Pope Benedict XVI Has Died & Now The REAL War On Sacred Tradition Begins
Those who dismiss Catholicism as necessary to True human flourishing are about to see the Hell on earth The Church has held at bay
“And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” - The Incarnate Wisdom, Matthew 16
With the death of His Holiness of Blessed Memory, Cardinal/Pope Joseph Ratzinger, the war on Sacred Tradition will now commence in all it’s demonic fury. No one is prepared for the sheer and unfiltered evil that is now to be unleashed against the penultimate enemy of God i.e. Man. The ages of pagan, human sacrifices as e.g. the Aztecs practiced will look like cheery Sunday strolls along the lake as the only force among Men that held it back, The Church, now enters Her own Passion. No one was more aware of this than Benedict XVI, indeed, in a 1969 radio interview (ah ha! the golden medium, radio!!) he predicted this epoch we now enter.
“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!
“How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.
“Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.
If you’re jolted by this 53 year old, prophetic interview of then Bishop Ratzinger, consider the prophecies of Venerable Barthelomew Holzhauser, especially his prediction of what the 5th Age of The Church will look like (he believed this age began with the Protestant revolt).
“This is a state of trouble, desolation, humiliation, and poverty for the Church. We may with just reason call it a state of purification, in which the Lord Jesus Christ has sifted His wheat, and will sift it again by wars, seditions, famines, epidemics and other scourges, by the tribulation and the poverty which He will suffer to weigh on the Latin Church, by means of heretics and bad Christians, who will take from her the greater part of her bishoprics and countless monasteries, especially the wealthier ones.
She is oppressed even by Catholic Princes, and despoiled by means of taxes, imposts, and other extortions. ... The Church is become poor and miserable, because she hath been calumniated by heretics, because her ministers are despised by bad Christians, who render her neither honor nor respect. By all these means God will sift His wheat; He will cast the chaff away to be burnt and will gather the wheat into His barns.
This fifth state of the Church is the state of tribulation, the state of apostasy, full of miseries of every kind. Few will be spared by the sword, by famine and by pestilence. We shall see kingdom rise against kingdom; empires will be divided in themselves, and brought to desolation; principalities and monarchies will be overturned, and almost the whole world will sink into poverty. The greatest desolation will reign over the earth.
All this has in part been already accomplished (1656 AD); a part remains yet to be accomplished. These things will come to pass by the very just judgment of God, because of the accumulated mass of our iniquities, whereof our fathers and ourselves have filled up the measure, at the moment when the mercy of Almighty God awaited our doing penance."
My friend Kennedy Hall offered this view of the aftermath of Benedict XVI’s death, I believe Kennedy is spot on.
If there is any inclination in Modernist Rome to play nice a bit with Tradition and theological orthodoxy for the sake of a ceremonial hat-tip to the failed experiment of the hermeneutic of continuity, this will be gone when Benedict is gone.
When Papa Emeritus is deceased, any faint glimmer of a pre-conciliar era will be officially gone, and the dysfunction inherent in the fraternity of the Church’s hierarchy will be—I believe—on full display.
And just like in a dysfunctional family after the death of the patriarch, I imagine there will be numerous spats and splits to follow.
Brace yourself.
We’ll need more than bracing, brother, for the evil that will attempt to become normalized; an ersatz UN-sacred tradition whose sacrifices are made to Ba’al and Moloch, we’ll need the protection of she who was foretold …
“she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.”
LET US APPEAL TO OUR LADY OF AMERICA
In 1956, Our Lady appeared in a series of apparitions to Sister Mary Ephram at her convent in Rome City, Indiana. In these appearances, Our Lady warned the humble sister of the coming moral crisis in these United States and on one occasion, Our Lady of America, requested a medal be struck, to protect the families of the faithful, with certain images and phrases on it.
Our Lady also asked that a medal be struck in the form of a shield with these words arched around her image: “By thy Holy and Immaculate Conception, O Mary, deliver us from evil.” On the reverse side of the medal Our Lady requested a coat of arms for the Catholic family, which symbolized the Indwelling of the Trinity in the devout home. Those who wear the medal with great faith and fervent devotion to Mary will receive the grace of “intense purity of heart . . . sinners will receive the grace of repentance and the spiritual strength to live as true children of Mary . . . it will be a shield to protect them against the evil spirits . . . and St. Michael himself will be at their side to allay their fears at the hour of death.”
The secular world that so prizes its own vanity in pride in this hulking, AI machine that life has become, has no concept of what life is going to be like without the Chair of St Peter and Christ’s Church on earth to hold back the ascendent evil. We are all about to be made eyewitnesses to this assault.
Our Lady of America; Pope Benedict XVI and Saint Pope Pius X, ora pro nobis!
Brace yourselves. Indeed.
Merry New Year’s, Y’all!
