Bischop Vigano : "The globalist Leviathan that keeps us enslaved today is far worse than the enslavement of Babylon and King Nebuchadnezzar,..."
SUNDAY XX AFTER PENTECOST
October 15, 2023
Omnia quæ fecísti nobis, Dómine, in vero judício fecísti,
quia peccávimus tibi, et mandátis tuis non obedívimus:
sed da glóriam nómini tuo,
et fac nobíscum secúndum multitúdinem misericórdiæ tuæ.
Dan 3, 31, 29 et 35
In all that Thou hast done, O Lord, Thou hast acted with true righteousness, for we sinned against Thee and did not obey Thy commandments: but Thou givest glory to Thy name, and Thou actest toward us according to the immensity of Thy mercy. The words of the splendid Introit of this holy Mass, on the vigil Sunday after Pentecost, are taken from the Prophet Daniel. They refer to a historical fact: namely, when King Nebuchadnezzar summoned satraps, prefects, governors, councilors, treasurers, judges, quaestors and all the high authorities of the provinces to announce the building of a golden statue in Babylon. A crier of Nebuchadnezzar's announces: Peoples, nations and languages, to you is addressed this proclamation: When you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, harpsichord, psaltery, bagpipe, and all kinds of musical instruments, you shall prostrate yourselves and worship the golden statue, which King Nebuchadnezzar has caused to be erected. Whoever does not prostrate himself to the statue, at that same instant he shall be cast into the midst of a furnace of burning fire (Dan 3:4-6).
In the face of the obedience of all peoples, nations and languages, however, there are those who remain faithful to the true God, and they are denounced to the king: Now, there are some Jews, to whom you have entrusted the affairs of the province of Babylon, namely Sadrach, Meshach and Abdènego, who do not obey you, king: they do not serve your gods and do not worship the golden statue you have caused to be erected (Dan 3:12). Nebuchadnezzar summons the three Hebrew officials and orders them, under penalty of death, to worship the idol. And they answer him: King, we have no need to give you any answer in this matter; but know that our God, whom we serve, can deliver us from the furnace by burning fire and by your hand, O king. But even if he does not deliver us, know, O king, that we will never serve your gods or worship the golden statue you have erected (Dan 3:16-18). Angered at their response, the king has them thrown into a fiery furnace, which, however, kills with its flames the soldiers who had thrown them into it. Sadrach, Meshach and Abdènego, unharmed, walked through the flames, praised God and blessed the Lord (Dan 3:24). We find almost the same words in the Epistle: Implemini Spiritu Sancto, loquentes vobismetipsis in psalmis, et hymnis, et canticis spiritualibus, cantantes, et psallentes in cordibus vestris Domino (Eph 5:18-19). Be filled with the Holy Spirit, entertaining one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual canticles, singing and praising the Lord with all your heart.
It is at this point that Azariah intones the wonderful prayer alluded to in the Introit. I urge you to read it again in the third chapter of the Book of Daniel, from verse 26 to verse 45. It should be the prayer of each of us in these days of rebellion and darkness.
Ananias begins with act of faith and worship.
26Blessed are You, Lord God of our fathers;
Worthy of praise and glorious is your name forever.
27You are righteous in all that you have done;
all your works are true,
righteous your ways and just all your judgments.
He then moves on to a confession of his own faults and an awareness of just punishment:
28Right was your judgment
For what you have brought upon us
And on the holy city of our fathers, Jerusalem.
With truth and justice you have inflicted all this on us because of our sins,
29for we have sinned, we have acted unrighteously,
departing from you, we have failed in every way.
We have not obeyed your commandments,
30we have not kept them, we have not done
What you had commanded us for our good.
We have not done what you commanded us for our own good, Ananias acknowledges. And so do we, the chosen people of the New and Eternal Covenant, new Israel, new holy nation. We contemplate what has been brought upon us and upon the holy city of our fathers, Rome.
31Now how much you have brought upon us,
all that you have done to us, you have done with righteous judgment:
32You have given us into the power of our enemies, unjust, the worst of the ungodly,
and of an unjust king, the most wicked in all the earth.
The globalist Leviathan that keeps us enslaved today is far worse than the enslavement of Babylon and King Nebuchadnezzar, but it obeys the same Prince of this world who then inspired the construction of a golden statue for the peoples to worship, and who today erects the idols of the New World Order, woke ideology, gender madness, Pachamama, synodality and all the fetishes that the Psalmist summarizes in four icastic words: omnes dii gentium demonia, all pagan gods are demons (Ps. 95:5). For by worshipping nature or by worshipping oneself, one always worships Satan anyway, and one who worships Satan cannot worship God.
Azariah seems almost to appeal to the divine Majesty, to the Dominus Deus Sabaoth, to the Lord of the armies arrayed in order of battle, to indulge his prayers not by looking to the nonexistent merits of the one who formulates them nor to the multitude of his faults, but to the word given to Abraham and Isaac, and through them to the entire chosen people:
33Now we dare not open our mouths:
dishonor and contempt have befallen your servants, your worshipers.
34Do not forsake us to the end,
For your name's sake, do not break your covenant;
35withdraw not thy mercy from us, for Abraham's sake thy friend,
of Isaac thy servant, of Israel thy holy,
36to whom thou hast spoken, promising to multiply
their seed as the stars of heaven, as the sand on the seashore.
And how much our lineage, the lineage of Christ, had multiplied over the centuries when He reigned over the nations and in the Church! How many conversions, how many vocations, how many children born to Grace and brought up in the fear of God and observance of His Commandments! And then we too did not do what You commanded us for our own good (Dan 3:30). Let us, too, recall with longing our Zion, sitting in tears along the banks of the Tiber: Super flumina Babylonis illic sedimus, et flevimus: dum recordaremur tui, Zion (Ps 136:1), as we shall shortly sing in the Offertory.
Then comes the plea for help, with a list of misfortunes and disasters that seems to speak to the situation in which Holy Church finds itself today:
37Now, however, Lord,
we have become smaller than any other nation,
now we are humbled all over the earth because of our sins.
38Now we have no prince, no leader, no prophet, no holocaust,
nor sacrifice, nor oblation, nor incense,
nor place to present the firstfruits to you and find mercy.
Azariah speaks of prince, leader and prophet: in short, he denounces the latency of an authority that should be there but is as if suspended, held hostage or sold to enemies. He does not mention a total absence of faith in the people but highlights it in the leaders: this, too, should give us pause, for it is precisely in the betrayal of authority that the public sin that so offends the divine Majesty is consummated.
And here we come to the heart of the prayer, the self-offering, in which Christ's redeeming Sacrifice and the need for the members of His Mystical Body, the Church, to follow Him on the way of the Cross are prefigured:
39May we be received with contrite hearts and humbled spirits,
as holocausts of rams and bulls, as thousands of fat lambs!
40Such be our sacrifice before you today and be acceptable to you,
For there is no confusion for those who trust in you.
But we, unlike the Jewish people, have Who is received by the Father: et sic fiat sacrificium nostrum in conspectu tuo, ut placeat tibi, Domine Deus. These are the words the priest recites at the Offertory, before invoking the descent of the Holy Spirit on the sacrificium tuo sancto nomini præparatum. In the Holy Mass, which repeats in bloodless form the Sacrifice of the Cross, we have the assurance that we are heard, for on our behalf it is the Man-God, the High and Eternal Priest, the Mediator between God and men, Our Lord Jesus Christ who addresses the Eternal Father.
And just as Azaria says he is willing to immolate himself, the profession of Faith returns powerfully:
41Now we follow you with all our hearts, fear you and seek your face.
42Do with us according to your mercy, treat us according to your kindness,
according to the greatness of your mercy.
Echo of this prayer is also the Communio: Memento verbi tui servo tuo, Domine, in quo mihi spem dedisti: hæc me consolata est in humilitate mea (Ps 118:49-50). Remember your word spoken to your servant, O Lord, in which you gave me hope: it has been my comfort in humiliation.
Too often we forget that the Lord God is Father Almighty. Yet we recite this in the first article of the Creed. He is Father: he loves us and wants our good. He is Almighty: this Love is infinite, to the point of giving the life of His own Only Begotten Son for us; this Love is so infinite that He is God Himself, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit Paraclete. This Love that proceeds from the Father and the Son deploys the power of His arm, scatters the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; overthrows the mighty from their thrones, raises the humble. The Virgin's exultation in the canticle of the Magnificat echoes the irrepressible joy over a Justice that is truly just because it is divine; a Justice that restores the eternal and perfect order of the divine κόσμος, shattered by Satan's χάος. A Justice that knows how to be prodigious and miraculous precisely because it is unequivocal that it comes from God. Let us listen to Azariah:
43Save us by your wonders, give glory, Lord, to your name.
44Instead, let those who do evil to your servants be confounded,
be covered with shame with all their power;
and let their strength be broken!
45Let them know that you are the Lord, the only and glorious God over all the earth.
As St. Gregory the Great points out to us in today's Matins Lessons, in St. John's Gospel, the royal official imperfectly believes in Christ's thaumaturgic power, unlike the centurion (Mt. 8:5-13), whose faith in Christ's divinity does not demand that He be present in person to heal the servant. That is why the Lord rebukes him - If you do not see signs and wonders, you do not believe (Jn 4:48) - while granting the official what he asks for, so that he may truly believe. Instead, the three children in the furnace believe, and the Babylonian king even believes, before the signs and wonders.
And as the bellows of the tormentors increased the flames, the angel of the Lord, who had descended with Azariah and his companions into the furnace, drove the flame of the fire away from them and made the inside of the furnace like a place where a dew-filled wind blew. So the fire did not touch them at all, nor did it do them any harm, nor did it give them any molestation (Dan 3:49-50).
At this point Ananias, Azariah and Mysaele intone their song of praise, the Song of the Three Little Boys, which is part of the Sunday Lauds Office. When we recite the Breviary - for those who are held to it or do it out of devotion - we should think that those words on the lips of the three boys - tres pueri - are uttered in the flames, where they remain unharmed because of their Faith and - let's face it, for once - their unwillingness to dialogue, their "rigidity," their "building walls." For it is not to love one's neighbor to let him lose his soul for eternity; nor is it to love God to take away from Him those souls for whom He shed His own Precious Blood.
We too should repeat Azariah's prayer more often, as a hostile world and a no less hostile Hierarchy blow on the embers of this hellish furnace that is the apostate West of the New World Order, so that our lot may be a warning to others. Videte quomodo caute ambuletis: non quasi insipientes, sed ut sapientes, redimentes tempus, quoniam dies mali sunt, St. Paul admonishes us in the Epistle (Eph. 5:15-16): watch therefore carefully over your conduct, behaving not as fools, but as wise men; profiting by the present time, for the days are evil . Profiting from the present time, that is, understanding that everything that takes place is permitted by God, and that what you have brought upon us, all that you have done to us, you have done with righteous judgment-as the words of the Introit recite-because already for two centuries the temporal Authority and for sixty years the spiritual one have made themselves deserving of the chastisements that are multiplying at this crucial stage for the fate of the world. And we with them, since as citizens and as Catholics we have tolerated, accepted and even encouraged the progressive betrayal of God and His Law by our civil and religious rulers. Now we have no more prince, no more leader, no more prophet, no more burnt offering, no more sacrifice, no more oblation, no more incense, no more place to present the firstfruits to you and find mercy (Dan 3:37-38).
In the face of the arrogance of the idolatrous Nebuchadnezzar, the humble steadfastness of Sadrach, Meshach and Obadiah shows us God's answer: Know that you are the Lord, the one and only God and glorious over all the earth (Dan 3:45). We can therefore hope, by virtue of Hope, that we too will pass unscathed through this furnace of vices and horrors into which God's enemies have thrown us, if only we understand what our faults are-and we know them well-and what the power, indeed: the omnipotence of God. The Postcommunium reminds us of this: Ut sacris, Domine, reddamur digni muneribus: fac nos, quæsumus, tuis semper obedire mandatis. O Lord, to make us worthy of Thy sacred gifts, make us, we pray Thee, always obey Thy precepts. And so be it.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
October 15, 2023
Dominica XX post Pentecosten
Homily on Sunday XX after Pentecost