La Salette, Applied - His Excellency Bishop Richard Williamson

[Michael]

La Salette, Applied

We tend to hanker after yesterday,
But hunker down is what we need today.

All prophecies are mysterious, including the famous Secret of La Salette revealed to a French peasant girl in the Alps of eastern France in 1846. However, that Secret certainly follows the Venerable Holzhauser’s broad outlines of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Ages of the Church, so that a large part of the Secret applies to our own end of the Fifth Age. Here is a substantial extract from that part of the Secret, in italics, followed by a Resistant priest’s presentation of how that end of an Age looks in our very own time. Firstly, Our Lady of La Salette:—

“There will be extraordinary wonders in every place because the true Faith has been extinguished and a false light lights up the world. ( . . . ) My Son’s Vicar will have much to suffer, because for a time the Church will be handed over to great persecutions: it will be the time of darkness; the Church will undergo a frightful crisis. With God’s holy Faith forgotten, each individual will want to direct himself and rise above his peers. Civil and ecclesiastical authority will be abolished, all order and justice will be trampled underfoot. Only murders, hatred, jealousy, lying and discord will be seen, with no love of country or family. ( . . . ) Civil governments will all have the same objective, which will be to abolish and make every religious principle disappear, to make way for materialism, atheism, spiritism and vices of all kinds . . .”

And secondly a priest of today:—“The Revolution has had a huge impact, and in 2017 it is a storm which is reaching its climax. Now is the time for us to hunker down, and help one another to survive the storm. This requires total abandonment to God’s Providence, and it requires more prayer and study to navigate and survive in the storm. It is no use hankering for that “Sunday Catholic” life-style which Traditionalists made a great effort to restore after the earthquake of Vatican II. Both the 1950’s and the 1970’s are gone for ever. By this crisis God is purifying His Church, which may be reduced to numbers and to a life-style close to those of the early Church. The beautiful buildings, relics, artwork and museums have been lost once to the Modernists, and they will be lost again to the Muslims, to natural causes, to wars. Let us brace ourselves to see the whole Christian heritage disappear, and as Lot fled Sodom, let us flee Neo-modernist Rome without looking back!

“For let us dream that at the next Conclave in Rome, by a direct intervention of God, the truly best of Cardinals is elected Pope. What could he do to restore the Church? Practically nothing, except offer up all the persecutions that would befall him the day after the election. Why? Because, surely as with President Trump in the United States, all the administrative machinery of the Church would still be in the hands of the Pope’s enemies, and he would not have the good men to replace them. And even if by a series of miracles, the whole of Rome was truly Catholic once more, would not the rest of the world on its present course have become virtually inconvertible? What can now stop mankind from becoming almost totally inhuman, unnatural, unreal? How could even a converted Rome evangelize tomorrow’s Zombies?

“We are going through a New Deluge, that of the Revolution, where the saving Ark which once was Rome has been hijacked by the enemies of God, and they are in the process of scuttling it. The Society of St Pius X was a lifeboat. But since 2012 it has thrown a rope towards the sinking Ark and is now attached to it. We poor souls of the “Resistance” are bobbing up and down on the waters, grabbing at pieces of wood for dear life. And that is how it is, and we had better face the reality around us.”

Kyrie eleison.

La Salette, Applied - His Excellency Bishop Richard Williamson

[Bill]

This was an interesting article. I don’t believe that any group today as it exists, the Resistance ance or the sedevacantists have all the answers. The scenario described by the Resistance Priest with Catholics forced underground such as in the 1st century (he makes no mention of a Pope) is very similar to the sedevacantist view. The idea of the next conclave electing the best of the cardinals is a pipedream, but if it were to happen, would we have a Catholic on the Throne? If Burke is the best of the lot, by which standard can he be considered Catholic? St Pius V’s? X’s? Or JPII’s?

The 1 point the sedevacantists make which is sensical, is that the return of Rome to the true Faith, as i understand their position, will come about by direct intervention of Our Lord, and the how is a mystery. Mystery is perfectly compatible with Catholicism. The contradictions of a Burke are not.

[Dawn Marie]

I agree with this EC with one exception...this part (below in quotations) is absolutely ridiculous and reeks of a humanistic standpoint only.  It completely ignores what will happen when Russia is actually consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as Our Lord and Lady PROMISED it would be in the end.  If we had no hope of Our Lady's triumph then this scenario the priest puts forward might...might have something to it, but we have God's promise.  To think that God has no power over His own Church is to think like a man who limits God and as a man whose Faith might be being tempted to a degree which suggests despair.

"

“For let us dream that at the next Conclave in Rome, by a direct intervention of God, the truly best of Cardinals is elected Pope. What could he do to restore the Church? Practically nothing, except offer up all the persecutions that would befall him the day after the election. Why? Because, surely as with President Trump in the United States, all the administrative machinery of the Church would still be in the hands of the Pope’s enemies, and he would not have the good men to replace them. And even if by a series of miracles, the whole of Rome was truly Catholic once more, would not the rest of the world on its present course have become virtually inconvertible? What can now stop mankind from becoming almost totally inhuman, unnatural, unreal? How could even a converted Rome evangelize tomorrow’s Zombies?"

[Dawn Marie]

Ellen B. White, Call Your Office!: Francis' Denial of the Last Things

October 21, 2017

From Sandro Magister in L'Espresso, October 20, 2017

Dr. Chojnowski: It seems as if Ellen B. White, founder of the Seventh-Day Adventists, was "right," according to Francis about the Last Things. No Hell, just annihilation of the wicked --- those who do not go to the Saturday Novus Ordo  "mass" perhaps? --- and eternal bliss for everyone else.

Here is a quotation from Ellen B. White, and then the article by Sandro Magister:

How repugnant to every emotion of love and mercy, and even to our sense of justice, is the doctrine that the wicked dead are tormented with fire and brimstone in an eternally burning hell; that for the sins of a brief, earthly life they are to suffer torture as long as God shall live.—Great Controversy, p. 535.

Article from L'Espresso by Sandro Magister, October 20, 2017

In the important newspaper “la Repubblica” of which he is the founder, Eugenio Scalfari, an undisputed authority of Italian secular thought, last October 9 returned to speaking in the following terms about what he sees as a “revolution” of this pontificate, in comments by Francis that are derived from his frequents conversations with him:
“Pope Francis has abolished the places where souls were supposed to go after death: hell, purgatory, heaven. The idea he holds is that souls dominated by evil and unrepentant cease to exist, while those that have been redeemed from evil will be taken up into beatitude, contemplating God.”
Observing immediately afterward:
“The universal judgment that is in the tradition of the Church therefore becomes devoid of meaning. It remains a simple pretext that has given rise to splendid paintings in the history of art. Nothing other than this.”
*
On Wednesday, October 11, at the general audience in Saint Peter’s Square, Francis said that such a judgment is not to be feared, because “at the end of our history there is the merciful Jesus,” and therefore “everything will be saved. Everything.”
In the text distributed to the journalists accredited to the Holy See, this last word, “everything,” was emphasized in boldface.
*
At another general audience a few months ago, on Wednesday, August 23, Francis gave for the end of history an image that is entirely and only comforting: that of “an immense tent, where God will welcome all mankind so as to dwell with them definitively.”
An image that is not his own but is taken from chapter 21 of Revelation, but from which Francis was careful not to cite the following words of Jesus:
“The victor will inherit these gifts, and I shall be his God, and he will be my son. But as for cowards, the unfaithful, the depraved, murderers, the unchaste, sorcerers, idol-worshipers, and deceivers of every sort, their lot is in the burning pool of fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
*
And again, in commenting during the Angelus of Sunday, October 15 on the parable of the wedding banquet (Matthew 22: 1-14) that was read at all the Masses on that day, Francis carefully avoided citing the most unsettling parts.
Both that in which “the king became indignant, sent his troops, had those murderers killed and their city burned.”
And that in which, having seen “one man who was not wearing the wedding garment,” the king ordered his servants: “Bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the darkness; there shall be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth.”
*
On the previous Sunday, October 8, another parable, that of the murderous vine dressers (Matthew 21:33-43), had undergone the same selective treatment.
In commenting on the parable during the Angelus, the pope left out what the owner of the vineyard does to those farmers who killed the servants and finally the son: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death.” Much less did he cite the concluding words of Jesus, referring to himself as the “cornerstone”: “He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but when it falls on any one, it will crush him.”
Instead, Pope Francis insisted on defending God from the accusation of being vindictive, almost as if wanting to mitigate the excesses of “justice” detected in the parable:
“It is here that the great news of Christianity is found: a God who, in spite of being disappointed by our mistakes and our sins, does not go back on his word, does not stop, and above all does not avenge himself! Brothers and sisters, God does not avenge himself! God loves, he does not avenge himself, he waits for us to forgive us, to embrace us.”
*
In the homily for the feast of Pentecost, last June 4, Francis argued, as he often does, against “those who judge.” And in citing the words of the risen Jesus to the apostles and implicitly to their successors in the Church (John 20:22-23), he intentionally cut them off halfway through:
“Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive, they will be forgiven.”
Omitting the following:
“Those you do not forgive, they will not be forgiven.”
And the fact that the truncation was deliberate is proven by its repititon. Because Francis had made the exact same deletion of the words of Jesus on the previous April 23, at the Regina Coeli of the first Sunday after Easter.
*
Last May 12 as well, while visiting Fatima, Francis showed that he wanted to set Jesus free from his reputation as an inflexible judge at the end of time. And to do this he warned against the following false image of Mary:
“A Mary of our own making: one who restrains the arm of a vengeful God; one sweeter than Jesus the ruthless judge.”
*
It must be added that the liberty with which Pope Francis cuts and stitches up the words of Sacred Scripture does not concern only the universal judgment. Deafening, for example, is the silence in which he has always shrouded Jesus’ condemnation of adultery (Matthew 19:2-11 and parallel passages).
In a surprising coincidence, this condemnation was contained in the Gospel passage that was read in all the churches of the world precisely on the Sunday of the beginning of the second session of the synod of bishops on the family, October 4, 2015. But neither in the homily nor at the Angelus on that day did Pope Francis make the slightest reference to it.
Nor did he make any reference to it at the Angelus of Sunday February 12, 2017, when that condemnation was once again read in all the churches.
Not only that. The words of Jesus against adultery also do not appear in the two hundred pages of the post-synodal exhortation “Amoris Laetitia.”
Just as no appearance is made in it by the terrible words of condemnation of homosexuality written by the apostle Paul in the first chapter of the Letter to the Romans.
A first chapter that was also read - another coincidence - at the weekday Masses of the second week of the synod of 2015. To tell the truth, those words are not included in the missal. But in any case, neither the pope nor anyone else ever cited them while discussions were being held at the synod about changing the paradigms of judgment on homosexuality:
"Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper. They are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them" (Romani 1, 26-32).
*
Moreover, at times Pope Francis even takes the liberty of rewriting the words of Sacred Scripture as he sees fit.
For example, in the morning homily at Santa Marta on September 4, 2014, at a certain point the pope attributed to Saint Paul these “scandalous” words: “I boast only of my sins.” And he concluded by inviting the faithful present to “boast” of their own sins, in that they have been forgiven from the cross by Jesus.
But in none of Paul’s letters can such an expression be found. The apostle instead says of himself: “If it is necessary to boast, I will boast of my weaknesses” (2 Corinthians 11:30), after having listed all the hardships of his life - the imprisonments, the floggings, the shipwrecks.
Or: “About myself I will not boast, except of my weaknesses” (2 Corinthians 12:5). Or again: “He said to me: ‘My grace is enough for you; strength is in fact made fully manifest in weakness.’ I will therefore gladly boast of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me” (2 Corinthians 12:9), with more references to the outrages, persecutions, anguish he has suffered.
*
Coming back to the final judgment, Pope Benedict XVI also acknowledged that "in the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background.”
But in the encyclical “Spe Salvi,” which he wrote entirely on his own, he forcefully reaffirmed that the last judgment is “the decisive image of hope.” It is an image that “evokes responsibility,” because “grace does not cancel out justice,” but on the contrary “the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life,” because “with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's return and for new life become fully convincing.”
And again:
“Grace does not make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal value. Dostoevsky was right to protest against this kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had happened.”

[Dawn Marie]