Cardinal Müller: Trad blogs are half the problem

And the other half are heretics…

“The tensions in the Church arise from the contrast between an extremist traditionalist front on some websites, and an equally exaggerated progressive front which today seeks to credit themselves as super-papists.”

Leave aside for a moment the problem of calling out faithful Catholics as “equally” to blame with the heretics, and recognize the bigger news:  It’s the latest admission of the incredible, borderline miraculous impact of the tiny, tiny tradsphere on the evil empire. I’m not using that word lightly; a miracle – supernatural intervention – is exactly what is needed, and is probably the only means to remedy the entire situation. How many trad blogs would you say might exist in the world? In the English speaking world, it’s fewer than 20, right? How many in all other languages? Well, the “Warrior Ants” (h/t Mundabor) continue to punch way above their weight. At this point, there is probably an entire secret dicastery monitoring the enemy. The Pontifical Council for Integral Closeness to Deplorables on the Margins. Or some such.
Go read the longer excerpt at Rorate HERE. 
As has become his custom, Müller manages to play both sides multiple times in the span of two paragraphs. It seems clear there is signaling going on here, to some group or groups, but at some point the dear cardinal will indeed need to choose which side he is on.

“Secure your own mask first, before helping others.”

I fly around 120K miles a year for my day job, so I hear that phrase a lot. Maybe that’s why when I heard it referenced by Ann Barnhardt in a podcast earlier this week, it just sort of went right past me.  The analogy was referring to the need to make sure your own faith, soul, prayer life, etc is well taken care of as prerequisite to anything else.
That same day, I went off to Confession, as I had already planned to do. The penance was totally focused on the need to pray for my own needs, and really making it a priority. The priest asked me if I had prayed my daily Rosary yet, and I told him I had not (I love that at the FSSP parish, it’s just assumed you’re praying a daily Rosary).  He instructed me to go offer my Rosary, entrusting to our Blessed Mother the channeling of all necessary graces for my spiritual benefit.
The podcast and the Confession should both have been a big wake up call. But the full gravity of the situation didn’t really hit me until about halfway through that Rosary when I realized, slap upside the head, I actually could not remember the last time I prayed the Rosary entirely for myself. The Holy Ghost always knows when you need a slap upside the head. Now you already know how much I love the Rosary, so you can imagine how odd this seemed to me. I mean, obviously I’ve prayed a decade or two as a penance, for an increase in this virtue or that, but a whole Rosary just for me? I can’t remember the last time, and that’s a real problem.
In Spiritual Warfare, the Rosary is a weapon of mass destruction. I’ve written about it many times in these pages. It’s a real weapon, not a metaphorical weapon. So much so, it almost seems selfish to offer it entirely for yourself. But it’s never selfish to pray for yourself, so long as your intention is in accord with God’s will. And we need not worry about petitioning something against His will, because He’s not granting that anyway. Of course in the individual prayers of the Rosary, the Our Fathers and Hail Marys, we are praying for ourselves within those prayers. But what I am talking about here are specific, personal, spiritual intentions beyond what is asked in those prayers.
I would be willing to bet that most Catholics who are somewhat secure in their faith, who are honestly trying to live authentic Christian lives, and who have managed by the grace of God to overcome a whole bunch of entrenched wretchedness, don’t pray for themselves nearly enough. We foolishly think we’ve extracted ourselves permanently from said wretchedness and we’re now “saved”. Not in the proddy sense of “once saved always saved”, but rather in the sense of “thanks to my hard conversion/reversion to the one true faith, even though I still fall sometimes, and even though I’m totally unworthy of the honor, I am now on the side of the angels and God will surely grant me final perseverance.”
Oh man, that is so dangerous. It’s for very good reason that Jesus taught us to pray to the Father to deliver us not into temptation, and that we ask Mary to pray for us at the hour of our death. It’s for very good reason that in the Roman Canon itself, during the Hanc Igitur, the priest and faithful pray to be saved from eternal damnation and be counted among the elect. Damnation is a real possibility if we so choose it, and “once saved always saved” is one of the most pernicious lies ever told. If you are truly living an authentic Christian life, Satan views you as a hard target; he knows he needs to deploy extra resources to bring you down, and deploy he will. He’s already won the soft targets without even trying, so he’s got extra munitions reserved for you. Meditate on the blitzkrieg he has planned for the hour of your death. Be terrified by this, and use the terror to build your counterattack.
With everything that’s going on right now, all of the “confusion” surrounding all aspects of the Bergolian antipapacy, Satan is squealing with delight and has launched a huge offensive. Bergoglio himself is a soft target for Satan, easily manipulated and used to destroy souls on a horrific scale. He is a soft target not only because he is an arch-heretic and profoundly stupid, but because he does not have the supernatural protection afforded to the holder of the Petrine office, due to his invalid election. Now, when this is the unmistakable reality of the Catholic Church today, the one true Church founded by God Incarnate, do you think perhaps the effects of this might be rather… widespread? The past nearly five years since the failed partial resignation of Pope Benedict has literally been, pun intended, a huge coming out party for all manner of perversion and reprobation; a spiraling tempest of filth. Do you want a sense of how long ago five years was? Five years ago, Hillary Clinton was campaigning AGAINST same-sex “marriage.”  Yeah. The ever quickening pace of events across all sectors of civilization is so breathtaking, you would be delusional to think it’s not all connected. The demonic activity is everywhere and is even palpable at times. PALPABLE. Have you felt it? Every solid priest I speak with confirms they feel it too.
So there is certainly no shortage of things to pray about. And while some of this is about prioritization, it’s also about recognizing your role at the tip of the spear. We need to militantly pursue our own spiritual perfection first and foremost. It might not seem right when it first hits your ear, but if we are too busy praying for everyone else at the expense of praying for ourselves, it does everyone a disservice. This may sound uncharitable or lacking humility, but that’s not the case, because it necessarily means expanding our own prayer life. The mere fact that you are here, reading this tiny, tiny blog right now, means you are probably the tip of the spear. Proper training is essential. By calling down these graces in petition, and cooperating with them, our own increase in holiness in turn makes our prayers for others more efficacious. Everybody wins.
You are part of a very small, elite, specialized unit. This is the greatest battle ever fought, because the results of this battle are eternal. You need to be on your game.
St Michael the Archangel, pray for us
St Joan of Arc, pray for us
St Martin of Tours, pray for us
St Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us
Christ, have mercy on us

Dubia first anniversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of the publishing of the Four Candinal’s “dubia” concerning Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia, two months after it was delivered to antipope Bergoglio.
The dubia are brilliantly written, and they follow a longstanding tradition in the Church when Rome issues a directive which raises questions in its interpretation. The ones we have in front of us, due to the wretched heresy contained in Chapter Eight, put Bergoglio in an impossible position, which is why he has refused to answer.
The dubia are important, as this is the only public challenge, by men with any standing to actually do something about it, to the public heresy of the man who is acknowledged by these same men to be the current pontiff, and the verbiage is precise and damning. On the other hand, the dubia are meaningless, because the premise is false, because Bergoglio is an antipope who usurped the throne invalidly due to the failed partial abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, who is still the one and only living pope. Which means Amoris Laetitia never really happened, nor did any of the other bogus “papal” documents, like the one about the backyard barbeque being mortal sin HERE. None of the hundreds of heretical and/or blasphemous mutterings of the despicable Argentine have any impact on the magisterial or pastoral teaching of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church, because he is not now, never was, and never shall be pope. Thanks be to God.
So my prayer today is that the world be awakened to the true situation in Rome, but also for the two remaining dubia cardinals to get on with it, with whatever the final correction is going to look like.

I have some troublesome “cherished beliefs” I need to share with Cardinal Archheretic Cupich

“It is our job to take up that discernment. It takes time. It involves discipline. Most importantly it requires that we be prepared to let go of cherished beliefs and long-held biases,” said the Archbishop of Chicago in a talk to the Catholic Theological Union published on YouTube October 27. HERE

Dear Blase, may I share with you a particular cherished belief that I’m most definitely not prepared to let go of?
HELL EXISTS: WHERE THE SOULS OF POOR SINNERS GO. HERE
Oh, does it seem wrong to “cherish” the thought of Hell? Nope, think again.  Hell is real. It’s never wrong to love the eternal truths. It’s never wrong to proclaim the Truth. You are obliged to do this. Knowledge of Hell is a great, great blessing. In fact, desiring Heaven solely out of a fear of Hell is good enough to get you there. It’s called Imperfect Contrition.
Cardinal Cupich is a lying heretic who needs to know he will spend all eternity in Hell for leading countless souls astray, and every one of those souls will rage against him personally face to face forever. He needs to repent and renounce of his heresy. He needs to know that there is no way to trick God by discerning, encountering, or attempting to abrogate God’s laws out of faux mercy.
I’ve been praying quite a bit on the Four Last Things. This topic has come at me from several different vectors of late. That’s usually a pretty good sign to sit up and pay attention. In particular, meditating on Hell and developing a deeply terrifying fear of it can be a most helpful exercise. It is an important step in growing our love for God, and wanting never to offend him. But for most of modernist, humanist, secularist western society, the Four Last Things have tragically become the Two Last Things. There are two versions, both as vacuous as they are ubiquitous:
First version: Death, Nothing. This group is split between the exploding number of atheists, and believers who think there might be a Heaven but no way could there be a Hell because mercy. Those who don’t make it to Heaven are just snuffed out… Soul annihilation. For a solid tracing of where this mindset must lead, using rational, linear thinking, go visit Ann Barnhardt, who nails it as usual HERE. 
Second version: Death, Heaven. For most nominal believers, that’s it. It makes no difference how the person lived their lives nor the circumstances of their death, nor really anything, unless they were literally Hitler. I’ve seen a lot of this even in Catholic circles, because of course nobody knows the faith. Yet suddenly when a “nice” person dies unexpectedly, of course he or she goes to meet God right away.  Julie at Connecticut Catholic Corner has a few words about this HERE.
Both versions reek, in different ways, of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. If you want to understand just how far 95% of “Christianity” has gone astray, get to know MTD. The five core dogmas of MTD are:

  1. God exists and He created the world
  2. God wants people to be nice to each other
  3. God wants everyone to feel happy and good about themselves
  4. God doesn’t need to be involved in our daily lives, unless there is a problem and we need Him
  5. Good people go to heaven when they die

It is not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions of people today think MTD is the central message of Christianity, which could not possibly be farther from the truth. I am linking here to a site that unfortunately contains quite a bit of anti-Catholic bigotry, but the page I’m sending you to is the best visual representation of MTD I’ve been able to find. Please go take a look. It’s a page that describes hundreds of people I know, both “Catholic” and not. Please go HERE.
This is what happens when you abandon “cherished beliefs”. Pretty soon, not only is your religion hollowed out, it actually turns into the opposite of what it was meant to be. You must call this out, and warn others about it. God’s laws don’t change, because God never changes, because God was always perfect, and you can’t change perfect into something more perfecter.
Let’s get back to Heaven and Hell. God created us to know, love, and serve Him in this life, so that we might be happy with Him forever in the next. He shared with us through the revealed truths what makes him happy and what hurts him. If we love someone, we try to do those things that make them happy, and avoid those things that hurt them. Sometimes we fail, and we need to be sorry for that and seek forgiveness. Striving to live an authentic Christian life is founded on these concepts. Building your “personal relationship” with the Triune Godhead is based on renouncing your sin AS A SIGN OF YOUR LOVE. Once you start thinking about it this way — that your actual sins are in fact personally injurious to God — you’ll start putting a whole lot more “discernment” into those bad decisions.
Hell was first created as a result of Lucifer’s refusal to serve God, when God revealed the entire plan of salvation to all the angels. Lucifer, likely the most glorious, beautiful, and intellectually superior angel created by God, was so disgusted, so enraged, so filled with sinful pride, that he just couldn’t accept the plan. This beautiful angel refused to accept that almighty God would lower Himself to take on flesh, homo factus est, and immolate Himself to redeem humanity. We might imagine that the icing on the cake was being told that God would not only become man, but be born of a woman, the spotless Virgin, and that this woman would in turn become Queen of the Universe. You can imagine the total throw down hissy fit Lucifer had upon learning that he had a female human monarch over him. So he issued his Non Serviam, and fully one third of the angels followed him in their rebellion, and were cast out. The other two-thirds chose wisely and were granted the Beatific Vision.
If you truly want to grow in your spiritual life, in your love of God, through a terrifying fear of Hell, think about this: If one-third of the angels willingly chose to reject the will of God, and were cast into Hell because of it, what percentage of the human race do you think ends up there? These angels, with soaring intellects orders of magnitude greater than ours, pure spirit, with no temptations of the flesh, the most beautiful and gifted creatures ever created by God… if 33% of these angels each individually chose to reject God to His face, what chance do we have?  Yeah, I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess a frighteningly large majority of the human race ends up in Hell. God’s justice is perfect, and the percentages aren’t good. Hammer this fact into your brain until it starts to pop up every time you are in the near occasion of sin.
We must instruct others on the reality of Hell. We must never desire anyone to go there. We must work and pray for the salvation of all souls. But Hell exists, it’s not empty, and people are falling into it every day.
Discern that, Blase.

“Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.” Matt 25:41

On church shootings: How to inform your pastor of our sacred duty to protect ourselves and our families

Yes, it’s not just a God given right, it’s a sacred duty.  It’s biblical.
I’ve already reblogged the post once, but in case you’ve yet to read it, go HERE The beginning is a little dated, as it was written during the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the election, but the core lesson is solid, and comes to us from the very lips of our Lord and Savior. Please click on the link to learn how and why Jesus Christ commands you to arm yourself.
If your church has “no weapons” signs posted outside, now is the time to explain to your pastor how dangerous this is. The events in Texas are a foretaste. Churches will become more numerous targets, as the world descends further on its trajectory. Priests who remain faithful and preach the truth will become targets, which makes the laity targets as well.
Write to your pastor and explain this. Following is a sample letter you can use. Laws are different in every state, this example is for Arizona. Both concealed and open carry are legal here, with or without a permit, but entities can erect and enforce “no weapons” policies on private property with proper signage. Learn well the laws where you live.
———————————-

Dear Father,

The events in Texas prompt me to engage you on the topic of the “no weapons” signs posted at the entrances of the church. Please hear me out. I’m attaching a link which explains well the obligation we have to protect ourselves and our families from corporeal threats. This is not only a God-given right, but a sacred duty. It’s not optional.
Criminals do not obey signs. In fact, these signs make our church, and you, more prone to attack, because the criminal knows that law abiding citizens do obey signs, and the sitting ducks inside the building have all been disarmed. The signs literally make the church a more dangerous place. To make matters worse, no additional security whatsoever has been provided as a countermeasure to the increased threat level caused by the signs.
Your continued valiant preaching of the hard truths also puts you and us at greater risk. It’s hardly unimaginable for someone with rage in their heart after a particularly uncomfortable sermon pricks a guilty conscience to want to teach this judgy priest a thing or two. We both know the hard truths will continue to be taught, so we ought to be prepared for the worst.
The current situation at the church leaves the laity with three horrible choices:
1. Neglect our sacred duty and attend Mass unarmed
2. Obey our sacred duty and break the law
3. Attend Mass elsewhere
I recommend adopting the policy of Mater Misericordiea in Phoenix, after the tragic murder of Father Walker. They have no signs forbidding concealed carry, plus they have added armed security. I’d be willing to bet that place is more secure than a police station.
Father, I beg you to remove these signs. The brilliance of concealed carry is that an assailant has no idea who is armed and who is not, and therefore must assume everyone is carrying. It is a huge deterrence to violence. The signs are an invitation to violence. We have enough hard choices to make in life.  This shouldn’t be one of them.
Respectfully,