which he was expelled.” Germany eliminated his Social Security pension as well as his veteran’s benefits. Germany actually sentenced him to one year in prison for “denying the holocaust.” In 1996 he attempted to travel to Switzerland to treat his kidney cancer but was denied entry. When his son died in a plane crash in Germany, he was not allowed to attend the funeral. In 1998, at the age of 79, he moved to Kiel, Germany, to finish out his years with one of his other sons. The “Introduction” continues,

There he was arrested on Jan. 31, 1998, at the age of 79, again for the crime of ‘holocaust denial.’ He was released on the orders of a doctor who found him too ill to stand trial again. Thies Christophersen passed away on Feb. 13, 1998, at the age of 79, on the 52nd anniversary of the horrific firebombing of Dresden in which as many as 300,000 innocent German men, women, and children were slaughtered despite the fact that the war was all but over. This is a higher figure than the estimated 250,000 Jews who died from all causes in Europe during the entire war! As a final affront to this lone dissenter, the secret police sealed off the cemetery for his funeral on February 20th to prevent any friends outside his immediate family from attending.

This is America and we still have a First Amendment privilege, a privilege which is unique in the world. We Americans can say and write unpopular things, at unpopular times. Mr. Christophersen learned, unfortunately, that Germany has no First Amendment.

Because Christ is God, it necessarily follows that St. John the Baptist is the last and the greatest of the prophets. The celebration of his birth is June 24th, the brightest day of the year, but also the day when the light begins to slowly recede as we approach December. St. John said of his Savior, “He must increase, I must decrease.” Conversely, the birth of Christ, December 25th, is the darkest day of the year, the day when the light slowly begins to encroach, as the days become lighter. St. John is greater than all the Old Testament saints, greater than Noah, than Moses, than Joseph of Old, than Abraham; in fact, his sanctity is only outmatched in human terms by St. Joseph, the Foster Father of Christ. No man is greater than St. Joseph.

The title used by Moslems, “Mohammed the prophet,” has always been troublesome for the Catholic. The Latin word propheta, means to foretell accurately a future event. But in the religious sense a prophet is one who foretells the coming of God; and this is why St. John the Baptist is the last of the prophets, and there can be no more prophets after him. Mohammed is not and cannot be a prophet. One who foretells the coming of the antichrist cannot be a prophet. There can be no doubt that the antichrist will have his apostles and disciples, but those who foretell the advent of the antichrist are not in the proper sense “prophets.”

The Fatima Center has produced a pamphlet on Mohammedanism according to the writings of St. John Bosco. The pamphlet is titled The Catholic Educated in his Religion: Conversations with the Father of a Family and His Beloved Sons (1853). The pamphlet could not be found on their website, www.fatima.org, and we do not know the reason. When a call was made to the Fatima Center, we were told that it was probably an old pamphlet that is no longer in print. The pamphlet is question-and-answer style and is reproduced here in its entirety:

This is the audio version of the article:

Father: Before talking to you about the religions separated at a certain point from the Roman Catholic Church, I want to draw your attention to the religions that do not have the characteristics of the divinity in them and which we call false religions. They range from Judaism to idolatry, to Mohammedanism, to the Christian sects professed by the schismatic Greeks, Valdese, Anglicans and Protestants.

Regarding idolatry, I think there is no need to discuss this with you, since nowadays it does not exist, with the exception of very few countries where the light of the Gospel has still not penetrated. Regarding Judaism, I think I have already spoken sufficiently in the first part of these conversations. If you like, I’ll now tell you about the others, starting with Mohammedanism.

Son: Yes, yes, first of all tell us what Mohammedanism means?

Father: Mohammedanism is a collection of maxims extracted from various religions, which, if practiced, bring about the destruction of every moral principle.

Son: In which countries is this Mohammedanism professed?

Father: It is professed in a large part of Asia as well as part of Africa.

Son: Who started Mohammedanism?

Father: Mohammedanism was started by Mohammed

Son: Oh! We’d really like to hear about this Mohammed. Tell us everything you know about him.

Father: It would take too long to tell you all about the stories about this famous imposter. But I’ll tell you who he was and how he came to establish his religion.

In the year 570, Mohammed was born into a poor family, of a Jewish mother and gentile father, in Mecca, an Arabian city not far from the Red Sea. In search of glory and desirous of bettering his conditions, he wandered around several countries and managed in Damascus to become the agent of a merchant’s widow who afterwards married him. He was cunning enough to take advantage of his infirmities as well as her ignorance, to establish a religion. Suffering from epilepsy, male caduco, he claimed his frequent falls were ecstasies wherein he had conversations with the Angel Gabriel.

Son: What an imposter to deceive people like that! Did he also try to work miracles to support his predication?

Father: Mohammed couldn’t work any miracles to support his religion, as he was not sent by God. God is the sole author of miracles. However, as he claimed himself greater than Jesus Christ, he was asked to work miracles in the same way as Jesus. He arrogantly replied that the miracles had already been worked by Jesus Christ and that he himself had been called by God to reestablish the religion by force.

With all this he claimed to have worked one miracle. He said he had been able to restore a piece of the moon after it had fallen onto his sleeve; to commemorate this ridiculous miracle, the Muslims made the half-moon their emblem. You laugh, beloved sons, and you are right to do so, since a man of that sort had to be deemed a charlatan, not the predictor of a new religion. For this reason, his fellow-citizens wanted to imprison him and put him to death since his reputation as an imposter and disturber of the peace was widely known. But he managed to escape and retreated to the city of Medina along with some libertines who helped him and made him the ruler of that city.

Son: What exactly does the Mohammedan religion consist of?

Father: Mohammed’s religion consists of a monstrous mixture of Judaism, Paganism, and Christianity. The book of Mohammed’s laws is called the Qur’an i.e. the book par excellence. This religion is also called Turkish (Ottoman) since it is widely diffused in Turkey; Muslim [Musulmana] derives from Mosul, the name that the Mohammedans give to their prayer director; Islamism, from the name of some of its reformers, at any rate, is still the same religion Mohammed established.

Son: Why did Mohammed put together this mixture of various religions?

Father: Since the peoples of Arabia were in part Jews, Christians and Pagans, he consequently selected a part of the religion they professed in order to induce them to follow him, choosing in particular, those points that would favor sensual pleasures the most.

Son: Mohammed must have been an erudite man?

Father: Absolutely not, he couldn’t even write; and in composing his Qur’an he was assisted by a Jew and an apostate monk. When discussing things contained in Holy Scripture he confused the facts; for example, he attributes to Mary, Moses’ sister, many facts that regard Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, in addition to many, many other frightful errors.

Son: This seems hard to believe: if Mohammed was ignorant and he didn’t work any miracles, how could he have propagated his religion?

Father: Mohammed propagated his religion, not through miracles or persuasive words, but by military force. In a short time, this religion which favored every sort of licentiousness, allowed Mohammed to become the leader of a troop of brigands. Along with them he raided the countries of the East and conquered the people, not by indicating the truth, not by miracles or prophecy but with one aim only; to raise his sword over the heads of the conquered shouting: believe or die!

Son: What a villain! This cannot be the way to convert people! Without doubt, Mohammed being such an ignoramus must have planted many seeds of error in the Qur’an?

Father: We could say the Koran (Qur’an) is a series of errors, the most enormous ones being against morality, and the worship of the true God. For example, it excuses from sin those who deny God out of fear of death; it permits revenge; it guarantees its followers a Paradise filled only of earthly pleasures. In short, this false prophet’s doctrine permits things so obscene, that the Christian soul is horrified just naming them.

Son: What is the difference between the Catholic Church and the Mohammedan one?

Father: The difference is very great. Mohammed established his religion with violence and arms; Jesus Christ established His Church with words of peace using His poor disciples. Mohammed incited the passions; Jesus Christ commanded the denial of self. Mohammed worked no miracles; Jesus Christ worked uncountable miracles in broad daylight and in the presence of countless multitudes. Mohammed’s doctrines are riduculous, immoral and corrupting; Jesus Christ’s are august, sublime and pure. In Mohammed not even one prophecy was fulfilled; in Jesus Christ all were.

To sum up, the Christian religion, in a certain way, renders man happy in this world so as to raise him up to the enjoyment of heaven; Mohammed degrades and dishonors human nature and by placing all happiness in sensual pleasures, reduces man to the level of filthy animals.

We believe in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation; we do not believe in the divided, unholy, ecumenical church, inside of which there is no salvation.

We believe in the Latin Mass, the Mass of St. Peter, of St. Pius Fifth, and of St. Pius Tenth; we do not believe in the sacrilegious New Mass, the Mass of Babel, the Mass of Paul the Sixth, the Mass which never unites, but always divides. It is dubiously valid, and undoubtedly immoral and sacrilegious.

We believe in the traditional rosary, the fifteen decades, the one hundred and fifty Hail Mary’s, as it was given to us by St. Dominic, thorough Our Lady, to the whole Church; we reject the New Rosary, the Masonic, illuminati-inspired “Luminous Mysteries.” These mysteries were added, not in the spirit of holy change, but in the spirit of novelty and confusion. The fifteen mysteries represent Mary’s fifteen years leading up to the Incarnation of the God-man in her womb, and these mysteries should not be added to nor subtracted from. No pope has the right to change the substance of the rosary, any more than he has the right to change the substance of the sacraments.*1

We reject the new rites of episcopal and priestly orders, and we look to the reinstitution of the clerical tonsure and the minor orders of Porter, Lector, Exorcist, and Acolyte. These priests who babble their way through the New Mass, like it or not, admit it or not, are dubious priests and bishops because of their doubtful priestly orders.

We reject the heretical notion that the Jews are the chosen People of God, that they are somehow superior, by way of race, to baptized Catholics. We believe that baptism means entrance into the Church, and following the rules of this Church means entrance into heaven. “Following the rules” applies to all, Jews and non-Jews. We believe with St. Athanasius in the Creed, “If any man will be saved, he must, before all things hold the Catholic Faith.”

We believe that the second Vatican Council II was filled with the spirit of novelty and confusion, and we reject the Council and all that it represents - false ecumenism, universal salvation, novelty in worship, et cetera. We look forward to another Council of the Church which will condemn the heretical and sacrilegious spirit of Vatican II.

We believe that marriage is between one man and one woman, and its primary end is the begetting of children. We reject the modern idea that God is pleased with other physical unions outside marriage. We reject the motto, “Do what thou wilt,” a motto given to us originally by Lucifer, and more recently reaffirmed by the satanist, Alistair Crowley. The modern world is infected with this error, including a great number of bishops and priests in the New Church.

We do not accept the heretical New Catechism of the Catholic Church. In fact, as one traditional priest wrote in 2005, the New Catechism “is conspicuously at variance with Catholic tradition,” and the Catholic has the obligation to “oppose it as loudly and vehemently as prudence allows.”2 *At the end of this Traditionalist Creed we offer free talks on the nature of the New Catechism. The reader is free to form his own judgments on this matter.

We believe that just as the Jewish Sanhedrin crucified their Lord two thousand years ago, today the Novus Ordo Sanhedrin (the pope and nearly all the bishops) crucify their Mystical Lord, the Catholic Church. We pray for the conversion of Rome as earnestly as the Apostles prayed for the conversion of the Jews.

St. Augustine said, Roma locuta est, causa finita est, “Rome has spoken, the matter is finished.”

But today we must say in the Augustinian spirit, Roma locuta non est, causa finita non est, “Rome has not spoken, the matter is not finished!”

Audio version of “Addiction Stories in America”

This essay might seem incredible, unbelievable, but all the stories are true. The people will remain anonymous even though most of them have died, and history will probably only remember them because of this short essay. God gave us instincts, but because of Original Sin our instincts have been thrown into disorder.

“The Man who did forty-five years straight”

Many years ago, I met a man who was sixty-three years old. He had a silver goatee, and his shoulders were as wide as a city bus. I remember thinking to myself before he spoke, ‘this guy could snap me in half.’ He grew up in a southern town in the 1930’s which did not even have a stoplight. One night, outside a bar, in a drunken rage he stabbed a guy to death. It just so happened that his victim was the son of the county prosecutor. The judge gave him forty-five years in state prison, without the possibility of parole. In prison he got sober and stayed sober because of Alcoholics Anonymous. This happened in 1945. The first four years he lay in his bunk crying to himself, ‘I am stuck here for the next forty-one years.’

After about seven years he decided to send a Christmas card to the mother of the man whom he had killed, and the card went something like this, “Mrs. Anonymous, I want to wish you a blessed Christmas. I am sincerely sorry for what I have done. I know that I cannot replace your son, but please forgive me.” He wrote this same Christmas letter for several years in a row, with no reply. And then one Christmas the mother had sent him a letter wishing him a Merry Christmas, and that she forgave him. His prayers and perseverance paid off.

He told us that the day he got out of the penitentiary, after forty-five years, there was not a single family member to greet him. He had enough money to get a bus ticket to the nearest A.A. club which was several hundred miles away. He arrived in Cincinnati, went to an A.A. meeting and told his story. Two men, whom he had just met, gave him a ride to Louisville and put $100 in his pocket. The night I heard that man’s story there was a full moon, and I remember him telling us, ‘Tonight, when you go outside and look at the full moon, thank God, because for nine years in the penitentiary I was not able to look at the moon one time because of my jail cell. I followed his directions that night, looked at the moon, and thanked God. I doubt the man is still alive, as he would now be ninety-nine years old. But his story lives!

“For the love of gambling”

My father was general manager of a car lot, and he had one salesman who had a gambling bug pretty bad. The man took a flight to Vegas and took a cab to the casino telling the cabbie to wait in the car. He went into the casino and placed ten grand on a losing hand of Blackjack. He went back to the cab, hopped on the plane and flew home, after a single hand of Blackjack. He told my father, ‘Well, if I’m going to lose ten grand in Vegas, might as well do it on one hand of Blackjack.’ He had himself barred from a gambling boat, and twice the casino manager caught him wearing a wig, trying to board in disguise. He also sold his own suits for gambling money.

“The weddings sure were nice”

I once met a lady who had such an eating addiction she would do the following: She would go through the newspaper and look up the Saturday wedding receptions. And on a typical Saturday she might hit four to six weddings, eating their food, not knowing any of the people. It was hilariously funny, but true. She was not proud of the fact, but it was her story, and had she not told it, it would not be in this essay.

“Alcohol, and more of it”

I was told a story of a man in the hospital who had a tracheotomy. His craving for alcohol was so great, he had his friend pour vodka down the hole in his throat. I was told of another man, and his preference was blue mouthwash, about ten percent alcohol. He was found in his apartment, dead, in a puddle of blue mouthwash. There was another man who decided to drink after twenty-five years of not having any booze. He went out to a bar, became so intoxicated, he was found dead in the parking lot the next morning, face down in a puddle. Lastly, years ago there was a young lady in her early thirties, and she decided to drink after ten years of sobriety. She passed out one night with a cigarette in her hand, burned alive in bed.

And when it comes to cell phones, the average American looks at his cell phone 186 times per day; over 67 thousand times per year. But let us not talk about addictions.

*I asked Grok to make her modest in the picture. Apparently Grok thought it wise to produce a picture of woman with three fingers on her right hand.

This is the audio version of “What Scripture Says about Finding a Wife,” by Bryan Shepherd

Several times throughout the Liturgical Year there is celebrated the feast of a holy widow. The Epistle and Gospel readings are taken from Proverbs 31: 10-31 and St. Matthew 13, 44-52. The thirty-first chapter of Proverbs, the last chapter, was written by King Solomon. King Solomon is not a likely man to give us marital advice given the fact that he had his woman troubles:

But king Solomon gave his heart to many women of alien birth, not only to Pharao’s daughter, but to Moabites and Ammonites, Edomites and Sidonians and Hethites. It was of such races that the Lord had warned Israel, You must not mate with them, or let them mate with your daughters; no question but they will beguile your hearts into the worship of their own gods. Hotly he loved and close he clung to them; seven hundred wives, each with a queen’s rights, and three hundred concubines besides; what marvel if they beguiled his heart? So, an old man now, he was enticed by women into the worship of alien gods, and his heart was not true to the Lord, his own God, like his father David’s before him. To Astarte, goddess of the Sidonians, Solomon bowed down, and to Moloch, the false god of Ammon, and set the Lord’s will at defiance, instead of showing his father’s loyalty. To Chamos, the false god of Moab, and to Moloch, the false god of Ammon, Solomon built shrines, there on the mountain-side in full view of Jerusalem, and humored thus all those foreign wives of his, that must burn incense, each to her own god, and offer victims. 3 Kings 11: 1-8

The nine verses from Proverbs 31: 10-31 provide a wonderful description of a would-be wife, but what more concerns us are the words of Our Lord found in the thirteenth chapter of St. Matthew. Our Lord uses three analogies when speaking of the man who finds a wife: 1. The treasure in the field (thesaurum) 2. the precious pearl (pretiosa margarita) and 3. fishing in the sea.

“The kingdom of heaven is similar to the hidden treasure in the field, which a man found, and on account of joy hid it, and he sells all things (universa) which he has, and he buys that field.”

The wife is the field; the treasure are her interior graces, her charm; the man owning the field is God, or on a more personal level, the father-in-law. The first and obvious question is, How did the man find the treasure? Did the man go to a field which he did not own, and start digging up the earth and overturning rocks? No, the seller of the field wanted the treasure to be found. The owner of the field liked the guy; he wanted him to have the field. Perhaps he had a virtuous daughter, and he wanted the guy to have the field, the treasure, the daughter. He had his servants bury the treasure in such a way that it was impossible not to be found. The bottom line is, he wants a good man for his daughter, but he is in control of the whole situation. He knows the physical and interior beauty of his daughter. He knows his would-be son-in-law, his servants, his property, and his treasure. He knows it all and the young man is no doubt intimidated. The young man knows the value of the property, the value of the treasure; and he knows how little he has to offer for something so wonderful. He no doubt tells the man, “Sir, this is the most precious piece of land I have ever seen. I will do all in my power to till it and make it fruitful. If you were to sell it to me, I would make you most proud. I have already sold all that I have to buy it.” At this point the owner knows that the young man has found the treasure, and the young man senses this. The owner knows that the price which the young man is willing to pay is pathetic in comparison to the value of the land, but he does not care about this. He has plenty of treasure and plenty of land, and he will give it to whom he will. This is the moral of the parable. If I am good and just, God wants me to have the best.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like to a merchant (negotiator) seeking good pearls. Who, when he had found a pearl of great price, went his way, and sold all that he had, and bought it.”

In the case of the Pearl of great price, the young man is willing to let go of his entire pearl collection. He sells it all because he found that one pearl more excellent than all the others. He tells the seller, “Sir, I have sold all my pearls for this pearl because nothing compares to it. Nothing could possibly compare with this pearl. In fact, every man in the world probably wants this pearl, and I am not worthy to have it, but if only you could let go of it, I will treasure it?” A pearl is hard and it retains its beauty, but it must be taken care of gently; and it must be polished. He will place that precious pearl in a special place in his home, and he will look at it often and realize that he has left all things for it. He will tell his friends, “This is my pearl, and you cannot touch it. Look, but do not touch.” And woe is that man if he cast that pearl before swine! Woe is that man if he forgets how precious that pearl is and starts to run after pearls far inferior in quality. Would the seller not grow tired of his nonsense and remind him, “Sir, I gave you a most precious pearl and now look at you. You have forsaken the beautiful pearl for cracked pearls, you fool!” The analogy is obvious.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like to a net cast into the sea, and gathering together of all kinds of fishes. Which, when it was filled, they drew out, and sitting by the shore, they chose out the good into vessels, but the bad they cast forth.”

Fishing is hard. Nets break and must be repaired; several days of catching nothing and the fisherman wants to give up; he gets sun burned. He might even be tempted to curse the fish, the very creature that gives him sustenance. But at the end of the day when the fishing is done, he takes that one prized fish home in a vase. St. Paul in one of his Epistles commands men to “protect their vessels,” that is, “protect their wives.” Just imagine if a fisherman took his prized fish home and fed it to the dogs. He would be called a fool. The worthless fish have already been thrown into the fire or fed to the birds, but he takes the prized fish home and brags about it. By analogy we are all fish, and on the Last Day all the worthless fish will be thrown into the fire, while all the good fish will be put in vessels and lifted up to heaven.

The Glories of Mary was written by St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (d. 1787), who was declared a Doctor of the Church by Blessed Pius IX in 1871. It exceeds 600 pages, and is considered his greatest Marian work. St. Alphonsus lived to the age of ninety-one and has left us many fine works, and it has been said that he was the most voluminous of all the Church Doctors. The Glories of Mary was published in the 1750 when St. Alphonsus was fifty-four years old, and he tells us in dedicating the volume, “I wish before dying, to leave this book to the world, in order that in my place it may continue to preach thee, and encourage others to announce thy glories, and the tender compassion thou showest to thy clients.” The volume presents an excellent admixture of Marian prayers, saints’ quotes, miracles associated with Mary, and general Marian history. The Glories of Mary is a work of scholarship and the reader will not disappoint himself in reading it.

Because the devil never sleeps, the rosary is and has always been a necessity for the Catholic, but it is especially true today that the Catholic must be most vigilant in the recitation of the rosary. The wickedness and deception in the world today is greater than ever, and the demonic attacks against God’s children have been most effective, and it cannot be doubted that the attacks occur both inside and outside the Church. The Church has been infiltrated by the enemy. “An enemy hath done this.” There are several books which bear out this truth, and provide a glimpse into the infiltration of the Church: AA 1025: The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle, The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Venditta by John Vennari, Who Shall Ascend by Fr. James Wathen, and The Plot Against the Church by Maurice Pinay.

A bishop tells a story

In seminary Bishop Richard Williamson told us of a story which occurred in France during World War II concerning the rosary. He urged all Catholics to pray the rosary daily. The story follows:

There was a small French village at the time of World War II, and this village maintained a non-stop 24-hr. devotion to the rosary. Every hour of the day, including nighttime, at least one French villager would occupy the parish church and recite the rosary. It so happened that a German Panzer division came to the gates of the city, and a miraculous thing happened to the Protestant/Nazi commander.

The Blessed Virgin appeared to the commander at the gates of the city, accompanied by an angel, wielding a sword. She said to the commander, “If you enter this town, I will destroy your entire division.” The commander avoided the entire town, deciding not to enter it. He later converted to Catholicism because of this incident.

A countess raised to life

In the Glories of Mary St. Alphonsus relates the following story, and we paraphrase:

There was a wealthy count who had his own chapel in his castle. He had a special devotion to Mary, and it was often the case that he would rise up out of bed in the middle of the night and go to chapel. One night his wife, fearing that her husband was being unfaithful, asked him, “Are you seeing another woman?” He answered her, “Oh yes, she is so lovely beyond imagination.” Fearing that her husband was being unfaithful, and unable to control her jealousy, she slit her own throat with a knife one night as her husband slipped off to chapel. The count arrived back to the bedroom from chapel, finding her covered in blood. He returned to the chapel and begged the Virgin Mary for the life of his wife. No sooner had he offered up his prayer to God that his servants came crying out, “Master, your wife calls for you.” His wife explained to him that she was already on her way to hell when the Blessed Virgin appeared to her saying, “Because of your husband’s devotion to me I have rescued you from hell.” The countess bore, all her life, the scar on her neck as a reminder, telling any willing listener her story.

A parrot is saved

This last story is also related by St. Alphonsus in the Glories of Mary. A monk once trained a parrot to say “Hail Mary.” One day as the parrot was perched outside, the monks noticed that a hawk was headed straight for the parrot. The parrot cried out “Hail Mary” as the hawk dropped dead on the spot. The monks were amazed.

Rosary in the End Times

We do not know when the end will come, either for ourselves or the end of the world. But we know for certain that toward the end, at the time of the great Apostasy and of the antichrist, times will be so tumultuous, so chaotic, so unforgiving, so disordered, that the only thing that will save us is the rosary - and for those us us fortunate enough to have the Mass. God is allowing the greatest amount of wickedness so that He can show the greatest amount of grace. The Apostles came to Christ when the storm had become so terrible and said to him in unison, “Save us Lord, we perish.” (Mt. 8: 25) The apostles of the end times will say to Mary, “Save us Mary, we perish!” And perhaps she too will say to us, “Why are you fearful, O you little ones of faith?” And perhaps she too will rise up and command the sea of this world, the terrible winds of liberalism, so that we her children will have a great calm.

The enemies of God speak about the Great Reset which they have planned. But do these fools not realize that God has planned a Great Reset, as he always does for his enemies? If God caused his enemies to be swallowed up by the Red Sea, would he not wreak a greater havoc on his enemies who devise evil against the children of Mary? In the Old Testament nature strikes out against the wicked - water, hail stones, and famine. But what if in these times the wicked angels strike out against nature? If we subscribe to the Three Days of Darkness, this is precisely what will happen. God will allow the wicked angels to oppress sinners, but those who are consecrated to the Blessed Virgin will be untouched.

Ave Maria Maris Stella! Hail Mary, Star of the Sea!

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In the history of the world there have been two great, famous trials. The first and most notable, the trial of Christ before the Sanhedrin, that band of religious frauds who murdered their Lord and Master. And secondly, we have the trial of Socrates, a man who was also killed by his own, the Athenian jury of 500 (399 B.C.). These two trials are not comparable if we examine them from the fact that Jesus is the Godman, whereas Socrates is only a man, the great Oracle of Athens. But it is a piece of irony that Christ and Socrates had both their similarities and differences. Christ was relatively poor; Socrates was known as the barefoot philosopher; both Christ and Socrates taught for free, demanding no money for their services; Christ was the reputed “Son of the Carpenter;” Socrates was the son of a stone mason; Christ was put to death in the religious capitol of the world, Jerusalem; Socrates was put to death in the legal and philosophic capitol of the world, Athens. Christ wrote nothing; Socrates wrote nothing. Christ was beautiful to behold; Socrates was ugly, being labelled by one Greek poet as the “pug-nosed philosopher.” Christ began teaching at the age of thirty; Socrates was put to death by a narrow margin of “thirty votes,” by a vote of 280 to 220. *Under Greek law if the jury is split 250 to 250, the accused goes free. Christ was murdered at twelve noon, when the sun was at its zenith; Socrates drank the poison at sunset as the light was leaving the world. Christ shared his Precious Blood with his apostles at the Last Supper, while teaching them; Socrates drank the poisonous Hemlock (wine mixed with Hemlock), while also teaching his students.

The late Jewish writer/columnist, Isadore Feinstein Stone (d. 1989), has left us a most precious volume, The Trial of Socrates. I.F. Stone was always on the Left politically, but he was always quick to call out the truth, cost what it may. He was aware of the “Military Industrial Complex” which is evidenced by his book on the Korean War, Hidden History of the Korean War (1952), as well as his many articles composed for I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which ran from 1953-’71. He was aware that Viet Nam was the result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. His writings can be found online at ifstone.org. I.F. Stone

The story of Socrates and Alcibiades

Of all the Platonic dialogues one of the most cherished is the Symposium, a conversation which occurs at the house of Agathon, a wealthy and learned Greek. Socrates arrives late to the party, barefoot, wearing his wintertime overcoat. The conversation among the dinner guests turns upon the subject of goodness and beauty and truth. What is the Good, the True, the Beautiful? Socrates’ student Alcibiades is one of the dinner guests. Alcibiades, one of the most handsome youths in Athens, at one time impregnated Roxanne, the daughter of a king. The king threatened to behead Alcibiades, but Socrates intervened, saving his life. Alcibiades arrives drunk to the dinner party and wants to crown Agathon the wisest man, τὴν τοῦ σοφωτάτου καὶ καλλίστου κεφαλήν (tḕn toû sophōtátou kaì kallístou kephalḗn) — “the head of the wisest and most beautiful [man].” (Symposium 212e)

Arriving late, Socrates is given the principal seat at table by order of Agathon. Socrates is the Archon, sitting at the head of the table, much like Christ is the Archon in Leonardo DaVinci’s painting “The Last Supper.” At one point Socrates rises while giving his lecture on the nature of Goodness, removing his winter coat, and Alcibiades remarks, θεῖα καὶ χρυσᾶ καὶ πάγκαλα καὶ θαυμαστά, (theîa kaì chrysă kaì pánkala kaì thaumastá...) — “...godlike, golden, completely beautiful, and wonderful...” Socrates is compared to the Silenoi, little statuettes which were ugly on the outside, but inside the chests contained golden trinkets.

The Trial

We have set the stage for the Trial of Socrates. At the age of seventy Socrates was tried under the charge of “corruption of the youth of Athens.” The obvious legal question is, Why did the Athenians wait until Socrates was seventy years old before accusing him of this charge? Stone says:

In an Athenian criminal trial, the jury voted twice. The first vote was on conviction or acquittal. Then if the verdict was for conviction, it voted again on the penalty. The biggest surprise at the trial of Socrates was how closely the jury was split on the first and basic question. Despite the fresh memory of the Thirty, the prestige of the chief accuser, and the growing realization of how antidemocratic were the teachings of Socrates, the jury seemed to have great trouble in making up its mind. A mere shift of six percent on the jury and Socrates would have been acquitted. (p. 181)

The Greek term employed to describe Socrates’ charge was megalegoria which Stone translated as, megal “great” and the verb agoreuo, meaning “to address an assembly.” Some charge Socrates of “boasting proudly before the Agora,” the assembly. Socrates throughout the trial mocked his very accusers, very often reminding the male jurors that he had taught their sons and had received compliments for being such a good and successful teacher. Socrates, like Christ, presented a problem to the corrupt individuals surrounding him. Socrates taught that one should be truthful, willing to suffer for truth, even if it means that he must stand alone against the corruption of the world.

Whenever we address the trial of Socrates, we always want to remember his beloved student Plato. Plato tells us in Phaedo that he was ill on the fateful day that Socrates drank the Hemlock. Some Platonic scholars believe that Plato was too mentally distraught, too consumed with grief. Plato, a teacher himself, with quite a following of students, would have appeared weak in the face of his own students had he broken down in the face of Socrates. Plato was no doubt an emotional wreck over the trial and death of his friend and teacher.

Under Greek law the accused had to drink the poisonous concoction before sunset. On the day of his death Socrates’ students begged him to continue teaching them until the sun went down. He reminded his beloved students that the law mandated that he drink the poison while the light was still in the heavens. Some paintings show Socrates facing the sun, with the poisonous chalice in his left hand, with his right hand outstretched to his students, pointing upward to heaven. Many of his friends and students have their faces turned away as they cannot bear the sight of Socrates teaching them while holding the cup of death. It is fitting to quote some of Socrates’ last words to the jury as he reminded them of man’s last end:

You too, gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence, and fix your minds on this one belief, which is certain - that nothing can harm a good man either in this life or after death, and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods. This present experience of mine has not come about mechanically. I am quite clear that the time had come when it was better to die and be released from my distractions. That is why my sign never turned me back. For my own part I bear no grudge against those who condemned me and accused me, although it was not with this kind intention that they did so, but because they thought that they were hurting me; and that is culpable of them. However, I ask them to grant me one favor. When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if you think that they are putting money or anything else before goodness, take your revenge by plaguing them as I have plagued you; and if they fancy themselves for no reason, you must scold them just as I have scolded you, for neglecting the important things and thinking that they are good for something when they are good for nothing. If you do this, I shall have had justice at your hands, both I myself and my children. Now, it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God. (Socrates Defense 41d-42)

Socrates referred to “his sign,” his daimonion, his “divine spirit” which we take to be his guardian angel. In Greek the verb daio means “to divide, to distribute.” It is true to say that my guardian angel is my other self, my “divided self” if you will. Socrates tells us that he had this guide, this daimon, from the earlies days of his childhood. We should be so fortunate to have our guardian angels present at the moment of our deaths!

While Fr. James Francis Wathen was still living, barely able to travel any longer due to his lymphatic cancer, he composed emails to his faithful children. We eventually persuaded Fr. to publish the emails believing them to be worthy material for future generations of traditional Catholics. The two-volume set is titled I Know Mine and Mine Know Me: The Voice of a Faithful Catholic Priest to His Flock, 2 vols. This following essay is taken from the first volume on the subject of Baptism of Desire, published June 19, 2005. Fr. puts forth the following considerations (in bold), and we offer some commentary where needed:

1. Why angels and men prefer Hell to Heaven is called the mystery of iniquity; how angels were and men are saved is called the salvific will of God.

The first sin in the history of the world was a sin by conspiracy. Lucifer, together with his other miserable angelic fiends, colluded to corrupt Adam and Eve. Satan did not act alone. The angelic conspiracy of yesteryear is no different than the conspirators today who want nothing more than world domination, the penultimate Surveillance State; they want control of the money, of entertainment, of all communications, in short, they want to be like gods. Like the fallen angels, these men too have been given actual grace by God to save their souls, and should they fail miserably to save themselves, this in no way frustrates God’s salvific will.

2. God’s having granted the grace of salvation to the saints from all eternity is called divine predestination.

God’s grace is given to every human being so that they become capable of becoming saints. God gives grace to every man, even the antichrist, as spectacular as this may seem. The most hardened sinners are given graces. In fact, it is not impossible that the greatest sinner in the world could become the greatest saint in the world if only he cooperated with the graces God gives him.

3. The reason for the creation of the material universe is the repopulation of the heavenly court, after the fall of the angels.

Married couples ought to keep in mind that terrible responsibility that they are commissioned “to be fruitful” and raise up saints to do battle against the forces of antichrist.

4. Almighty God therefore creates men in order to save them.

And we add, God does not create men to damn them. This is the terrible heresy of Calvinism. St. Alphonsus says in the History of the Heresies that John Calvin committed a sin so foul that he would not even dare mention it. As the man, so his religion.

5. God is absolute goodness and love itself; but his ways are inscrutable.

The sinner in Hell knows that he rejected Eternal Love. He knows that it was his love for sin which caused him to reject all that is Good, True, and Beautiful. He will screech out to others, “I am the biggest fool for being in this place,” yet in his heart of hearts he knows that there are plenty in Hell more foolish. He is a divided man because he wants to leave Hell because of all the hatred there, but also wants to stay there, because he knows that God is so good and to be exposed to that Goodness would be a pain greater than Hell.

6. God wants the salvation of every man and the damnation of none.

God does not want each man to have his equal share of money - this is the Jewish doctrine of Karl Marx; God does not want every human being to have access to the Internet. He does not want everyone to have running water. God wants obedience from his children on earth so that they can be with Him in Heaven.

7. God does everything in His power to save every man.

How many times in the New Testament did God show his patience and mercy, especially toward the Jews? He even allowed his own Mother to be mocked, to be cursed at, spat upon, shoved, etc. Jesus could have annihilated his enemies with only a single thought. The devils, because they have superior intellects and memories, will remind the damned souls in Hell, “Remember that time when such and such happened, God was trying to save you, but you did not listen, and now you are mine!”

8. If any man is saved, it is because God saved him.

9. If any man is not saved, it is because he chose not to be saved.

A man really chooses his own sins in place of God’s laws, and thus he chooses Hell to Heaven. A man must know God and love God. He knows God with his intellect but loves God with his will. The modern error concerning salvation is the following, “If I am smart and know a lot about God, this will save me.” Nonsense, because plenty of “smart” people end up in Hell.

10. God cannot bestow heaven on a man who has no merits, who is not sanctified, even if, in the eyes of humans, he is a “good man.”

Men are so often very wrong, much like the old lady who says, “oh, that sweet boy is so good.” The boy might be the greatest rogue, the worst liar in the neighborhood, much to her stupidity. She thinks him good because he helped her cross the street, which must make him a good boy for some foolish reason.

11. A man cannot be saved outside the Catholic Church, because only the Church can sanctify him.

Most traditional Catholics will concede the antecedent but will deny the consequent. Many Catholics fall into the error of Arianism, that a man can sanctify himself through his own goodness. If we put this truth in logical form it would read: If a man was saved in the Church, then he was sanctified in the Church. If we affirm the consequent, A man was sanctified in the Church, this does not mean that a man was necessarily saved. In logic the rule is, To affirm the antecedent is to affirm the consequent, but to affirm the consequent is not necessarily to affirm the antecedent.

12. No man goes to heaven unless he freely chooses it.

13. Even though a man must cooperate with God, he cannot save himself; his salvation is due to God; not himself, because anything in the supernatural order requires divine power.

Every human being under the New Law must receive the waters of baptism, because only baptism supernaturalizes him. Even those with no personal sin must be supernaturalized, that is, they must move from the natural to the supernatural order. As one author put it, “Through Baptism we become Jesus mystically.” Sanctification happens in time, in the natural order of things; salvation is an eternal state, and it is the supernatural order.

14. No man goes to hell unless he freely chooses it.

It will be most terrible in Hell for the damned to contemplate the fact that all are there because they chose it freely. And they will blame all the others for being there, “It is your fault that I am here, you wretch.” The eternal blame game!

15. A man does not choose Hell instead of Heaven; he chooses his will instead of God’s.

16. A man chooses to go to hell in this life; he freely chooses to remain in Hell forever.

This is a bitter pill to swallow, but is it not true?

17. In Hell, no man blames anyone but himself for his damnation.

18. In Hell, they do not hate God, they resist Him; they hate themselves.

19. That in the Providence of God which a man does for his salvation is termed Divine Predestination. This means that God provides all the graces a man needs to be saved because He knew from eternity that the man would accept them.

20. It is a teaching of the Church that God gives to all men sufficient grace for salvation; to those who are saved, he gives efficacious grace.

21. The reason that God does not give efficacious grace to those who will be lost is that they would not accept it; this is the same reason God does not give grace to those in Hell.

In Hell there is no grace, no sanctifying grace, no sufficient grace, no efficacious grace. The souls in Hell are aware that God is in Heaven with his saints.

22. The reason the punishment of Hell is eternal is that neither the demons not damned humans cease to resist God.

23. God grants the Faith to those who would accept it; those he knows will not accept it He leaves in ignorance of it; this ignorance is not “invincible”; it is culpable.

24. It is impossible for us to know or understand God’s dealings with all others; we understand poorly God’s dealing with ourselves.

25. Even though we can judge that our neighbors are failing to fulfill the requirements of salvation, once they have departed this life, it is impossible to know whether they have been saved or lost.

26. Hell is the necessity of divine justice, which is worthy of all praise.

27. In his passion and death, God revealed with forceful clarity how much He wishes to save every man. He gave expression to this consuming desire when He exclaimed: “I thirst” (Jn. 19: 28) He ordained that His legs should not be broken, but that His Heart should be opened that the Church of salvation could be born.

28. The millions who will abide in Limbo forever teach us that no one has the right to the grace of salvation.

Fr. Wathen says more on the subject of Baptism of Desire, but we end the short essay here. If one is interested in the hardback volumes, then he can visit my eBay bookstore, orestesbrownson. We hope that these truths, as bitter as they may seem, will be a source of meditation for the Catholic. None of us thinks about Hell enough, perhaps because we are prideful enough to believe that we will not go there. It is good to remember the saying of St. Louis Marie de Monfort when thinking about Hell:

Even if you are on the brink of damnation, even if you have one foot in hell, even if you have sold your soul to the devil as sorcerers do who practice black magic, and even if you are a heretic as obstinate as a devil, sooner or later you will be converted and will amend your life and will save your soul, if-and mark well what I say-if you say the Holy Rosary devoutly every day until death for the purpose of knowing the truth and obtaining contrition and pardon for your sins.

When we look at the Old Testament there is one obvious fact, Mary is found there, and her number is eight. Only the faithful Catholic will find Mary in the Old Testament, because only he looks for her there. The Protestant, the Jew, the Mohammedan, the freethinker, will all of them not look to Mary in the Old Testament; that is, unless God gives them the grace to look for her. The greatest pain in Hell is the following thought, “In rejecting Mary I have rejected God, and in rejecting God I have rejected Mary.” Mary, in a hidden way, fills the pages of the Old Testament, just as she reveals herself in the pages of the New Testament. It is often the case that the eighth chapter, eighth verse of any particular book in Holy Writ makes reference to her. The feast of Mary’s Immaculate Conception is December 8th; her birth is commemorated on September 8th.

In chapter seven of Genesis we see Mary’s rosary prefigured. Noah lets down a rope measuring the waters, 7:20, “The water was fifteen cubits higher than the mountains which it covered.” We see later in Genesis, 8:8, that Mary is prefigured again. Noah sends out a dove from the Ark; and the dove is female. “He sent forth a dove after him, to see if the waters had now ceased upon the face of the earth.” The rope had knots in it, spaced out perfectly between each cubit, and at the end of the rope was an anchor, and the Anchor is Christ. We should ask ourselves, Why in the book of Genesis does the rosary appear before Mary, the dove, is sent forth from the Ark? God will only renew the world when people pray the rosary. He who finds the rosary, finds Mary, and in finding Mary, finds Jesus. *Years ago, I administered a Scripture quiz to a high school religion class, asking them, “What was the sex of the dove which Noah sent forth from the Ark?” One student got the correct answer, and her name was Mary. The waters which destroyed the earth are at the same time the waters of death and the waters of life, similar to the waters of baptism.

In the Catholic Bible - the only Bible there is - there are seventy-three books. Only three books bear a woman’s name, Ruth, Judith and Esther. Ruth is the 8th book, and Judith is the 18th respectively. The combined three books total 705 verses. 705 divided by eight is eighty-eight. Both Judith and Esther have sixteen chapters, both divisible by eight; Ruth is four chapters, half of eight. Even the three names combined are composed of sixteen letters, divisible by eight. We will look at the eighth chapters of Judith and Esther, as well as Ruth. nota bene: I asked Grok, How many verses are there in these three books? Grok said, 697, which prompted me to correct Grok, mentioning that Judith had 345 verses in the Challoner edition. Grok admitted its mistake, changing the number to 705. This is proof positive that one should trust his own instincts and not rely on the power of computer programmers!

In the book of Ruth Ruth’s mother-in-law, Noemi, says to the inhabitants after losing her husband and two sons, “Call me not Noemi (that is beautiful,) but call me Mara, (that is bitter,) for the Almighty hath quite filled me with bitterness.” (1:20) Etymologically the names Maria and Mara are closely related. Even the Sanskrit word mara means “death” or “pestilence.” Ruth 3: 7-8 says: “And when Booz had eaten, and drunk, and was merry, he went to sleep by the heap of sheaves, and she (Ruth) came softly and uncovering his feet, laid herself down. And behold, when it was now midnight the man was afraid, and troubled: and he saw a woman lying at his feet.” Booz is the great-grandfather of King David, and he was also the husband of the orphaned and widowed Ruth. Booz was merry with wine, but St. Joseph was merry with the wine of grace. Joseph had at his feet a “heap of sheaves,” indeed he had at his feet, Jesus, the Son of God, the Bread of Life. Mary in her humility put herself at the feet of Joseph, just as Ruth placed herself at the feet of Booz. Mary gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem. Booz “came out of Bethlehem,” just as the mother of St. Joseph, Rachel, was born in Bethlehem; his father, Jacob, was born in Nazareth. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of King David, and He was the Son of David, David’s King and Messiah.

The book of Judith is Deutero-Canonical and has been rejected by all Protestants as not divinely inspired. The Catholic Church has declared that Judith is a book inspired by God. Every Protestant who rejects the book of Judith is a heretic, simply by virtue of the fact that he rejects a book which is inspired by God, and has been declared so by the Church. And in denying the book of Judith he denies the whole Bible, not just a part of it. It is akin to a man telling a beautiful woman, I love you, but I must cut off your left hand. What deranged fool does not see a problem with this? Judith 8: 7-8 says:

“And she was exceedingly beautiful, and her husband left her great riches, and very many servants, and large possessions of herds of oxen, and flocks of sheep. And she was greatly renowned among all, because she feared the Lord very much, neither was there anyone that spoke an ill word of her.” And after Judith slew Holofernes, the enemy of Israel, it was the high priest Joachim who came out to greet Judith, saying “Thou art the glory of Jerusalem, thou art the joy of Israel, thou art the honor of our people.” (15:10) The father of the Blessed Virgin was St. Joachim, and when the Virgin Mary was born to him he said these same words to his daughter.

The book of Esther recounts the holy woman and her uncle Mordechai who are eventually saved and elevated by the gentile king Assuerus. Esther represents Mary who will gain victory over the antichrist, just as Esther cut off the head of Holofernes. Ester’s name in Persian means “star.” Mordechai represents St. Joseph: “And Mordechai going forth out of the palace, and from the king’s presence, shone in royal apparel, to wit, of violet and sky color, wearing a golden crown on his head, and clothed with a cloak of silk and purple. And all the city rejoiced and was glad.” We have said before, but it bears repeating, St. Joseph is the greatest man whom God has created. Notice that Mordechai went from a position of relative non-importance to being crowned with gold. The king Assuerus put Mordechai before himself, and it was Esther who urged that Mordechai be honored. Mary urges us to honor Joseph. She demands it. And this happened in the eighth chapter of Esther.

The Witnesses hang out at the local airport by my house, and over the past couple of weeks I have talked to several of them. It is no surprise that a good number of them are ex-Catholics, a fact which they readily admit. Various Witnesses have trounced around my neighborhood for years. They are pleasant people, but their doctrines are shifty, imprecise, and their demeanor is, in general, innocent and immature. Most Witnesses, upon examination of their doctrines, will shy away from any discussion of their founder and his ideas, and with good reason.

To better understand the Jehovah Witnesses, I pulled several volumes from my shelves: Three volumes of the Radio Replies (RR) which were printed by Frs. Rumble and Carty, published by TAN Books (1979 reprint of 1938 edition). Fr. Rumble broadcast from Sydney, Australia, and Fr. Carty from St. Paul, Minnesota. They devote several pages to the Jehovah Witnesses from which we will borrow. If these radio priests were alive today, what would they have to say about their home state Minnesota and Australia? But we digress. The other volume is Answering Jehovah Witnesses (2001) (AJW) by Jason Evert.

Some views held by the Witnesses are the following: Jesus is really Michael the Archangel; the doctrine of the Trinity is pagan in origin; the Holy Ghost is not a Person, but God’s active force; there is no hell (this is convenient); the unsaved are simply annihilated; an individual man has no immortal soul, and while many will live in paradise on earth, he must be one of the 144,000 “anointed ones” if he wants to go to heaven - good luck with the one! (AJW 45)

They also believe that Jesus’ Second Coming happened in 1914, at the start of World War I. Christ’s return was invisible, not in the flesh, but how they know this is we can only guess. Witnesses may not vote, salute the flag, accept a blood transfusion, or celebrate any holiday or birthday, as they believe that all of these things displease God. (AJW 45)

Enter Charles Taze Russell: Founder

RR answers the question concerning the founder of the Jehovah Witnesses, Charles Russell:

Pastor Russell was born in America in 1852. He was first a Congregationalist, then dabbled in Seventh Day Adventism, and finally set up for himself as a prophet announcing the Second Coming of Christ. His piety was not true piety. It was an unbalanced religious mania centered entirely in himself…Nor was Russell a follower of Christ in practice. His wife divorced him for infidelity; and he made money by selling what he called ‘miracle wheat’ at sixty dollars a bushel to credulous farmers, the fraud being eventually stopped by the Federal authorities, who made him refund the money. (RR, v. 2, 1351)

Russell believed that he was one of the seven angels referred to by St. John in the book of the Apocalypse. The other six angels were the Apostles Paul and John, the heretic Arius (condemned by the Council of Nicaea in 325 for denying Christ’ divinity), Peter Waldo (of the heretical Waldensian sect which was condemned by Pope Innocent III in 1208), John Wycliff, and Martin Luther, a renegade Catholic priest who shacked up with an ex-nun named Katharine(AJW 24)

Russell initiated a lawsuit in 1913 against a Baptist pastor, J.J. Ross, who claimed that Russell was a pseudo scholar who “never attended the higher schools of learning.” During the court case Ross’ attorney, Staunton, cross-examined Russell, forcing Russell to admit that he was not familiar with the Greek language. (AJW 26)

Russell wrote some books titled the Millenial Dawn Series, later renamed Studies in the Scriptures. The official magazine of the Witnesses is The Watchtower. Russell was fascinated with the Great Pyramid of Giza. He said of it:

Viewed from whatever standpoint we please, the Great Pyramid is certainly the most remarkable building in the world…It acquires new interest to every Christian advanced in the study of God’s word…The Great Pyramid, however, proves to be a storehouse of important truth - scientific, historic, and prophetic - and its testimony is found to be in perfect accord with the Bible…It was evidently a part of God’s purpose to keep secret, until the Time of the End. (AJW 29)

The Witnesses and the Trinity

The Witnesses, like many Protestants, maintain that the Holy Trinity is an idea borrowed from former, pagan histories. The Watchtower claims that the Egyptians worship Osiris, Isis, and Horus; and the Hindus believe in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. (AJW 57) But an error equally as grievous is their belief that the early Church developed the doctrine of the Trinity after the writing of the Gospels. The reverse is true. Oral tradition precedes written tradition, and the doctrine of the Trinity was believed by the Church before a single line of the New Testament was written. The early Church did not develop the doctrine of the Trinity from a set of loosely held opinions.

The Witnesses cannot even agree that Jesus is God. In their publication they have changed the famous biblical quote to the past tense, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am (I was).” There is a similar quote in Greek when Christ says, “Indeed, I am the Light of the world” ego eimi to phos tou kosmou. The Witnesses apparently would have no problem if this phrase were to read, “Indeed, I was the light of the world.”

A Court Reporter Takes Over

When the founder of the Witnesses died in 1916, the organization was taken over by a court reporter from Boonville, Missouri, Joseph Rutherford. Radio Replies says:

In 1918 he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for conspiracy and disloyalty in promoting military revolt in America, but was released with many other prisoners in an amnesty in 1919, after having served nine months in Atlanta Penitentiary. (RR 333)

In terms of statistics, in 1874 the Witnesses counted thirty members, and as of 1998 they had fourteen million adherents; and as of 1999, they had over eight thousand adherents who were self-proclaimed members of the “anointed” class, those who were able to partake of bread and wine at the memorial service. It is only these “anointed ones” who have any hope of going to heaven. (AJW 48)

The next time the Wonky Witnesses show up at your door hopefully this essay will give you a bit of ammunition with which to arm yourself.

This essay is written in honor of my late uncle, Sgt James Payne (JP), who served in Viet Nam with the 1^st Bn., 8^th Marines; 3^rd Bn., 26^th Marines, from 1964-68. He participated in the following operations: Prairie, Chinook, Big Horn, Shawnee, and Choctaw. Like many men who left Viet Nam badly mangled, both physically and mentally, he too was a victim. He died at the Veteran’s Hospital about fifteen years ago, a victim of too much beer and whiskey. When he died, he was six foot two and he weighed 80 lbs. I once told him that I had known several people in A.A. who had been sober for several years, to which he replied, “A.A. is for quitters. A.A. is for people who don’t know how to drink.” He was right, A.A. is for people who have lost the power to drink successfully, but what he may not have realized is that sometimes it is quite normal and necessary to be a “quitter.” But I will say this about my Uncle James, he never told me a lie, and all that he related to me is true, however tragic it may seem.

Before Viet Nam

My grandmother on my mother’s side was a devout Catholic who lived in Brandenburg, Ky. She died in 1955, aged 32, leaving behind six young children. Her diary often reads, “I went to holy Mass this morning.” One day Uncle JP told me a story about her, assuring me that it was one hundred percent true:

“Bryan, your grandmother was dying of cancer. We just had a tornado come through town, and the Blessed Virgin statue in the front yard was swept away, it was gone, nowhere to be seen. I looked for that statue everywhere. I went to mom’s bedside and knelt down saying, ‘Mom, you are not going to believe this, but that Blessed Virgin statue is gone, the tornado took it away.’ She replied, ‘Well James, I guess God wanted it then.’ Several days later we had another tornado and that statue came back to its original spot. I could not believe it and told mom that it had come back to the very same spot. She told me, ‘Well James, I guess God wanted that statue to stay right there.’”

Uncle JP enlisted in the United States Marines shortly past his seventeenth birthday in August of 1964. Until then the only life he had known was the innocence of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Louisville, Ky. At one time it was a Catholic orphanage presided over by fifty nuns; and they had over 250 orphans. Today there are no nuns, even though the property still retains the title of “orphanage.” His other five siblings were back home in the orphanage praying for him every day. My mother told me that every day at St. Joseph’s Orphanage the Franciscan priests would have Mass, Rosary and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. My mother and all her siblings were confirmed by the late Archbishop Sheen. I found out that Bishop Sheen would visit the Catholic orphanages, giving the children the sacrament of Confirmation.

Lieutenant from Ohio

He asked me one day, “Bryan, do you know how many guys in my outfit came home?” I answered probably only a few. He said, “Yes, there were thirty-three in my unit, and three of us came home.” It would have only been two men, but he saved his Lt., a “black man from Ohio.” He recounted how his Lt. took a round in the stomach, and he carried on his left shoulder his wounded comrade, while spraying 50 cal. rounds with his right hand. He got his Lt. to the chopper. His commanding officer tried to give him the Silver Star Medal for “saving an officer while under enemy fire,” but he told his CO to give it to someone else.

Blowing up a bridge

He had a new captain show up on the scene, and his name was Capt. Diablo. Being introduced to the new captain, he said, “Capt. Diablo, you need to shut your mouth, this is Viet Nam. If you do not listen to what I tell you, you are going to get your head shot off.” Diablo listened up! Capt. Diablo had a supply of whiskey and dynamite, and JP told him, “I want three bottles of whiskey for my men and all the dynamite you can give me.” Diablo asked why he needed dynamite, to which JP replied, “Don’t worry about it, you will find out soon enough.” The next morning JP and another marine swam into the river and placed dynamite on an enemy bridge. At 0400 hrs. they blew up the bridge, causing the train and its occupants to crash into the river. The explosion was so violent that it shook the captain’s quarters, prompting Capt. Diablo to remark, “What the hell did you do Payne?” “Sir, we took care of the bridge and the enemy too.”

Beware of Bamboo Vipers

I asked Uncle JP one day if a man ever died from snakebite. He told me the man’s name which I cannot recall. He said, “Yes, in Viet Nam there were Bamboo Vipers, and they would coil around bamboo at head level.” One day his friend right next to him was hit in the neck by a viper, “dead by the time he hit the ground.” In Viet Nam one had to always be on the lookout for bamboo vipers and trip wires.

A rogue marine

One of the horrors of war is that men are often driven to do things they would not ordinarily do. They oftentimes become more like beasts than men. One man had raped a Vietnamese woman, when he was caught by the Viet Cong. They nailed the man to the wall, cut off his testicles, and placed them in his mouth. This is how his fellow marines found him, a truly horrific sight.

The tale of a Tunnel Rat

Uncle JP called himself an enemy scout and Tunnel Rat. He told me that some of the tunnels were 200-300 yards long. The Viet Cong would booby trap the tunnels with hooks, and often there were snakes in the tunnels. Often the Tunnel Rat would get to the end of the tunnel and “hit the hatch.” If there was something on top of the hatch, say a chest or something, the Viet Cong would start firing rounds onto the floor as the marine would scramble back to his position. This happened several times.

Conclusion

Both my father, Richard, and my Uncle James served in Viet Nam. Both men believed that Viet Nam was a political conflict. My father believed that Lyndon Johnson played a role in the Kennedy assassination, and that he collected war profits as a result of the Military Industrial Complex. Uncle JP told me that the Marines could have taken all of Viet Nam is a couple of weeks, but the War Lords would not allow it. He told me the marines would take hill, and the next day get orders to retreat. It is a tragic to think that War Lords will keep boots on the ground because there is money to be made. The book Blood, Money and Power by Barr McClellan was written by a powerful attorney, and he claimed that he talked to LBJ personally a few weeks before the president’s death. LBJ wanted the truth to come out that he was responsible for the death of Kennedy, but McClellan felt that the deed was done, and there was nothing he could do but write a book.

“And when you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars, fear ye not. For such things must needs be, but the end is not yet.” St. Mark 13:7

In the 1980’s, when I was in the fifth grade, I had a grade school class named American Civics. We learned that America has three co-equal branches of government, the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. All three branches are co-equal, and each branch is meant to hold the other two branches in check. If any one branch of the government becomes reckless in its ambitions and begins to usurp the Constitution, then it is the duty of the remaining two branches to offer up a reprimand, and if need be, convict and impeach. The U.S. citizen maintains a moral presence in all three branches. He elects the president of the United States (indirectly through the Electoral College); he elects members of the federal House of Representatives; and he elects judges, at least at the local level. As a people tend to gravitate toward corruption and veer away from virtue, the branches of government, if left unchecked, become corrupt over time, eventually becoming tyrannical. America today is as close to tyranny as she has ever been.

In American history we have had two great mass sedition trials. The first case was in early American history at the time of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Adams, a Federalist (a believer in a strong federal government), was elected president in 1797, and Jefferson, the anti-Federalist (a believer in a weakened federal government), was narrowly elected to serve as vice-president alongside Adams. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence which specifically mentioned the fact that governments will often “become destructive of their ends,” forcing the people to “alter or abolish” the government altogether. In Jefferson’s time the American people were strongly anti-federalist, so much so that Jefferson was elected president in 1801. At this time there was a law of sedition which punished those who engaged in “false, scandalous, and malicious writings against the government, either house of congress, or the president…” But the simple fact of the matter is that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and the First Amendment (a part of the Bill of Rights) was not ratified until fifteen years later, on December 15, 1791. What this tells us, or ought to tell us, is that the Constitution (ratified Sept. 17, 1787) was not sufficient as a stand-alone document. Rather, the government, as well as the people, had to be reminded that we have a right to say unpopular things, a right to carry firearms, a right not to have our homes invaded by the government, and a right to print and carry unpopular manuscripts, among other things. In other words, the Bill of Rights makes explicit what was only implicit in the Declaration and Constitution.

The most notable casualty of this vague sedition law was a Vermonter, Matthew Lyon, a congressman and newspaper man. Lyon was an Irishman who had the fire of St. Patrick in his bowels. Lyon’s father was put to death by the English in Ireland because of his support for the “White Boys Rebellion,” a collection of faithful Irish who strove to throw off the tyranny of the English. Lyon came over to America on a ship as an indentured servant. He served in two state federal legislatures, Vermont (1707-1801) and Kentucky (1803-1810). He operated a Vermont newspaper and accused John Adams of an “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” The arrest of Lyon by John Adams’ henchmen is detailed in the book The Sedition Case: The Story of America’s Greatest Legal Battle - The Infamous War-time Sedition Trial:

This (Lyon’s newspaper articles) offended leaders of the party in power, and a hand-picked jury was chosen under the guidance of Justice Paterson, who saw to it that the editor was convicted, fined and clapped into prison. Having the misfortune of falling into the hands of a sadistic marshal, he was subjected to inhuman treatment while serving sentence. Being unable to pay his fine, the term of incarceration was extended. Friends trying to raise money through a lottery, purchased an advertisement in the Vermont Gazette at Bennington and its editor was immediately arrested…the Federalists, though intolerant and fanatical, were not disloyal to their country; whereas, those responsible for the New Deal Sedition Case were devotees to the Communist party line.1 (pgs. 8, 12)

The New Deal Sedition Case

The Great Sedition Case took place in Washington, D.C., in 1944. The American patriots who opposed America’s entrance into World War II, were charged with conspiracy to “undermine the morale of the armed forces.” (p. 43) The Chicago Tribune for October 12, 1952 said it best:

Judges and lawyers alike will tell you the mass sedition trial of World War II will go down in legal history as one of the blackest marks on the record of American jurisprudence. In the legal world, none can recall a case where so many Americans were brought to trial for political persecution and were so arrogantly denied the rights granted an American citizen under the Constitution. (p. 45)

The president of the United States, Franklin “Don’t want to Know (Delano)” Roosevelt was behind the prosecution of these innocent Americans. Three indictments were originally brought against the defendants in 1943, but the original prosecutor was removed from the case, and only the third indictment would stick. The defendants were tried under the Sedition Act of June 28, 1940. One legal issue with the case is the fact that many of the defendants had published their writings long before the enactment of the Sedition Act, prompting the legal question, “How can one be liable for breaking a law not yet in existence?” And we must remember that when the law was enacted in June of 1940 America was still in peacetime status, as Pearl Harbor had not yet occurred and America had not yet entered the War. Americans were being tried in 1944, based upon a law enacted in 1940, for statements which some of them had made as early as the 1920’s.

Roosevelt’s lapdog was Attorney General Francis Biddle, and it was Biddle who issued the three indictments against thirty Americans from across the country. The defendants were summoned to Washington, D.C., even though a person “charged with either a criminal or civil offense stands trial in courts of his home district.” (p. 48) Roosevelt wanted to make an example of these Americans who promoted the idea that World War II was a Banker’s War, a war to destroy the German people. Roosevelt knew that if he could get all the defendants in Washington, D.C., then the media machine would be able to paint them as disloyal, misguided patriots.

The most famous of the defendants was a woman named Elizabeth Dilling (d. 1966). Dilling was an anti-communist from the Chicago area, the daughter of a Scotch-Irish surgeon. Her notable work was The Red Network: a ‘Who’s Who’ and Handbook for Radicalism for Patriots. She also published The Octopus, a book outlining the roots of Jewish communism. After her death another book was published, The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today, formerly titled The Plot Against Christianity. An entire article could be devoted to Dilling, but we must confine ourselves to the Sedition Trial. We give the official list of indictments as found in the book The Sedition Case:

1. Democracy is decadent; a national socialist or fascist form of government should be established in the United States

2. A national socialist revolution is inevitable if we are to rid our country of its decadent democracy.

3. The Government of the United States, the Congress and public officials are controlled by Communists, International Jews, and plutocrats.

4. The Democratic and Republican parties and their candidates for public office are tools of International Jewry, and do not represent the will of the American people.

5. The acts, proclamations, and orders of the public officials of the United States and the laws of the Congress are illegal, corrupt, traitorous and in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States.

6. The United States is governed, not by the duly elected representatives of the people, but by a group of alien-minded persons opposed to American principles and ideals and seeking to overthrow the Constitution of the United States.

7. President Roosevelt is reprehensible, a war mongerer, liar, unscrupulous, and a pawn of the Jews, Communists and Plutocrats.

8. President Roosevelt is a Jew and is working with International Jewry against the interests of the people of the United States.

9. The activities and territorial acquisitions and plans of the Axis Powers constitute no real danger to the national existence and security of the United States or any of its territorial possessions.

10. The Axis Powers are fighting to free the world from domination by Communism and International Jewry, and to save Christianity, hence the United States should give no aid and comfort to the enemies of the Axis.

11. The cause of the Axis Powers is the cause of justice and morality; they have committed no aggressive act against any nation and are fighting a solely defensive war against British Imperialism, American Capitalists, and the desire of American public officials to rule the world, hence any act of war against them is unjust and immoral on the part of the United States.

12. The nations opposed to the Axis, plan to use American lives, money and property to defend their decadent systems of government.

13. The participation of the United States in the war has been deliberately planned by our leaders with the ultimate aim of promoting our enslavement by British Imperialism and International Communism.

14. The public officials of the United States of America are trying deliberately to provoke war with peaceful nations, such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, which are seeking only to live at peace with the rest of the world.

15. President Roosevelt and Congress, through a surreptitious and illegal war program against the Axis Powers, sold out the United States and forced the Axis Power to wage war upon us.

16. President Roosevelt by his war-mongering policies is draining the resources of the United States to save Communist China, Imperial Britain, and Atheistic Russia from inevitable defeat.

17. Our program of giving American arms and equipment to foreign nations results in United States military and naval forces being inadequately armed and equipped and in their being exposed to terrible slaughter.

18. The public officials of the United States are knaves who have deliberately concealed the truth that our unprepared boys, racked by disease and slaughtered like sheep, will be dumped in a million foreign graves to buy a valueless victory.

19. The whole war is the result of a Jew-sponsored, money-making scheme to bleed the United States Treasury.

20. As the result of incompetence and corruption in public office, the United States is unprepared to wage war against the Axis Powers, who have the best equipped and most powerful military establishment in the world.

21. The present war is a dishonest war waged at the expense and measured in the blood and dollars of the people of the United States solely for the benefit of and to insure the continuance of world domination by “International Bankers,” “International Capitalists,” Mongolian Jews,” “Communists,” and “International Jewry.”

22. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was deliberately invited by the public officials of the United States, in order to involve the United States in a foreign war.

23. The war with Japan was deliberately provoked by the insane, unjust, aggressive and traitorous policies of officials of the United States.

24. An honorable and just peace could be brought about speedily were it not for the opposition of Communists, International Jewry, and war profiteers.2

It would be fitting to answer each one of these charges one by one, as an argument can be made for many of them. But time does not permit. During the trial Mrs. Dilling, Colonel Sanctuary, Dr. Winrod, Mr. Hudson, and others quoted the 1919 British White Paper as their defense against the charge of being Nazi sympathizers. The White Paper was read to British Parliament by order of His Majesty the King in April, 1919. The White Paper read in part:

I consider that the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue now before the world, not even excluding the war which is still raging, and unless, as above stated, Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world, as it is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things.3

One lawyer who represented Colonel Sanctuary, one of the defendants, was a Jew by the name of Henry Klein. Klein actually sent a several page letter to every member of Congress in 1943 asking for the impeachment of Roosevelt. Counselor Klein was a seasoned veteran, and he addressed the federal grand jury. We give only a brief remark:

The alleged indictment begins by stating that Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 - a purely academic statement - but a very significant statement, because this document charges that these defendants followed ‘the Nazi line’ by their writings and speeches. What does Mr. Rogge (prosecutor) mean by that? He means that because Hitler was anti-Semitic, so to speak, in Germany, that these defendants were anti-Semitic in the United States. Does that mean that they intended to undermine the morale of our armed forces? He does not tell you that there was anti-Semitism in every country in Europe before and after Hitler came to power in 1933; nor does he tell you that there was anti-Semitism in the United States for many years before Hitler…Nor does he tell you that anti-Semitism or anti any other religion or race is not a crime under our laws.4

Klein’s speech to the jury was so masterful that he received hate letters from other Jews. One Jewess, Mrs. Goldsmith, the wife of Arthur J. Goldsmith, a New York broker who worked out of the Waldorf Tower, wrote to Klein, “You are a renegade, the lowest scum of the earth…You have done the Jewish people such harm as Hitler in his wildest mental ravings could not have conceived.” Henry Klein died in 1955, and the New York Times obituary article concluded by saying:

In 1950 he petitioned the House Judiciary Committee to impeach Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter. His books included "Standard Oil or the People"; "Bankrupting a Great City-The Story of New York"; "Dynastic America and Those Who Own It"; "Sacrificed The Story of Police Lieutenant Charles Becker": “America, Use Your Head," and “Politics, Government and the Public Utilities in New York City." Surviving are his widow, Lena, and three sisters, Mrs. Estelle Finkelstone, Mrs. Mae Friedman and Mrs. Mildred Young.5

As the grueling trial came to a close near the end of 1944 an interesting thing happened. The presiding trial judge, Edward Clayton Eicher, Chief Justice of the District Court for the District of Columbia, died in his sleep, at the age of sixty-five, on the night of November 29th. His death was the death blow to the trial. Because the presiding judge died during the trial, the prosecution realized that they would need to retry the case, something they were not willing to do. The trial formally ended by court order on December 7, 1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Imagine the irony!

Article in MP3 format. Narrated by author.

The first time I remember hearing the phrase, “America is making the world safe for democracy,” was during the Ronald Reagan days. And we still hear this lie parroted by such worthless news outlets as CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, et alia. Nearly every U.S. military intervention in the last fifty years has been done in the spirit of “making the world safe for democracy.” When the world gets blown up by a handful of selfish billionaire oligarchs they will tell us all, “Be happy in your fifteen-minute cities, for we have made the world safe for democracy.”

Very rarely is it the case that a man pursues politics because he desires to improve the welfare of the city or state. In America money is king, or as John Calvin would have it, “God blesses financially those who love him.” Apparently, using Calvin’s philosophy, God must really love U.S. politicians because they do quite well for themselves. Most politicians, despite what they may tell you, enter politics because of self-love; because of love of money. And most wars are fought in behalf of the money masters, what Henry Ford called the “Copper Kings.” The famous Dr. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, lived a modest and religious life. He said of democracy:

I am not a ‘democrat,’ if only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and spiritualize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power - and then we get and are getting slavery.1

Whom would Tolkien call out today as being the “Orc with the ring of power?” Protestantism always lends itself to democracy, and a corrupt democracy at that; and America, because it is still a Protestant country, must necessarily find itself in the throes of the democratic spirit. Protestantism is in the spiritual realm what democracy is in the political realm - the will of the people. If the members of your local church support abortion, or LGBT, or birth control, or any other immorality, it is because the “democratic spirit” pervades your church, and you the individual will do nothing about it.

“Making the world safe for chaos”

In case you have not followed American history these last hundred years, any time a politician or author tells you that “America is making the world safe…” whatever words follow after are a lie. A strong argument can be made that America had no business in either of the two World Wars, and an even stronger argument can be made that America will have no business in the upcoming Third World War, which is sure to happen. Never mind all of the military interventions, the coup d’etats, the C.I.A. drug smuggling, the F.B.I. eavesdropping, ad naseam. All of these things are done, you see, to make the world a safer place.

During my graduate days I had an M.A. course titled “Just War Theory,” and the core theologian studied was the great St. Augustine (430 A.D.), the Doctor of Grace, Doctor Gratiae. It was St. Augustine who gave us the principles of what constitutes a just war. We share these principles because every Catholic when he weighs the justifiability of a war, must answer these basic questions. I have a book written by the Rev. Patrick J. Dolan, titled Just War Theory in the Gulf War Debate (1997), and it is from this volume that we list the principles of a just war according to St. Augustine:

1. Just Cause: Is there a ‘real and certain danger’ which can only be confronted by war? Though it is clearly evident that a grave wrong [aggression, hostage taking, torture] has been done and is still continuing, we must have clarification of the many objectives proposed to correct that wrong.

2. Competent Authority: Who in this case is the competent authority to authorize the use of force? The president acting alone, the president and congress…

3. Right Intention: Are the reasons set forth as a just cause for war the actual objectives of military action? Also implied in this is the question of any hidden agenda on the part of the allied nations, as well as the obligation not to demonize the people of the enemy nation.

4. Probability of Success: Is the prospect of success sufficiently clear to justify the human and other costs of military action?

5. Proportionality: Will the war with Iraq (Iran ‘fill in the blank’) leave the people of the surrounding nations better or worse off?

6. Discrimination: The military means used…must be directed at the aggressors, not innocent people. (page 52)

   

Given these six criteria for the principles of a just war, one can see that achieving a “just war” is not an easy task. There are always moral decisions to be made when choosing military action as a last resort. It was the late G.K. Chesterton who said:

When we say about war that ‘all nations are equally to blame’ even though one nation is the aggressor, we say a nation may choose to do whatever it wishes. (The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, Rawley Myers)

It was the same Chesterton who predicted World War two in 1932 when he said, “We are already drifting horribly near a new war, which will probably start on the Polish border.”

In the current case of the Iranian crisis, it seems that any Catholic who is living by Catholic principles must admit that there is no moral justification for attacking Iran. The fact that some Iranian leader said thirty years ago that America is “the great Satan” is no excuse. And besides, America has given the world Planned Parenthood, half-naked girls on M.T.V., homosexual rallies and parades, lying and perverse politicians, failing schools, the Epstein Files, et alia. The list of immorality is nearly endless. Is Iran or any other nation wrong when they allege that America is the great Satan?

Our Lady Immaculate, save America!

This article in MP3 format

An evening with Irving

Over twenty years ago David Irving visited my church hall for an evening talk. Here was a man at the height of scholarship, a respected British historian, in his late fifties, who spoke with a charming British accent, telling his listeners of his fascinating research into the history of Adolph Hitler. His talk was excellent, and I remember thinking to myself, “Here is probably the most learned World War II historian in the world, and he is speaking to twenty men in a parish hall in Louisville, Ky., the largest city in the state.” Mr. Irving told us that he was due to speak at the University of Louisville, having been invited by the university military R.O.T.C. club. But it was not to be. When the local news media caught wind of his talk that evening, a smear campaign was launched denouncing him as a “Holocaust denier” and a “fraudulent historian.” Someone at the University of Liberalism contacted him, telling him that he was not welcome to speak. Mr. Irving was upset over the fact that a woman named Sister Soulja, a.k.a. Sister Psycho, a radical leftist, had spoken at U of L, and that she had received a speaking fee from the university. She advocated in her speech: One day out of the year African Americans should have the indiscriminate right to go out and kill a few whites, simply because their ancestors had been oppressed under slavery by white men. This is America, the country where one is allowed the protections of First Amendment speech unless he is on the campus of a state-funded university.

*The above book was a fascinating read. It is amazing to me that a British historian could possibly be jailed in Austria for a talk which he had given some sixteen years earlier in which he called into question the existence of the gas chambers. Mr. Irving told us that he had been pulled over in Austria while on his way to visit a friend. He said to us, “Just imagine me, a chubby British historian, driving a rental car to meet a friend in Germany. And I get pulled over by eight Austrian policeman who pointed nine-millimeter Glocks at my head. And for what? For giving unpopular opinions about history.” Mr. Irving spent four hundred days in solitary confinement in Austria’s oldest jailhouse. The Austrians ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Mr. Irving says without hesitation that Hitler’s Final Solution was never about Jewish homicidal liquidation; in fact, he asserts that there was no war-time evidence that Hitler or his German staff ever communicated in writing the mass homicidal liquidation of the Jews referred to by some historians as the Final Solution. He has written voluminously on the topic, and we will leave the matter here. We suggest to the reader the books Nuremberg: The Last Battle and The Morgenthau Plan, 1944-1945. These books will show the American maliciousness following the War, and of course the reader is free to read the other volumes which are of greater length than these two relatively short works.

Public libraries in America have been hijacked by liberals. There is not a single book in the city of Louisville today written by David Irving, and yet he has written probably thirty books. In fact, consider Irving’s book, The Morgenthau Plan 1944-45, not a single copy is to be found in America per a World Cat.org search. The book was printed in 2010, but not a single copy exists. Amazon tells us that the book “is not currently available.” If you want to purchase a copy, good luck, both copies go for over $100 on bookfinder.com.

Link for David Irving talk, circa 2003: https://rumble.com/v3qdl8d-david-irving-real-history-audio-talk-given-in-louisville-1999..html?mref=lbs2z&mc=5c3sg

pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v3qdlz1-david-irving-real-history-pt.-1-audio-talk-given-in-louisville-1999..html?mref=lbs2z&mc=5c3sg

A discovery at age ten

At the age of ten I convinced my mother to drive me to the Louisville Main Free Public Library, as I was interested in reading about World War II. Times were relatively safe in 1982, and a mother could do such a thing in those days. This same public library a few years ago had a city clean-up day in which the volunteers found over two hundred used drug needles on the library property. When I made my way upstairs to the second floor of the library, I spotted a young, red-headed man, a librarian, who appeared to be in his twenties. We will call him Red, and I am B.S. since these are my initials. The conversation went like this:

BS: Excuse me sir, I am interested in doing a little research on World War II and I am curious to find out about the man who has written the most on the subject.

Red: Well, do you have any particular author in mind, as I do not know who has written the most about World War II?

BS: Not exactly, but let me ask, who started WW II?

Red: Well, most authorities say Adolph Hitler started the war in 1939.

BS: OK fine, but what authorities, if any, say that Adolph Hitler did not start the war? What authorities say that Adolph Hitler was framed into starting the war? That would be a good place to start, because then I could research both sides of the argument and decide for myself whether Hitler started the war.

Red: Well, young man (as he flashed a big smile), there is another librarian who knows more about World War II than me, let me fetch him.

Red eventually led me to the World War II section of the library. I did not check out a book that day but do remember telling my father about the incident. My father was a private investigator, and he taught me to be distrustful of others, to do my own investigation, to weigh the evidence, and let the chips fall where they may, cost what it may.

Seminary days

In 1995 I was a second-year seminarian at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, a traditional Catholic seminary which was operated by the Society of Pope St. Pius X. The seminary rector was the multi-lingual bishop, H.E. Richard Williamson. He taught a class, Acts of the Magisterium. One day he told the eleven of us classmates to take out a piece of blank paper for a pop quiz, promising us that no grade was to be taken. He asked the question, Write down a number, how many Jews were gassed in the gas chambers during World War II? As the bishop read off the eleven answers there was one answer which caused him to raise his eyebrows. I had put a “zero” on my piece of paper, the only student to do so. The bishop laughed heartily and told the seminarians, “Well, one thing is for sure, Mr. Shepherd is a from the school of Fr. Wathen.” The bishop later asked me if I had a copy of the Fred Leuchter Report, and I loaned it to him. That evening at supper the entire seminary had a laugh as news of Bishop Williamson’s Holocaust quiz made its rounds from table to table.

What is Holocaust denial?

But we must ask the question, what does it mean to deny the Holocaust? In logic we either affirm or deny the truth of a proposition. I will define, roughly, the Holocaust: A deliberate plan on behalf of Adolph Hitler and his high command, to exterminate, primarily by means of the gas chambers, the Jews who were under Nazi occupation. I deny the truth of this proposition; and since I deny this proposition, most would label me a “Holocaust denier.” I am not denying that Jews died in the camps, of course they did. I am not denying that Hitler was antagonistic toward the Jews, of course he was. I visited Auschwitz back in 2014. I saw the original firing wall where some political prisoners were shot by the Nazi guards. I also saw the starvation room where St. Maxillian Kolbe was starved to death along with others. There were both Jews and non-Jews at Auschwitz. There was a sign at Auschwitz which gave the number (I cannot recall the figure) of Polish non-Jews who were housed there because of their opposition to Germany. Non-Jews died at Auschwitz as well, but historians and the media have made the terms “Jews” and “Hitler” synonymous with the Holocaust.

Coke and Zyklon-B

A problem that looms even larger than the gas chambers themselves is the disposal of the bodies. It is said that the Jewish victims at Auschwitz were incinerated in the ovens. Assuming the gas chambers to exist, we still have a problem with the cremation of the bodies. When I questioned Grok about the number of cremations per day at Auschwitz, this answer was given:

At the height of the extermination process—particularly during the spring and summer of 1944, when over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz between May and July—estimates suggest that up to 6,000 to 10,000 people were gassed per day…On average, though, the daily number was lower outside these intense periods. From mid-1942 to late 1944, when the gas chambers were in regular use, the figure likely ranged between 2,000 and 4,000 victims per day, depending on the arrival of transports. (Grok)

But the problem with this scenario is the coke. Coke was a solid fuel derived from coal which would burn at high temperatures. Coke was manufactured in German plants and had to be shipped by train to Auschwitz. Coke was not a natural substance but made synthetically. I asked Grok to calculate how much coke in pounds would be required to cremate 4,000-10,000 bodies per day. This was the result:

4,416 bodies/day * 44.09 pounds/body = 194,671 pounds of coke per day.

10,000 bodies/day * 44.09 pounds/body = 440,900 pounds of coke per day.

To cremate 10,000 bodies per day would have required 220 tons of coke per day. This is an astounding 1.5 million pounds of coke per week, an insane, unbelievable figure, which no credible historian can honestly posit without appearing ridiculous. Grok estimates that one rail car could hold 120 tons (240,000 lbs.) of coke. But we must remember that this is daily usage. We have not even addressed the question, Were the crematoria run twenty-four hours a day, or just during daylight hours? The cremated victims would need to be extracted from the gas chambers safely (due to the presence of poisonous gas on the bodies), transported to the crematoria, and the coke would need a constant feeding into the ovens to burn at steady, high temperatures. And we still have the problem with extracting the ash and unburnt bone fragments from the ovens. Some of the original ovens can still be seen at Auschwitz, and are small, crude, brick-built ovens which were used to burn lice-infected clothing and perhaps a few corpses.

The storyline changed as to the method of execution. The original story is that the Germans had hatches in the roof of the gas chambers. The Nazi guards would then climb on top of the roof, remove the hatch, and pour water into canisters of Zyklon-B crystals, producing the poisonous gas. This story then morphed into the famous shower-head gas chamber theory which most people are familiar with today.

Teaching a college class

I once taught a college history class at a college which will remain unnamed. Most of the students were current or ex-Army students. One day the lecture was on U.S. history, and the topic of the Holocaust gas chambers came up. I told the small class that I had been to Auschwitz, had read books on the subject, and that I did not believe in the gas chambers. One older black gentleman, a retired Army man, became quite agitated and mentioned to me that I was wrong about the matter. I kept pressing him on the issue, asking him what he had read or investigated on the issue of the Holocaust, and he eventually admitted to having read a single New York Times article. Unfortunately, this man represents a great deal of Americans. An emotional argument is always the weakest. How many people have told me over the years, “But gosh, I have seen the pictures of the emaciated bodies, have been to the Holocaust museum, and have been told by the news media all these years that there were gas chambers. Surely it must be so?” The fact is that many Americans find comfort in the lies they have been told about history. It is much easier to go along with the narrative rather than read books and listen to lectures about all the lies we have been told.

If I tell a man, “Christopher Columbus was a good guy, don’t believe the lies,” or “You imbecile, a plane does not cause a steel building to collapse upon itself,” he will politely dismiss me as one of those conspiracy theorists CNN warned him about. What he really means to say - whether he admits it or not - is that any conspiracies he gives credence to are worth believing, and his opponent’s “conspiracy theories” are a bunch of hogwash. What he fails to realize is that the C.I.A.-controlled news media has conspired to dumb him down, to make him a useless idiot. He is like one of the dumb animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm who believes the pigs’ lies simply because they talk the talk and wear shiny jackboots.

The Holocaust according to Nation of Islam

The term holocaust means a “burnt offering to God.” St. Thomas gives the definition of holocaustum in the Summa Theologica:

A sacrificial offering burnt whole or wholly consumed; a form of oblation practiced by the Jews as well as by pagan nations of antiquity; hence, the complete surrender of anything as an act of atonement or consecration to God. (A Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas, Roy J. Defarrari)

And no female victim could be offered to God as a holocaust, sed nullum animal feminini sexus offerebatur Deo in holocaustum.

I have a book printed by the Nation of Islam titled The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (1991). There is a chapter titled “Holocaust,” and the Nation of Islam interprets their holocaust as the black slave trade. The chapter quotes Ira Rosenwaike:

The Jewish population in 1820 is concentrated in a few principle towns, in particular the five centers which then had functioning congregations; New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah…In Charleston, Richmond and Savannah the large majority (over three-fourths) of the Jewish households contained one or more slaves; in Baltimore only one out of three households were slaveholding; in New York, one out of eighteen…Among the slaveholding households the median number of slaves owned ranged from five in Savannah to one in New York. (p. 180)

The same book refers to the “holocaust ships” which transported the slaves to America.

The point we make is simple: The term holocaust has been used by various religions to represent various ideas. As a Catholic I employ the term Holocaust to represent Christ, the True Lamb who was burnt up upon the cross. As St. Thomas tells us, “The Jews sinned, not only toward the Man Christ, but even insofar as they were the crucifiers of God,” et ideo Iudaei peccaverunt, non solum tamquam hominis Christi, sed etiam tamquam Dei crucifixores.

Mater Dei, ora pro nobis!

Audio version of the article, “Kirk Church and the Catholic Jews”

We use the term “Kirk Church” or “Kirk Effect” to define modern-day, liberal Catholicism. The assassination of Charlie Kirk has opened even wider the door of liberal Catholicism. Immediately after the Charlie Kirk assassination how many liberal Catholics retorted, “Oh, Charlie was a saint, he ran Turning Point U.S.A., surely he is in heaven!” Today the liberal says to himself, “Well, Jesus was a good Man, and since I believe this, I am a good man too.” The greatest sinner on earth can believe that Jesus was a good person, but this will not save him.

The liberalization of the Catholic dogma Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, “No salvation outside the Church” began long before the Kirk Effect; in fact, even before the destructive Vatican Council II (1962-’65), the late Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, wrote a book in 1946 titled Ransoming the Time. He devotes a chapter to the topic of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. My Article on "No Salvation Outside the Church" Chapter five of Maritain’s volume is titled “Who is my Neighbor?” a chapter devoted to the promotion of “good fellowship,” a phrase which he prefers to the word “tolerance.” He also speaks of “brotherly intercourse,” a term which can have a truly Catholic meaning, but also a dangerously liberal meaning. Dr. Maritain easily confuses the reader who does not sift through the subtle poison with which he is infected. He deals directly with such concepts as “implicit faith,” “the Truth,” and the “Soul of the Church,” but these terms must be properly defined. He admits that there is an attempt in the world to “bring closer together the believers of the various religious families.” “He says:

It (the Catholic Church) teaches that charity presupposes faith and has its root in faith, in other words, in truth divinely revealed. It teaches that explicit faith in Christ, illuminating the human mind regarding the inmost secrets of divine truth and life, is not only the requisite means for souls to attain the highest degree of conformity with God and divine union, and a prerequisite for peoples to achieve a firm position of general morality and perfectly human civilization, but that that faith is also the response of reverence justly due to God’s gift, inclining His glory toward us. Explicit faith in revealed truth, therefore, is the first duty of everyone who is not capable of hearing through his ears and in his heart the word of God. But Catholic theology adds that faith together with grace are offered to all souls, even if they are unable to know the truth explicitly in its integrity. If those souls are in good faith and do not refuse the internal grace offered to them, they have implicit faith in Christ and accept implicitly the entire divinely revealed truth, even if they only believe, having no clearer light, that God exists and saves those who seek Him. (Heb. XI, 6)

If, therefore, Catholics hold that there is no salvation outside the Church, you can see that this maxim can shock only those who understand it wrongly and who are ignorant of what is commonly taught concerning the ‘soul of the Church.’ All it means to us is that there is no salvation outside the Truth, which, explicitly or implicitly, is freely offered to all. And does that not seem fully in harmony with the nature of man and his essential dignity? Surely if there were salvation outside the Truth, I should not want such a salvation, for I prefer the Truth to my joy and freedom; or rather I know that only the Truth can give me real joy and set me free.

We believe that there is no salvation outside the Truth, and the fact that all men do not explicitly know the Truth, the fact of religious division, far from being a good in itself, is a mark of the distress of our condition. But we also hold, as I have just explained, that the Truth speaks to every man’s heart; and God alone knows who those are, in whatever part of the world they may be born and whether or not they live under the regime of His publicly revealed word, who truly and efficaciously hear His interior and secret word. We believe that there is no salvation outside Christ, but we also believe that Christ died for all men and that the possibility of believing in Him - either explicitly or implicitly - is offered to all. We believe that there is no salvation outside the Mystical Body of Christ, but we also believe that those who visibly belong to that Body by confessing the faith and by the sacraments, and are thus designated to continue in time the work of redemption and receive more generous effusions of the vehicles of grace, are not its only members. We hold that every man of good faith and right will, provided he does not sin against the light and does not refuse the grace interiorly offered to him, belongs, as we put it, to the Soul of the Church, or, in other words, is invisibly and by the motion of his heart a member of the visible Church and partakes of her life, which is eternal life. And no man, withal, whether Christian or non-Christian, can know whether he is worthy of love or of hatred.

Maritain uses the terms “Church” and “Truth” synonymously. Truths can be found outside the Catholic Church, but not supernatural truths in their totality. The Church is a supernatural agency, not natural, and her origin and end are both supernatural. The Church can only communicate supernatural truth. Maritain believes that “every man of good faith and right will” will, by the “motion of his heart,” invisibly become a member of the visible Church and partake of her life. He tells us, “And no man, withal, whether Christian or Non-Christian, can know whether he is worthy of love or of hatred.”1 Notice that it is Maritain’s “motion of the heart” which makes one a member of the Church, not baptism. This is nothing more than to say, one can become a member of the Church without the sacraments, “the natural motions of his heart” grants him admittance into the Church. This is pure naturalism, say what we will.

The Faith is explicit, whether in the catechumen or the baptized. An explicit truth, i.e. the Immaculate Conception, is explicitly believed by the catechumen as equally as it is believed by the man baptized. A man can believe explicitly the Immaculate Conception and still go to hell, if he is in the state of mortal sin. A man can believe all Catholic truths and still go to hell. The minute a man ceases to believe one article of the faith, he loses the virtue of faith. We do not call a man a partial heretic because he denies a truth; we call him a heretic, because that is what he is for his denial of a single dogma. He does not partially deny a truth. He either affirms or denies it. He is either a Catholic or he is not. And the very instant he refuses to investigate what he ought, he commits a sin against Faith. Aristotle says that it is more important to know a few higher truths than to know many lesser truths; and the highest truth is - You must become Catholic to be saved!

Maritain tells us that man’s reason shows us that “other religions can also transmit to mankind many great truths…certain truths which the Gospel did not take pains to teach.” But there is only one Truth, as the Protestants like to say, “Jesus saves.” Jesus is found in the Church, not outside of it. Jesus is the Bread of Life, and he told us, “No man goes to the Father but be Me.” And if a man hears about Jesus, it is explicit, not implicit. Maritain speaks of “poor idolaters” who are of “good faith,” but how does he know this? Is it the “motion of his heart” which tells him that they are of good faith, or does he know it explicitly? Has the Church revealed this to him? There is no charity without the Faith, which is to say that there is no supernatural charity without the Faith, because Faith is supernatural. A man does not naturally love the Faith, and even if he were able, it would not get him to heaven. It does us nothing to speak of natural charity because natural charity does not get us to heaven. Maritain says, “I know very well that if I lost my faith in the least article of revealed truth, I should lose my soul.” True enough. A man’s reason tells him that it is reasonable that he becomes a Catholic, just as his reason tells him that it is unreasonable that he should attempt to become a member of multiple religions, or to become a member of a non-divine religion. “He who is not with me is against me,” Christ said. The Faith is reasonable because God is reasonable. It is impossible for God to be unreasonable, just as it is impossible for man to be reasonable by rejecting a reasonable religion.

The Jewish “Convert” Dr. Henri Bergson

Fr. John Oesterreicher (Fr. O), a Jewish convert, wrote a book titled, Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers discover Christ (1952). The seven Jewish philosophers of whom he treats are: Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Adolph Reinach, Max Scheler, Paul Landsberg, Max Picard, and Edith Stein.

He first treats of Dr. Henri Bergson (1859-1941), a Jew who knew about Catholicism for many years but never received baptism. Fr. O declares that Bergson was a Christian in voto, “in desire.” He records the circumstances of his death:

Bergson was not a member of the Church when he died, but he was a Christian in voto. On the morning of what was to be his last day, a priest-friend, Chanoine Lelievre, was called. But France was occupied then by German troops, communications were difficult - when Chanoine Lelievre arrived, Bergson was gone; he could do no more than recite the prayers for the dead and bless his body.2

To say that a man is a Christian in voto is to say that he is not a Christian at all. There is no invisible Christianity, and this means necessarily that there is no invisible means of becoming a Christian. Unfortunately for Bergson he failed to become a Christian because he sensed the Catholic Church was hostile to the Jews. He admitted as much to his wife in a letter dated February 1937:

My reflections have led me closer and closer to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism. I should have become a convert, had I not seen in preparation for years (in great part, alas, through the fault of a certain number of Jews entirely deprived of moral sense) the formidable wave of anti-Semitism which is to sweep over the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted. But I hope that a Catholic priest will be good enough to come - if the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris authorizes it - to pray at my funeral.3

Bergson’s ego is on display. He will not enter the Church, but when he dies, he wants a priest of the Church to show up and applaud him for his non-membership. At the end of the day, even if the Catholic Church contains some anti-Semitic members, this is not a sufficient reason for not joining it. Had Bergson lived a few more years, he would have realized that the Catholic Church actually protected the Jews. He would have discovered that Pope Pius XII actually allowed for many of the Jews to receive fake baptismal certificates so as to avoid Nazi arrest. He would have seen the Catholic conversion of his brother Jew, Israel Anton Zolli (Eugenio Zolli), the chief rabbi of Rome.

Husserl, Reinach and Scheler

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the father of Phenomenology, was influenced by the priest Franz Brentano, who left the Church over the pronouncement of the dogma of papal infallibility. Fr. Brentano considered Jesus “one of the great prophets,” the “most progressive of the prophets before him.” It is a heresy to reduce Christ to the status of a prophet, and this error is shared by Jews and Muslims alike. Husserl was also influenced by the writings of David Strauss and Ernest Renan, two men who maintained that the Gospels were mythical, not real.

Husserl was baptized a Lutheran in his 20’s, and while his wife converted to Catholicism, there is no evidence of his being reconciled to the Church. He befriended a Catholic nun, Sr. Adelgundis, and once told her, “Man draws near to God not by grace but by his own continuous struggling.”4 It was this same nun who would be near him when he died at the Benedictine priory of St. Lioba. Dying in a Catholic convent, surrounded by nuns, Husserl said to his nurse on April 27, 1938, “I have seen something wonderful. Write it down quickly!” The nurse returned with the notebook, but Husserl was dead.5

Adolph Reinach (1883-1917) received his doctorate in philosophy in 1906, after studying at Munich. He was also admitted to the bar, but never practiced law, instead teaching alongside Husserl at Goettingen. Reinach formed a love of Catholic culture, admiring St. Thomas, St. Augustine, Beethoven, et cetera. He was the protege of the Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand. Reinach would be sent to fight in the World War I, but not before being baptized alongside his wife. Fr. O says of him:

After he was baptized, Adolph Reinach rejoiced to have been reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, to have become one with Christ. Though baptized by a minister, he did not consider himself a member of the Protestant community nor did he take part in its worship or life, for he still was and wanted to be on the way. But never on earth did he enter the Church; in November 1917, a year after his baptism, he was killed in Flanders.6

We do not know his last moments in the battlefield, whether a priest was there or not. Assuming that he was validly baptized, and that he did not adhere to any heretical doctrines, he might have very well saved his soul.

Max Scheler (1874-1928) was born to a Jewish mother and Gentile father. He was baptized at the age of fourteen. At the age of forty-two, in 1916, he visited the Benedictine Abbey in Beuron, prompting him to write, “I have made my confession; I have come back to the bosom of the Church, I am infinitely happy, and I know I owe this to the Blessed Virgin.”7 Scheler ran into trouble in 1921 when he tried to marry one of his students. He sought to obtain an annulment with his existing marriage, but when he found that the annulment would not be granted, he married the woman civilly. He then declared that the Church misinterpreted Christ’s teaching on divorce. In the spring of 1928 Scheler left Cologne, where he had been teaching philosophy since 1919, and went to Frankfurt to assume the chair of philosophy there. On May 19 of the same year, he died suddenly of a coronary stroke. A Catholic priest gave him a Christian burial, apparently being ignorant of his bad marriage and lapse of faith.

From Landsberg to St. Edith

Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901-1944) was the son of Ernst Landsberg, a well-known scholar of the history of law from the Rhineland. His friends once joked with him about Darwin’s Descent of Man, prompting him to remark, “We live Darwinism in reverse; the evolution is from man to ape.”8 He was baptized by a Protestant minister because his parents desired for him a spiritual home. His undergraduate studies were under Husserl at Freiburg and continued under Scheler at Cologne. He agreed with St. Augustine’s definition of virtue, ordo amoris, the order of love. But man is filled with amor inordinatus, a disordered love, and must turn to God. Again he turned to St. Augustine, “He who loves rightly cannot but rightly believe and hope.”9 At the age of twenty Landsberg wrote a scholarly work defending the Middle Ages. For him the Catholic Middle Ages was a triumph over the paganism of old. Once again, he defends his thesis by quoting St. Augustine, Tota opera nostra, fratres, in hac vita est sanare oculum cordis, per quem videtur Deus, “Our whole work, brothers, in this life, is to heal the eye of the heart, through which God is seen.”

On the day that Adolph Hitler came to power Landsberg fled Germany “so as not to breathe its envenomed air.” He went to Switzerland, to Paris, and then to Barcelona, where he lectured. But the Spanish Civil War cut short his Barcelonian adventure. In his diary Landsberg recalled the teacher of St. John of the Cross, Fray Luis de Leon, the Augustinian friar who spent five years in prison under the Inquisition. Landsberg says some interesting things about Hitler which we will not ignore:

Why are we, as Christians, Hitler’s unconditional opponents? Because Hitler is a tool of anti-Christ. For us this is no metaphor, no figure of speech. Anti-Christ is present and active wherever Christ is crucified; and Christ is crucified wherever unjust might persecutes the innocent, the least of the innocent. In this the Christian can have no part, he must be vigilant and firm.10

Landsberg, being a Christian Jew, realized that he might eventually get apprehended by the Gestapo. He found consolation in a quote by St. Teresa of Avila, “Grace is the highest attribute of the sovereign person, who, by virtue of his freedom, rises above life within the group. Nothing can excel grace.”11

Landsberg spent his remaining days in France working alongside the French Resistance which sought to fight off the Germans in France. He knew that this could mean death for him, and he prepared for death, and Fr. O says that he “attended holy Mass regularly.” Asked about the Church he said, “I will become Catholic when the Church becomes Catholic.”12 Landsberg intended to receive conditional baptism at the end of the war, but it was not to be. Warned that the Gestapo were after him, he tried to flee, but in vain, and being captured in February 1943, he was sent to Oranienburg, Germany. He died at Oranienburg Camp on Palm Sunday, April 2, 1944.

Max Picard (1888-1965) began as a physician but soon became disenchanted with medicine. He wrote a book, The Flight from God, which does not mention Christ once, but Fr. O alleges that it is Christian, nonetheless. The book’s motto is taken from St. Augustine, “Where will he go, the fugitive from the face of God? He turns this way and that, as if he sought space for his flight…Where will you go? Where flee? If you wish to flee from Him, flee to Him. Flee to Him confessing, not from Him hiding, for hide you cannot but confess you can.”13

St. Edith Stein (1891-1942) is, of all the persons we have treated in this essay, the one who we can confidently say is in heaven. The life of Edith Stein is well-known to most Catholics. She earned her PhD in philosophy, only to convert and become a nun, Sr. Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. Being a Catholic Jew, she was arrested by the Gestapo in Holland, put on a train with other Catholic religious, and sent to Auschwitz, where she died August 9th, 1942. After her death a prayer composed by her was found in her convent cell at Echt. It read, “O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us. Light of the World, Phos Hilaron, You bring salvation to our race. Sun of our night, Lamp of our days.”

According to the book, Maps of the Lands of Christ, published in 1947 by St. Anthony Guild Press, Jesus Christ is credited in Holy Scripture with having performed forty-six public miracles. Forty-six is also the number of books in the Old Testament; we infer from this that the God of the New Testament, Jesus Christ, is the same God as that of the Old. There is only one God of both Testaments. Forty-six is also the combined number of years of the Blessed Virgin (16) and St. Joseph (30) when Christ was born: We list these miracles as they happened chronologically in the life of Christ. This list is at it appears in the book, together with the place of the miracle, as well as the corresponding readings as found in the traditional Liturgical Year (1962). *Some of the miracles occur more than once in the readings throughout the Liturgical Year, and in this case, we give the multiple dates.

Water made wine at the marriage feast of Cana: The fourth evangelist, St. John the Divine, was the youngest of the Apostles, as well as the last to die, at Ephesus, in the year 100 Anno Domini (A.D.) This first miracle of Christ is only mentioned by the last of the Gospel writers, St. John. It is very likely that St. John the Evangelist sat next to Christ, and served as a direct eyewitness to the conversation between Christ and the Blessed Virgin. It was the Jewish custom at religious events for the the youngest of the students to sit to the right of the Rabbi.

This event is commemorated on the same day as the Epiphany, Jan. 6., and the tradition is that the Miracle of Cana occurred in January, 30A.D. Saints says, “At the Blessed Virgin’s request, Jesus changed six jars (120 gallons) of water into wine…the type and symbol of the fact that the water poured upon every Catholic at Baptism is to give him the right to another sacrament, the Blood of Jesus in the holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which he receives in Holy Communion.” (p. 3) Cana of Galilee, Kefr Kenna, was the home of Bartholomew (Nathaniel), and was situated 22 miles southwest of Capharnaum.

Immediately after the miracle, Jesus entered the Temple at Jerusalem. The fifteenth verse of St. John’s second chapter is an indirect reference to the fifteen mysteries of the rosary, “And when he had made, as it were, a scourge of little cords, he drove them all out of the temple, the sheep also and the oxen, and the money of the changers he poured out, and the tables he overthrew.” St. Augustine somewhere says, “Christ at the miracle of Cana changed water into wine; at the Last Supper he changed wine into his Blood.”

John 2: 1-11; Place: Cana of Galilee; Missal: 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany

By the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The official’s son: St. John records this miracle immediately after the incident in which Christ meets the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob; the woman we know as St. Photina. The question is, how was Christ meeting and speaking with Photina at the well not a miracle? It is theoretically possible that Christ knew of her, that she had had multiple marriages, and that she was living with a man not her husband. We of course know that this is not the case.

The Gospel account of the official’s son appears in John 4:46, and also appears in the Mass of May 12, the Feast of Sts. Nereus, Achilleus, Domitilla, and Pancratius. In 1969 the modernist pope, Paul VI, removed Flavia Domitilla altogether from the calendar, even though her name was originally added to the feast of Sts. Nereus and Achilleus in the year 1595.

The ruler in the story is from Cana of Galilee, and we do not know the name of his son. It is probable that he knew of Christ because of the miracle at Cana of the water made wine.

John 4: 46-54; Capharnaum; 20th Sunday after Pentecost; May 12: Feast of Sts. Nereus…

The first draught of fishes: There is much symbolism in this third miracle. There are two ships, both empty, and the people are starving for truth, “that when the multitudes pressed upon him to hear the word of God…And saw two ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them, and were washing their nets.” There are two ships, and two separate businesses- we are told in the first chapter of St. Mark that James and John were in the boat with their father Zebedee, “with his hired men” (mercenariis). The two empty ships remind us of a barren Church, a lack of priests. Christ climbs into Peter’s boat, but Peter is not yet pope, as Scripture says that Christ went into Simon’s boat, saying to him, “Simon, launch out into the deep.” The people were hungry, yet they listened to the sermon of Christ, and after having listened, then Christ delivers them food. Scripture says that the Apostles “left all things,” but this is not literally true, because we know that after the Resurrection Peter went fishing again in his boat (John Ch. 21).

There are some apparent inconsistencies between the two Gospel accounts of the ‘miraculous draught of fishes’ as found in the fifth chapter of St. Luke and the first chapter of St. Mark. It appears that the two Gospel writers depict the same incident, but the reader can perform his own investigation.

Luke 5: 1-11; Sea of Galilee; 4th Sunday after Pentecost

The demoniac in the synagogue: Christ entered the synagogue at Capharnaum, and expelled the demons from a man possessed. This action is also symbolic of the fact that Christ will cast out the demons of the Synagogue, as well as the demons who inhabit his Church. The demon first speaks in the plural, “Let us alone, what have we to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth?” And then it is followed up with a demon speaking in the first person singular, “I know thee who thou art, the holy one of God.” The Latin is “Sanctus Dei”,” the Holy One of God. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the word sanctus is from sanguinis tinctio, “dripping of blood.” In the Old Law the high priest would “drip with blood.” The demon foretells that this is “the Christ,” the Holy One who will be covered in blood.

Mark 1: 23-27; Luke 4: 33-36; Capharnaum

Peter’s mother-in-law: Christ and several of his Apostles travel from the Synagogue to Simon’s house, showing us a transition from the Old to the New Testament, a theme constantly seen in the Gospels; and the Church is sick with a fever, signified by Simon’s mother-in-law who has a fever. The Synoptic evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke refer to “Peter’s house,” “the house of Simon and Andrew,” and “Simon’s house.” Once the Church is restored (Peter’s house), then Christ heals all.

Matt. 8: 14; Mark 1: 29-31; Luke 4: 38, 39; Capharnaum; Thur. after 3rd Sunday Lent; Ember Saturday Lent; Mass for the Deliverance from Mortality.

Healing of many sick and diseased: And the whole city came to the house of Peter at nighttime. “And all the city was gathered together at the door,” as St. Mark informs us. Christ first heals the Church, then he heals the people who come to its door.

Matt. 8: 16,17; Mark 1: 32-34; Luke 4: 40; Capharnaum; Thur. after 3rd Sun. Lent; Ember Sat. Pentecost.

Healing of a Leper: The three Synoptic writers all record this incident of the leper. Luke says he “fell down on his face,” and Mark says, “kneeling down” he was healed. It is evident that the leper first put his face to the ground, and Our Lord healed him of his leprosy while still in this posture.

Matthew 8: 2-4; Mark 1: 40-45; Luke 5: 12-14; Galilee; 3rd Sun. after Epiphany

Christ Escapes the Mob: In the synagogue in the town of Nazareth Christ tells the Pharisees of the past when heaven was shut up for three and a half years during the time of Elias. He also mentions Naaman the leper, a gentile. Christ is obviously referring to the leprosy of the Jews, and for this he escapes their grasp as they attempt to throw him over a cliff. Christ made Himself invisible and very likely the Apostles also.

Luke 4: 28-30; Nazareth; Monday of the 3rd week of Lent

The paralytic let down through the roof: The tearing away of the tiles is symbolic of tearing away our sins so that divine grace can invade our souls. All three synoptic Gospels record this miracle.

Matt. 9: 1-8; Mark 2: 1-12; Luke 5: 18-26; Capharnaum; 18th Sun. after Pentecost

The infirm at the pool of Bethsaida: The pool with five porches is symbolic of the five wounds of Christ. There is a tradition that this pool was situated on the property that was once owned by the parents of the Blessed Virgin. St. Raphael the Archangel is the angel who would guard over the protective waters of this miraculous pool.

John 5: 1-9; Jerusalem; Ember Friday in Lent; Feast of St. Raphael Archangel

The man with the withered hand: The man with the withered hand was healed in the synagogue of Capharnaum. Christ told the man to stand up and stretch forth his hand. This man is symbolic of the priest who dares to handle Christ with a withered hand; but Christ restores him.

Matt. 12: 9-14; Mark 3: 1-6; Luke 6: 6-11; Capharnaum; St. John Damascene, March 27.

Healing of many sick and diseased: St. Luke records this miracle as happening immediately after Christ named his Apostles. This miracle occurred on the Mount of Beatitudes.

Luke 6: 18, 19; Mount of Beatitudes; St. Bartholomew, Aug. 24; Sts. Fabian and Sebastian, Jan. 20; Sts. Euphemia, Lucia and Germinianus, Sept. 16; Sts. Cosmas and Damian, Sept. 27; Vigil of All Saints, Oct. 31.

The centurion’s servant: This centurion, a gentile, built a synagogue for the Jews as St. Luke tells us. Christ healed his servant, and this miracle happened right before the healing of the son of the Widow of Naim.

Matt. 8: 5-13; Luke 7: 1-10; Capharnaum; 3rd Sun. after Epiphany; Thur. after Ash Wednesday; Votive Mass for Sick

The widow’s son: The Widow of Naim had an only son, Maternus, who later became the first bishop of Cologne, Germany. His feast day is September 14th the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. This miracle is symbolic of the Church, which, during the time of the antichrist which seems to be dead, only to be raised up by Christ.

Luke 7: 11-17; Naim; 15th Sun. after Pentecost; Thur. after 4th Sun. Lent; St. Monica, May 4.

Blind and dumb demoniac: Only St. Matthew records this miracle which occur right after the healing of the man with a withered hand.

Matt. 12: 22; Capharnaum

Christ calms the sea: St. Matthew tells us that Christ is asleep while the boat (the Church) is being bombarded by waves (sin). All three synoptic Gospels record this miracle.

Matt. 8: 24-27; Mark 4: 36-40; Luke 8: 23-25; Sea of Galilee; 4th Sun. after Epiphany

The Gerasene demoniacs: Gerasa is a town on the western side of the Lake of Galilee, south of the town of Bethsaida-Julias and north of Hippos. All three synoptic Gospels record this miracle. Christ cast out of this man Legion, the name of the devil(s) who inhabited this man possessed who lived in the caves.

Matt. 8: 28-34; Mark 5: 1-15; Luke 8: 27-35; Gerasa

The woman with a hemorrhage: This woman has been troubled by an issue of blood for twelve years. Once again, she symbolizes the Church, founded by the twelve Apostles. St. Mark tells us that she had spent all her money on doctors, to no avail. St. Luke records the same fact.

Matt. 9: 20-22; Mark 5: 25-34; Luke 8: 43-48; Genasareth; 23rd Sun. after Pentecost

Jairus’ daughter: Christ entered the house of Jairus and informed the house guests that the girl only sleeps, and they “laughed him to scorn.” And the damsel was “twelve years old,” once again the symbolism is blatant, a Church which appears dead, but is raised to life.

Matt. 9: 18, 23-25; Mark 5: 22-24, 35-43; Luke 8: 41, 42, 49-56; Capharnaum; 23rd Sun. after Pentecost.

The two blind men: Matt. 9: 27-30; Capharnaum

A dumb demoniac: Matt. 9: 32-33; Capharnaum

The first multiplication of loaves: The five loaves and two fishes were multiplied for the people, leaving twelve baskets left over. The people were made to sit down “by hundreds and fifties,” symbolic of the 150 Hail Mary’s of the rosary.

Matt 14: 13-21; Mark 6: 30-44; Luke 9: 12-17; John 6: 1-13; Bethsaida-Julias; 4th Sun. Lent

Christ walks on the water: The Apostles were rowing during the Fourth Watch of the night, which is the period from 3am-6am. When St. Peter sees Christ, he leaps out of the boat. This means that Peter is not in the ship, the Church is without a pope.

Matt. 14: 25-33; Mark 6: 48, 51; John 6: 19-21; Sea of Galilee; Octave day of Sts. Peter and Paul, July 6; Sat. after Ash Wed.

The Canaanite woman’s daughter: Matt. 15: 21-28; Mark 7: 24-30; Coast of Tyre and Sidon; Thur. after first Sun. of Lent.

The deaf-mute: Christ has earwax not doubt on his fingers, and then putting spittle on the fingers, he touches the man’s tongue. Faith cometh by hearing, and once received, man has an obligation to preach it to others.

Mark 7: 32-35; Coast of Tyre and Sidon; 11th Sunday after Pentecost

Healing of many sick: Matt. 15: 30, 31; Decapolis

The second multiplication of loaves: Christ feeds the four thousand who had been fasting for three days. There are seven baskets left over, symbolizing the seven sacraments.

Matt. 15: 32-39; Mark 8: 1-9; Horns of Hattin (Genesareth); 6th Sun. after Pentecost

A blind man: Christ touches the man’s eyes twice, signifying the Old and New Testaments. After the first touch the man’s vision was incomplete, for he tells us, “I see men as it were trees, walking.” It was only after the second touch that he saw all things clearly.

Mark 8: 22-26; Bethsaida

The Transfiguration: Matt. 17: 1-8; Mark 9: 2-8; Luke 9: 28-36; Mount Thabor; 2nd Sun. of Lent; Ember Sat. Lent; Feast of Transfiguration, Aug. 6

A possessed boy: Christ cast a demon out of an only son who had been possessed from birth.

Matt. 17: 14-20; Mark 9: 14-28; Luke 9: 37-43; Dabareth (Mt. Hermon?); Ember Wed. in September

Money for the Temple tax: Ironically it is only St. Matthew, the former tax collector, who records the miracle of the Temple tax. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, takes the Stater from the mouth of the fish, and pays the Temple tax.

Matt. 17: 23-26; Sea of Galilee

Jesus escapes from His enemies: John 8: 59; Jerusalem; Passion Sunday

The man born blind: Three times in Scripture does Christ heal by spitting, twice in St. Mark and once in St. John.

John 9: 1-7; Jerusalem; Wed. after 4th week of Lent

A possessed man: Luke 11: 14-26; Judea; 3rd Sun. of Lent

A stooped woman: This woman had been stooped over and curled up for eighteen years, which is three times six. She symbolizes the Church which has been persecuted by the Jews, as six is the number of man. The rabbi of the synagogue even answers Christ, “Six days there are wherein you ought to work.” Christ calls him a hypocrite.

Luke 13: 10-17; Judea; Ember Saturday in September

The man with dropsy: Christ asks a question of the Pharisees, and, without waiting for their answer, heals the man with dropsy. The man was not invited to the lawyer’s house for dinner because after healing him, Christ “sent him away.” The man had the faith to come there to the house of the chief of the Pharisees.

Luke 14: 1-6; Perea; 16th Sun. after Pentecost

The ten lepers: Jesus heals ten lepers and only one, a Samaritan, a stranger, comes back to give thanks.

Luke 17: 12-19; Perea; 13th Sun. after Pentecost

The raising of Lazarus: This miracle is only recorded by St. John the Beloved Apostle, and it takes up the first forty-four verses of the eleventh chapter. This is the miracle that put the Jews over the edge, and it is this miracle which prompted them to plot his murder.

John 11: 1-44; Bethany; Friday after 4th Sun. of Lent

Bartimaeus and another blind beggar: Matt. 20: 29-34; Mark 10: 46-52; Luke 18: 35-43; near Jericho; Quinquagesima Sun.

Withering of barren fig tree: Matt. 21: 18, 19; Mark 11: 12-14; Mount of Olives

Healing of many sick: Matt. 21: 14; Jerusalem

The soldiers fall to the ground: John 18: 4-6; Garden of Gethsemani; Good Friday

Malchus’ ear: Luke 22: 50, 51; John 18: 10, 11; Garden of Gethsemani; Wed. of Holy Week

The Resurrection: Matt. 28: 6; Mark 16: 6; Luke 24: 6; John 20: 5-9; Jerusalem; Saturday after Easter

Second draught of fishes: John 21: 1-14; Sea of Galilee; Wed. within octave of Easter

The Ascension: Mark 16: 19; Luke 24: 50, 51; Mount of Olives; Ascension Thursday