SOMETHING TO VERY SERIOUSLY THINK ABOUT!
The environment today has become more hostile than ever to the preservation of freedoms.
The left has taken the road to becoming more hostile than ever before as they continue to launch rogue strategies, engage in unlawful behavior and spew file rhetoric to attack the very freedoms that define America’s greatness.
They not only challenge our opinions, which is within their own rights of freedom, but then go so far as to inhibit our very right to express them. They have taken the extreme measures of interfering with our abilities to engage in free speech, peaceful assembly and speaking out for the GOD GIVEN positions we hold dear.
New York asshole Governor Andrew Cuomo hates firearms, hates people who favor them, hates the NRA and especially hates our Second Amendment freedoms. But not for himself and his bodyguards however. Safety for me but not for thee is his prime motto.
And he hates all of this so much that he is not what-so-ever shy about it either.
He weaponized the New York State banking regulator, the most powerful agency of its kind in the country, to punish and silence the NRA. The governor directed regulators to send letters to all CEO’s of banks and insurance companies in the state to pressure them to cease doing business with the organization.
THINK ABOUT THAT!
This utter contemptuous asshole singled out an entire category of people who should not receive financial services and even checking accounts simply because HE disagrees with their opinions. He doesn’t like your political viewpoint and therefore wants you denied of financial services.
He effectively wants to BLACKLIST a legal organization!
The country must NEVER become a nation, or world for that matter, in which free citizens and free speech are vilified and punished for merely expressing their beliefs. NEVER!
It’s quite clear that this idiot went way too far this time and many communities, stakeholders, leaders and legal scholars agree.
That, however, means nothing to this madman. He and his supporters will stop at nothing to advance a personal political agenda, even if is contrary and at the risk to the most fundamental principles of human rights.
In fact, this clown’s chosen candidate for Attorney General vowed to attack the NRA as a pillar of her campaign platform. That’s even before being elected to that office.
DID YOU GET THAT?
BEFORE spending even one day in office, she declared that we, you and me as well as all law-abiding citizens and NRA members are a terrorist organization.
Her first goal stated was to vow to conduct a TAXPAYER FUNDED ‘FISHING’ expedition to investigate them in the state in which they were founded 148 years ago!
Make NO mistake about this. A contrived political investigation is NOT the action of a public servant. This is a RANK POLITICAL VENDETTA AND ILLEGAL SCANDAL. IT COMPLETELY SMACKS OF RACKETEERING AND IMMEDIATELY REQUIRES A LOOK INTO IT WITH THE RICO ACT!
THAT’S what I keep talking about when I mention too much authority and power in the hands of a small group of people. THAT, right the hell there!
IT IS TIME FOR ALL TO SPEAK OUT LOUD AND SPEAK OUT BOLDLY!
IT IS TIME WE SHOW THAT WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP OR SURRENDER ONE SINGLE INCH OF OUR GOD GIVEN, CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS!
ANTI-GUN POLITICIANS, pundits and activists like to characterize their restrictions against lawful gun ownership as fresh thinking. They smear the Founding Fathers (“Old White Men”) as being so unimaginative that they couldn’t possibly have foreseen today’s technology. Their patronizing argument that the Second Amendment only guarantees a right to own a musket makes about as much sense as claiming the First Amendment only guarantees a right to own a quill pen.
On the contrary, the writers of our Constitution were subjected to—and pursued—advancements in firearms technology that rocked their world. Over the intervening decades, successive achievements have enabled better concealment, improved accuracy over greater distance, faster rates of fire, easier reloading, increased magazine capacity and more efficient ammunition. Each one has changed the balance of power between nations, between the weak and the strong, between predators and prey and, perhaps most importantly, between citizens and their would-be masters.
The fundamental changes wrought by such revolutions mock the histrionics of present-day gun control advocates. Cory Booker and Eric Swalwell rail against 19th-century inventions as if they had just been 3-D printed on some terrorist’s kitchen table. Presidential candidates threaten to jail formerly lawful gun owners for possessing technology dating from the Grover Cleveland administration. News flash, Elizabeth Warren: The semi-automatic 1911 pistol was developed by John Moses Browning in … 1911.
We’ve gotten over it. The NRA has created Museums called “Disruptors:’ They highlight firearms featuring a technological leap that created a tectonic shift in society. You’d be surprised to see that the changes they wrought are the same ones being debated today. Despite dire predictions, modern society seems to have survived—perhaps even thrived—because of them.
SALVATION
The merits and grace of Christ were applied by God to men of goodwill in anticipation of His death on the Cross. God, in His eternity, is not conditioned by time, and men could benefit by the death of Christ just as they can make use of an inheritance which is absolutely certain to be given to them in due time. The merits of Christ were applied to Jews of goodwill in virtue of their faith in a Redeemer to come. Every single human being has the moral standard that what is apprehended to be morally good must be done, whilst moral evil must be avoided.
Those who – through no fault of their own (the major hurdle in order to qualify as being invincibly ignorant of Jesus Christ and His true Catholic Church,) – did not know of a Redeemer to come could be saved if they:
But extremely rare is the soul who has never fallen into mortal sin. Such common mortal sins include as having ever attended and/or participated in non-Catholic religious worship or prayer services, including:
Despite having fallen into sin, they could yet achieve salvation if prior to death they
For a soul to meet both requirements “a)” above, and requirement “b)” with the proper intensity of true contrition necessary as to make effective any attempt at an Act of Perfect Contrition, especially in one not habitually conscious of doing so, is so rare, the Catholic Church teaches, as to be almost impossible.
However, be there any such invincibly ignorant soul who exists, or has ever existed, dying in a state satisfying those two requirements by being so intent upon having lived throughout his life focused on, and practicing, truthful behavior, the Church teaches and that such a person would immediately recognize the complete truths of the Catholic Church as being of those of the Supreme Being. And for that reason, that particular invincibly ignorant person is a member within the bosom and unity of the true Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, by Baptism of Intent.
Thus, the infallible teaching that there is no salvation outside the bosom and unity of the true Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ remains true.
Protestants ask if God is everywhere, He must fill every man even as He filled Jesus. What was the difference between the relationship of Jesus to God, and that of other men? God must be part of all.
It does not follow that, because God is everywhere, He must be part of man’s being. Man’s being is finite and created. The Infinite and Un-created God could not be a component part of created finite being. God and man are in two totally different orders of being, and their co-existence in the same place or space could not make them part of each other. As a matter of fact, God is not even conditioned by space as are creatures. But even in the natural and physical order, thought and brain (a nexus of physical nerve endings) co-exist in a human head without thought becoming part of the brain. The brain belongs to the material order; thought to the spiritual order.
If thought were part of the brain, the brain would increase or diminish as thought increased or diminished. But it does not. And just as thought can co-exist in one’s head with a material brain without becoming a component part of that brain, so God’s existence everywhere does not make Him a part of man’s being.
What then was the difference between the relationship of Jesus to God, and that of ordinary men? It cannot consist in any aspect of God’s omnipresence, since the human nature assumed by the Second Person existed as much within the immensity and omnipresence of God as you do. It must consist of something over and above that relationship to the omnipresence of God; in something proper to Jesus, and not possessed by any other human being. What was it? It was this: Apart from the Divine Attribute of omnipresence possessed by the Divine Nature, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity entered into possession of, and controlled the human nature born of Mary, so that this human nature never became a created human personality, but remained the created instrument of a Divine Personality.
Thus, within the omnipresence of God, which no created being can escape, a new bond is established between the human nature of Christ and God, a bond which does not exist in the case of any other human nature. It is a personal bond, enabling the one Person of the Eternal Son to say equally, “I am God,” or “I am man,” according to His possession of both a Divine and a human nature.
Other human beings can never say, “I am God.” They are restricted to the expression, “I am a man.”
But the human nature of Christ was gripped into a bond of personal union with the eternal and Divine Son who possessed and controlled it, making it integral to His one Personality for the purposes of our redemption in a nature drawn from that human race which was to be redeemed.
It had to be by what is known as a conditional necessity. God could have exercised His mercy only, and condoned our sins without exacting expiation on the part of the human race. But if God wished to satisfy the claims of justice that was requiring a divine atonement for man’s sins against an infinite God – something incapable of finite, created mankind – then the Incarnation and death of Christ were necessary. The Son of God freely chose to offer Himself in sacrifice, and that sacrifice was the logical necessity consequent upon His choice. He need not have chosen to die, and to die in such a way; but having chosen to do so, the fact necessarily followed.
In dealing with God’s work for the salvation of souls, our knowledge is limited to what He has revealed and actually accomplished. It is impossible to say what would have been done by God if what has happened did not happen. We must take things as they are, and be content to let curious speculations go unanswered.
Just as the sins of mankind in general from which Christ came to redeem us were not willed by God, so the evil dispositions of those who actually put Christ to death were not willed by God. Thus, the treachery of Judas, the injustice of Pilate, the hatred and malice of the Jews—these things were evil and opposed to God’s will. And those guilty of such evil dispositions were blameworthy before God. You must not think of God as planning that Christ should die, and then arranging that some men will be evil enough to kill Him. Where we think one thing after another, God sees all things simultaneously. He sent His Son to a world which He knew was wicked, and needed redeeming; and into the midst of men who would, as a matter of fact, be evil enough at heart to condemn Him to death. But the evil was the fault of men, not of God. God did not ordain, nor cause the evil; but God the Father in cooperation of the Holy Ghost permitted it to be the death of His Son who had undertaken to expiate in a manner that only such a divine atonement would be acceptable to God for mankind’s sins. For even if all men ever created sacrificed themselves seeking forgiveness, collectively it would not be sufficient expiation to achieve redemption crimes against the infinite Divinity of the Holy Trinity that required a divine sacrifice of infinite value.
The sacrifice of Calvary was not a purely human sacrifice. The atonement was made by God because the Person, whose human nature was nailed to the cross, was God. The Person, and not the nature under the then control of that Person, is the terminus of attribution.
If a person abuses his use of reason by willfully committing murder by punching a man to death, it is irrational, unjust and useless in court for the murder to say “It wasn’t me that killed him. It was my fist.” Thus, the human nature which was nailed to the cross was His Who was and is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. And the sacrifice, though directly involving the death of the human nature, derived its dignity from the Person to whom it belonged. It was, therefore, an atonement of infinite value derived from the infinite dignity of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. In no logical, just sense can one say that a purely human sacrifice took place on Calvary.
Yet there are today in 2019 Talmudic Judaics, heathens, atheists and rapidly increasing many others globally of a contumacious and pertinaciously blinded intellect who reject the proven divine nature of Jesus Christ.
Those who adopt that mentality are the ones willingly or unwittingly are (now not so subtly) promoting a scio-econo-religio- (but mainly) political pre-figurement of what eventually becomes acceptance of a long-awaited “Political Messiah” who becomes the ultimate Antichrist that Scripture says will have totalitarian rule for forty-two months.
As a lyric of the late John Lennon (shot to death 1980 in NYC) espoused in the Beatles song, Imagine: “Imagine a world without religion.” Lennon’s sophistry therein was that is the way to achieve world peace. With incredulous and alarming alacrity, the world apostatizes unrestrained towards that Talmudic Judaic New World Order (NWO) goal by
Firstly, annihilating its major obstacle: true Catholicism. With exception of a mere faithful remnant, this has virtually been achieved via Talmudic Judaism founded & controlled Freemason infiltrators to the Sacred College of Cardinals who executed a coup d’etat of the Chair of Peter in the October 26, 1958 Papal Conclave. Subsequent actions of the unbroken successive line of anti-popes (i. e., illicit claimants to the Papacy) during the 1960’s as follows:
April 1962’s defective, QUO PRIMUM-condemned “1962 Latin Mass”/”John XXIII Mass” that replaced the true Roman Missal of Pius V Mass in all once-Catholic churches globally;
October 1962 beginning of the EXECRABILIS-condemned Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) with its two hundred plus heresies; the
Easter Sunday 1968 Announcement by Anti-pope Paul VI illicitly instituting the QUO PRIMUM-condemned NOVUS ORDO MISSAE [New Order of the Mass in the vernacular] and DEFECTIBUS-condemned NEW RITE of ORDINATION Rite of Ordination for priests and bishops. No man claiming to be a priest or bishop, who says he receives his “ordination” or promotion to the episcopacy wherein the defective New Rites was utilized, is valid. Jorge Bergoglio was invalidly “ordained” in the New Rite of Ordination in Argentina in December 1969. Thus, Mr. Bergoglio was never a validly ordained priest, must less a bishop, cardinal or pope. He is an anti-pope now teaching since January 2017 there are no flames of torture nor punishment when a bad person dies… that hell and Satan are both myths created by the Catholic Church in order to scare people into joining, and paying in for “protection” from these myths.
Secondly, the ongoing phase of gathering all other religions worldwide (Talmudic Judaism, Freemasonry, Socialism, Communism, Anarchists, Pagans, Heathens, Heretics, Muslims, Hindus, African Animists, Atheists, etc.) into cooperation with the apostates who run the Vatican have nearly established a “One World Contra-Church” where doctrinal differences are not discussed. The name of Jesus Christ will be diminished in usage until it becomes forbidden to mention (as is the case in most Freemason Lodges) and considered a word that conjures “hate” against mankind.
The Catholic doctrine says that Christ died for the purpose of saving sinners. But note this: Christ did not die to save sinners unconditionally, as if His death means that all sinners are necessarily saved. His death provides salvation for all who are willing to comply with the conditions laid down by Himself.
That is true, but Christ does not force salvation upon anybody. He did die to offer the means of salvation to all mankind, and, therefore, to every single member of the human race. In that sense His death will avail for you personally, if you personally comply with the conditions prescribed by Christ. It is as if it were in a person (debtor) in financial debt with a bank, and some charitable soul (benefactor) lodged sufficient money in the bank to discharge that debt, giving the debtor (now beneficiary) a checkbook to draw upon the money. The benefactor could truly say that he had done enough to save the beneficiary from beggary. But if the beneficiary refused to put his name to a single check, and would not walk a step towards the bank, despising the benefactor’s arrangements, the beneficiary would not be saved from beggary. That would be the beneficiary’s own fault, however, and no proof that the benefactor’s provision for the beneficiary was not efficacious in itself.
Christ did not die for sinners so that they could go on being sinners.
Yet that is precisely what is taught by the heresiarch Martin Luther (1483-1546), founder of Lutheranism. His biographers record that he once wrote a friend: “Sin on boldly. You need only put your faith in Jesus Christ and you are saved. You may commit a thousand acts of immorality or a thousand murders a day, and you are saved. So sin on boldly.” and signed his name to that letter.
The apostatized Vatican of the Counterfeit-Catholic Novus Ordo Contra-Church in recent years:
People who have died in the bosom and unity of the true Catholic Church in the state of sanctifying grace, who were sinners during life, but who repented of their sins, and did their best to comply with the conditions imposed by Christ, have been saved by Him from hell. People who are still living have not yet been saved by Christ. He has paid the price necessary for their salvation, if they choose to avail themselves of it.
Those who are actually sinners in grave matters (such as those living outside the Catholic Church, or those being a member of the Catholic Church but living in mortal sin) are not availing themselves of it at present; and if they die in that mortally sinful state, will not be saved at all. Those true Catholic sinners who do abandon their sins, repenting of them, and die in a state of such repentance, appealing to Christ for salvation, will be saved by Him—from hell.
He did not die to save sinners or anyone from death in the ordinary physical sense of the word. Even those who will be saved and who have been saved, were not intended to be freed from the necessity of death as the termination of this earthly life. Their salvation is from a future and eternal hell—that living death of all man’s hopes and aspirations for happiness.
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here” (from Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri [1265-1321])
It will not be applied to anyone who dies Protestant because they are dying as heretics, schismatics, therefore, outside the bosom and unity of the true Catholic Church. But the fact will remain true for all eternity that Christ did do His part to atone for Protestant sins, and the privilege of salvation was possible for them, if they had repented and returned to the true flock before the first death. Those that didn’t are now are experiencing the second death. The atonement was there, but the Protestants dying in such state of heresy and schism will not avail themselves of it.
One who has no faith in Christ, as Christ really was and is, could alone speak like that. If Christ be reduced to the merely human level, and emptied of His Divinity, then it becomes a question of merely man and man; and we all admit that, where man and man are concerned, no mere man could satisfy for the sins of another man; and that he who sins should do so, if it be possible to him. But in reality, no mere man can satisfy adequately for sin against God, however well able he may be to repair injuries against his fellow creatures. And only abiding faithfully by the complete, true Christian doctrine with the true Catholic Church solves the problem of reparation of sin against God.
We have no choice in the matter. For it is an accomplished fact that Christ died for the redemption of mankind. The only choice left to us is rejection of Christ’s sacrifice, or acceptance of His redeeming work. He who has no faith in God’s revelation and no sense of sin or real understanding of what sin means will reject it.
Protestants would not say that, did they have a right idea of the doctrine. Grasp the position. The gravity of an offense is intensified by the worth of the person offended. Precisely because one’s own mother has a special claim upon the respect and reverence of her child, ill-treatment of her is worse than that of another.
But sin is against the infinite dignity and majesty and authority of God. No mere creature could make adequate atonement or reparation to the Creator for such an offense. Yet since human nature gave such offense, one in a human nature should make reparation. So the Eternal Son of God became man. Because of His Divinity, He could make adequate reparation; because of His humanity, He could make it in our name.
Man did not love God enough to keep God’s law, but broke that law and became worthy of death. Why should God preserve man in life only that man might offend him? So Christ endured death, expiating our sinful pleasures by His sufferings, and compensating for our own lack of love by the immense love in His human heart for God. And in order that this might not be just one isolated individual suffering for another, even as He blended Himself with our humanity in the Incarnation, so He blends us with Himself by grace. He is the Head and we are the members; and Head and members are one. So Christ sacrificed Himself, making those for whom He did so one with Himself.
By this very union of love between Himself and those in attendance at the Mass, Christ could say to His Father, “Father, what I offer, they offer; and the love you have for me will be your love for them also.”
Note: The adding of a few drops of water to the Chalice of wine before Consecration represents faithful Catholics participating at the true Latin Mass as the offering of themselves to be immolated on the altar with Jesus during the actual Consecration of the bread and wine mixed with water to become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ at a true Roman Missal of Pius V Mass.
Thus God “so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son.” That Son, by shedding His blood for us, atoned for our sins, exemplifying His own words, “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13. One who sees no spiritual significance in this does not understand ordinary gratitude.
It is this doctrine of Christ’s death on the Cross for us, of His vicarious death, that the Saints found their greatest inspiration. As St. Paul said, in Gal. 2:19-20
“19 For I, through the law, am dead to the law, that I may live to God : with Christ I am nailed to the Cross.
“20 And I live, now not I ; but Christ liveth in me. And that I live now in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself for me.”
Haydock Commentary Galatians Chapter 2
“Ver. 19. He here expresses the change which had been wrought in him. The law to which he had been attached, had passed away from him. Now he was so united to Christ and His Cross, that he says : Not I, but Christ liveth in me. The strong expressions made use of by S. Paul with regard to the Jewish law in this chapter, may appear strange, and very capable of wrong interpretation. But we must ever bear in mind that S. Paul speaks exclusively of the ceremonial part of the law, and not the moral, contained in the decalogue: of this latter he says in ep. To the Romans (ii. 13.) he doers of the law shall be justified. But to this effect, was and is necessary the grace which Jesus Christ has merited and obtained for all, grace which God has shed on all, more or less, from the commencement of the world.
Protestants state: Catholics have said that after His death, Christ resumed the life He sacrificed on the cross.
Catholics believe that. The man who rejects it must shut his eyes to the historical evidence available.
That is not so. Factual proof may be either by personal experimental knowledge, or by the evidence of history. If historically a man must shut his eyes to the evidence, or believe that the Battle of Waterloo took place, Protestants cannot say that the Catholic is blind to the nature of factual proof.
The Gospels and St. Paul’s Epistles constitute five independent historical documents which leave no shadow of doubt. Their being bound in one volume does not affect their independence of each other.
Protestants who espouse the heresy of Sola Scriptura will – in contradiction of their demanding one only relying on Scriptures – frequently reject certain Scriptures as being too unbelievable. Protestants begin by rejecting the resurrection on the score that they will not believe in what seems to Protestants so incredible an event. They doubt the Gospels precisely because they record what Protestants deem incredible. But had a Catholic produced any other documents recording the resurrection, Protestants would then have had the same reason for doubting the reliability of those documents found outside the Bible. Such is Sola Scruptura-believing heretics who have made their own irrational conundrum because of the Protestants who conjure up excuses for denying the reliability of the Gospels!
It is not reasonable to refuse to believe what is in the Bible unless a Catholic can produce evidence other than that contained in the Bible which contain the evidence to validate the meaning of the Bible verse Protestants may find incredible, and so reject. Whosoever rejects documental evidence in Scripture is obliged to prove why it should be so rejected. It is the Protestant duty to disprove the historical value of the five documents of the Gospels and St. Paul’s Epistles. Instead, Protestants merely to ignore the verses they find unbelievable, and shut their eyes to the evidence. Picking through the Bible and choosing what they accept, how they want to interpret it, or reject and skip over verses hard for them to believe is one of the main characteristics of Protestantism. It is the cause for the never-ending fragmentation and disagreement of mainline Protestant and Non-Denominational sects over the last five centuries. It is only getting worse and leading them to become indifferent to their corrupted concept of “Christianity.” The demonized chaos of Protestant, Non-Denominational, and Vatican II Counterfeit-Catholic Novus Ordo sects are all spinning further from belief in Jesus Christ and His WORD. This situation makes them unknowingly (and increasingly uncaring) prime subjects for soon succumbing to a seemingly pious, far more intelligent, charismatic, and effective world leader who then supersedes all religions… by the required adoration of him, the Antichrist.
Here the Protestants show they do not doubt, therefore, that the accounts were written by contemporaries of Christ. Protestants place their doubts on the possibility of the writers being insincere; or, granted their sincerity, on the possibility of their being mistaken. Now the possibility that they were insincere has long been abandoned as quite unreasonable by even the bitterest enemies of Christianity. Firstly, it would be so pointless to conspire to impose on the world a religion in which the Apostles themselves did not believe. They had nothing to gain. Men do not break with all their friends, and invite persecution and death, for a lie which they know to be a lie. Nor were the cowardly Apostles rendered suddenly courageous by a conviction they knew to be unfounded. If they were liars, they were not conscious liars. They were sincere.
That leaves the second possibility per the Protestants: Were the writers mistaken? That supposes the writers to have been deranged, and suffering from some strange hallucination. But that is impossible. It is so evident that they were not expecting Christ to rise. Their tendency was to un-believe and not to believe. And also, there were too many witnesses for them all to be subject to precisely the same hallucination. Nor is it reasonable to admit their sanity on things Protestants are willing to accept, and arbitrarily declare them insane whenever Protestants do not happen to like what they have to say. To make Protestant likes and dislikes the test of credibility is prejudice—not reason.
Quite so. And the historical evidence for the resurrection is better than that for the greater number of events of those times accepted as historical by scholarly men. The only reasons Protestants have advanced against the value of the evidence are suggestions that the writers were either liars or insane. And neither suggestion is reasonable.
All historical evidence consists in the acceptance of the recorded word of others. Such acceptance is not a departure from the strict laws of historical evidence, provided we make sure that the documents are 1) authentic, 2) that there are sufficient witnesses to preclude the possibility of derangement, and 3) that the witnesses were men of unimpeachable honesty.
That is foolish. The fact that an account of an event has been written voluntarily, and not at the instigation of State officials, cannot invalidate the account. We cannot reject history merely because the authors were interested enough to want to write it. Of course, when extraordinary events are recorded, one must inquire more carefully into the nature of the interest prompting the writers. In the case of the Gospels, there is no interest other than the desire to record the truth.
In the case of the Gospel and Pauline accounts of the resurrection they have been considered, and with a thoroughness with which no one who is familiar with the subject could quarrel. The chances of faked entry are excluded by the very independence of the records. And that human error is responsible for the narration of the event is impossible.
They do not pretend that a proof exists. They say that the historical proofs of the resurrection as a fact render its denial a violation of reason. It is the man who does not want to believe who pretends that the evidence is not sufficient. Yet he has nothing to advance against that evidence except his prejudice against anything supernatural. He practically says, “I do not think that it would happen, and I refuse to accept any evidence that it did happen.” But preconceived ideas of the probable and improbable must yield to facts.
No. And you will find no support for your belief in the Bible. Christ Himself warns us to watch and pray lest we enter into temptation. That is meaningless, if temptation in no way endangers the soul. He said, “Blessed is that man who, when his Lord cometh, is found watching.” Lk. XII., 37. That implies that it is possible not to be in a fit state when called to judgment. Again and again He warns us of the danger of losing our souls, and puts the question, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” St. Paul tells us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling. Those who think themselves to stand are told to beware lest they fall. Protestantism’s “once saved, always saved” idea finds no justification in the Bible.
In other words, no man can be lost, in whatever wickedness he may indulge, and even though he persists in evil dispositions until his last conscious moments! According to Protestant doctrine, therefore, it does not matter whether a man tries to live a good life or not. Whether he wants it or not, he’s got to be saved. There is no other alternative. Christ was talking folly, according to Protestants, when He said in Matt. X., 28. “28 And fear not them that can kill the body, and cannot kill the soul: but rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
If all men are necessarily saved, there’s no need to fear anything at all. Again, why does our Lord tell us that, on the last day, all men will be judged, the good being rewarded, and the wicked sent to the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels? Such Protestant ideas do not harmonize with the Bible at all.
If that text is rightly interpreted as meaning that the just man must have faith, and must live in practice according to the requirements of his faith, it expresses the truly Catholic position. But the “original” Protestant position was that good works were in no way necessary for salvation, and that man is saved by faith alone. By the 20th century, not one in a hundred Protestants accepts it. Now that belief vacillates among younger Protestant generations.
The first Protestants said, “Not what a man does but what a man believes is the test of salvation.”
The modern Protestant says just the opposite: “Not what a man believes, but what he does.”
When Protestants say they will never lose their Protestant inheritance, poll acts say they have lost it. The original Reformers, men like Luther, and Calvin, and Knox, would denounce their present position with violent rebuke.
If we turn to the real teaching of the New Testament, we find in James 2:17-24
“17 Even so faith, if it have not works, is dead in itself.
18 But some men will say: Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without works; and I will shew thee my faith by works.
Haydock Commentary Chapter 2
“Ver. 18. Some men will say: Thou hast faith, and I have works. Shew me thy faith, &c. He confutes the same error, by putting them in mind that one can shew that he has faith, which is an interior virtue, only by good works, and that good works in a man shew also his faith; which is not to be understood, as if good works were merely the marks, signs, and effects of faith, as some would pretend, but that good works must concur with faith to a man’s salvation by an increase in grace. (Witham)
“19 Thou believest that there is one God. Thou dost well: the devils also believe and tremble.
Haydock Commentary James Chapter 2:19
“ Ver. 19. The devils also believe, and tremble. St. James compares indeed faith without other virtues and good works, to the faith of devils: but comparisons must never be stretched farther than they are intended. The meaning is, that such a faith in sinners is unprofitable to salvation, like that of devils, which is no more than a conviction from their knowledge of God; but faith which remains in sinners, is from a supernatural knowledge, together with a pious motion in their free will. (Witham)
“20 But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?
21 *Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works, offering up Isaac, his son, upon the altar?
Haydock Commentary James Chapter 2:21
“Ver. 21. Was not Abraham….justified by works? We may observe, that St. James here brings the very same examples of Abraham and Rahab, which it is likely he knew some had misconstrued in St. Paul, as if the great apostle of the Gentiles had taught that faith alone was sufficient to salvation. But St. Paul neither excludes good works done by faith, when he commends faith, excluding only the works of the law of Moses, as insufficient to a true justification. See Romans iii. 27. And St. James by requiring good works does not exclude faith, but only teacheth that faith alone is not enough. This is what he clearly expresseth here in the 22nd and in the 24th verse. Man, says he, is justified, and not by faith only. And (ver. 22.) seest thou that faith did co-operate with Abraham’s works, and by works faith was made perfect. In fine, we must take notice, that when St. James here brings the example of Abraham offering his son Isaac, to shew that he was justified by works, his meaning is not that Abraham then began first to be justified, but that he then received an increase of his justice. He was justified at least from his first being called, and began then to believe and to do good works. It is true his faith was made perfect, and his justice increased, when he was willing to sacrifice his son. (Witham)”
22 Seest thou that faith did co-operate with his works: and by works faith was made perfect?
23 And the Scripture was fulfilled, saying: *Abraham believed God, and it was reputed to him to justice, and he was called the friend of God.
24 Do you see that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only?”
Thus speaks St. James. He taught that both faith and good works are required, and that both are taken into account at our judgment. But even if one takes, not New Testament teaching, but Protestant teaching, it cannot be said that good works fulfilled in order to obtain salvation are today regarded as utterly damnable by Protestants. That was Protestant teaching. Depending on which of the 38,000+ mainline sect one asks today in 2019, it still exists among them now, just not as prevalent.
Compassion for those whom one believes to be unfortunate is certainly to a person’s credit. But Protestant belief that Catholics are unfortunate is not justified by anything When the women of Jerusalem wept over our Lord during His passion, He said to them gently, “Weep not for Me. Weep for yourselves and your children.” Lk. XXIII., 28.
The same words apply to Protestants. Believing in their heretical, privately interpreted Scriptural concepts of Christ that differ from sect- to-sect, pew-to-pew, and person-to-person, they de facto make their own person gods in contrast to reality.
Protestants “pity” Catholics. They had been doing so precisely because the faithful Catholic conduct (nearly extinguished today) is orthodox; it is completely in accordance with all Christian principles instituted by Christ and His Catholic Church.
Many “Christian” principles held by Protestants contradict, reject, skip, or change interpreted meaning frequently to quickly adapt to accommodate their own prideful, changing lifestyles, and perversities so as to manipulate and/or personally exploit the rapidly changing times, technologies, and situations. That’s called relational morality. It assuages not only he nearly one billion Protestants and Non-Denominationals, but also the 1.3 billion V2 Counterfeit-Catholics – approximately 2.3 billion, all of whom call themselves “Christian” and collectively claim now to subsist within one Church. They are edging closer to totally morphing into a One World Religion. …by simply and expediently disregarding (even legislating against any negative mention of Judaism, Freemasonry, and Islam in Canada and other countries, and suppressing discussion of any doctrinal differences.
The delicate challenge remains to domesticate the world’s 1.7 billion world’s Muslims and have them join with the “Church”… without it becoming a colossal jihad fest of swinging scimitars and rolling heads. If only this man-made “Church” could soon find & celebrate whatever they can accept in common with such current heathen outsiders. But if unsuccessful efforts delay the agenda of milestone achievements, well then, there’s always that resistance-remover known as total warfare to keep the end-goal schedule on time and people employed. Men like war-hawk John Bolton, currently the Chief Security Adviser – along with several dozens of others in President Trump’s immediate Administrative circle – are all holders of an Israeli passport. That pledges their allegiance to Israel, despite their U. S. citizenship. No man can serve two masters. These Israeli passport-holding U. S. federal government people are technically unregistered, de facto Israeli agents dealing daily with our nation’s national security and top secret issues. Since any one of them could gleefully explain the “military option” to defend Israel at all cost with American flesh, blood, lives, equipment, and wealth, one need not be taken aback unexpectedly to learn in a crisis which master these dual citizenship agents serve loyalty in the long run…especially if the Zionist goal of world domination is achieved.
Monitoring the rate of progress being made toward completion of the One World Religion (OWR) aspect by this 2.3 billion-strong amalgamated congregation, pseudo “Christian Church” involved as a major element in Talmudic totalitarian goal may serve in calculating the expected arrival of the ultimate Antichrist. The work of corralling and mentally conditioning those affiliating with it to eventually accept the “Political Messiah” has begun. It is necessary in order to have as smooth as possible segue from sovereign nation-states into a One World Government. Since
1) there have been are no true popes since October 9, 1958 to restrain such evil men from completing their “one and the same plan”;
2) considering that charity is waning worldwide, and;
3) the true Christian faith is all but abandoned, suppressed, and forgotten,
The Talmudic Judaic power controlling this NWO/OWR movement might advance the time schedule.
Although its emerging center of OWR authority tentatively is based now in Rome, that might change quickly to be relocated to Jerusalem. Now in his 83rd year, Mr. Bergoglio (born Dec 17, 1936, Argentina,) a/k/a Anti-pope Francis, has already said he doesn’t want any more to be called “pope,” that that he is just the bishop of Rome. So when dies, there may be no more illicit claimants to the Chair of Peter. The U. S. Embassy, formerly in Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem. And the Talmudic Judaics, the true masterminds controlling this One World Religion phenomenon, generally favor Jerusalem.
The TALMUD (Hebrew for Teaching), completed 500 A. D. by the Jewish Rabbis who reject Christ, states in it: “Any man not a Jew is just an animal you can kill.” It also states that “Jesus is in hell boiling in excrement.” Having been taught from the Talmud, Muhammed put the same statement about Jesus in the Qu‘ran.
Be aware that today’s 2.3 billion practicing false “Christian” characteristics of their heresies, schism, and apostasy enable them to care not about their voting for, participating in, facilitating, or condoning by their silence the heinous, Law & Order-destructive sins of Modernism, Liberalism, Divorce, Abortion, Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, Private Interpretation, LGQBT Movement, Sanctuary Cities for Illegals, Usury, etc., etc. …
It is no wonder that many Protestants are motivated to maintain and teach Sola Fide and be against having to do good works because it allows them to not have to stop sinning. One need just look at their personal immorality to know they never were serious about Knowing, Loving, and Serving God as He commands to achieve salvation, if they were ever seriously hoping and earnestly striving for that eternal outcome. All these false “Christian” sects continually vitiate what God has given so as to tailor-fit those principles so they can never have condemnations or place constraints against their changing modes of abusing God’s commandments relational to their having total liberty to extract greater gains from their humanistic and secular pursuits of entertainment, sensuality, pleasures, and mammon. Belonging to a “Christian” sect can serve them for social fellowship and advancing one’s career contacts. If they are to ever seek holiness, it must be validated to them by physically experiencing an existentialist phenomenon. Faith is too “mental” for them. They want to physically “feel holy” or think they have not had a spiritually satisfying experience at their church that day.
False “Christian” sects not sincerely seeking salvation according to true and complete Christian principles. True, unchangeable Christian principles as fully taught by Jesus and His true Catholic Church are deemed too restrictive and unaccommodating of their perverse lifestyles. If only by example, their own marital-status of divorcing, “remarrying” in concubinage, or cohabitation with a “significant other” constitute their personal scandalous lives or their condone with their sect others living in such states of sin that scandalize children and others.
The heresy of Sola Fide without any need for good works, as Martin Luther taught it, both allows and encourages engaging in the biggest sins throughout life to attest how great is the mercy and forgiveness of God because Jesus Christ paid for all sins on the Cross. These are their personal evils creating morally dysfunctional families & societies. That list of immoral behaviors above perpetrated by false “Christian” sects represent those characteristics that willfully interfere with the perfection of the nature of things. That accurately paraphrases the definition of “evil” [the absence of good] written in the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas, O. P. (1225-1274.)
Protestants say Catholics always have to be striving to be good Roman Catholics.
That certainly is the Catholic doctrine. Surely if one is a Catholic, he ought to strive to be a good one. But the Protestant difficulty is concerned with the idea of striving.
Protestants think that all this striving to be good is not in the spirit of Christianity. But did not Christ Himself say, “If you will enter into life, keep the commandments.” Matt. XIX., 17; and again, later, “If you love Me, keep My commandments”? Now one who wishes to be a good Catholic is told that he must strive to keep these commandments. And it is not always easy. It is easier to follow temptations opposed to them. Christ said, therefore, “Strive to enter by the narrow gate.” Lk. XIII., 24. He evidently believed in striving to be good Christians. St. Paul writes to the Galatians, VI., 7, “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. In doing good, let us not fail. Whilst we have time, let us work good to all men.”
And as if he had not insisted sufficiently on the necessity of striving to be good, he wrote to the Philippians, II., 12, “With fear and trembling, work out your salvation.”
To the Corinthians 1, IX., 25, he said, “Know you not that they who run in a race, all run indeed, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that you may obtain. And everyone who striveth for the victory, refraineth himself from various things. I run, but not carelessly; I fight, but not as one beating the air. But I chastise my body and bring it into subjection.”
What is all that but striving! In 1 Timothy VI., 11, he writes, “But thou,O man of God, pursue justice, godliness, faith, charity, patience, mildness. Fight the good fight.” Add to all this our Lord’s constant warnings to us to be vigilant, to watch and pray, to pray without ceasing, and it is very difficult to see what you can find to condemn in our doctrine that one has always to be striving to be good.
Natural good works, performed without any motive of love for God, and by one not in God’s grace and friendship, will save no one. That is why St. Paul says, “If I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” 1 Cor. XIII., 3. But good works inspired by love of God and performed by one in God’s grace and friendship do contribute towards one’s salvation. That is why the New Testament, in James II., 24, says, “By works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” In fact, such good works are necessary for salvation, for St. James says in V., 26, “For even as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.”
St. Paul excludes works performed by one’s own efforts, independently of God’s grace. No man will be able to boast that he saved himself by his own efforts, and that he did not need the grace of Christ. But St. Paul did not contradict St. James who declared that, “By works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” And this is the teaching of Christ who said, “If any man love Me, he will keep My commandments,” and the keeping of Christ’s commands means good works. We do need, besides good works, both faith and charity, and in the text you quote St. Paul is insisting upon faith as one necessary condition, a faith which is a gratuitous gift from God. But not for a moment does St. Paul mean that a man is saved by faith only, to the exclusion of good works.
Christ’s words, “It is finished,” do not show that our salvation is completed in one glorious act. They indicate that He had fulfilled His part in the essential work of our redemption. But our part still remains. He has paid the price, but we shall be saved only if we fulfill the conditions necessary to profit by His death for us. And it is not enough to believe in the finished work of Christ by simple faith in order to secure eternal salvation in heaven with Him. Christ said to the Apostles, “Teach men to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” Matt. XXVIII., 20.
Both St. Peter and St. Paul insisted upon salvation both by faith and good works. Did St. Peter insist on salvation by works only, when he wrote, “There is an inheritance reserved in heaven for you who, by the power of God, are kept by faith unto salvation”? I. Peter 1, 5. And how can people say that St. Paul championed salvation by faith to the exclusion of good works, when he wrote to the Galatians, “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. What things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in his flesh, of the flesh also shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting. In doing good let us not fail. Whilst we have time, let us work good to all men.” Galatians VI., 8. He is a very shallow reader of Scripture who would confine St. Peter’s teaching of salvation to works, and St. Paul‘s to faith. But, above all, it is a mystery how anyone can say that St. Peter based salvation on works of the Jewish Law, when we find him writing in his first epistle, I., 18, “You were not redeemed by your vain mode of living and the tradition of your fathers, but by the precious blood of Christ.”
No soul is born to be damned. God sincerely wills the salvation of all men, and gives all men sufficient grace to be saved. In fact He warns us all by conscience and by His commandments against the very things that could destroy our eternal happiness. He would not warn us against the things that take us to hell if He wanted us to go there. He would keep silent about them and let us go over the precipice.
There is no predestination for damnation. Nor is it futile for an individual to endeavor to save his soul. God says even to the worst sinners, “Repent, and if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made white as snow.” Isaiah I., 18. If a man is lost, it will be solely through his own fault. God may know that certain souls will choose to damn themselves, but He knows they have not got to do so, nor does His knowledge make them do so. Knowledge doesn’t cause an event, the event causes knowledge. Because Jack is running I know that he is running. But he certainly isn’t running because I know it. God knows that a man will choose to lose his soul only because that man will so choose. There is no need for him to choose so disastrously. He receives sufficient grace for his conversion.
Let him correspond with the voice of God and of conscience, repenting of his sins, and he will be saved. It is not futile for him to endeavor to save his soul, and if he is lost it will be precisely because he did not endeavor to do so. Just imagine a farmer who says: God knows whether I’m going to have a crop or not. If He knows, I’ll have it, whatever I do. If He knows that I won’t have it, I won’t have it, whatever I do. So I won’t plough, I won’t sow any seed, it’s futile. Such a man is working on the absurd idea that knowledge causes the event instead of realizing that the event causes knowledge of it. Let us all do our best in the service of God, the practice of extra virtue, the avoiding of sin and the desire of holiness. If we do, the practical result will be our salvation. The solution of the speculative problems can safely be left to God.
No. Calvin certainly did not get that doctrine from St. Augustine, though he may have pretended to do so. G. P. Fisher, Protestant professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale University, in his standard work “The History of the Christian Church,” page 321, says that Calvin, in his “Institutes,” went further than Augustine, declaring that sin, and consequently damnation, are the effect of an efficient decree of God. Now St. Augustine could not have taught that doctrine, if Calvin had to go further than Augustine in order to teach it!
But let us go to St. Augustine himself. A man who believed that some men are predestined to hell no matter what they might do, could not possibly write as follows. In his book on “Catechizing the Ignorant,” St. Augustine writes, “The merciful God wishes to liberate men from eternal ruin, if they are not enemies to themselves, and do not resist the mercy of their Creator. For this purpose He sent His only-begotten Son.”
Again he writes in his book “On the Spirit and the Letter,” “God wills all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth; but not in such a way as to take away their free will, according to the good or bad use of which they will be most justly judged.” No man who believed that God predestines some men to hell could write those words.
Those who claim St. Augustine as the author of Calvinistic predestination to hell have never understood St. Augustine; and perhaps have never made anything like a serious study of his works. The Pelagian heretics denied the necessity of grace for salvation. St. Augustine insisted that man cannot save himself without the grace of God. He insisted, too, that grace, being grace, must be a gratuitous gift of God which, though given to all men, could not be due under any title of justice to them. Calvinists made the unwarranted conclusion for themselves that, because it was not due in justice, therefore it was not given to some; and that God therefore created some souls intending them for hell. But St. Augustine never taught that.
Take the good Catholic first. To live his good life he kept the commandments of God. But no observance of God’s commandments gives any subsequent right to break them. If he breaks God’s commandments by later mortal sin and refuses to repent, he dies in a state of mortal sin and at enmity with God. He necessarily goes to hell, though he need not necessarily have fallen into a state of sin, and further, need not necessarily have remained in such a state. A previous good life in no way justifies later sins. If a man commits murder on Wednesday, is it any defense that he did not commit adultery on the preceding Tuesday? Now take your poor sinner, who, after living a bad life, repents and saves his soul. By repentance, he recovers God’s grace. And he is saved, because he availed himself of God’s mercy, asked for forgiveness, and died in God’s friendship. The one-time good man is not lost because of his previous good life, and this man is not saved because of his previous bad life. There would be injustice if that were the case. But it is not. The one-time good man is lost because he nullified his good life by subsequent sin; the bad man is saved because he nullified his bad life by subsequent repentance and a request to share in the merits of Christ.
If there be a sincere deathbed repentance the soul would be saved, provided the sorrow were perfect, or, if imperfect, it had the assistance of the Sacraments of the Church. But steadfast refusal during life to do God’s will does not give much hope of a deathbed repentance. Firstly, God has promised forgiveness to those who do repent. But He has never promised time to repent. He says Himself that death may come to us at any moment and blessed is the one who is found to be watching. That does not augur well for the unprepared. Secondly, even granted some form of regret, the ingrained dispositions of a soul which has steadfastly refused to do God’s will during life do not give much hope of suddenly attaining to a perfect love of God and perfect sorrow for past sins. And if such a soul dies without the Sacraments, it is lost. Yet such a soul has done nothing to deserve the happiness of the Sacraments. We are warned over and over again by God against the presumption of delay in our conversion to Him. To carry on in sinful dispositions, determined to go on with them, is the conduct of a fool. The only safe preparation for a good death is a good life.
If such repentance proceeds from a purely natural dread it is not really repentance at all, and has no value whatever.
If it proceeds solely from a supernatural fear based upon faith in the revealed doctrine of hell, it would have sufficient value to save a soul provided the Sacraments were received. Otherwise it would not save the soul. And there is no guarantee that a priest could be obtained in time for the administration of the Sacraments. We do not know whether we are to die of a slow illness, giving us plenty of time to prepare to meet God, or suddenly of heart failure.
Mere fear of what will happen to us will not of itself save us. Perfect sorrow without the Sacraments will save us. Imperfect sorrow with the Sacraments will save us. But imperfect sorrow without the Sacraments is powerless to do so.
The persistent and habitual sinner cannot rely on salvation except by taking it for granted that he will have the opportunity to receive the Sacraments, or that he will suddenly attain to perfect dispositions of love and sorrow which are absolutely alien to his distorted and warped nature. It is clear that there is no justification for his taking these things for granted. The only real security is the security of a good conscience, and the only possible advice to the man who is not running straight with God is that he should square up, repent sincerely of the past, and begin to serve God. Remember the words of Christ, “Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee,” Lk. XII., 20, and His estimate, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul.” Matt. XVI., 26. Our Lord made both. And He ought to know. To risk one’s soul for anything this life can offer is to be a fool. To be prepared to make any sacrifice rather than jeopardize one’s eternal salvation is wisdom.
You are making the priest say more than he did say. He did not say that it was no use repenting of one’s sins at the end of life. God has promised forgiveness whenever a man sincerely repents of his sins, even though it be with his very last breath. A man who thus repents will at least save his soul, and God is more satisfied with that than He would be, did the man not repent at all. The mission priest you heard was trying to bring home the fact that, if God is worth serving in the last year of a man’s life, He is worth serving throughout life.
Scripture itself says that it is indeed good to have served God from one’s youth. Nobility of soul rebels against the thought of spending all one’s best years in sin, and offering God the dregs of one’s life. And that is certainly not the way to serve God as God must wish. But we cannot conclude from that that it is no use turning to God at the last. If one has not served God as he should, it is of the utmost use to die at least repenting of one’s sins; and the more one’s sins the greater one’s obligation to repent of them.
It is certain that the murderer can repent and save his soul, though he will have to expiate in Purgatory the injustice of taking his neighbor’s life, so much greater than the mere taking of his property. Meantime we have to remember that if the victim were in a state of mortal sin at the moment of the tragedy, the murderer was not responsible for his being in such a state.
Death may come to a man in any one of many ways, whether slowly by disease, or suddenly by accident, or even by the ill will of some fellow human being. But whenever death comes, and however it comes, no man has a right to be in a state of sin at that decisive moment. Every man has the obligation to be ready to meet God just when God takes him, and by whatever means he is taken. So Christ warns us, “Watch ye, therefore, because you know not what hour your Lord will come.” Matt. XXIV., 42.
And again, “If the householder did know at what hour the thief would come, he would surely watch and not suffer his house to be broken open. Be ye then also ready, for at what hour you think not the Son of man will come.” Lk. XII., 39. In actual practice, of course, we cannot say that any man has been killed with no time for repentance. In a flash, quicker than the speed of any bullet, God could offer a man all the graces necessary for a complete reconciliation with Him. We cannot therefore form any certain judgment concerning the actual fate of any soul, and must leave that question to God. He alone knows the interior dispositions of each soul as He recalls it to Himself. Of one thing we are sure. Every soul receives sufficient grace for its salvation. Of one thing we are ignorant—of the manner in which God dispenses that grace. And we must leave each soul to God, refusing to judge concerning its eternal destiny.
TO BE CONTINUED
The Holy Scriptures are the Word of God. But it is clear that if the Scriptures are wrongly interpreted, they become the word of man. As St. Jerome put it, in his comments on the Epistle to the Galatians (speaking against the Luciferians) “Let us be persuaded that the gospel consists not in the words but in the sense. A wrong explanation turns the Word of God into the word of man, and, what is worse, into the word of the devil; for the devil himself could quote the text of Scripture;” and he did so when he tempted our Lord in the desert. (Matt. 4. 6.)
Protestants should consider well this point, especially those who so confidently and plausibly boast that they stand by the Bible alone, and imagine that to stand by the Bible alone means that they rely not upon human authority, but upon the Word of God.
Certainly nothing can be better than to stand by the Word of God, but whether what they call standing by the Bible alone be to stand by the Word of God, we shall see.
Let us observe, 1st, that the Bible, though divinely inspired, is but a written document, and a written document often so obscure, that St. Augustine, though so great a scholar, and a doctor of the Church, confessed that there were more things in the Bible he did not understand than those he did.
Let us consider, 2d, that the Bible, because a written document, would remain always silent unless interpreted, that is, unless some meaning is affixed to the words, by someone. It is clear that the Bible cannot speak and interpret itself,—you must take the Book in your hand, open it, read it, compare passages, and attach a certain meaning to those words which fall under your eyes.
Therefore, when a Protestant says: ” I stand by the Bible alone,” he does not mean that he stands by the Bible uninterpreted, for in such case the Bible is mute. He does not mean that he stands by the Bible as interpreted by the Church, for that would not be the Protestant but the Catholic principle. Nor does he mean that he stands by the Bible as interpreted by somebody else; as that would be, according to his notion, to give up his right of private interpretation. But he means that he stands by the Bible alone as interpreted by himself, and that the sense in which he himself understands it is the Word of God. And therefore a person who is guided by this principle comes to say this :
” The Bible, interpreted by the fathers, may or may not be the Word of God; the Bible interpreted by the Church may or may not be the Word of God ; the Bible interpreted by anyone besides myself may or may not be the Word of God; but the Bible interpreted by me, that is indeed the Word of God, my only teacher, my guide, my infallible authority.”
To a Catholic who would rejoin: ” What, my friend, if you were to understand some passage of Scripture in a wrong sense?
” The person who would still stick to that principle would have to reply: ” That would be a great pity, but still, not acknowledging any other authority but my own private judgment, I have a right to look upon that interpretation mine as the Word of God.”
And if a Catholic were to add : ” Is it not reasonable to suppose the interpretation of the Bible by the whole body of bishops of the Catholic Church, though disagreeing with your private interpretation, should be the right one, and therefore more likely the word of God ” the Protestant would be reduced to answer: ” I do not agree, because that interpretation would not be mine” If you argue so,” the Catholic may justly reply, ” I must say that with you, my friend, the me and the mine stand for all arguments.”
Let him who has eyes see what spirit is at the root of this boastful saying, and how shallow is the principle of standing by the Bible alone.
The Bible in the original language, or when truthfully translated, indeed in itself the Word of God, and infallible; but the Bible is not the Word of God, nor infallible, with regard to us, unless rightly interpreted, that is, interpreted with authority, certainty, and infallibility. For if the interpretation be wrong, the Bible ceases to be, with regard to the reader the Word of God; and if the interpretation be unauthorized, doubtful fallible, the Bible becomes, with regard to ‘the reader, unbinding, doubtful, fallible.
In the gospel, however, we are commanded, under pain of condemnation, to believe; that is, to hold without a doubt as true what is taught as divinely revealed, therefore there must be somewhere the rightful interpreter, and the right interpretation.
Again, the gospels and the epistles contain severe censures on the sin of schism and heresy. It is clear that all schism and all heresy must be essentially in opposition to truth ; we must therefore necessarily know with certainty what is true, before we can know what is opposed to the truth : but by private interpretation, an undoubted belief or infallible knowledge of revealed truth is impossible, therefore no schism or heresy could be condemned contrary to Scripture and to all antiquity.. The words of Christ to the Pharisees, ” Search the Scriptures, for you think in them to have life everlasting ; and the same are they that give testimony of me ” (St. John v. 39), cannot be taken as the sole means of salvation recommended, much less recommended to all, as to those who cannot read, or who cannot possess a Bible ; much less still as a necessary means of salvation.
Nor can it be taken as though Christ thereby recommended private in disregard of authoritative interpretation of Scripture ; 1st, because that is not stated nor implied in that passage; 2nd, because He Himself, in that very place, interprets authoritatively the Scriptures, by saying : ” They testify of me ” 3rd, because in fact the Pharisees showed that their private interpretation wrongly led them to look upon Christ as a breaker of the Sabbath (St. John 5. 18), and consequently to reject Him as the Saviour ; 4th, because from what our Saviour then said, it cannot be gathered that the Pharisees thought that life was to be had from Scripture privately interpreted, to the exclusion of authoritative interpretation ; thus a person may piously read and interpret Scripture privately for his own learning and edification, and yet respect, accept, and prefer authoritative interpretation to his own, at least in those cases in which it can be had.
Thus, Catholics do think to have life in Holy Scriptures, but do not thereby exclude authoritative interpretation, but on the contrary take it for their guide.
But let us, for argument’s sake, suppose that the Pharisees went by private interpretation of Scripture. Even in this supposition it would not follow that Jesus Christ, by that saying, meant to approve their conduct ; for also Catholics do often say to Protestants who go by private interpretation : ” Search the Scriptures, for you will find that they bear testimony to the divinity of Jesus, to the institution of the seven sacraments, to the unfailing authority of the Catholic Church;” and no one ever dreamt to affirm that by so saying Catholics mean to approve the Protestant principle of private interpretation.
Again, if that passage were to be taken in the Protestant sense to establish the principle of private interpretation, two consequences, quite inadmissible, would follow, namely: 1st, that if the Pharisees had found by their private interpretation that the Old Testament (which was the only part of the written Word they had then) did not bear testimony to Christ, or that it bore testimony against Him, as many did imagine, they would have been justified in disbelieving Jesus Christ ; 2d, that not believing in Christ until moved by private interpretation of Scripture was better than simply believing in Christ on the word of Christ, or of His Church, without consulting the Scriptures, as the Apostles and thousands of Jewish and pagan converts did.
To avoid these two inadmissible consequences, it remains that the above cited and similar passages must be understood in the Catholic sense just mentioned. To the Apostles our Lord gave the charge to ” teach all nations,” and the faithful were commanded to hear and believe them. (Mark 16.) This commission was accompanied by a promise that He would be with them in this office of teaching to the end of time. (St. Matt, 18.19, 20.) From these expressions it is clear that their lawful successors were also included in the commission and promise given to the Apostles, It follows then that the authoritative interpretation of Scripture made by the lawful successors of the Apostles is the true one, and truly the Won of God ; a contradictory interpretation must therefore of necessity false, and is not the Word of God ; because a thing under the same aspect cannot be true and untrue at the same time, for truth in all things is one and the contradiction of it is error.
Hence St. Peter condemns private interpretation of Scripture, saying ” No prophecy [or explanation] of Scripture is made by private interpretation.” (2 St. Peter i. 20.)* Those who refuse to hear and to follow the legitimate interpretation, and the faith of the Church, often, instead of the Word of God, that is, what God really meant in Holy Scripture, have only their own inventions and errors, and these they mistake for the Word of God.
These persons consequently fall into a maze of perplexities, and often change their interpretation. They are, as St. Paul expresses it: ”tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” (Ephesians 4. 14.) St. Peter warns us of this danger, when, referring especially to St. Paul’s epistles, he says: ” In which are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.” (2 St. Peter iii. 16.)
Hence it appears how rash and dangerous is the principle of private interpretation, which emboldens every individual to prefer his own private view of any passage of Scripture to the solemn interpretation and decision of the whole body of Catholic bishops of past and present time united to the see of Peter. Persons actuated by such pride cannot expect to be led by God unto truth.
Objectors say that to submit to the teaching of the Church is to give up our reason. But if it could not be called a surrender of reason for the early Christians to submit to the teaching of the Apostles, because it was a submission to the messengers of Christ, to the witnesses and authorized expounders of revelation as long as the Apostles lived, surely it cannot be considered a surrender of reason, but a high exercise of reason and a most reasonable act for other Christians to conform themselves to the teaching of the Catholic Church, that is, to the body of the Catholic bishops with the Roman pontiff at their head, who are the lawful messengers of God, the legitimate successors of the Apostles, the witnesses and authorized expounders of revelation ; for they, in an uninterrupted succession, keep up that apostolic office, which, according to Christ’s declaration, and through the promised special assistance of the Holy Spirit, was to last to the end of time. Not a few Protestants think themselves authorized by St. Paul to follow their private interpretation of Scripture by those words, ” Prove all things,” which occur in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, chap. 5. 21.
1st, It is hard to have to include in the words “all things” the Holy Scripture, as there is no allusion to it in that chapter ; and, if admitted, it would prove too much: namely, not only the sense of a certain text, but whether the text “prove all things” is itself to be admitted or not. 2d, It would be absurd to suppose, that that direction was authorizing each Thessalonian in particular to follow his own private interpretation of Scripture; for, in that case, the dissensions, instead of decreasing, would have been increased, and the whole congregation turned into a little Babel. It is plain that that direction was given to the whole congregation as a body with their pastors, to whom in that very letter the lay people were recommended to pay deference (verse 12), were the principal part of it. Surely if the whole congregation of a town agrees with their legitimate pastors about admitting or not admitting a certain doctrine, and they both follow the Tradition, that is; the doctrine of the Apostles kept alive among them, as recommended to them by St. Paul himself (2Thess. ii. 15), they would be sure to go right ; but that would not be by the Protestant but by the Catholic system of interpretation.
Objectors also say that everyone has the assistance of the Holy Spirit to interpret the Bible rightly. But if this were so, people would agree and would not contradict each other in their interpretation of Scripture; for no passage of the inspired Word of God, in its right meaning, can really contradict another passage in matters of faith, of morals, and of fact.
But numerous Protestant denominations often differ one from another and often contradict each other in vital points, and each assumes to prove his particular doctrine from Holy Scripture. I say vital, for, on account of these very points, they have thought themselves in duty bound to separate from some other community. This plainly shows that they are not inspired by the Holy Spirit, who being the spirit of unity and truth, cannot create discord, teach error, cannot suggest a false meaning, and cannot contradict Himself.
This principle of private interpretation of Holy Scripture, during the three centuries since Luther’s time, has given rise to hundreds of sects among Protestants, and this in spite of the efforts of several of the civil governments to prevent such subdivisions. Had this principle been adopted in the beginning of Christianity, and gone on working throughout the Christian world for eighteen centuries unrestrained by the civil power, the sects would probably by this time have enormously increased.
The Bible without an authorized, that is, divinely given, interprets could not condemn any heresy, nor could any of the Christian sects adjudge any individual or any other sect as guilty of heresy, without abdicating its own principle of private interpretation for all. Even Tertullian, a father of the second century, could say :
” Wherefore the Scriptures cannot be the test [speaking of controversy] nor can they decide the conflict since, with regard to them, the victory must remain in suspense.” (Tertul. Book on Prescription, chapter xix.).
In all centuries those persons who maintained and taught their own private interpretation in opposition to that of the Church, have been regarded by all the fathers, saints, and doctors of the Church as heretics, and were condemned as such by the Church.
Catholics do well to read and study the Holy Scriptures for their greater instruction and edification, but always in a spirit of submission to the Catholic Church, so as never to prefer their own private view to the interpretation and teaching of ” the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” (1 St. Timothy 3. 15.)
SALVATION 1
SALVATION
Protestants believe that because the Catholic Church is inhuman and takes the joy out of life how can one believe in her? The true Catholic Church is not inhuman. That true Catholic Church founded by Christ is not to be confused with the man-made Vatican II Novus Ordo Counterfeit-Catholic Contra-Church that emerge in 1962 amongst a once Catholic hierarchy, clergy, and laity. With the exception of a remnant of few souls who remained faithful, they failed a test of faith requiring them to reject the QUO PRIMUM condemned “1962 Latin Tridentine Mass” a/k/a “John XXIII Mass” of April 1962, and the subsequent heresies later that year of the EXECRABILIS-condemned Second Vatican Council that ran from October 13, 1962- December 8, 1965. In so doing, they apostatized from the true Catholic faith, incurring ipso facto excommunication from the Mystical Body of Christ. [Note: This is virtually a vitandus grade excommunication – i. e., forbidden from having contact for high risk of spiritual contamination, – given the unprecedented breadth, depth, scope, and malice of their contradictions and blasphemes to Christ and His true Catholic Church dogmas, doctrines, and Sacraments. The true Catholic Church survives unchanged in eclipsed exile.] Thus, the arrival of the Great Apostasy of the end-times foretold in Scripture was made manifest. This Talmudic Judaic-founded & controlled, Freemason-infiltrated, pseudo-Catholic sect remains ongoing and in control of the once-Catholic Vatican and all its institutions and assets worldwide. Its goal is establishing a One World Religion to welcome the long-awaited “Political Messiah” the Talmudic Judaics will install as the ultimate Antichrist. The true Catholic Church, founded on Pentecost Sunday nearly two millennia ago, has never pretended that fallen human nature will find the service of God easy. She calls this world a valley of tears, and she has tears for the sufferings of her children. But she has to be true to God, and to tell us the law. What would be the good of the Church if she did not do so? The Church must tell us the right thing. Whether we do it or not is quite another matter which concerns our personal salvation. But to lose faith in the Catholic Church because she tells us the right thing is rather foolish. There would be some sense in rejecting her if we discovered that she was telling us the wrong thing. As for being deprived of joy, remember that there is no state of life which is one of unmitigated pleasure and self-indulgence. Every state in life has its irksome duties. And no earthly pleasure or benefit is sufficient compensation for the loss of God’s grace. Indeed, one who really and sincerely loves in a Christian way would rather endure a personal deprivation of pleasure than inflict the evil of serious sin upon the soul of the one loved.
SALVATION 2
Protestants believe it is impossible to live up to the standard set by the Catholic Church. The standard is not set up by the Catholic Church. She did not make the law and she cannot unmake it. And God does not ask the impossible. If a man takes the means he can live up to it, either practicing self-control, or accepting the children God sends. God offers sufficient help with every difficulty to the man of goodwill who meditates upon Christian truth and is earnest in prayer for the necessary grace.
Protestants believe one cannot keep on praying and denying oneself indefinitely. We must all keep on praying as indefinitely as this life lasts. Always to pray and not to faint is Our Lord’s command in Luke 18:1 “1 And He spoke also a parable to them, that we ought always to pray, and not to faint,” HAYDOCK Commentary Luke 18 “Ver. 1. Always to pray, i.e., to pray daily, and frequently; (Wi.) and also to walk always in the presence of God, by a spirit of prayer, love, and sorrow for sin.” As for denying oneself indefinitely, many people do in this matter, and have to do so, when circumstances forbid anything else. Self-denial is burdensome. The choice allowed by God depends upon our idea as to which is the less burdensome. If self-denial is burdensome. But if done accordingly to God’s Will, God will give the grace to face the temporal trials that will prove a blessing.
Protestants say they have tried prayer and self-denial and have found them wanting.
Protestants are heretics and as such, along with others living outside the Mystical Body of Christ, have no means to obtain sanctifying grace that justifies a soul for entry into heaven. Yet, in God’s mercy, He allows all mankind to receive actual grace for doing good and avoiding evil. Actual grace is a temporal benefit only while living on earth and, if the recipient cooperates with it freely, can be used as the grace necessary to convert to His true Catholic Church – the only means to sanctifying grace necessary for salvation. Prayer may have been tried, but likely not fervently enough; self-denial, but halfheartedly. The goodwill to correspond with God’s actual grace was wanting, and probably, too, ordinary prudence.
Protestants say having to pray and practice acts of self-denial tempts one to give up the Church. That is foolish, and will not better things. Will ya person neglect other obligations because he has failed in this, and give up religion on the principle that he who commits one sin might just as well commit a dozen sins? The only thing to do after failure is to repent as men do of other sins, and try again to be faithful.
SALVATION 3 & 4
What precisely do you mean by the saving of one’s soul? The meaning of that requires a brief analysis of man. Man consists of body and soul. The body is material and perishable; the soul is the mind, states St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), consisting of six functions: 1. Reason, 2. Intellect, 3. Understanding, 4.Memory, 5. Free Will, and 6. Conscience. This souls is spiritual and imperishable. But the soul is the real person. It is the soul which knows and loves, is happy or miserable. Now as the soul is immortal, it enters at death into an eternal state, whether it be one of supreme happiness, or of direst misery. By”saving one’s soul” is meant going from this world in the sanctifying grace and friendship of God, so that one avoids eternal misery, and secures eternal happiness. What are the conditions of salvation? That we serve God in this life, doing what He commands, and avoiding what He forbids. That surely is evident. If men have not always done what God commands, or have not always avoided what He forbids, they must be a member of His true Catholic Church and at least be sincerely contrite, repentant of their sins, and be in the state of sanctifying grace before they go from this life to meet their eternal Judge. Obligation to be a Catholic Is it necessary for salvation to become a member of the Catholic Church? Since God sent His only-begotten Son into this world, and that Son established the Catholic Church, sending it to teach all nations, it is certainly necessary to be taught by that Church if one desires to save his soul. Christ said, “If a man will not hear the Church, let him be as the heathen.” Matt. XVIII.,17. Are All people not members of the Roman Church heathens? The Catholic Church, of course, stands foursquare for the teachings of the Gospel. She accepts absolutely all that Christ says. And consequently, she accepts the words of Christ recorded in Matt.XVIII., 17, “If a man will not hear the Church, let him be as the heathen.” But to whom does the Church apply those words? In that all who die outside the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church have no salvation, even if they shed blood for the name of Christ (see infallible Council of Florence, 1441, Pope Eugenius IV. Denzinger’s The Sources of Catholic Dogma. D #714, ) they all are as damned as any who die as heathens. Christ’s use of “heathen” refers to the outcome of all dying who refuse to hear and obey His Catholic Church. So it makes no difference be they called heathens or Protestants, Non-Denominations, Jews, Hindus, Moslems, Mormons, etc. – they all, dying in that state outside the Mystical Body of Christ, share in a common destiny: the eternal flames of hell. An invincibly ignorant person is one who through no fault of their own and by no need for extraordinary means, have never heard of the Catholic Church, Christianity or Jesus Christ (extremely rare today,) who have lived their entire life by good conscience, recognizing by right reason the
existence of a Supreme Being (but not participating in false religions) – is so self-disciplined & living righteously that he is considered a member of the Catholic Church via Baptism of Desire/Intent because he would instantly recognize the complete truths of its teachings. However, such a person is so extremely rare as to be almost non-existent.
Protestants – many who have never bothered much about religion – ask: Do you say that I am obliged to become Catholic? God has declared the Catholic religion to be necessary. Jesus commanded in Matt. 18:17 all must hear His Catholic Church. To hear and obey, one must be a member of His Church and living in the state of sanctifying grace when they die, if they are to be saved. There is no other way. But many individuals outside the Catholic Church adopt a peculiar position, saying they have never bothered much or at all about religion. Then it is most necessary that they begin to give their attention to the question. For example, you went to the bother of learning to write. You have bothered to learn the use of various things which are necessary to your earthly welfare. You know what those things are for. But surely it is man’s duty to know what he himself is for! And a man cannot know that unless he knows the fundamental truth concerning his origin, his nature, his destiny, and the moral law. The teachings of the true religion alone can provide the necessary knowledge, and a man is obliged to find that true religion. Individuals rob themselves of excuse by the fact that a vast international Church like the Catholic Church is in this world – the pearl of great worth – claiming to speak with the authority of God. Confronted with such a fact, every reasonable man would say, “Such claims are rather tremendous. At least, I’d better look into them and see whether there is any justification for them.” Those who would note the fact, and simply not bother about it, are sinfully violating reason, and have only themselves to blame for wrecking their eternal destiny. St. Thomas Aquinas stated the sin is irrational, especially any sin that precludes one’s opportunity to salvation, should they die in that state.
Protestants say there is no need to join the Catholic Church in order to be saved because John III., 15, says, “Whosoever believeth in Him will not perish, but will have life everlasting.” That particular text does not say that non-Catholics will be saved. It might avail if Christ had never said anything else. But He said much else. And whosoever really believes in Christ must accept every single thing He taught, and try to fulfill all that He commanded. For example, He said, “Unless your justice abound more than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Matt. V., 20. One could believe in Christ, yet make no effort to acquire the prescribed justice. That is why Christ said, “Not every one who cries: ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matt. VII., 21. It is evident that an unconditional and universal sense cannot be attached to the text of John 3:16. They will be saved who so believe in Christ that they are prepared to accept and to fulfill all the conditions prescribed by Him.
SALVATION 5 – 8
Protestants say there is nothing in those wonderful words of a privileged Church. The same Christ who uttered those wonderful words also said,”If a man will not hear the Church, let him be as the heathen and the publican.”(Matt. 18:17 It is necessary then that those who believe in Christ should hear and obey His Church. And Protestants must ask themselves whether they hear and obey any Church as your teacher and ruler in religious matters. Also you must ask yourself what Church Christ had in mind when He spoke. If Protestants say that it is not necessary to obey any Church, they do not believe completely in, nor practice fully, Christ’s WORD. And in that case, Protestants cannot be ranked amongst those included in the promise, “Whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish.” The Church Christ had in mind was the Catholic Church; and once a man adverts to the fact, he must join her if he wishes to save his soul.
Protestants posit Gal. III., 28, which says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” St. Paul was speaking there of the Catholic Church in which national and earthly differences are no obstacle to membership (i.e., the reason Greeks by the end of the first century referred to the Church as “Katholikos” [Universal] .) Insofar as we are members of the Catholic Church, all other Catholics are our brethren. In our mutual faith there is neither Gentile nor Jew, neither German nor Frenchman, nor Italian, nor Irishman, nor American. We Catholics are all one in Christ Jesus, belonging to His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church. But Protestants belong to man-made “churches” – nearly 40,000 mainline Protestant sects all disagreeing with each other as to the meaning of Scripture, calling each other heretics. Not one Protestant sect was founded by Jesus Christ. The text quoted which says that we should all be one cannot possibly justify our continued separation of sects and differenced in dogma, doctrines and liturgies. In reality, it is Protestantism which says that there are Jews and Gentiles, Englishmen and Germans, Dutch and Norwegians, for it permits religion to differ according to nationality. Where Catholicism has one religion for all nations, Protestantism sanctions as many religions as there are nations, and even variations and divisions within the one nation. The text quoted is really suicidal for Protestantism, and proves the necessity of Catholicism – the one and only Church founded by Christ and defined by Him as being of One Faith, One Fold, and One Shepherd Protestants ask: If the Catholic Church presumes to say that unless a man is a Catholic he is not serving Christ? He is not serving Christ as Christ demands. There is no possibility of a Protestant being invincibly ignorant of the full teaching of Christ through no fault of his own when Protestants espouse the heresy
of Sola Scriptura, use the King James Version (KVJ) “bible” (no such heinously corrupted, and unauthorized book with over 20,000 errors can be called the WORD of God) in which certain truths stolen from the Latin Vugate Bible are printed correctly, such as Matt. 1817 quoted above – yet today the approximately one billion Protestant ministers and their laity collectively of their nearly 40,000 mainline Protestant sects not counting the burgeoning Non-Denominational sects mostly using the KVJ – abide not by that verse nor by several other Catholic truths (“must drink His Blood and eat His Flesh” or no salvation,; “all generations shall call me [HolyVirgin Mary] blessed”; etc.) as are contained in the KJV. Protestant sects neither do these things, nor can validly do transubstantiation of the Bread and Wine, should their particular sect. even offer the laity a “Communion service.” None of these Protestant sects existed 500 years ago, much less two millennia, so that is the first hurdle among many more they can never get over when they attempt to say they have been saved already (misinterpreting John #:16) or are on their way (unfortunately, to hell.) This is why Catholics pray FOR them (never WITH) that God would give them the actual graces to abjure of their errors and return to the true Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ. Surely this is disheartening to many who lead good lives and believe in Christ, yet cannot conscientiously accept the dogmas of Rome. Then it is not true that such persons “lead good lives and believe in Christ.” For when they conscientiously refuse to accept the Roman Catholic Church dogmas instituted by Christ, they are ipso facto conscientiously refusing to do what Christ commands in 1) Luke 10:25-28 as follows: “25 And behold a certain lawyer stood up, tempting Him, and saying: Master, what must I do to possess eternal life. “26 But He said to him: What is written in the law? How readest thou? “27 He answering, said: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all my thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbor as thyself. “28 And He said to him : Thou hast answered right : this do, and thou shalt live.” Haydock Douay-Rheims Bible Commentary to Luke 10:25: “Ver. 25. Eternal life? The law of Moses does not expressly promise eternal life to the observers of it, but confines its promises to temporal blessings during this life. Still we always find that the Jews hoped in another life after this. This opinion is clearly observable in the books of Scripture, written both before and after the captivity, and in Josephus (ed., Titus Flavius Josephus, 37 A. D. – c. 100 A. D. Roman-Jewish Historian) and Philo (ed., Philo of Alexandria a/k/a Philo Judaeus, 20 B.C. – 50 A.D., was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher.) Calmet. (ed., Antoine Augustin Calmet, O.S.B [Order of St. Benedict], 1672-1757. A pious French Benedictine monk, Abbot, Exegete, Historian, Scholar, Theologian, Philosopher, Occultist, Translator. Pope Benedict XIII [reigned 1724-1730] wished to confer episcopal dignity upon him, but his humility could not be brought to accept the honor. Calmet was greatly admired by the philosopher Francois-Marie Arouet known by his nom de plume “Voltaire” [1694-1778.] ) 2) Matt. 18:17 “17 And if he will not hear them: tell the Church. And if he will not hear the Church, let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican.” St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) defined GOOD as that characteristic which perfects the nature of a thing. EVIL is the absence of good. Once-faithful Catholics became influenced by the writings Catholic Augustinian monk-priest, Martin Luther (1483-1546) in Wittenberg (56 miles S. W. of Berlin,) Germany, revolted in 1520 and ran away from the Catholic Church. They created their own man-made Lutheran religion and creed, and per Luther’s urging, began usurping Catholic Church properties. In less than three years they began experiencing the beginning of what has become never-ending fragmentation into new “Christian” sects holding uniquely differing dogmas and doctrines a result of each sect members doing their own private interpretations condemned in 2 Peter 1:20 that contradict the Infallible Authority of the Teaching Catholic Church founded by Christ. All these sects refuse to hear and obey the Catholic Church founded by Christ as he commands in Matt 18:17 stated above. Protestants, therefore, are far from “good,” pridefully disobeying the commands of Jesus Christ, adding-deleting-changing the intent of Scripture, and virtually making their own gods by creating doctrine contradicting those of Christ and His Catholic Church. creating their ” All the heresies Protestants teach, their destruction of the Priesthood, abandonment and mutilation of Sacraments, schism from Christ’s chosen Vicars, ejection of Divine Tradition, abrogating the teachings of the Fathers of the Church, denigrating the Blessed Virgin Mary, promoting Freemasonry with its Luciferian Doctrine, and allowing/encouraging all the divorces, remarriages, and unnatural unions that break up families, impair societies, and overthrow governments. Protestantism has for five centuries contributed to moral, ethical, and political declines, false “science” (evolution, etc.), sophistry (the so-called Enlightenment, Liberalism, etc.,) theosophy (e. g., the heresies of Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura, etc.) and public education first introduced by Luciferian Freemasonry after their French Revolution of 1789. Taken collectively, Protestantism impacts and produces emotionally and spiritually deprived children being deceived and placed upon the path to infinite perdition. So it is a lie of exponential degree to ever depict what was instigated by Satan as being good and believing in God. Protestantism’s god is Lucifer, the god of Freemason Lodges in which so many Protestant ministers and laity claim high ranking Brotherhood. The collective result of Protestantism is an ungodly, anti-Christ social order imbued with erroneous doctrines inspired by Lucifer to contradict the salvific efforts of Jesus Christ, and obstruct His true Catholic Church’s function as the sole pathway to salvation. Wherever they reside, whatever governments in which they participate (many as Freemason/Eastern Star Protestants legislating/sponsoring abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicides, fetal stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and LGQBT “rights”) and throughout positions of power and influence within key global institutions and corporations, they elusively, gradually, and steadily implement New World Order agendas. Second only to the Talmud Judaic bankers who aided and abetted them throughout Europe in breaking from all things Catholic, Protestants learned to become purveyors of usury enslavement instruments and contracts through the banks they operate, living lives that grossly thwart the redemption and eternal salvation offering of Jesus Christ and His true Church. For Protestants and other baptized heretics to proclaim their individual, respective sect membership is both good (perfecting the exegesis of Scripture) and Christian (perfecting the nature of the true Catholic Church practices founded by Christ) – while at the same time saying every other Protestant sect is heretical – is a profession of oxymoronic impossibility. Given those Protestant/Non-Denominational evils as stated above – i. e., those characteristics by which these heretics, schismatics and apostates willfully interfere with the perfection of the nature of man whom God created to achieve a heavenly end goal – let the following be known to those approximately one billion souls today comprising nearly 40,000 mainline Protestants and innumerable NonDenominational sects : “It [Catholic Church] firmly believes, professes, and proclaims that those not living within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart ‘into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels’ [Matt. 25:41], unless before the end of life the same have been added to the flock; and that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is so strong that only to those remaining in it are the sacraments of the Church of benefit for salvation, and do fastings, almsgiving, and other functions of piety and exercises of Christian service produce eternal reward, and that NO ONE, WHATEVER ALMSGIVING HE HAS PRACTICED, EVEN IF HE SHED BLOOD FOR THE NAME OF CHRIST, CAN BE SAVED, UNLESS HE HAS REMAINED IN THE BOSOM AND UNITY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.” (Source: Denzinger’s The Sources of Catholic Dogma. Council of Florence (1438-1445; under Pope Eugenius IV [reigned 1431-1447]). D. #714) Then there are 1.3 billion current affiliates of the Vatican II Novus Ordo Counterfeit-Catholic Contra-Church who refuse to study and obey the infallible, immutable teachings of the pre-1958 true Catholic Church as had been taught prior to the coup d’etat of the papacy that took place on October 26, 1958 in the Papal Conclave. They may all be judged even more severely and sent to even lower depths of that unfathomable pit of eternal hell-fire.
SALVATION 9
Since the true Catholic Church is the one Church to which God wills all mankind to belong, it is impossible to hold out hope of salvation to those who reject that Church and deprive themselves of all the helps she can give. And should some of the statements herein dishearten those outside the Church sufficiently to make them take an interest, inquire, and discover the truth, leading eventually to their becoming Catholics, then the intent of this writing to serve that goal will have been achieved. Grace and salvation.
Protestants ask: Am I right or wrong in saying that all men are sure of salvation through the merits of Christ? Wrong. Your mistake arises from your notion that Christ expiated our sins on the Cross without making any conditions for those who desire to benefit by His redeeming work. But redemption is not unconditional. Matt. 19:16-17 states: “16 And behold one came and said to Him: Good Master, what good shall I do that I may have life everlasting?”17 But He said to him z; Why askest thou me concerning good? One is good, God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” Haydock Douay-Rheims Bible Commentary Matt. 19 “Ver. 17. Why askest thou me concerning good? In the ordinary Greek copies, why dost thou call me good? Wi. – One is good, etc. God, alone, by
His own nature, is essentially, absolutely, and unchangeably good ; at the same time He is the source of all created goodness, as mere goodness is an emanation from His. The person here addressing our Saviour, appears not to have believed that Christ was God: wherefore our Saviour, to rectify his misconception, tells him that God alone is good, insinuating thereby, that he should believe Him to be God, or ease to address Him by the title of good. T. – The sense is, that only God is good necessarily, and by His own nature. The Arians bring this place to shew that Christ is not truly and properly God: but by this way of speaking, Christ does not deny that He is good, even by His nature, and consequently God; but seems to speak in this manner, to make the man know who He was. Wi. “
SALVATION 10 & 11
Again, we are told in Acts 2:38 that men must repent and be baptized as follows: “38 But Peter said to them ; Do penance, and be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins : and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Haydock Douay-Rheims Bible Commentary Acts Chapter 2 “Ver. 38. Be baptized: believing and making profession to believe, and hope for salvation, by the merits of Jesus Christ. Thus you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, the grace of God, and perhaps those other gifts of speaking in tongues, working miracles, etc. Wi. – The gift of the Holy Ghost. That is, justifying (ed., a/k/a sanctifying) grace, which is infused into our hearts by the laver of regeneration. The exterior gifts of the Holy Ghost, the gift of tongues, of miracles, prophecy, etc. were, in the beginning of the Church, more regularly the consequences of confirmation or imposition of hands. Calmet.” or again in Mark 16:16
“16 He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not, shall be condemned.” Haydock Douay-Rheims Bible Commentary Mark Chapter 16 “Ver. 16. Let those weep and lament ho have not seen Him, and in a short time shall receive consolation. Blessed are they that weep, for they shall be comforted, S. Mat. v. S. Jerome. – Perhaps someone will say within himself, I have already believed, I shall be saved: he says true, if his faith be support by good works; for that only is true faith, which does not contradict in works what is believed in words. S. Gregg.” All such conditions suppose that it is possible not to be saved. The Protestant will say, “Then Christ has not redeemed the human race after all!” The proper reply to that is Christ has paid a price sufficient for the redemption of all men who are willing to be saved and who are prepared to comply with the conditions. And henceforth it is each man’s own fault only if he is lost.
Protestants ask of what avail was the shedding of Christ’s blood if there is still a danger of everlasting damnation in hell? Of great avail. For without the shedding of that blood no human being could possibly have attained eternal salvation and the supernatural destiny originally intended for man by God. But whilst the death of Christ made this salvation possible, it was never intended to save men whether they wished to be saved or not, and whether they continued to do evil or not. Christ did not offer unconditional salvation to mankind.
Protestants teach that when they are converted or changed by accepting Jesus as our Savior, they are then Christians with full assurance of eternal life. If Protestantism teaches that, then Protestants are very much to be pitied. For their Protestantism is simply building up false hopes within them, and offering conditions of salvation radically opposed to the teaching of the New Testament. Nowhere is full assurance of salvation promised to anyone. Our Lord says to us in Matt. 26: 41 “41 Watch ye and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Haydock Commentary Matt. Chapter 26 “Ver. 41. Watch ye and pray, etc. We watch by being intent on good works, and by being solicitous that no perverse doctrine seize our heart. Thus we must first watch, and then pray. Origen (ed., Origen of Alexandria a/k/a Origen Adamantius (c. 184 – 253 A. D.) – Catholic Church Father, scholar, ascetic, and theologian who wrote over 2,000 treatises on Christian apologetics, hermeneutics, theology, and textual criticism.) Why does the WORD command we watch and pray to avoid temptation, if souls are already – according to Protestantism – fully assured of salvation simply by accepting Jesus as their Savior? Because it is not true, but is just another Protestantism heresy that takes souls to hell. Christ manifestly tells us that there is a danger of forfeiting salvation by falling into temptation after having being baptized. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Cor. 10:12, “12 Wherefore let him that thinketh himself to stand, take heed lest he fall.” Haydock Commentary 1 Cor. Chapter 10 “Ver. 12. Take heed lest he fall.
SALVATION 12
This regards the doctors and teachers in the new Church of Corinth; who, relying upon their own learning, did not think themselves weak, and presuming too much upon their own strength, exposed themselves to the danger of falling. See. S. Chrys. And – S. Aug de dono. Persev. – Self-diffidence is the foundation of our strength. We prevent many dangerous falls when we keep close to the earth by humility.” St. Paul wrote in Hebrews 6:4-8 “4 For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, have tasted also the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, “5 Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come, “6 And are fallen away, to be renewed again unto penance, crucifying again to themselves the Son of God, and making a mockery of him.” “7 For the earth that drinketh in the rain which cometh often upon it, and bringeth forth herbs useful for them by who it is tilled, receiveth blessing from God. “8 But that which bringeth forth thorns and briers, is rejected; and very near to a curse, whose end is to be burnt.” Haydock Commentary Hebrews Chapter 6:4-8 “Ver. 4. etc. For it is impossible, etc. This is an obscure place, differently expounded, which shows how rash it is for the ignorant to pretend to understand the Holy Scriptures. Many understand these words, it is impossible, etc. of the sacrament of penance, or of returning to God by profitable repentance, especially after such heinous sins as an apostasy from the true faith. But then we must take impossible, to imply no more than a thing that is very hard to be done, or that seldom happens, as when it is said, (Matt. Xix. 26.) that it is impossible for a rich man to be saved: and (Luke xvii. 1.) it is impossible that scandals should not come. For it is certain that it is never impossible for the greatest sinners to repent by the assistances which God offers, Who has also left the power to His ministers to forgive in His name the greatest sins. But others (whose interpretation seems preferable) expound this of baptism, which can only be given once. The words in the text very much favor this exposition, when it is said, who were once enlightened. For baptism in the first ages was called the sacrament of illumination. See. S. Denis de caelesti Hierar. c. iv. S. Grg. Naz.
SALVATION 13 – 16
Etc. The following words also agree with baptism, when they are said to have been made partakers of the Holy Ghost; to have tasted the good word of God, and the power of the world to come; all which signify the interior graces, the miraculous gifts, and power of working miracles, which they who were baptized frequently received in those days. “ – They cannot be renewed again unto penance. That is, they cannot be renewed again by baptism, which is also called a renovation. Tit. Iii. 5. Their sins may indeed be forgiven them in the sacrament of penance, but this is not a renovation like that in baptism, in which both the guilt, and all pain due to past sins, is remitted; whereas in the sacrament of penance, though the guilt, and the eternal punishments due to sins is remitted, yet many times, temporal punishments, to be undergone either in this world or the next, still remain due to such as have been great sinners, to them who by relapsing into the same sins, have crucified again to themselves the Son of God, making a mockery of Him; i.e., who, insensitive to the favours received, have ungratefully renewed sin; to take away which Christ suffered, was mocked, crucified, etc. Wi. – Macknight (ed., Rev. Dr. James MacKnight D.D. (1721-1800) – a Scottish minister and theological author of “Harmony of the Gospels” [1756; revised 1763] ; “The Truth of the Gospel History [1763]) observes that Beza (ed., Theodore Beza (1519 in France – 1605 in Geneva, Switzerland) – author, translator, educator, theologian who assisted and later succeeded John Calvin [1509-1564] Calvin was a former Catholic who became a French theologian, pastor, and “reformer” in Geneva during the Protestant Revolt, and established heresies of predestination; full assurance of salvation by simply accepting Jesus as one’s Savior; and heretical Calvinism doctrines.) Beza, (as a leader of the Protestant Revolt from the Catholic Church centered at Geneva,) without any authority from ancient MSS, hath inserted in his version Si, If they shall fall away, that this text might not appear to contradict the Calvinistic doctrine of the assurance of salvation. The English translators have followed Beza. The biblical student will be glad to find Dr. Wells, in his elegant edition of the New testament, frequently restoring and preferring those readings which agree with the Latin Vulgate. The same just tribute is paid to the Vulgate by Walton, Mills, Gerard, Griesbach, Harwood, and others. Indeed the Vulgate has been declared authentic in a general council, and probably expresses more of the true reading of the original or autograph, than the Greek edition that is now to be found (ed., i. e., in late 18th century), and certainly much more than modern versions, which are strained more or less by the preconceived sentiments of the translators. “- For the earth that drinketh in the rain, etc. He bringeth this comparison, to give them a horror of abusing God’s graces and favours, and making themselves guilty of hell fire.” Hebrews VI., 4, 5. contradicts the Protestant heretics who say people who have been once illuminated, have tasted the heavenly gift, and who were made partakers with the Holy Ghost, should have had full assurance of eternal life with Christ. Yet the event proved such an assurance illusory. St. Paul, too, tells us of those who had made shipwreck of the faith. He is talking of Christians, who had accepted Jesus as their Savior in 1Tim 1:19-20 as follows: “19 Having faith and a good conscience, which some rejecting have made shipwreck concerning the faith: “20 Of whom is Hymenaeus and Alexander : whom I have delivered to satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme.” Haydock Commentary 1 Timothy Chapter 1:19-20 “Ver. 19. An evil life is not infrequently the leading principle of defection from the faith. The heart, not the mind, is generally the first corrupted.” “Ver. 20. I have delivered to Satan; whom I have excommunicated, that, they may learn not to blaspheme, or speak against the truth of the faith. Theophylact. – The devil frequently, at the time, took possession of, or afflicted the excommunicated with diseases and other temporal evils. S.Chrysostom.”
Protestants teach Jesus offers salvation as a sheer gift. All we have to do is to accept. Jesus offers Himself and His grace to us as a free gift, beyond all our deserts. But Protestants are wrong when they say we only have to accept. We have to labor and strive to fulfill all the obligations imposed upon us by God. Mere acceptance of Christ without that is of no avail. St. James, the Apostle, writes, “Faith without works is dead. Do you not see that by works a man is justified and not by faith only.” James 2:24 Clear enough. Protestants, leave this in their KJV, yet chose to reject this WORD of God from their belief, as do they many other Scripture verses. Luther wanted to tear out the entire Book of James, but his financial supports threatened to cut him off financially if he did so. He relented, kept it in his Luther “bible,” but taught against it by espousing his heresy of Sola Fide, and added the word “alone” to his “bible” so it reads man is saved by faith alone. Most Protestant sects adopted that Satanic heresy.
Protestants say the gift of God is life eternal through Christ Jesus. That is quite true. But it is not an unconditional gift. After the fall of man, God had no obligation to offer us eternal happiness, and, therefore, His doing so was a sheer gift. But all the same He laid down certain conditions involving good works, and as we are not necessarily compelled to fulfill them, the Protestant doctrinal heresy of full assurance becomes a chimera, as also does another Protestant heresy that for salvation we have only to accept Jesus as our Savior. With the help of His grace, we have to work out our own salvation by good works in fear and trembling lest we ourselves should fail to do our part.
Protestants say that with Roman Catholics, one always has to be doing something to gain grace. Of course, that is so. When we pray we are doing something to gain grace. “Ask, and you shall receive,” is the promise of Christ. Our Lord also showed the necessity of good works when He said, “He that doth evil cometh not to the light.” Scripture tells us, too, to redeem our sins by almsgiving. But that would be impossible unless almsgiving for the love of Christ were a means by which we gain grace. All along the line, in this matter, the Protestant doctrines are at variance with Scripture, and brings out once more that Protestantism is fundamentally un-Scriptural, whilst Catholic ideas are fully in accordance with Holy Scripture.
Protestants say God has called us out of dead works to worship Him through Jesus, the true and living way. That is true, provided “dead works”are correctly interpreted. But it is quite wrong when Protestants then teach that all good works are dead and useless. Protestant sects disagree and struggle trying to understand the doctrine of Predestination of souls. Pre-destination of soul is simply a special Providence of God in regard to a particular individual for whom God has foreordained special graces with which He knows that the individual will certainly correspond. There is no such thing as predestination to hell. To every man in this world God gives sufficient grace for salvation and every man can be saved by corresponding with it. Therefore, if any man is lost, it is his own fault. But there is a re-destination for a specially chosen few to very special graces over and above the ordinary distribution, as in the case of St. Paul, who though a Pharisee, was predestined to his glorious Apostolate. Now, with these principles in mind, we can go on to other issues. Has everyone an equal chance of getting to heaven? Not necessarily. The attaining of heaven depends upon the reception of actual Baptism in the case of infants, and upon Baptism at least implicitly by desire on the part of adults. But those who have come to the age of reason and responsibility even then, may not all have necessarily an equal chance of salvation, although all, without exception, have a true chance. For example, Mary, the Mother of Christ, certainly received very special graces and helps which are not given to ordinary souls. But God gives to every adult sufficient grace for salvation. He has no obligation to give to every soul those extraordinary graces which, in His sheer generosity, He bestows upon some. The question of justice does not enter into the distribution of gratuitous gifts, although God is bound in justice to Himself to give sufficient grace that men may observe the commandments He imposes. And He does so. Protestants say, after all, it is the kind of body that we have that governs our actions during our lives, and the kind of life we lead determines our reward in the next world. It is true to a certain extent only that the kind of life one leads determines his reward in the next world. The use of “to a certain extent” distinguishes that because after an evil life a man could die repentant and be saved almost solely through the merits of Christ, his only personal good being practically the one act of good-will by which he corresponds with the final grace God’s mercy offers him. But it would be a sin of presumption to lead an evil life in the expectation of such a final grace. Faithful, obedient Catholics wisely try to live according to the graces God gives them day by day, so as to be ready whenever God should decide to take us from this world. In this sense, the kind of life we live normally determines our future lot. But an analysis of the Protestant first statement: It is the kind of body we have that governs our actions during life will conclude this not to be true. For man’s higher faculties of the soul (i. e., the mind), reason and will, govern his actions. If he has the use of these faculties, and they do not govern his actions, but are subservient to the blind impulses of bodily inclinations, he sins. But men do not necessarily give in to those blind impulses. The Protestant general statement that the kind of body a man possesses governs his actions during life implies he would have no choice in certain circumstance because of his kind of body to avoid committing willful actions constituting sin. And that is why this Protestant general statement is absolutely denied. Catholic martyrs chose death rather than allow their body or circumstances to cause them to commit sin. A true Catholic must be willing to give his life to remain faithful.
SALVATION 17
Some Protestants believe the course our life is going to take is affected to a great degree by the type of make-up we are given, a factor over which we have no control. We have control over our make-up. Thousands of people have successfully resisted inherited tendencies. The standard of virtue attained by different people often varies according to their natural characteristics. Even a person identified as “naturally irritable’ because raised by nervous and highly strung parents may find it harder to practice patience and good temper than other persons of a naturally sanguine and happy demeanor. It’s a matter of mind conditioning. And just as it was conditioned to exhibit unrestrained behavioral responses by manifesting knee-jerk irritability, such a mind (the soul) needs to pray for God’s graces to learn how to achieve civil restraint. One’s way is to stop sinning and frequently pray such as, “Lord God, I pray that not my will, but Thy Will be done. I beseech Thee in Thy Mercy and Goodness to give me the graces and virtues to restrain my impulses of irritability, and to become pleasing to You and those with whom I come in contact throughout life, through the merits of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Redeemer. Teach me how to love Thee more and more. Amen.”
Protestants ask if each soul gets enough grace for salvation if it will but correspond. The response is: YES!
Some Protestants doubt enough grace is given people to overcome evil tendencies. Enough grace is given them to enable them to save their souls. The salvation of a soul depends not only upon the use of grace, but upon the relative standards expected of the soul by God. Our Lord tells us clearly that God will adjust His demands according to the actual responsibility of each individual. That variance in standards He shows in His parable of the talents, five being given to one man, two to another, and but one to a third. Not so much will be required of the man with but one talent as from him with five talents. Again, in Luke XI, 48, Christ says, “Unto whom much is given, of him much shall be required.” But that God gives sufficient grace to each according to the standard required of him for salvation is not in the least a doubtful proposition. God has revealed that He sincerely wills the salvation of all men and also that grace is necessary for salvation. Therefore to all men He offers sufficient grace for their salvation according to their relative needs and the relative standards allotted to them.
SALVATION 18 – 19
Some Protestants teach that there are some souls too brutal and hardened to be sensitive to grace, and question if grace creates a new moral nature within them. Sufficient grace is offered to any man properly importuning God to resist an evil influence. If they refuse to listen to the promptings of grace and of conscience, they may become more and more brutal and hardened, and less sensitive to grace. They become habitual sinners. Christ died for sinners. He came to save that which was lost, and He wills not the death of a sinner but that he be converted and live. Even after a lifetime of sin. He will still offer sufficient grace for salvation, and special graces towards the end of life when sinful attractions have lost much of their fascination. Protestants who believe God does not give every man sufficient grace for salvation, doubt man could easily turn to God if he will. Man receives sufficient grace if he can save his soul. Whether he can do so easily or with difficulty is beside the point. As long as he can do so, the grace is not insufficient for salvation. He is saved if he actually dies in a state of grace, whatever his previous life may have been. The Emperor Napoleon Bonapart, who had imprisoned two popes (Pope Pius VI died in a French prison), yet had a Catholic priest take his confession when he was dying in exile. So to say the least, He will give them grace sufficient for their radical conversion and salvation, a grace adjusted to their particular needs. If they need a greater grace than a less hardened person, they will get that greater grace. That grace will not force them. They will have to accept it voluntarily with whatever will-power they actually have. But it will be truly sufficient for their salvation according to their actual capacity and the relative standard God expects of them. A man can be lost only for what is his own fault, not for what is not his own fault. God knows all the grades of personal responsibility and guilt, and will duly allow for them.
Protestants would ask why a man becomes a priest, and dedicate his life to the work of God, while some other unfortunate became a heathen, concluding there are two different sets of circumstances over which neither party had any control. This question sums up the mistake which characterizes your whole letter. Protestantism, in dealing with man’s relation to a supernatural destiny, yet are trying to explain it by natural elements only. Protestantism is leaving out God and the influence of grace, and all notions of supernatural agency. It’s rather like complaining that you can’t dig up cube roots with a spade. Why did I become a priest, and why has some other unfortunate become a heathen? A man would become a priest because God inspired him with the thought to do so, and because the man chose to correspond with that good inspiration. He could have refused and become a heathen. Some other unfortunate became a heathen, if he ever possessed the Christian faith, because he chose not to correspond with the grace God gave him. If you examine the two lives, there will not be found different sets of circumstances over which either man had no control, in the sense Protestantism intends. Some circumstances may have happened which we could not control, but we did not lose the power to control ourselves in those circumstances. That is the point Protestantism overlooks. Sometimes people cannot control being brought into contact with the claims of the Catholic Church. But acceptance or rejection of those claims certainly was within their control. What did Christ mean by the parable in which the late arrivals received the same pay as those who had worked all day, and who justly protested? The parable is not to be interpreted literally and merely from this world’s point of view, but as exhibiting the conditions of the kingdom of heaven to which Christ applied His illustration. Eternal salvation depends upon the gift of divine grace, and God will grant that salvation by justice to those who have served Him from their youth, by mercy and goodness to those who turn to Him in repentance or later stages of life, or even at the last moment. And no one will ever have the right to complain against God whether He manifests His justice or His mercy in granting salvation to any given soul. Equity will be secured, of course, by the greater glory and merit of those who have served God longer and more faithfully on earth. But our Lord is not here concerned with that. He is concerned with the general fact of eternal salvation given equally to souls of various qualifications. The parable was directed against the Pharisees who thought themselves the elite, and condemned our Lord’s goodness to the publicans and sinners, as if these poor people should not be given any hope of eternal salvation. They thought that was theirs by right, and that God was not free to grant it to others even in sheer
mercy. Where the dispensation of grace is concerned God is above all human criticism.
Protestants question that Catholic people believe that they can be saved if forgiven by a priest up to the last moment of life. That is so. Catholics dare not put limits to God’s mercy; God has Himself declared that His mercy outnumbers all reckoning on the part of men. But don’t conclude that Catholics believe that they are justified in continuing in sin merely because if a man repents at the last he can be saved. They know quite well that they are never justified in continuing in a state of sin. God has promised forgiveness when a man does repent, but He has never promised time to repent. If a man mocks God’s mercy by making it the excuse for further sin, and for further delay in his conversion, such a man forfeits any right to mercy at the last. If he repents he will save his soul, but how does he know that he will not meet with a sudden and unforeseen death? If he receives the Sacraments from a priest, and is in proper dispositions, he will save his soul, but what guarantee has he that a priest will be available just where and when he is needed? Remember, too, that according to Catholic doctrine, sins, even though forgiven, have to be expiated in purgatory; and the man who barely saves his soul after a lifetime of sin, will expiate his sins in a purgatory that will scarcely bear description. God is not mocked. Sins cannot be multiplied with impunity, even though God is merciful.
SALVATION 20
If two Catholics die, one after a good life, and another after an evil life, but getting forgiven before he dies, does the evil one get the same reward as the good one? No. The evil one will have far more to expiate in purgatory, and when he does enter heaven, will attain a far lower degree of happiness and glory than the one who has consistently served God.
Protestants ask if it would be very hard on one who lived a very good life, but was unfortunate enough to die at the last with a mortal sin on his soul? That is hardly a likely contingency. But if it did happen, it would be hard for such a person, but not unjust. Firstly, he has no need and no right to be in a state of mortal sin when death comes. Secondly, his previous good life does not affect the matter. The observance of all God’s commandments for sixty years gives no right whatever to violate one of them then. It’s like arguing that a man is justified in stealing on Tuesday because he did not commit adultery on the preceding Monday. On the other hand, a person who had led a bad life could repent at the last and save his soul. That’s not hard on anybody. The grace of repentance is always at the disposal of men of good will, offered through the sheer mercy of Christ. Protestants posit that the man good all his life but who sins near death would go to hell, and the bad man to purgatory., believing that’s hardly fair. Fairness is not involved in this question. First, these two cases have no relation to each other. The fact that the wicked man accepted God’s mercy has no relation whatever to the fact that the previously good man would not have it. Remember that God offered sufficient grace equally to both according to the necessities of each. Suppose two beggars were offered each half-a-dollar by a Catholic; if one notices that the benefactor is a Catholic, and through bigoted enmity towards Catholics, spits on the ground and refuses to take the offering, whilst the other gratefully accepts it, who is going to blame the Catholic for injustice because one man goes without his dinner, whilst the other has it?
Being in a state of mortal sin, an erstwhile pious man is no longer a “good man”, and no one has a right to assume that he is still good. Nor is he condemned to hell for any of his previous goodness. He is condemned for being an evil man in a state of enmity with God, a state which no previous goodness could justify. And the bad man is not saved because he was bad. He is saved because he had ceased to be bad, repenting of his crimes, and becoming good in God’s sight by his willing correspondence with the grace offered him. We cannot exclude goodness by supposing that a man falls into mortal sin and dies in that state, and yet still regard that man as possessing goodness. Nor can we suppose a bad man converted to goodness, and then argue as if he were saved because of his
badness.
TO BE CONTINUED
REPROVING PROTESTANT HERESIES
On IMAGES
Protestants will ask why are true Catholic Churches decorated with images and statues in direct violation of the second commandment?
The second commandment is, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Protestants, of course, call that the third commandment. But they are wrong in doing so, having taken that part of the first commandment which refers to images as the second of God’s commandments. But do those words forbid the making of images? They do not. God was forbidding idolatry, not the making of images. He said, “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image of anything in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath. Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them.” God deliberately adds those last words, yet non-Catholics ignore them. He forbids men to make images in order to adore them. But He does not forbid the making of images. The commandments are given in Exodus, XX. But in that same Book, XXV., 18, you will find God ordering the Jews to make images of Angels!
Would any man accuse God of not knowing the sense of His own law? He says, “Thou shalt make also two cherubims of beaten gold, on the two sides of the oracle.” In other words, the Jews were to make images of things in the heaven above. And if non-Catholic interpretation be true, why do such non-Catholics violate God’s law by making images of things in the earth beneath? Why images of kings and politicians in our parks? Why
photographs of friends and relatives? On Protestant or other non-Catholic theory, such critics could not even take a snapshot of a tree. You would be making an image of a thing in the earth beneath. The critics strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! This is the fruit of their private interpretation of Scripture. No. God does not forbid the making of images; He forbids the making of images in order to adore them.
Protestants have been known to say they have seen more idols in Catholic Churches than sincere Christians.
No Protestant has ever seen an idol in a true Catholic Church. An image is an idol only when it is the object of divine worship. Protestants and other non-Catholics have seen images in Catholic Churches, but every true Catholic (i.e, NOT the Counterfeit-Catholics of the V2 Novus Ordo Contra-Church) knows that divine worship cannot be offered to such images. Would the Protestant critics call the Statue of Liberty, in New York harbor, an idol? As for their not seeing sincere Christians in a Catholic Church, you cannot expect to test the sincerity of a Christian by the color of his tie or the shape of his shoes.
Protestants will say God forbade us to worship plaster statues as Catholics do, yet Catholics would send missionaries to convert heathens who do the same thing.
God absolutely forbids us to worship wooden and stone statues, and Catholics are not so foolish as to commit so serious a sin. But Catholics do honor representations of those who are in heaven, just as we all honor our dead soldiers by tributes of respect to their Cenotaphs. If I lift my hat to the flag of my country as I pass the memorial to our dead soldiers, am I honoring the cloth or the stone, or what it stands for? If it be lawful in that
case, it is certainly lawful to honor the memorials of the dead heroes of Christianity, the Saints. True Catholic missionaries used to go to heathen tribes of foreign lands to save them from the idolatrous worship of man-made gods. No need to travel anymore because in the U. S. today we are surrounded by heathens. That situation is an outcome of the Coup D’Etat of the papacy at the October 1958 Papal Conclave and the subsequent, illicit Second Vatican Council (October 1962-December 8, 1965) that began the destruction of Catholic dogmas, doctrines and Sacraments in all once-Catholic churches. The ongoing goal of these usurpers of the once-Catholic Vatican is the total eradication of Catholicism globally by means of never-ending changes being made by the unbroken succession of post-1958 anti-popes “in the spirit of the (illicit) Second Vatican Council.” Meanwhile, the true, indestructible Catholic religion exists today in a state of eclipsed exile, maintained and practiced unchanged by few faithful souls worldwide.
Protestants will say they have seen Catholics on their knees adoring and praying to statues in their Churches.
They have not. They have seen Catholics kneeling at prayer, and perhaps kneeling before an image of Christ, or of Our Lady. But if one were to conclude that they were praying to the statues, that was not the fault of the Catholics. It was Protestant’s own fault in so far as he judged them according to their own erroneous preconceived ideas. Without bothering to ask for information, the Protestant guessed and guessed wrong. Before an image of Mary, Catholics may go on their knees and pray to God through the intercession of that Mother of Christ whom the statue represents. But no one has the right to accuse them of praying to the statue. Were the Protestant to kneel down (as unlikely for a Protestant to do) by his bedside at night for a last prayer, could he be regarded as adoring or praying to his mattress?
Protestants will say they have seen a Catholic kiss the feet of a statue of Christ.
If I kiss the photograph of my mother, am I honoring a piece of cardboard? Or is it a tribute of love and respect offered to my mother? A Catholic reverences images and statues only in so far as they remind him of God, of Christ, or of Our Lady and the Saints. Where a pagan adores and worships a thing of wood in itself, I kiss the cross not because it is a piece of wood, but because it stands for Christ and for His sufferings on my behalf. And I am sure that Our Lord looks down from heaven and says, “Bless the child; he at least appreciates my love for him.” The Protestant mistake in this issue is that they try to judge interior dispositions from exterior conduct—a dangerous policy always.
Protestants will say Catholics raise their hats when passing a Church;
why not when passing statues in a Catholic shop window?
The true Catholic who would raise his hat when passing a Catholic Church did so as an act of reverence for the Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist in the tabernacle on the altar. But Christ’s Eucharistic Presence is not thus present in shops selling Catholic articles of devotion. But of course, the Protestants missed the point and took it for granted that Catholic men lift their hats because statues are present in the Church. Then they concluded that the Catholics ought to do so when they see statues in a shop window.
Protestants will ask if the use of statues is all right, why did the Catholic Church cut out the second commandment?
Protestants are asking an impossible question. They might as well ask me, “Why has Australia declared war on the U. S.?” No man could answer that question, because there is no answer to it. I could only reply, “Tell me first, are you under the impression that Australia has declared war on the U. S.?” And if the Protestant replied in the affirmative, I would proceed to correct the Protestant’s notions. Had the Protestant but asked me, “Did the Catholic Church cut out the second commandment?” a reply could have been given at once. The true Catholic Church certainly did not do so.
The Protestant Bible gives the second commandment as referring to images. But the Catholic Catechism gives it as referring to taking the name of God in vain, omitting the references to images.
Even the Protestant Bible does not give the second commandment as referring to images, though Protestants are usually erroneously taught that those words in the first commandment which refer to images constitute a second commandment.
The Roman Church omits the second commandment and then breaks
up the tenth into two, in order to avoid having only nine.
The reverse is the case. Protestants make the first commandment into two, and then, to escape having eleven, turn the ninth and tenth into one! The first commandment, as given in the Bible, is as follows: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt not have strange Gods before me. Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven
above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them. I am the Lord thy God, etc.” Exodus, XX., 1-6.
Protestant will say that the (true, pre-1958) Catholic Church is deceiving us. That is not what Catholics are taught. Some Protestants say they have a Catholic Catechism which gives the first commandment as “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before me.” They say the Catholic Church cut out the reference to images.
In the first place, if we wished to deceive our people, we would be very foolish to give them the full wording of the commandment in the Douay (NT in English: 1568 A.D.)-Rheims (OT in English;1609 A.D.) Version of the Bible, where they could detect the deliberate distortion! In the second place, in the Catechism we give the full substantial sense of the words I have quoted, but in a brief and summarized form which can be easily memorized.
Protestants also say Catholics deny that the (true) Catholic Church has changed the commandment
I do. Protestants saying that notice words only, paying little or no attention to the legal substance of those words. To simplify the wording whilst retaining the full sense is certainly not to change the commandment. If the Protestant says, “He is under an obligation not to give expression to his thoughts at the present moment,” I do not change the substance of what you say if I repeat to some small child, “He must not speak now.” The first commandment contains within its involved Hebrew amplification two essential points: that we must acknowledge the true God, and that we must avoid false gods. Those two essential points are put briefly and simply in the Catechism for children who are more at home with short and easy sentences.
The commandments do not require such alteration.
The commandments do not. But the hopeless tangle most Protestants get into where this first commandment is concerned shows clearly that it needs to be stated precisely, without any substantial alteration. It is not a question of words, but it is a question of law, and Catholic children at least know and can clearly state the law.
Protestants say Catholics are violating the text of Scripture, and that the reference to images is a separate verse.
The numbering of the verses affords no argument. There was no numerical distinction of verses in the original Scriptures. Nor did God reveal such distinctions. All who are acquainted with the subject know that Scripture was divided into verses by men some centuries after Christ for greater convenience. The method of dividing the Commandments, however, is not of very great importance. The complaints of Protestants against the Catholic division are rather like that of some modern daughter who would want to spell her name SMYTH, and who complains that her mother spells it SMITH. But the mother knows best how it should be written, and the mother Church knows best how the commandments should be numbered, and only she has the authority from Christ to do so.
On MARY
Protestants accuse Catholics of having dogmas concerning their “goddess Mary.”
It would be mortal sin for any Catholic to regard Mary as a goddess. If a Catholic expressed such a belief to a valid, faithful Priest (none available today) in confession he would be refused absolution unless he promised to renounce such an absurd idea. If any Protestant wishes to attack true Catholic doctrine, he should at least find out what true Catholics do believe before he attempts to begin.
Protestants say that if Catholics call her Queen of Heaven, are they not doing her an injustice in refusing to her the title of goddess?
It would be the greatest possible injustice to regard her as a goddess. It is just to honor her even as God has honored her, which we Catholics do. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords, and His mother certainly possesses queenly dignity, holding the highest place in Heaven next to her Divine Son. But that does not, and cannot change her finite and created human nature. To regard her as a goddess would be absurd.
Protestants say Catholics insist that she is the Mother of God!
Jesus Christ is true God and true man, and as He was born of Mary she is truly the Mother of God. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was born of her according to the humanity He derived from her. She is not a goddess, for God did not take His Divine Being from her. But she is the Mother of God since the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was truly born of her in His human nature.
Protestants question how could Mary be the mother of the One who created her?
Mary owed her being, of course, to God, but this under the aspect of His eternal Nature. Subsequent to her creation that human nature was born of her which the Son of God had assumed to Himself. She was, therefore, the mother of Christ. But Christ was one Divine Person existing in two natures, one eternal and divine; the other temporal and human. Mary necessarily gave birth to a being with one Personality and that Divine, and she is
rightly called the Mother of God.
Protestants say the Catholic Church insists also upon the biologically impossible dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary herself
The dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary has nothing to do with biology. It does not mean that she was conceived miraculously in the physical sense. She was normally conceived and born of the parents, Joachim and Ann. But in her very conception, her soul was preserved immaculate in the sense that she inherited no stain of original sin, derived from our first parents. Thus, she was born without concupiscence (i. e., the proclivity of man’s fallen nature to sin as a result of Eve’s first sin.)
Protestants say the according to Catholic doctrine the Sacrament of Baptism destroys original sin. Then they ask if Mary did not need Baptism.
Mary did not need Baptism in so far as that Sacrament was instituted for the destruction of original sin. She received that Sacrament in order to participate in its other effects, and chiefly in order to receive the Christian character which that Sacrament impresses upon the soul.
Protestants say if Mary was sinless, she could not have needed redemption! Yet is not Christ the Redeemer of every child of Adam?
In so far as the sin of Adam involved the whole human race in condemnation, Mary needed redeeming. But there are two ways of redeeming. God could allow one to be born in sin and then purify the soul by subsequent application of the merits of Christ, or He could, by an anticipation of the merits of Christ, exempt a soul from any actual contraction of original sin. Thus He exempted Mary from any actual inheritance of the sin, and she owes her exemption to the anticipated merits of Christ. In other words, she was redeemed by Christ by prevention rather than by subsequent purification.
Is there any evidence in Scripture that Mary was indeed never actually subject to original sin?
Yes. In Gen. III., 15, God said to Satan, “I will put enmities between thee and the woman … thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” The radical enmity between Satan and that second Eve, the Mother of Christ, forbids her having been under the dominion of Satan, as she would have been had she ever contracted original sin in actual fact In Lk. I., 28, we read how the Angel was sent by God to salute Mary with the words, “Hail, full of grace.”
Grace excludes sin, and had there been any sin at all in Mary she could not have been declared to be filled with grace. The Protestant version translates the phrase as “thou that hast been highly favored.” But the Greek certainly implies “completely filled with holiness.” However, complaints that our doctrine exempts Mary from the contracting of
original sin is becoming more and more rare in a world which is tending to deny original sin altogether, and which wishes to exempt everybody from it.
Protestants say St. Paul says that One died for all, and therefore all were dead. II.Cor. V., 14.
Such texts must be interpreted in the light of other passages where God reveals that Mary was never under the dominion of Satan. Mary is included in these words of St. Paul juridically in so far as she was born of Adam, but she was not allowed to be born in sin to be afterward’s redeemed. She was redeemed by prevention.
Protestants say St. John knew the Mother of Christ better than the others, yet he does not mention her Immaculate Conception!
In Rev. XII he shows clearly his knowledge of the deadly opposition between Mary and Satan. His Gospel he wrote to supplement the Synoptic accounts, and sufficient details had been given concerning Mary herself by St Luke. Omission to mention a fact in a given book is not proof that the writer did not know of it, and above all, if it does not fall within the scope of his work.
Did the early Church know anything of this doctrine?
St. Augustine (354-430), in the 4th century, wrote, “When it is a matter of sin we must except the holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom I will have no question raised, owing to the honor due to Our Lord.” St. Ephrem, also in the 4th century, taught very clearly the Immaculate Conception of Mary, likening her to Eve before the fall. The Oriental churches celebrated the feast of the Immaculate Conception as early as the 7th century. When Pope Pius IX. defined the Catholic doctrine in 1854 he gave, not a new truth to be added to Christian teaching, but merely defined that this doctrine was part of Christian teaching from the very beginning and that it is to be believed by all as part of Christian revelation.
Protestants say the infallible Church allowed St. Bernard to remain in ignorance of this doctrine.
Since the Church had not then given any infallible definition on the subject St. Bernard naturally could not be guided by it. St. Bernard believed that Mary was born free from sin, but he was puzzled as to the moment of her sanctification. He thought the probable explanation to be that she was conceived in sin, but purified as was St. John the Baptist prior to her actual birth. But he did not regard this opinion as part of his Faith. Meantime his error was immaterial prior to the final authentic decision of the infallible Church. St. Bernard believed all that God had taught and all that the Catholic Church had clearly set forth in her definitions prior to his time.
Protestants say St. Thomas Aquinas denied the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception
His opinion was probably much the same as that of St. Bernard. Before the definite decision of the Church was given theologians were free to discuss the matter. But the Church has since defined that the soul of Mary was never subject for a single moment to the stain of original sin. Both St. Bernard and St. Thomas would have been very glad to have had the assistance of such a definition.
Protestants say the Church withheld that honor from Mary for so long a time.
Since Mary always possessed that honor, the Church did not withhold it from her. The definition that Mary did possess such an honor was given by the Church when necessity demanded it. There was no real dispute about this matter in the early Church. In the middle ages, theologians attempted a deeper analysis of the privileges of Mary and, with no infallible decision of the Church to help them, some theologians arrived at defective
conclusions chiefly because of the defective psychology of the times. Some theologians held that Mary was preserved from original sin from the very moment of her conception; others said from the moment of her animation; yet others that she was purified at a moment subsequent both to her conception and to her animation. All admitted that she was sanctified prior to her actual birth. Now that the Church has spoken there is no doubt on the subject.
Protestants say Franciscans and Dominicans attacked each other bitterly over the Immaculate Conception
They indulged in much controversy; many controversies, but it was a free matter for discussion until the Church had given her definite ruling. The Catholic Church demands unity in doctrines which have been definitely decided, liberty in matters still undecided, and charity always. I admit that her ideals of charity have not always been maintained by her wayward children in theological controversies, but that is no fault of the Church.
Protestants say Philip III and Philip IV had asked Popes Paul V (r.1605-1621,) Gregory V (r. 996-999: first German Pope,) and Alexander VII (r. 1655-1667) to define the Immaculate Conception in order to stop the wrangling, and that the Popes replied that the doctrine was not definable as not being in Scripture
The Popes have never given such a decision. Paul V in 1617 forbade anyone to teach publicly that Mary was not immaculate. Gregory V in 1622 ordered the discussion to stop until the Church should have given an official decision. Alexander VII said that the Immaculate Conception of Mary was the common doctrine of the Church and that no one must deny it. None of these Popes gave a dogmatic definition, but rather a disciplinary ruling. Pope Pius IX (r.1846-1878: longest reigning Pope) defined the doctrine finally in 1854. Protestants say calling Mary a virgin, seeing that she was a mother, is the linking of the two terms that insult reason. The assertion that an omnipotent God is limited by the natural laws, which He Himself established, is an insult to reason. Jesus, the child of Mary, was conceived miraculously without the intervention of any human father and was born miraculously. Jesus did not pass through the birth canal but was miraculously in an instant made present to Mary without any birthing pain. [Read St. Bridget of Sweden’s account of the apparition of Mary to her during which she revealed the details of the pregnancy and birth.] Mary’s virginity was preserved throughout her entire life. I do not claim that any natural laws were responsible for this event. I claim that God was responsible, and the only way you can show that the doctrine is not reasonable is by proving that there is no God, or that He could not do what Catholic doctrine asserts.
Protestants question where it says in Scripture that Mary was ever a virgin.
Isaiah the prophet (VII., 14) certainly predicted a supernatural and extraordinary birth of the Messiah when he wrote, “The Lord Himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” St. Luke says, “The angel Gabriel was sent from God … to a virgin . . . and the virgin’s name was Mary.” When Mary was offered the dignity of becoming the mother of the Messiah, a privilege to which any Jewish maiden would ordinarily look forward with eager desire, she urged against the prospect the fact that she had no intention of motherhood. “How shall this be done, because I know not man.” She does not refer to the past, but by using the present tense indicates her present and persevering intention. The angel assured her that her child would be due to the miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit and that she would not be asked to forfeit the virginity she prized so highly, and then only did she consent. Luke I., 26-38. When Jesus was born Mary had none of the suffering usually associated with childbirth. The child was born miraculously, Mary herself in no way incapacitated. She herself attended to her own needs and those of the child. “She brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.” Lk. II., 7.
Some Protestants suggest that Mary, in order to cloak her own sin, persuaded St. Joseph that her child was of the Holy Ghost.
No. That is absolutely false. Mary, saluted by an angel as full of grace, was the purest and holiest woman who ever lived on this earth. And, as a matter of fact, with sublime confidence in God, Mary refrained from explaining the event to St Joseph, leaving all to God. As St. Matthew tells us, “Behold the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is
conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.'” I., 20. What some Protestants suggest has been said by certain people merely because the Catholic Church honors Mary. Their hatred of the Catholic Church is so great that they dislike all she loves, and are willing to overlook any injury to Christ in fostering their hatred. Yet how can they hope to please Christ by
dishonoring His mother? Every true child bitterly resents disrespect to his mother, and Christ was the best son who ever lived. The more we honor Mary the more we honor Christ, for the honor we show her is because of Christ, If He were not the central figure, Mary would have been forgotten long ago.
Protestants ask that if Jesus was born of a virgin, why does He say nothing about it?
We do not know that He said nothing about it. The evangelists do not record any special utterances of Christ on this subject, but they do not pretend to record all that He ever said. St Luke tells us that when He met the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures, the things that were concerning him.” XXIV., 27. There is every probability that He explained His advent into this world according to the prophecy of Isaiah. Meantime the Gospels do
record the fact that Mary was a virgin, and their words are as reliable in this as when they record the utterances of Christ.
Protestants say that, in proving the Davidic descent, Matthew and Luke’s giving of the genealogy of Joseph would be useless were not Joseph the father of Christ.
The genealogy of Joseph was that of Mary also. They were kinspeople of the same Davidic stock. The Jews as a rule, counted their generations only in the male line, and such a generation alone would appeal to the Jews for whom Matthew above all wrote. The same St. Matthew records that the angel told Joseph that the child was conceived miraculously by the Holy Ghost and not through the intervention of man. St. Luke in turn, left no doubt as to his mind on the subject when he carefully wrote that “Jesus himself was beginning about the age of thirty years; being (as it was supposed) the son of Joseph.” III., 23.
Protestants say that St. Matthew says that Joseph knew her not till she brought forth her first-born son. I., 25.
Nor did he. And the expression “till” in Hebrew usage has no necessary reference to the future. Thus in Gen. VIII., 7, we read that “the dove went forth from the ark and did not return till the waters dried up.” That expression does not suggest that it returned then. It did not return at all, having found resting places. Nor does the expression first-born child imply that there were other children afterward. Thus Exodus says, “Every first-born shall be sanctified unto God.” Parents had not to wait to see if other children were born before they could call the first their first-born! 781. Matt. XIII, 55-56, says, “His brethren James and Joseph, and Simon and Judes and His sisters, are they not all with us?” The Jewish expression “brothers and sisters of the Lord” in Scripture merely refers to a relationship in the same tribe or stock. Cousins often came under that title. In all nations, the word brother has a wide significance, as when one Mason will call another a brother-mason without suggesting that he was born of the same mother. The same St. Matthew speaks explicitly of “Mary, the mother of James and Joseph” in XXVII., 56, obviously alluding to a Mary who was not the mother of Jesus but who was married to Cleophas, the brother of Joseph.
Protestants point out Matt. XIII, 55-56 says, “His brethren James and Joseph, and Simon and Judes and His sisters, are they not all with us?” to cast aspersion upon the Ever-Virgin Mary.
This common Protestant error manifests their obstinate, contumacious ignorance and pertinacious malice towards the Mary, Mother of God throughout the last five centuries. Therefore, it bears repeating what has explained above, that the Jewish expression “brothers and sisters of the Lord” in Scripture merely refers to a relationship in the same tribe or stock. Cousins often came under that title. In all nations, the word brother has a
wide significance, as when one Mason will call another as a brother-mason without suggesting that he was born of the same mother. The same St. Matthew speaks explicitly of “Mary, the mother of James and Joseph” in XXVII., 56, obviously alluding to a Mary who was not the mother of Jesus but who was married to Cleophas, the brother of Joseph.
Protestants say there would not be two girls in the one family called Mary.
There certainly could be. And St. John, XIX., 25, writes that there stood by the cross of Jesus “His mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas.” But even here, Mary of Cleophas need not have been a sister in the first degree of blood relationship, but rather of the same lineage in more remote degrees of either consanguinity or affinity. Why are Protestants, who believe in Scripture, so convinced that Mary had other children? They are not inspired by love for Christ, or for the mother of Christ, or for Scripture in their doctrine. Their main desire is to maintain a doctrine differing from that of the Catholic Church. But it is a position, which is rapidly going out of fashion. Learned Protestant scholars today deny as emphatically as any true Catholic that Mary had other children. When Our Lord, dying on the cross, commended His mother to the care of St. John, He did so precisely because He was her only child, and He knew that Mary had no other children to care for her. The idea that Mary had other children is disrespectful to the Holy Spirit who claimed and sanctified her as His sanctuary. It insults Christ, who was the only begotten of His mother even as He was the only-begotten of His Heavenly Father. It insults Mary, who would have been guilty of great ingratitude to God if she threw away the gift of virginity, which God had so carefully preserved for her in the conception of Christ. It insults St. Joseph. God had told him by an angel to take Mary to wife, and that the child to be born of her had no earthly father but was the very Son of God. God merely gave St. Joseph the privilege of protecting her good name amongst the un-discerning Jews, and He chose a God-fearing man who would respect her. Knowing that her child was God Himself in human form, Joseph would at once regard her as on a plane far superior to that of any ordinary human being, and to him, as to us, the mere thought of her becoming a mother to merely earthly children would have seemed a sacrilege.
Protestants will say Catholics urge these privileges granted to Mary as the foundation of Catholic devotion to her, yet Christ said, “Rather blessed are they who hear the word of
God and keep it.”
Would anyone presume to say that Mary, whom the angel addressed as full of grace, did not hear the Word of God and keep it? Protestants have missed the sense of the passage to which they allude. In Luke XI, 27, a woman praised the one who had the honor to be the mother of Christ. Christ did not for a moment deny it, as you would like to believe. The sense of His words is simply, “Yes, she is blessed. But better to hear God’s word and keep it, and thus attain holiness, than to be My mother. You cannot all imitate Mary by being My mother; but you can do so by hearing God’s word and keeping it.” The thought that those who hear God’s word and keep it are rather blessed than Mary because she did not is simply absurd. “Henceforth,” declared Mary prophetically, “all generations shall call me blessed.” Lk. I, 48. And Elizabeth saluted her with the words, “Blessed art thou among women.” Lk. I, 42.
Protestants question how do Catholics prove Mary’s bodily assumption into Heaven?
No Christian could dispute the fact that Mary’s soul is in Heaven. Christ certainly did not suffer the soul of His own mother to be lost. The doctrine of her bodily assumption after her death is not contained in Scripture but is guaranteed by the first two of the three sources of Revelation being 1)Tradition protected by the Holy Ghost and by the 2)Teaching Authority of the Infallible Catholic Church, both of which served to start the
Church and both of which precede the existence of 3) the New Testament.
St. Augustine said he would not believe the Bible were it not for the fact that the Church declared it is true. That Scripture omits to record a fact is no argument against it. Omission is not denial. Meantime early traditions positively record the fact of the Assumption. And while the mortal remains of a St. Peter and of a St. Paul are jealously possessed and honored in Rome, no city or Christian center has ever claimed to possess the mortal remains of Our Lady. Certainly, relics of Our Lady would be regarded as having greater value than those of any Saint or Apostle, so nearly was she related to Christ. And it was most fitting that the body of Mary, who had been preserved even from the taint of original sin, should not have been allowed to corrupt. After all, it was just as easy for God to take her glorified body to Heaven at once as it will be to take the glorified bodies of all the saved at the last day. However, the definite sanction of this doctrine by the infallible Catholic Church is sufficient assurance of the fact. It is a de fide requirement since 1854 in order to be a true Catholic.
End of Part 1 of 2
Almost every aspect of our lives requires permission.
Our money is dispensed through centralized services like banks or Paypal.
Our electricity is controlled by centralized power companies.
Our internet connections are run through the most hated companies (if you’re in America, at least).
Our web pages are filtered by Google.
Our passwords are dependent upon the websites accepting them.
Most of the time, it all seems to be working well enough.
That is, until Paypal shuts down your ability to receive payments online, or your bank closes your account, or the Fed’s funny munny policies bludgeons your savings account into debt-fueled submission.
Or your domain is seized by a faceless bureaucracy…
Or Google ranks your website low because a few employees were triggered by a savior complex.
Or a few opaque algorithms are executed out of a need to lift dull corporate propaganda above your content because their biz model is flawed (and, worse, dishonest).
Or you spend years building a massive following on Youtube, helping the platform become the behemoth it currently is, only to be de-platformed and demonetized because you failed to abide by the wishy-washy guidelines.
Even Amazon has blacklisted self-published authors from using their services and without a word of explanation.
That’s their prerogative, sure.
But it’s a bad long-term strategy.
And all of these examples reveal the need for decentralization in an increasingly complex and polarized world.
The Dumbing Down of Righteousness
We aren’t naive enough to blame the companies themselves.
Centralized companies who use the hammer of censorship arbitrarily are kowtowing to mass-mindedness a mob mentality that can only possibly see the world in the lowest resolution possible.
The kind of mentality that arrogantly thinks the emotional center to which it desperately latches onto is the center of gravity around which everything else must revolve.
Anything that does not resonate in such a grandiose solar system, then, should be eradicated from existence as it is clearly against the laws of physics.
This is the problem with “movements” in general. They allow people who have plenty of personal demons to deal with (and don’t we all?) to project those demons onto their neighbors and instead attempt to slay them there.
And, worse, it eradicates any chance for individual ingenuity.
As Stephan Hoeller writes in his book, Freedom, the mass-minded individual “takes to collective and political movements wherein their already precarious and puny individuality dwindles to minuscule proportions. Imitation, dependence, lack of personal judgment, a lowering of the mental level are the inevitable accompaniment of the submerging of the individual in a mass movement.”
Psychologist Carl Jung once said that any movement, even if composed of wholly admirable persons, has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, violent animal and the bigger the movement, the more unavoidable its blindness and stupidity.
The Romans had a saying along this vein: Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri.
Translation: “The senate is a monster, but the senators are good men.”
The mob-mentality often demands that society “society,” according to the mob, being some self-existing entity, having a life and meaning apart from its members take care of all the dirty, slimy, uncomfortable stuff, smooth out the edges of life, and abdicate individual responsibility in every respect (im)possible.
Jung put it this way in Psychology and Alchemy:
“It is so much easier to preach the universal panacea to everybody else than to take it oneself and, as we all know, things are never so bad when everybody is in the same boat. No doubts can exist in the herd; the bigger the crowds the better the truth and the greater the catastrophe.”
Mass-mindedness is behind the great regression into infantilization.
You don’t have to look far to see examples of the mass-mind at work. Just this past week:
The UK has decided to ban any commercial which might portray “harmful gender stereotypes.”
(Translation: We decide what define men, women, and everything in between, not you, or the individuals who buy your products.)
Texas wants to make suggestive jokes illegal.
Simon Black of Sovereign Man reports the following.
“The Texas state legislature has passed two bills which would define ‘harassment’ on campus as ‘unwelcome, sex-based’ words. Hearing anything that makes you feel even slightly uncomfortable would be considered sexual harassment.
“The legislation allows university professors to be fired or imprisoned for failing to report any instance of harassment that falls under this loose definition.”
(Translation: Hey, kids. Don’t like the grade your professor gave you? Well, boy do I have a solution for you.]
Frogs and the “OK” symbol are symbols of “hate”
A leaked internal memo from Facebook has identified a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand symbol a bannable offense — as they are, of course, “hate symbols.”
What started as a joke by 14 year-olds on 4chan is now a punishable offense by our social media gods.
(Translation: Yes, sure, let’s trust Facebook with our financial lives.)
Emotionally Stunted Madness
Those who cheer the banning of “hate speech” (AKA, anything that makes one feel uncomfortable or the need to feel morally superior).
Are also the same types who would’ve in the past ironically enough, given our modern moral pulpit’s (apparent) distaste for religious dogma shunned people out of society for blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy.
Today’s secular church doesn’t care what you look like so long as you become a sounding board for its 3,333 ever-shifting commandments.
If not?
The digital mob will try to alienate you from society by doxxing you, harassing your employer or via public humiliation.
No matter how you shake it, this isn’t a very good long-term strategy, either.
There’s a long-held axiom of war that goes something like this:
The weapons I use on my enemy today will be used on me with equal or increased intensity tomorrow.
The thing I’m most excited about is the “blockchain revolution”:
The potential to make freedom a moot point. Not because I want people to be able to spew vile, emotionally-stunted ignorance, but rather because I want to live in a society that’s strong enough and emotionally mature enough to be able to handle such conflict in a responsible and adult-like way.
I look forward to a society where the individual owns his or her own emotional stuff and realizes the difference between psychological projection and actual conflict.
And furthermore understands how to resolve either of them in such a way that not only is the tension of the polar opposites resolved and not left to fester until it explodes.
But perhaps a transcendent third emerges out of the ashes of the conflict and a new way of seeing the world and the “other” is breathed into life.
Few are truly naive enough to think we can just sweep conflict under the rug (by banning it) and it’ll disappear. That if we close our eyes tightly enough the baddies will go away.
I don’t think we need less conflict. One of the main causes of polarization is people are opting out of conflict, opting for fake, superficial, posturing forms of conflict. I think we need more conflict. But the healthy stuff.
The raw, heavy, sweaty, inescapable, cathartic conflict.
Where truths come to light and are sat with and digested.
This will mean, of course, sometimes, things we don’t like could very well rise to the top.
But rather than repressing, suppressing, or depressing– responses that, psychologically speaking, only serve to turn ideas into fixations, obsessions, and ideological possessions (AKA demons) — the mature society would face it and see it for what it is: part and parcel of the human condition…
Society’s devils and demons are born by following the instinct to avoid and isolate the things that trouble us — by not facing them head-on.
Without facing them head-on, however, true progress is impossible.
We’re only left celebrating faux, superficial progress.
Progress that lacks any soul or wisdom.
Progress that lacks any wholeness, richness, or depth.
Only freedom — especially the freedom to bring the festering darkness into the light will offer us such an opportunity.
When freedom as an inalienable right becomes a moot point, that’s when the real work will begin. Until then, we’ll invest our time and energy in continuing to plant the seeds of it, for those of us willing to put the time and energy into it that is.
After watching anti-gunners spout off ridiculous suggestions as methods to reduce gun violence, it’s easy to think that you’ve finally heard it all and that it’s just a matter of getting it through those people’s thick heads why gun control never improves the situation.
But, then, something surprises you.
Take a recent opinion piece written by this BITCH Juliette Kayyem, an assistant secretary of homeland security during the Obama administration. On June 1, 2019, Kayyem wrote,
WHAT ENDS LIVES? GUNFIRE.
WHAT SAVES LIVES? THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE.
THE ASSAILANT USED A .45-CALIBER HANDGUN WITH EXTENDED MAGAZINES AND A BARREL SUPPRESSOR. THIS SMALL DETAIL — THAT THE LOADED GUN WAS FITTED WITH SIMPLE, AND LAWFUL, “SILENCING” EQUIPMENT — THREATENS TO UPEND HOW WE UNDERSTAND AND TRAIN FOR ACTIVE-SHOOTER CASES IN THE FUTURE.
Kayyem goes on to say other things which simply aren’t true, such as implying that semiautomatic firearms are multi-shot weapons (for those of you who are unfamiliar with types of firearms, they aren’t the same. Semiautomatic weapons only fire One. Shot. At. A. Time.).
But the most glaring issue with this BITCH’S op-ed piece is what she doesn’t talk about which really would have saved lives: the 2019 Virginia Beach shooting took place in gun free zones. I’ve already posted that issue several times now.
So, by claiming that the real way to prevent gun violence deaths is by having louder guns (or banning silencers), which ignores the surprise shootings like drive-by shootings, etc., Kayyem is completely ignoring reality, and that reality is that law-abiding gun owners with their firearms on them (and can, thus, shoot back) are what stop mass shootings. We’ve seen it over and over and over again.
The good guy with a gun is the solution to gun violence.
Can it completely stop gun violence? No. Nothing can because one simply cannot predict when a person with evil intent will use that intent and ingenuity to get a gun and kill someone, but a good guy with a gun can make sure that the evil person doesn’t get to take a second shot and a second chance to kill someone else. BAM. BINGO. PIZZAM!
That’s the reality, and I’ll take it over anti-gunners’ illusions of safety that leaves us all as sitting ducks in a country-wide gun free zone.
The Old Guard is Dying.
The old world is dying.
Talk to anyone from any political, cultural, “ist,” or “ism,” and, no matter where you sit, 99% of them will agree with you on one thing:
It’s time for a new paradigm.
A new way of relating, behaving, experiencing, and seeing the world and our place within it.
A paradigm that’s, perhaps, entirely unlike the past…
A Copernican Revolution 2.0.
Lest we dishonor the dead and destroy ourselves and everything that’s been built.
Or we suffer the destructive doldrums of endless revolutionary circling’s on the merry-go-round of history.
The Spork in the Road so to speak.
More than any time in history, we live in a time where it’s possible to break free from the failures of the past.
And yet, on the flip-side, more than any time in history, we also live in a time where it’s possible for us to sink deep into an inescapable tyrannical hell-scape…
One that blasts past the limits of even the wildest of imaginations of what it would mean to live a truly miserable existence.
The individual now possesses powerful tools to level the playing field, levers with which to move the entire world with the press of a button.
And the state also has access to such powerful tools and pushes them onto its “subjects” without consent, or, oftentimes, even our awareness.
Which is why…
It’s long been our beat that the real battle isn’t the old and tired tiffs between nations over geopolitical power.
Rather, the real battle, as Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg put it, is “a conflict between decentralization and centralization, between freedom and top down CONTROL.”
Specifically, it’s a conflict between voluntary choice and age-old force.
It’s a battle between sovereignty as individuals or (once again) the individual’s coerced subservience to the jackbooted institution, the gilded throne, or the impulsive, un-reflective stupidity of mob mentality.
The many advocates for top-down control by force, as “well-meaning” as they might be, have an emotional attachment to the Old Guard — a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts — seeing little by way of possibilities outside of the tiny box of arbitrary, elitist social engineering.
Thing is…
It’s not exactly a failure of those who refer to themselves as our leaders…
These are always in flux.
Rather, it’s a failure of individual self-awareness… and a desperate lack of recognition of our true nature as human beings.
You Have an Inherent Nature
All throughout history, the social engineers, central planners, and builders of societies have always assumed human beings don’t have a specific nature.
We are, they have always believed, infinitely plastic, amorphous blobs, clean slates to which not only can be molded… but should be molded to suit the grand plans of the new, hot, utopian vision.
Human beings have always been told they must devote their lives to the State, to God, or the “common good,” as defined by those who sit on the high and mighty perches of society.
In this distorted reality tunnel, the human being is little more than a sacrificial animal, born to serve the dictates of those who deem themselves superior to the unwashed masses…
A draft mule for those who look down the bridges of their noses at the human creatures and see only swarming throngs of vermin, packs of parasites, a collectively clustered cancer on the world.
This isn’t (entirely) because all central planners and their glazed-eyed zealots are (mis)guided by resentment, envy, pride, lust, greed, gluttony, and, more recently, Karl Marx.
But because we as individuals do not know ourselves enough to realize that we do, indeed, have a specific nature… and this nature requires a specific type of society for proper and healthy functioning.
We are not (entirely) unlike the rats in the Rat Park Experiment — put us in an environment which goes against our nature and all we want to do is consume cocaine all day.
We will adapt to the environment, sure.
But only enough to survive… hardly will you see us thrive.
Place us in an environment suited to our mental, physical, and spiritual needs, however, and — boom — the water bowl of cocaine will be there, but it will sit untouched, unnoticed, and unwanted.
The abject failure of the current order, big picture, is a failing not of the culture, government, economy, or biology — but of individual self-awareness.
We can’t demand for ourselves that which we have not taken the time to understand — which is, of course, ourselves.
If we did understand, after all, we would simply stop participating in those things which do us harm…
We would stop trodding down the unsustainable path with the rest of the lemmings… until there are no lemmings left for the blood-and-guts-stained pit beyond the cliff.
So, with little self-awareness as to who we truly are, we, too, assume we can be molded for the Perfect Society.
As we beg and plead, with our sticks and our placards and our witty slogans, for the busybodies to do what they must, at all costs, to make us whole.
If we are to have a happy, healthy society, it must be harmonious with the requirements of this inherent nature.
And, ultimately, if we can whittle this nature down to its barest of bones, the closest we can come to touching it is this:
To the extent that an individual is not free to live his or her life peacefully…
According to his or her own standards…
To make good, life-affirming, generative choices and be rewarded for them and then, as a result, to feel good and in harmony with life…
And to make bad, life-negating, degenerative choices and be punished for them and then, as a result, to suffer and fully feel at dis-ease with life…
To think, feel, intuit, sense, and act freely in accordance to one’s own individual nature, in pursuit of reaching one’s full potential and maturation…
And to fully own what one honestly earns by the sweat of one’s own brow…
Unless these things are not in place…
Try as one might to convince oneself otherwise…
Such an individual is still a slave.
But not a slave to a master… not a slave to some tyrant in some large building who signs his name willy-nilly on piles of papers.
Rather, a slave to one’s own ignorance about who he or she truly is as an individual with an inherent nature…
And how to live in accordance with that nature, so that the proverbial cocaine is forgotten because, of course, we have much better things to do — despite cocaine not only being permitted, but even freely given.
We Are Already Free
It’s no small feat to recognize that freedom is not something granted to the individual from somewhere up above.
But something for which it requires the individual to consciously accept responsibility.
And to own completely his or her own massive power as a free individual.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” author Marianne Willliamson writes. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
Because the REAL truth is…
We are already slaves being contained from freedom.
And nothing, not even tyranny, is more gut-wrenchingly horrifying than that.
THE STATEMENT BELOW BASICALLY SUMMARIZES AND REFLECTS THE RESULTS OF FORCED COOPERATION BY A ‘QUORUM’ OF SHAREHOLDERS IN 2018 FOR GUN MAKERS RUGER AND SMITH & WESSON BRANDS TO PRODUCE REPORTS ON VIOLENCE, RESEARCH AND MONITORING, THEREBY REFLECTING THE FOLLOWING RESULTS IN THEIR REPORT OF 2/18/2019.
The criminal misuse of firearms is a complex societal issue, resistant to solution through more laws or new technologies. We respectfully disagree with those who seek to blame firearms themselves – and by extension firearms manufacturers – for the violent actions of criminals. We believe that most Americans cherish their Second Amendment rights and desire better efforts to control criminal violence, not more laws that abridge the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Similarly, we do not believe that consumers are interested in buying expensive, technology-laden firearms with questionable durability and reliability.
The long-term viability of Ruger and its attractiveness as an investment to shareholders depends most critically on listening to and serving the interests of consumers. One need not delve very deeply into the history of our industry to find examples of companies that opted for a politically expedient course of action, only to discover that they so offended their core customers that they were barely able to survive. At Ruger, we strive to learn from the mistakes of others rather than condemn ourselves, and therefore our shareholders, to repeat them.
BAM. BAM AGAIN!
*See other Peter Strzok blog on this piece of shit scumbag.
The FBI did not warn the Trump campaign that two members of its campaign were under FBI investigation when agents met with the campaign in August 2016 to warn it about national security threats.
Lindsey Graham Quotes Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok: ‘Trump Is A F**king Idiot’
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge reports that the FBI’s mid-August 2016 counterintelligence “defensive briefing” for the Trump campaign did not notify campaign officials that Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos were under investigation. Fox News reports:
Strzok, who was later removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team for sending anti-Trump texts, was a central coordinator for the FBI on the defensive briefing, which included multiple agencies. Three weeks earlier, Strzok opened an FBI counterintelligence investigation into campaign aide George Papadopoulos.
A source familiar with sensitive records documenting the August briefing told Fox News that Strzok was in a unique — and apparently conflicted — position. Strzok opened the FBI investigation into Russian outreach to Trump campaign aides, while at the same time he was supposed to be warning the Trump campaign about Russian activities.
During a segment on Fox News, Herridge noted that the time of the events is significant as days before the briefing Strzok and Page spoke about their “insurance policy” against then-candidate Donald Trump.
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whom he was having an affair with.”It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
After that text message was released last summer, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro wrote:
This looks an awful lot like motivation for launching an investigation into Trump in order to sink Trump as a hedge against Trump’s victory. The FBI’s investigation into Russian governmental interference in the election began in July 2016, just weeks before Strzok’s text message. And that means that there is now more of a smoking gun of FBI corruption against Trump than there is of Trump colluding with Russia.
Herridge further notes that just a couple of days before the infamous “insurance policy” text message, the two anti-Trump agents had the following text message exchange:
Page: [Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!
Strzok: No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.
When that text message was released last summer, Shapiro responded to it by writing:
This is an explicit admission that high-ranking actors in the FBI saw preventing Trump’s presidency as paramount. Barring some highly damning information demonstrating the full legitimacy of the Russia investigation, this text from Strzok to Page could and should completely destroy whatever faith that America still had in the legitimacy of the Russia investigation.
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Thursday:
There was a defensive briefing of candidate Trump on Aug. 17 of 2016. And I can tell you what he wasn’t told: He wasn’t warned about a Russia investigation that Peter Strzok had opened 18 days earlier.
Why would Peter Strzok, who would participate at Jim Comey’s direction in a defensive briefing designed to protect and warn a candidate, be the same person who is in fact at that time already investigating the candidate’s campaign? That shouldn’t happen. There should be answers to those questions.
fox files 
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