The following program was made possible by the generosity of those who have determined to hold fast to the true Roman Catholic religion, as expounded by the Roman Catholic Church before the disasters of Vatican II and the so-called New Mass.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Come, Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of thy faithful, and kindle in them the fire of thy love.
Send forth thy Spirit, and they shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.
Let us pray. O God, who didst instruct the hearts of thy faithful by the light of the Holy Ghost,
grant us by that same Spirit to be truly wise, and ever to rejoice in its consolation.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Hello and welcome to What Catholics Believe.
I'm Thomas Nagley.
I'm here with Father William Jenkins.
He is a traditional Catholic priest of the Society of St. Pius V, and he also serves
as the pastor of Immaculate Conception Church right here in Norwood, Ohio.
Hello, Father.
How are you this evening?
Very fine, Tom.
Thank you.
And you?
Just the same, Father.
It's good to see you, as always.
Yes, you too.
You too.
Father, I would be remiss if I didn't wish you a very happy birthday today on behalf
of all of our viewers, so God bless you there.
well thank you very much and i received a plethora of text messages wishing me a
blessed birthday and i appreciate every one of them in fact it's going to take me until
my next birthday to respond to all of them but it's very kind of everyone especially their
prayers that go with the greetings i really appreciate that very much no problem
Yeah, Father, we'll certainly keep you in our prayers, but any other prayer requests that you have to begin the program tonight?
uh quite a few tom yes well i mean there are actually hundreds and hundreds of
them all of those in the immaculate heart of
mary prayer list uh i really thank mary brueggemann for
her work with that to uh
be the person who monitors that and makes sure all of those intentions are posted.
It's a great work and also we have our own Immaculate Conception Church prayer list, as you know.
And often the two of them coincide with each other.
I do ask continued prayers, please, for Cheryl Johnson and also for Paul Riley
and the families, you know, the Johnson and the Riley families there.
Um...
Now both Paul and Cheryl are quite ill. Paul as a result of an automobile accident, as you know, and Cheryl as a result of an aneurysm.
So we're grateful that they were able to keep them with us. God hasn't called them. We're asking our Lord now to...
to heal them both, bring them back to health again.
And Richard Wilt also is suffering right now.
Please keep Rich in your prayers.
Remember Nancy and Laurie Nelson
and their cousin Monsignor Handwerker.
Monsignor Handwerker also has cancer that is being treated.
We pray for him.
And also please keep in your prayers Monica Condit.
Monica will be undergoing surgery tomorrow.
So please pray for her and her family.
Pray for Rosanna.
Fiori, Rosanna's very old, and Bernie Kunkel.
And you might know Bernie Kunkel rather well, right?
He's a relative of yours, Tom, right?
That's right.
And he's undergoing a series of very delicate surgeries involving multiple surgeons.
So please keep burning in your prayers.
He's been suffering for quite some time now.
I also pray for Mary Stiebelach
and also an intention very dear to my heart,
Maria Bischel, one of our graduates now
who is now home from the convent
because she's very ill.
So please keep Maria in your prayers.
We pray that...
She'll get good diagnosis and good treatment and be as good as new or better as soon as possible.
So please ask our Lord to have mercy on all these good souls.
Please continue praying for our country.
And also remember the January 6 victims who are being persecuted and imprisoned for having done nothing more than just walk through an open door.
by mistake right essentially
and also reacted to
To things being thrown at them
flash grenades and so on just reacting to these things and are being they're being found guilty of all kinds of
All kinds of things and incarcerated for months or years on end. So please keep them in your prayers all of them and
We had a question last time about the Red Mass for those in our judges and attorneys
and so on, our judiciary, we need to pray for them and we also need to pray for all
of our law enforcement personnel and all of our medical personnel.
They're all being involved in very special things these days and they who are supposed
helping us and protecting us, and so on.
Unfortunately, they find themselves put upon to
Um,
do things that are not in our best interest so we need to pray for them very very
persistently to pray for them
So anyway, Tom, there you are.
All right, very good. Thank you, Father.
Well, Father, we had several viewer email
and also some current events on the agenda for tonight.
But I guess first, I know many of our viewers
are very anxious to hear your thoughts.
bishop strickland of the nova sordo uh just recently getting uh forcibly removed i guess
from his uh from his diocese in texas the state of texas and uh i guess bishop strickland said
in response to that that he was he was forced out because some of the forces in the nova sordo
church are trying to change the teaching of our lord um said some other interesting things but
father what was your um reaction when you heard this uh
this news that Bishop Strickland was removed from his diocese.
Some are calling it shocking.
Did you find this shocking at all, Father?
What was shocking to me was how long it took to have this happen.
mm-hmm
I mean, of course, it was inevitably going to happen.
Um...
As long as this Bishop Strickland said Catholic things, he could not be at peace with Francis,
or Francis would not be at peace with him, because Francis is a modernist through and through.
Francis, in fact, is the quintessential modernist, right?
He's a modernist in every way, a thoroughgoing modernist.
Um...
And so when he encounters anything Catholic,
he wants to crush it.
Um...
You know, Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas, has been making comments for many months now about, even about Francis personally and his, you know, attacking the faith and so on.
Bishop Strickland has come out against the homosexual community.
quasi-nones out in, I mean, the abomination-nones out in Los Angeles and actually led a prayer rally against them, against the Dodgers, welcoming them and awarding them and rewarding them.
Um,
So, you know, this is against the LGBTQIA, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, agenda, which Francis favors entirely.
And so the problem is, though, that Bishop Strickland has gone along with the Novus Ordo.
I mean, he really has gone along with the Novus Ordo. He just wants a conservative Novus Ordo.
and Novus Ordo with a Catholic, at least, veneer.
He wants to keep articles of faith, of the Catholic faith, at the same time going along with the new Mass, the new sacraments, and all the changes of Vatican II.
And so he hasn't yet faced the fact that these two things are antithetical, the traditional Catholic belief, faith, doctrines, and the practice of the Novus Ordo.
The Novus Ordo is a religion of modernism. It is the practice of modernism.
And if Bishop Strickland is going to reject modernism, he necessarily has to reject the Novus Ordo in its entirety also.
Pope St. Pius X said that modernism is the synthesis of all the heresies.
So how can there be peace between modernism?
traditional Catholic belief, traditional Catholic doctrine, traditional Catholic faith,
and the practice of modernism with its new mass and its new sacraments and all the rest.
So Bishop Strickland himself is kind of living a contradiction here.
He must feel that tension somehow.
And when he speaks out about some of these egregious examples of anti-Catholicism on the part of Pope Francis,
not only is he having to face the contradiction that he's living by being part of the Novus Ordo,
but he's also almost daring Francis to do something about it.
And inevitably Francis is going to do this. But even now, Bishop Strickland is living in it as kind of fantasy.
Because he says well, I can't really blame Francis for this because he's being pressured into this. Oh, really by whom?
By the people he's appointed
There there. No, no, it was Francis himself who did this
To vicious Bishop Strickland. It was Francis who wanted your head on the platter. Okay, and
He's got plenty of dancing girls to demand it, but he himself
Wanted you gone
because he wants what you represent, much of the time, gone.
And that is a denunciation of the more outrageous things he's saying and doing.
So he finds you an obstacle.
More than an irritant, you have become a rallying point for those who still have some faith left in the Novus Ordo.
All right.
And Francis cannot abide that.
Um...
So inevitably, he's going to have to move against you.
Uh...
For those who don't know, Bishop Strickland was fired by Francis, essentially,
as Bishop of the Diocese there in Texas.
And a certain Bishop Joe Vasquez, who already has been denounced by some parties
as being involved in a cover-up of abuse and so on,
he's been made the administrator, temporary administrator of the diocese.
in Bishop Strickland's absence, so.
Now what becomes of this Bishop Strickland, I don't know.
I'm praying, hoping and praying that he will see
in all its clarity the contradiction
between the new order of religion
that came out of Vatican II
and the true traditional Catholic faith,
which I believe he still holds.
And seeing that contradiction, I pray that he has the courage to simply declare himself entirely for the faith
and to practice the traditional Catholic faith.
Unfortunately, he himself was ordained and consecrated, ordained a priest and consecrated
within the Novus Ordo, by the Novus Ordo, for the Novus Ordo.
And that still holds him.
And, of course, one has to ask about this ordination and consecration rights, too.
because they are not designed to produce Catholic priests.
They were not meant to do that, or to produce Catholic bishops.
They were meant for modernists.
They were meant to ordain modernists and consecrate modernists.
And again, you know, modernism is the synthesis of all heresies.
So one has to really question.
those rights and examine them very carefully to see uh and not only the rights themselves but who
is performing the rights what what even faith was was there on the part of those who who performed
those ceremonies and you carry that back to the origins of the nova sorda and you realize
it was all conceived in modernism so um but i still am hoping and praying that bishop strickland will
will see the reality of all this, and completely reject the new order and all of its pops, right?
And, uh...
So anyway, do pray for him.
So was I surprised?
As I say, I was surprised that it took this long.
At first, Francis was pressuring him to resign
and he wouldn't resign.
And so Francis just had to get out the ax
and do away with him.
I guess Francis would have considered it
to be a victory in his own right if he'd gotten to resign.
But anyway,
But no, Archbishop Vigano says this was like a raw, blatant misuse of power, so on. How so?
I mean, if Bishop Strickland continues to say that Francis is the Pope, that he is "the vicar of Christ on earth,"
which Francis does not say anymore, but if Bishop Strickland says so, I mean, how can he complain about this?
Of course, he would just have to say, well, okay, this is the decision of a reigning pontiff of the Catholic Church.
He has the right to do this, and I should simply accept it without complaint.
But if he says that his removal was because of forces in the Church wanting to change the teaching of our Lord...
and thus to apostatize eventually, essentially.
Um...
and his removal was the unique decision of Francis himself personally intervening to do this,
then what does this say?
How can he not say and face the fact that it is Francis who wants to change the teaching of Christ?
How can anybody deny that now that Francis has already said he's creating, he is actually literally creating a new church. So I'm hoping and praying that Bishop Strickland just comes to face reality on this issue.
- Father, why do you think people have,
people were so surprised by this?
Some say even, some were even shocked by this.
Why is that?
Why are they so, why is it such a big deal
when they hear some Novus Ordo bishop say,
I mean, a few ostensibly Catholic things
and to have this reaction from a Novus Ordo pontiff?
Why is that so shocking to you?
- Well, I don't know anybody who's been following
what Francis has been saying and doing
should not be surprised by this at all.
I mean, even LifeSite News carried an article
after all that they've said acknowledging
Francis is anti-Catholic.
Um...
thought and behavior
why would Francis
do something like this
And I'm thinking, well, what kind of a question is that at this point, at this juncture?
The question should be rather, what would prevent Francis from doing such a thing?
What would prevent him from doing it?
Yeah.
The only thing that one could conjecture that would keep Francis from making a move like this
is because he was afraid of the backlash.
But Francis is not afraid of it.
the back line.
Well, he wants those who have the traditional Catholic faith to leave.
He really does want them gone.
They are obstacles to his whole plan.
His whole plan is to create a new synodal church of the world.
You know, just recently
Francis himself came out and directed his PACT, his Pontifical Academy for Theology, right?
uh
to completely abandon deductive theology.
and follow inductive theology, the inductive method of theology.
I don't know how many people actually even paid much attention to that,
or even understood the significance of it.
But even to suggest this, and part of Francis, let alone to order this,
says in just two words, the entire program of modernism.
The entire program of modernism is encapsulated
in the words inductive method or inductive theology.
You see, modernism, and when I say modernism,
I'm referring to all of those practitioners of modernism,
true believers of modernism, Francis being first in line.
They have redefined the word faith.
We've talked about this before.
We know Catholics believe that faith is actually a virtue or a power of the intellect.
God gives his grace to the human mind, the human intelligence.
Okay.
to know truths about God by divine revelation.
and to believe them as true, even though the human mind
Get out of the stand.
It is simply of the very nature of divine revelation that it involves truths about God
and truths, therefore, that are beyond the power of human comprehension.
And so, the human mind needs grace from God to assent to the truths that God reveals about Himself.
The fact that he is a trinity of persons.
The fact that the Son of God, the second person of that trinity, became man as our Savior.
That he was born into this world.
That he died on the cross for us.
in reparation for our sins to redeem us that he rose from the dead that he he left us the
the very sacrifice of his body and blood soul and divinity
here among us as a continual testimony to his love and his sacrificial death for us in the Holy Mass.
All of these things involve mysteries that the human mind cannot comprehend,
could not even discover for ourselves if we went looking for them.
God would have to reveal these things to us. This is the very nature of true faith and true
religion. True faith, if it comes from God, and let's face it, if it's not from God,
there can't be true faith. It's just something we've made up for ourselves.
But true faith must come from God, and it must have supernatural mysteries.
the naturalists in philosophy and the the rationalists in philosophy
start their philosophy by saying that you cannot you cannot believe
anything that you can't understand it's wrong it's an insult to the human mind for a person
to actually believe mysteries of faith the only thing worthy of man is what he can figure out
for himself so the naturalists and the rationalists from the very beginning
ignore the question, and they actually outlaw, as it were,
a matter of divine revelation, of mysteries about God.
They forbid you to believe that.
Unfortunately, the modernists are at peace with that.
And, you know, we turn to the question of what modernists think of faith, then, therefore.
Because the modernists consider themselves believers, but what do they believe and why?
What is faith to them?
Well, it is, you might say, almost the exact opposite of what the Catholic Church believes
about faith and believes what faith really is.
The modernist starts off by saying faith is not
a virtue of the intellect at all.
It's not even a virtue.
It is an action.
An action rooted where?
Not in your intelligence for truth.
It is rooted in your religious sense.
That everyone has a religious sense that's part of the human condition.
In other words, we have a certain feeling about the divine, that there's something
beyond ourselves.
And that religious sense
calls out for something more, something beyond ourselves,
something perhaps even beyond the world around us.
The modernist, as St. Pius X says, tells you that your intelligence cannot know anything about God.
or anything beyond this world.
But the modernist also, according to St. Pius X in his encyclical Pacendi, condemning the errors of the modernist, says that the modernist says you can't even know the world around you because your intelligence cannot actually connect, as it were, with reality.
So, for the modernists, we're living in a world of phenomena, it's almost like illusion.
We have impressions of things around us as being real, whatever that is, they're real
to us individually, but we can't really reach what they actually are.
Our minds, in other words, according to modernists, are not made for truth.
an utter and complete denial of the biblical understanding that we are made in the image of God
by a power of our intellect to know truth and a power of our will to love what is good.
Modernist doesn't have any concept of that, doesn't even allow a concept of that.
The modernist says that rather the religious sense in you craves the divine, and you find it.
Your religious sense actually experiences something in nature, something powerful, something that you can't explain for yourself.
because it is beyond your ability to explain,
but not in terms of truth, in terms of experience.
You experience the divine in some kind of mystical way.
That, for the modernist, is faith, your experience of the divine.
Everyone has this religious sense, and everyone can experience this divine, and that experience is your faith.
It comes down to basically something emotional
that stirs up something in you,
the religious sense they call it,
seems to be much more related to your emotions,
certainly more related to your emotions and your intellect,
more your feelings than anything.
And that you come away feeling,
I have somehow come into contact with the divine,
whatever that might be.
And I say whatever that might be because
People all through the world, throughout history, have experienced this.
Even the pagans experience the divine.
They experience it in nature, and it's a real experience of the real divine.
Even the pagans do so.
in their worship of pagan goddesses like Pachamama.
They experienced the divine too.
There's real faith there according to the modernists.
Real faith in the real divine.
They've experienced it and it manifests itself
in this way as Pachamama.
Francis is actually a modernist to the core.
in that he really believes these things.
He really believes that in paganism, indigenous religions and so on,
there are genuine experiences of the divine which are true faith.
And we have something to learn from these, we all do.
Catholics experience the divine in their own way.
In the past, Catholics have experienced the divine in their mass and their sacraments.
But no longer, Francis says, these are no longer accurate ways
of really experiencing the divine, which is why they want to make the old ways go away,
because now we have to go on to the new ways of experiencing the divine.
And that's why Francis wants to turn it back to the paganism,
because there you had genuine experience of the divine.
Francis tells the imam in Abu Dhabi that God wills all religions.
Because again,
The divine, right, is too great to express itself or reveal itself in any one religion.
The divine can reveal itself in all the different religions to all the different peoples and
let them experience him by the religious sense.
And they're all true as long as they grow.
Except one thing.
There is one experience of the divine that is no longer tolerable, that must be suppressed,
and that is the experience of the divine that you find in the traditional Mass.
That no longer corresponds to the divine, any longer, Francis says, and it has to be left behind.
The one experience of the vine in the whole world that now is unacceptable is yours and mine as a traditional Catholic.
our, quote-unquote, experience of the divine in the traditional Catholic faith.
That's unacceptable anymore.
As far as Francis is concerned, that's not the divine.
Now we have to move on.
All of this actually is wrapped up in the idea of inductive theology with Francis
and his concept of faith.
The deductive theology is where you start with divine revelation,
principles of divine revelation, which Francis just calls rigid formulas.
But the Catholic Church understood to be the doctrines of the Catholic faith.
Those things, Francis detests those things, he despises those things.
In the encyclical against modernism, St. Pius X says that modernists find these things
the enemy of true faith.
Because, as long as one holds to these truths of the past, as revealed by our Lord and as
guarded by the Holy Ghost in the history of the Church and her tradition, as long as one
holds to these old, in Francis' mind, stale and worn-out doctrines, these prevent one
from being open to the spirit of surprises and experiencing the divine today in a different way.
because we're stuck in those old formulas. Like, you might be stuck in quicksand.
In fact, the modernists, as St. Pius X says, say that if you do not give up those formulas
and move on and experience the divine in continually new ways, then your faith is dying,
and the church is going to die with that.
*cough*
So, the modernist thinks he's actually rescuing the church from a death like that, from being
ossified or petrified by cutting us loose from the old doctrines and enabling us to
launch into the deep and experience and launch into the unknown.
And cultivate new experiences of the divine and new doctrines, new formulas that are true
for us today.
They will not be true
for the next generation, perhaps, because they'll
have a different experience of the divine.
But we have to, according to the modernists, have our own personal experience of the divine apart from anything else that the church has taught us in the past.
So that in those experiences of the divine that you and I have today, that's where we find true faith, the true faith of today.
And all of that comes into play with Francis' synod on synodality.
Because Francis and his modernists don't look to divine revelation as God revealing
through the prophets, through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, as St. Paul says in the
first chapter of Hebrews, verse 1.
The God who has spoken at various times through the prophets, now in our times has spoken
through his own Son.
The modernists say that's not where you have to look for your doctrine.
In fact, you can't cling to that, the let or let go, so you're free to experience the
divine in your own way, in your own time.
So that's where we have to go for Francis and the modernists. We have to go to modern man.
We have to go to modern man whether he's in the cities or whether he's in the jungle. We have to
go and we have to bring him in, and we have to get his testimony. That's the inductive method.
Survey. Take surveys. Survey all of these people. Ask, "Well, what are you experiencing of the divine?
how are you experiencing the divine right now in your life you have to fill out these questionnaires
as to where they're finding the divine in their life right now francis spelled all this out back
in 2013 um and he he actually said this is where the church has to head now
And the church has to actually survey the people wherever they happen to be in their
lives and however they have to be living their lives right now.
And taking that survey then, we have to begin to put all that together because making those
the answers of the people about what they're experiencing about the divine.
coalesce, the bishops have to make all of that come together and put it all together.
All these surveys.
Notice that the whole idea of a synod on synodality
was the thousands of surveys being sent out.
This is precisely the modernist concept.
These surveys are essential to the modernist idea
of how we find out what the faith is right now.
We have to get people surveyed
about what they're experiencing right now.
The bishops then have to kind of boil it down to kind of a soup, and they have to serve it to Francis.
Francis then has to savor the soup, and he himself has to reduce it all
to formulas.
That's what he says explicitly in 2013 when he became the Pope of the New Order.
He said this is what the pontiff does.
This is his ministry, to reduce the experiences of the faithful into some kind of formulas
that everyone has to accept.
Okay.
And this is quintessential modernism, as they say,
the very essence of modernism.
So the divine reveals himself
through the multiplicity of individuals.
thousands of individuals who are experiencing the divine we have to be surveyed about what their
experience is and then ultimately that has to filter its way through the bishops well the
priests the bishops and so on until finally francis can actually boil it down to some simple
formulas that everyone has to accept okay this is the expression of the true faith as it is being
experienced by the people right now right now
Um...
The inductive method is the survey. The the inductive method takes the information from the multiplicity of individuals and their experiences. That's what induct the inductive method is. That's why when you conduct
inductive theology, as Francis demands it, you are doing exactly that. We are going by surveys,
we're surveying the people about their experiences of the divine in their lives today.
And so forget the whole idea.
of divinely revealed truth coming to us from prophets or even from the Son of God.
All the Son of God could reveal to us is his personal experience of the divine at that time.
but that doesn't necessarily correspond to the people's experience of the divine
today francis is busy discerning what that is and he's going to tell us what it is and
that's where it all comes down and it's going to come down in the one world religion
and well unfortunately i i think it's heading directly into the hands of the antichrist
So, why would a Bishop Strickland have any place in this?
Why would a Bishop Strickland want any place in this?
Why would he want to legitimize this and say, "Well, we have to cling to this."
Even though I'm being sacked, why would I want to lend any scintilla of legitimacy to this and pretend there's anything Catholic about this?
I don't know.
Father, do you think that, does Francis actually believe these things to be true?
I mean, this inductive theology that you described, this modernist way of thinking, this modernist
notion of faith, or whatever you want to call it, does he actually believe these things
to be true?
I mean, is he embracing modernism because he, I mean, out of hatred for the truth, out
of hatred for Christ's church, or does he actually believe that?
you know he actually embraces modernism believes that it is true and he's actually trying to
implement these things for the good of the church well tom that's a very good question
in the encyclical bashandi in 1907 popeyes the tenth indicated the modernists believed
that they were really the saviors of the church because if the church's belief was not
able to evolve, but was stuck in old formulas.
When Christ promised the Apostles at the Last Supper to send the Holy Ghost,
He did not say He was sending the Holy Ghost to teach us new doctrines,
but rather to bring to our minds whatever Jesus Himself had taught us.
And so the doctrines taught by our Lord were fixed forever, permanently.
should never be changed at all. That was the work of the Holy Ghost. For Francis
now, he has replaced the Holy Ghost with the spirit of surprises, involving
constant changes.
But the modernists say, according to St. Pius X, that if the church doesn't change, the
church will die, because being alive means you're changing, and if you stop changing,
you're dead.
Actually, we think if you stop...
We think if you die, you decay, and then you really change, you know, you lose your identity, basically, you become a corpse.
Francis is the other way around.
As a modernist, you have to continually change your beliefs, according to the evolution of human experience of the divine, in order for the church to live.
Right?
And so Pope Pius X says they are reformers and they actually have this madness of their pride and their audacity
to think that they are saving the church from dying because without them the church would die.
The ironic thing about all this is that Francis is saying we reject the doctrinalism of the past.
We need to do inductive theology.
We need to find revelation where it's really happening in the lives of the people.
And they can tell us who God is right now, what they're experiencing.
As I said, the ironic thing is, but it comes right down to it.
who is ultimately going to make the decision as to who god is right now is it really the people
taking a read on who god is reporting them to the bishops who kind of translate or distill that down
and francis then is going to kind of turn it out into formulas for everyone to believe
to assent to.
Ultimately, Francis has started with an agenda already.
He knows what he wants to achieve.
I mean, he wants to basically consecrate
the LGBT perversion.
He wants to make that okay, basically.
He wants to legitimize that in the church.
And this last synod, his intention was to bring that out clearly.
Now he's deferred it to 2024 again because there is opposition.
He says there's still work to be done in softening up the minds of the people to accept this.
So we'll give it another year. Okay, he's willing to do that.
But he's made it very clear this is where he wants to go.
So, as I say, the ironic thing is, the modernist says, we're getting the read from the people
about what they believe, but the fact is, the modernist has already determined in his
own mind what they should be believing, and that is what the modernist thinks.
The modernist has his own personal faith experience, and as far as he's concerned,
That's who God is right now.
And surveying all these people isn't going to change his mind about who God is.
He's the modernist. He's the genius. He's the one who really knows who God is.
So, all of this has a predetermined conclusion.
It's going to come out with Francis' idea of who God is right now.
All of this is going to lead to Francis making a proclamation, okay, saying, "Ultimately,
this is what I agree with, and this is what I'm going to tell you with these formulas,
my personal idea of who God is or should be and who you think he should be."
that he's pro-LGBTQ and all the rest.
And don't tell me otherwise.
Because if you tell me otherwise,
going to shut you down right why well because you do not correspond to my modernist belief
i don't care what you're experiencing you're experiencing it all wrong if you contradict me
this is the pride and the audacity of the modernist so i think saint pius the tenth would
answer that question that you asked you know what is he thinking does he hate the church and
therefore he's a modernist or is he a modernist because he hates the church and the answer is
actually yes
there's a symbiotic relationship between the two.
Yeah.
I think Francis, in my own personal thought on the subject, for what it's worth, is that Francis just is a kind of a rebel.
And he's anti-doctrinal by just his natural personality and temperament.
I mean, he tells you that when he was a child...
And he was serving the traditional mass.
Okay.
He and his fellow server would try to jumble up the Latin
to confuse the priest while he's saying the prayers
at the foot of the altar.
They would drop the missile because it was too heavy.
I mean, they were making a shambles of the Mass back then.
This is Francis' childhood.
And I think he's still doing the same thing now
as an old man.
He's basically making a mess of everything as he says.
And I think he does have a certain contempt
for the Catholic faith.
The fact that he found modernism now to express himself in his own words
rebellious, revolutionary, egotistical approach to life,
I think just is a good fit for him.
And it increases his hatred for the faith.
So I think there's an interplay between the two.
His hatred for the true faith and his embracing of modernism,
I think, is kind of a vicious circle or cycle that plays itself out.
And the more anti-Catholic he becomes,
the more modernist he becomes,
the more anti-Catholic he becomes.
it becomes like a some kind of a tornado yeah
um in his case kind of a firestorm and um and this is where they're taking him
Now, you know, Michael Matt of The Remnant has raised this question about, well, the visibility of the church, right?
We have to hold that the church is a visible organization.
There are two big questions these days with people who are dealing with the Francis phenomenon.
And one is the idea of apostolic succession, which we talked about recently.
that you have to have apostolic succession to be Catholic.
And the other thing is the visibility of the Church, right?
And they're trying to address the Francis question with these two ideas.
And
we talked about apostolic succession that that's not just a matter
of continual you know ordinations going from one generation to another
The first criterion for apostolic succession
is having the apostolic faith and the continuity of faith.
So right away, you'd have to say,
that's not in Francis' favor, that's against him.
I mean, we can't say, well, we need Francis
because we need apostolic succession,
while Francis is busy condemning the idea
of Catholic faith and Catholic doctrine,
the very concept of it he's rejecting.
So, as I say, the question about apostolic succession, Francis fails on that.
But the question of then the visibility of the church,
they fall back on that and say, "Well, without Francis,
then there is no visibility of the church."
Well, how can you say that?
They say, "Well, you have to have a pope to have the visibility of the church."
Then you realize, well, that can't be true.
I mean, there have been 260 interregna,
and so you mean to say when a pope dies and there is no pope,
the church's visibility somehow becomes invisible?
lapses or whatever and they say well no no even when there's a pope who died the church still
has the potential to elect a new pope and so you're saying that the visibility of the church
somehow is is on vacation or somehow it's it's lapsed during that time and become only potential
visibility? And only when the church elects a new pope does the church actually become
visible again? I mean, how can you say that you have to have a living pope for the church
to be the visible organization that Christ established?
when popes die and you have to elect another pope.
what happens to the visibility of the church
during those times
in other words what they're saying is nonsense
the church
is visible, a visible organization
with or without a reigning pontiff
and
at any given moment.
And yes, the true church does have the potential
to elect a supreme pontiff and a vicar of Christ on earth.
That's true.
Now they may say, well, if Francis is not,
if you question Francis being the pope,
then where are you gonna get a new pope?
and they say that you're automatically saying
that there can't be another pope.
That's not what we're saying.
We're just saying that you're posing a dilemma here.
We're just saying a pope
doesn't even have to have the faith.
So the criterion for being a valid pope
is lower than the criterion
for even being a practicing Catholic.
the pew on Sunday. You know, you can't even, you know, a Catholic, a person can't even come up
and receive holy communion worthily if he doesn't have the Catholic faith. And you're saying you
don't even need the Catholic faith to be a pope, the vicar of Christ on earth. That doesn't make
any sense as a Catholic. It makes no sense whatsoever. And you're also approaching the
idea that you're saying, yes, he's the pope, and no, we don't have to do anything he says.
says, they're very much rapidly approaching that idea.
And again, that doesn't compute for a Catholic.
So we're saying they're proposing a dilemma here,
but let them not reach for false arguments like such as, you know, when a pope dies,
Then logically speaking from what I'm saying what they're saying actually is that the visibility of the church is somehow
lapses into
Passivity or potentiality only until the new Pope is elected
It doesn't work that way never did
Now, the Church is a visible organization by its very nature.
established it, right? Whether there's a reigning pontiff or not, the Church is a visible organization.
It's not the Pope who makes the Church a visible organization, it is Christ himself. The Pope is the
visible head of the Church on earth, that's true, but the fact is he's not personally the one who
makes the Church a visible organization. The Church of its nature is established by Christ,
is a visible organization.
um
So both of those arguments on the basis of apostolic succession, on the basis of the visibility of the church, they fail to address this question of Francis.
I mean, look, this whole question of modernism.
um
This gentleman named Terry Barber, who started this, I guess he has a radio podcast or an internet podcast called Virgin Most Powerful, I think it is.
He's a Bishop Strickland.
- He is a Bishop Strickland hour.
And he is saying,
and I don't know that Bishop Strickland himself
has ratified this yet,
but Terry Barber is saying that the Cardinal,
Cardinal Di Nardo, who is actually over Strickland, has told Bishop Strickland that there is no
"depositive faith," which is exactly what I just said about the modernists.
They don't believe there is a deposited faith, sacred scripture, sacred tradition, with unchanging truth.
Okay?
I mean, he says there's no such thing.
Is that a heresy?
I mean, it basically comes down to apostasy, really. So again, I mean, you have this cardinal
appointed by Francis, who actually is coming out and actually telling Bishop Strickland, who has
just been sacked, that there is no deposit of faith. And you ask yourself, how is this possible?
And how is this man could even be considered a Catholic, let alone a Catholic cardinal,
and have any authority in the church whatsoever from Francis?
And you have Francis himself who actually says we need a new theology
which does not always correspond to the Christian face of God.
And you ask, well, if their new theology doesn't correspond to the Christian face of God,
then whose face does it correspond to?
I mean...
the indigenous people's face? I mean, is it, if it's not the faiths of Christ,
and Christ, the Lord said, if you're not with me, you're against me,
and he who does not gather with me scatters,
then if it's not the face of Christ, is it the face of Antichrist?
Is that the new face of their new theology?
What are they getting at here? What is Francis actually getting at here?
So people are reacting to that, rightly so, but they need to understand that it all goes back to what we've known all along, that Francis is a modernist and he's completing the work of Vatican II, which is the modernist revolution.
to overturn the Church.
And so, no, we cannot be surprised
that Francis would fire a Bishop Strickland.
We cannot be surprised at anything Francis does for now.
He's rejected the faith.
He's anathematized the Catholic faith.
the Catholic religion and he's trying to replace it with something else something
that disturbed me very much recently was this report Francis actually had about
7,000 children come to the Vatican from all over the world 7,000 children gathered
gathered in the Paul VI audience hall,
which is an abomination.
You've seen the photographs which show it
looking like you're inside the head of a snake,
right with the fangs, right where Francis is seated.
Incredible, but true.
And when you walk into the place, you really do get a very creepy feeling in this audience hall of Paul VI.
But in any case...
Francis took pre-selected questions from these 7,000 children and they were pre-selected
on the basis of how they were directed to climate change.
The whole idea of this seance of Francis with these little children from all over the world
was to promote nature worship and the devotion of climate change as the new religion.
And Francis was giving discourses there with the children about climate change.
And he actually had the children answer, "Can children save the earth?"
And he asked them, "Can you children save the earth?"
And Francis said, "Yes, you can change.
You can save the earth," he tells the children.
Because you are simple and you understand that to destroy the earth is to destroy us.
"We must guard the earth.
Do you understand this?
If you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself.
That's all that's left.
You and the earth.
Right?
You're part of the earth.
That's all there is of you."
And then he went on to say, "Let's say it all together, slowly, without shouting.
Let's say it all together.
To destroy the earth is to destroy us," and he had to repeat it over and over and over
and over again.
"To destroy the earth is to destroy us.
If we destroy the earth, we destroy us, altogether.
He who destroys the earth, destroys us, altogether.
"To destroy the earth is to destroy us."
So who are the destroyers?
The destroyers of the earth.
They're the real enemy.
Have the children chanting this.
"One who destroys the earth, destroys us."
Talk about like the Nazi, you know,
name the enemy, right?
Point the finger, Hamas and all the rest, right?
Anathematize those who are destroying the earth.
They are the villains these days
and they must be destroyed, right?
get the children chanting that
what is Francis saying
when he has the children
chanting over and over again
nature is our future
he had the children chanting that
nature is our future
he never talked about faith
We never talked about the Catholic faith.
The idea of the children's souls, saving their souls, our Lord Jesus Christ,
His sacrificial death on the cross, the Mass, the sacraments, not one word came out of Francis' mouth.
Nature is our future. We are the children of nature. He who destroys nature destroys us.
This is Francis there, chanting this, some great pagan priest cheerleader. And the sad thing is that the children
are all
chanting it with him under his guidance.
This is what he's teaching mankind.
I mean, how can anybody not think of Francis
as the little beast of the apocalypse?
He was calling everyone to worship.
Is that right?
It just, I don't understand.
Why would we be surprised?
You know, it all gets back to your original question
about the firing of Bishop Strickland.
Why would that be surprising?
All of this addresses that very question.
Why would any of this be surprising?
We have to face reality ourselves
and see what's happening and accept it.
And yes, we can explain it to someone,
To some extent, perhaps there are some things we can't explain, but our faith tells us what we need to know.
And we know what we need to do. We need to believe the traditional Catholic faith.
As Father, as Dom Morris said, "Well, get the catechism, learn the catechism of the faith, the true catechism of the true faith.
Learn that first, and then practice the faith, the old traditional Catholic faith."
which is never old, right, for us.
It is not new, it's not old, it's eternal, right?
It is the teaching of Christ here.
that's what we have to cling to
Well, Tom, I know you had a number of questions that you wanted to get to,
and there were a number of other things that were worth mentioning to here, too.
Francis actually inviting a Mason to address the Vatican's
Conclave about the the climate right again environmentalism
Inviting a chief mason to
Address
The prelates of the church on the question of climate change the new religion, okay
perhaps if you if you're up to it I know we don't have an awful lot of time but
because we have a lot of questions you've told me that maybe we could
quickly go through these and I can just make a few really quick comments about
them
Yeah, the first one we have was asking about the Pact of the Catacombs.
He said that he's heard more and more about this Pact of the Catacombs,
and he's wondering if you could explain exactly what that is
and how it's being used by the modernists to steer the conciliar church.
Yes, again, I'm trying to be brief, okay?
Toward the end of Vatican II, Second Vatican Council,
There were about 42 prelates, bishops, including cardinals,
who met at what they call the underground basilica,
attached to the catacombs of Domitilla,
In Rome, or outside of Rome,
to the south of Rome. And attached to those catacombs of Domitilla there is a basilica that
was actually dedicated to two martyrs, Nereus and Achilleus, who were actually attached to the
household of Domitilla who herself was related to the royal family, the imperial family of the Flavians.
Okay.
we're talking going back very early on in the church's history these bishops at the end of
vatican ii met down in that basilica underground and they basically made a pact with each other
that they would work tirelessly to actually modernize the church and put the church at
the service of mankind as though it had not been there rather than at the service of god
they made a pact to change the church to basically make it essentially a masonic institution
to serve mankind, and they were all modernists, they all subscribed to the modernist errors,
and they made this pact, basically, to put to death the old church as it was.
and to bring out of the ashes of the old church this new religion, the religion of the world.
There's a lot of information out there about the Pact of the Catacombs,
and I would suggest if somebody actually looked that up,
they'd find there are books that have been written about this very subject.
But it's of very great interest because we see now
that there were those who were involved in this Pact of the Catacombs
who throughout the entire history after Vatican II
were completely given over to creating this new church outlined in their Pact
and that they lead directly to Francis and what Francis is doing today.
Okay. Another question then, Father, have you ever heard of the so-called Jesus Prayer?
One of our viewers says that several of his Eastern and Oriental Orthodox acquaintances have asked him about this,
and if this is something that Catholics do, it's just a tradition in the Catholic Church to pray the so-called Jesus Prayer.
Well, you know, Tom, you start asking, well, what is the Jesus Prayer?
And there are people who have different ideas.
And evidently, the Jesus Prayer, so-called, has evolved over time.
Some say, it goes back even to the 6th century, and consists of basically what we pray in the Divine Office in Latin:
"Deus in adiutore me mentende, Domine ad adivandum me festina"
"Lord, come to my aid, Lord, hasten to help me."
And it involves chanting, saying those words interiorly in your mind over and over and over and over again, sort of like a mantra.
And in the course of time, then, others have substituted other words for the Jesus Prayer.
Most recently, someone suggested, well, the Jesus Prayer is, "Oh Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner,"
like the publican said, who stood in the back of the temple, right, not even looking his eyes to heaven.
but just beating his breast and saying, "Oh Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."
But what all of these formulas have in common
is they involve repeating and repeating and repeating over and over and over again.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, the same words.
And in the course of time, this has been related to consciousness
of parts of the body where someone is bowed over and
and is conscious of his stomach, his bowels, or his heart,
or is somehow related to, it's sort of like
what are they, somaism, or whatever, well it's something to do with the body.
And there are those who find this much too related to
oriental, mystical cults
of what has become of this so-called Jesus Prayer.
Now, the prayers that I just mentioned in Latin or in English,
"Oh Lord, come to my aid,"
or "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner,"
are perfectly good and perfectly fine.
And any Catholic can and should pray them,
meaning more than just say them.
But the so-called Jesus Prayer phenomenon
has been condemned by the church in various ways at various times and voices in the church
because the way it's evolving in the course of time is almost like a mantra
where you're saying these words over and over again
and they become basically just a cant without any real meaning whatsoever.
Uh, and one becomes mindlessly saying these things over and over again.
And the result of this is supposed to take you through three stages.
And in the third stage, you have this theosis stage, where you experience God as the uncreated light.
And no wonder, you know, this whole idea of this oriental mysticism, and let's face it, the Orthodox are really into this.
The Orthodox are not really into theology as we know it in the West, which is very rational.
It's faith-seeking understanding.
As St. Anselm said, theology is faith seeking understanding as it goes back to the doctrines
of the faith that God has revealed to us as truth for our minds.
Faith then seeks understanding in applying our human reason to the truths of faith.
In the East, it's much more a mystical idea, and you see this.
even in the pagan mystical religions
of, again, experiencing, feeling, and so on.
And this idea of the Jesus Prayer sitting there and
you know, reciting this kind of mantra over and over again,
even if they're words from the Gospel, still.
And with the idea, even focusing on chakras or points of the body,
with the idea that it's going to elevate you by reciting that mantra
to this theosis state where you're then experiencing the uncreated light of God.
Well, no wonder. You know, there are those who have found this to be not only suspect, but very dangerous,
and even leading in the direction of a heresy condemned by the Church as quietism.
So one has to be very careful.
If, you know, why would we say, well, say this is a Jesus prayer or that is a Jesus prayer?
I mean, any true prayer would qualify, you would think, if it's offered to the Father
through our Lord Jesus Christ, I mean, it's all Jesus' prayer.
All prayer has to be offered through the Son of God right now.
No one can come to the Father except through me.
So even the idea of saying, "Well, that's a Jesus' prayer," implying that, you mean
there are prayers that aren't Jesus' prayers?
But that's not true, I mean, all true prayer has to go through the Son of God.
Jesus' prayers in that sense.
So the very concept to me is like antithetical to the faith.
But, as I say, in the Divine Office we say many times every day,
"O Lord, come through my aid. O Lord, make haste to help me."
We pray it in Latin.
in greek or in english has the same meaning but i would never and the church would never want me to
just keep saying that over and over again until it becomes kind of mantra so that i can then somehow
be raised to the level of having an experience of the uncreated light of god which is impossible yeah
Um...
Because the uncreated is God himself.
And how can I have a vision of the divine light which is the uncreated light of God in this life?
is totally contrary to Catholic belief.
And if that's what they mean by it,
then we have to absolutely reject it.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Well, maybe just one more, Father, because it's a topic over in the month of November, the month the church is dedicated to the poor souls in purgatory.
One of our viewers asked about the souls in purgatory and if our guardian angels are able to intercede for us, are able to intercede for the poor souls in purgatory.
And if so, in what ways do they actually intercede for us?
Well, can our guardian angels pray for us?
They can.
They are among the saints in heaven
insofar as they are sanctified in angel.
They have the beatific vision.
As our Lord says, the guardian angels see God in heaven,
even now, while they are serving us here on earth.
And they glorify God in heaven.
um
But the question of whether they can pray for us in purgatory
Um...
That's another question, you know, that's a question I haven't ever really seen addressed,
whether our guardian angels accompany us to purgatory, whether they simply leave us in purgatory,
and then they are in heaven, uniquely in heaven.
I mean, I would think that the guardian angels
are with us throughout until we're actually saved.
Obviously they don't go to hell with us, clearly.
No doubt about that.
But you know, theologically, yes,
they might accompany us through this life.
And after we depart this life and we're judged,
then the guardian angel,
would would have ended his service to us it's quite possible
that his service concerns us here in this life that that is god what god wants him to do
But, you know, I understand that the individual asked about
Um...
religious saints and so on
had souls from purgatory appear to them
and they ask have I had that experience as a priest
and the answer is no I haven't
Have I heard of similar stories from any of our priests in our society?
I have not heard any of our priests say, "A soul from purgatory has appeared to me."
When we go to Rome with our students, we often go to the Purgatorian Museum and we see the
marks of those.
who did appear, who did come from purgatory
and imprinted their hands on wood or on a page of a breviary.
And yes, it's very clear this is a human handprint here.
I mean, even down to the fingerprints practically,
scorched into a page or into a block of wood.
And this is a visitation from an actual soul from purgatory asking for prayers.
I think all of our priests have probably had the experience, I have certainly, and that's why I think others have too, of being called to homes where strange things are happening.
Some figure is appearing, and some of these are more credible than others, but there are certain indications that something's going on that is not readily explained by any natural means.
But anyway, what I found, for what it's worth, is there are troublesome presences and prayers that can be offered to chase them away, to drive them away.
There are definitely malicious or malevolent spiritual presences in certain places, okay?
That can be driven out by prayer, and by notably the prayer of the church and the exorcism of the place.
It's different from the exorcism of a person, because when the devil possesses a person,
his presence there, the satanic presence there, is on a different level.
But an evil presence of an evil spirit in a place is something that I think most priests
probably have had to deal with at one time or another.
Um,
But I have also found that there are reported times presences that are spoken of by children who say, well, I saw this figure coming down the stairs, this...
unidentifiable thing or person actually and I did not feel threatened by this.
But this thing kind of showed itself to me and does so periodically.
And perhaps multiple members of the family say this.
And I believe that this can be the presence of a soul in purgatory asking for prayers.
They're not malicious or malevolent spirits who torment those who live in the house.
but they are simply making themselves known.
Is this something non-Catholic to suggest this? No, quite the contrary.
When I was at Stift Wilton in Innsbruck, Austria,
as a theology student there at the University of Innsbruck,
There was a rather well-known story about a "Klopfgeist," a knocking ghost who actually
did periodically manifest himself, and it was obvious that he was seeking prayers.
He wasn't tormenting or afflicting, terrifying people, but just making his presence known
to ask for prayers.
And when the prayerful response was given, when someone who had a visitation like that
then the presence left as well, was satisfied.
Can God allow souls in purgatory to do that?
We know, we have the stories, even of saints with visitations from souls in purgatory who were allowed by God to come and ask for prayers.
There's a whole story behind the knocking ghost here, which I won't go into now because of the length of time involved here.
But one of the canons, these are canons regular, not monks, the shtetlilten,
actually identified who it was, and who was seeking those prayers, and had been for the previous 400 years or more,
coming and asking prayers. It was a member of the community who had gone bad, who had gone wrong, fallen afoul of his vows.
and how he identified this poor soul, literally, poor soul, the purgatory,
is, I think, an interesting story, but I'm not going to tell a story right now.
Anyway, so yes, I think we priests have had the experience of
Um...
hearing of spirits, malevolent or otherwise,
Um...
you might say manifesting or showing themselves in certain places and you know the distinction
between a malicious spirit who is out to terrify and terrorize individuals or a family is very
different presence from one who is there simply by the grace of God asking for prayers and trying to
induce other people there to pray for them.
So, in any case, I don't know if that really answers the question of that particular writer,
we'd probably let it go at that right now.
So it's not a bad question at all to ask
during this month of the holy souls.
So, you know, when we ask,
as you asked at the beginning of the show,
prayers, pray for the souls in purgatory, obviously.
And let's say it goes without saying,
but it needs to be said.
ask for mercy for them too
well Father thanks for being here tonight
appreciate getting through all of that
and again a very
blessed birthday to you
Well, thank you very much, and we appreciate that.
I'm still amazed that God is putting up with me, but I'm very grateful to him.
And the prayers of those who offer for me, they're much needed, and they certainly will.
St. Paul said, the grace of God has not been void in him.
I hope to be able to say that someday, too.
So thanks for your prayers.
Yes, Father, thank you.
And thanks to all of our viewers as well for watching this episode of What Catholics Believe.
Until next time, we ask that you all remember the words of Our Lady at Fatima,
to consecrate yourselves and your families to the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
to pray and do penance.
Thank you, and God bless you.