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Saint Catherine of Siena, Wake Forest NC

"The persecutions which the evil enemy has stirred up at various times against the most holy sacrifice of the Mass are a proof how sacred a thing it must be, and how obnoxious to the devil; otherwise he would not attack it with such violence. (...)

From the days of the apostles until the present time the holy sacrifice of the Mass has had no more vehement opponent than the unhappy Martin Luther, who not only attacked but decried this divine mystery. He did not do this of himself, nor when he first apostatized, but at a later period, and at the instigation of the devil. In fact the deluded man himself acknowledges in his writings that his teaching comes from the devil, and only at the suggestion of the evil one has he abolished the Mass as an act of idolatry, although he must have known full well that the devil is the hater of all that is good, and teaches mankind naught but what is evil."

(...)

If the people are ignorant of the great value of holy Mass they do not love and esteem it as they ought; they never go to Mass on week-days, and on Sundays and holidays they are too often indifferent, irreverent, superficial; they absent themselves on a mere pretext, and without the slightest scruple of conscience.

But if they understand the vast efficacy and value of the holy Mass, they cannot fail to prize more highly this costly treasure, to love it deeply, and assist at the divine oblation with greater reverence. There is in the Catholic Church no mystery more important, more consoling, more salutary, than this sublime mystery of the altar. If this truth were recognized aright, we should certainly see a larger attendance at Mass on week-days."

Source:Cochem's Explanation of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass

 What would happen to a priest already sharing in the priesthood of Christ by reason of his ordination, if he refused to share in Christ’s condition of victim? He would certainly be falling away from the priestly ideal: his life would become disordered, disturbed, and confused. He would remain a minister of Christ but without a sincere love for his affectionate Master. No longer a man of God but a man of the world, a man whose life has become vain, superficial, barren. This deplorable state of sterility reveals in an even better light the fruitfulness of a genuine apostolate, just as it is easier to appreciate the value of justice when we see the suffering resulting from injustice. Every priest should ask for the grace to be a victim in the way God wants him to be, to suffer patiently whatever God has willed for him from all eternity, so that he takes up his cross each day not simply as a faithful follower of Christ but as a priest standing in the place of Christ himself. He must undergo a mystical death before his physical death.


Source: The Priest in Union with Christ, Father Reginal Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

Our Lady of Fatima, St. Joseph Catholic Church, Raleigh NC

O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.

• "In August of 1917 Our Lady told the children, "pray much and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go to hell because there is no one to make sacrifices for them." As to the kinds of sacrifices Our Lady was asking, she revealed to Sr. Lucia on one occasion: "The good Lord is allowing Himself to be appeased . . . but He Himself complains most bitterly and sorrowfully about the small number of souls in His grace who are willing to renounce whatever the observance of His laws requires of them."

• " Many persons," Sr. Lucia explained, "feeling that the word penance implies great austerities, and not feeling that they have the strength for great sacrifices, become discouraged and continue a life of lukewarmness and sin." Then she said Our Lord explained to her: "The sacrifice required of every person is the fulfillment of his duties in life and the observance of My law. This is the penance that I now seek and require." Source: Rosary Center

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI. in 1933:

“Suppose, dear friend, that Communism is the most visible among the organs of subversion against the Church and the Tradition of Divine Revelation. Thus, we will witness the invasion of everything that is spiritual: philosophy, science, law, teaching, the arts, the media, literature, theater, and religion.

I am concerned about the confidences of the Virgin to the little Lucia of Fatima. This persistence of the Good Lady in face of the danger that threatens the Church is a divine warning against the suicide that the alteration of the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul, would represent.

I hear around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject her ornaments, and make her remorseful for her historical past. Well, my dear friend, I am convinced that the Church of Peter must affirm her past, or else she will dig her own grave.

I will fight this battle with the greatest energy on the inside of the Church, just as outside of it, even if the forces of evil may one day take advantage of my person, my actions, or my writings, as they try today to deform the history of the Church. All human heresies which alter the word of God are so that a greater light might appear.

These underdeveloped peoples will save the Church, Eminence. A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God, that His Son is only a symbol, a philosophy like so many others. And in churches, Christians will search for the red lamp where Jesus awaits them, like the sinful woman crying out before the empty tomb: ‘Where have they taken Him?’

Then, priests will rise up from Africa, from Asia, from America, formed here in this seminary of the Missions, who will say and who will proclaim that the ‘bread of life’ is not ordinary bread, that the mother of the God-man is not a mother like others. And they will be cut to pieces to testify that Christianity is not a religion like others, since her head is the Son of God, and the Church is His Church.” Pie XII Devant l'Histoire 1972

"The Pope had very special and peculiar difficulty in dealing with the Catholic Modernists; for Modernism was very insidious in its methods. The Modernists said: there may be difficulties about the dogmas of faith from the point of view of philosophy and historical criticism; they may not be philosophically and historically true; but, even so, their religious value remains, for they can be believed by faith. To the ordinary faithful Faith meant intellectual assent to truths on the authority of the word of God. It seemed, then, as if the Catholic Modernists were not impugning the intellectual truth of the dogmas of faith. But the Modernists meant by Faith the use of dogmas as rules of action; we should live and act, they said, as if Christ were God, as if He had arisen from the dead, as if He were really present in the Blessed Eucharist. There was then an equivocal use of the word "faith".

The true faith of the Church was being undermined. Intellectual assent to the dogmas of faith on the authority of God would be impossible if the dogmas themselves were philosophically or historically false. Thus Modernism was a formula or prescription for an easy imperceptible death to Christianity. But Pope Pius X. intervened, and saved his people from the poisoned prescriptions of the Modernists." The Catholic Book Bulletin, Vol 1 P33-34 1911, Modernism and the Old Faith by Very Rev. Fr. Daniel Goghlan, D.D.

Prayer to the Holy Angels for Parishes
All you legions and choirs of Angels, please make haste to come to the aid and defense of our One Holy Roman Catholic Church. Led by St. Michael, may She be protected from destruction within by all modernistic attempts that try to diminish the true presence of God and take away His proper and due respect! In particular, come to the aid of my parish (name your parish) that it may remain or be remade to be a place of reverence and a stronghold from which the One True Triune God may continue to lead and strengthen us. Amen.

“Go teach,” said Christ to His Apostles. Teach what? Not the opinions of Peter, James or John, not the sayings of Matthew, Philip or Bartholomew, not this or that system of belief, or these or those deductions of human reason; but “the things that I have commanded you.” And the command laid upon the twelve Apostles is still honored and obeyed by the priest in the Church of God. The priest, then, teaches, not in his own name, nor does he propose a doctrine thought out in deep study, but, “God exhorting through him” on account of his unity with the chair of Peter, he but echoes the divine voice, heard throughout Judea in the dawn of Chris­tianity. The priest speaks and the world listens, not because of his words of deep reasoning, nor on account of his faultless diction, nor because of his fervent eloquence, but because he speaks as one having authority, the authority given by Jesus to His Apostles, and by them transmitted to him."

Source: The Priesthood by Rev. M.S. Smith (The Homelitic Monthly and Pastoral Review, Trinity Sunday, May 1922) Special thanks to Robert Olson

"The Pope had very special and peculiar difficulty in dealing with the Catholic Modernists; for Modernism was very insidious in its methods. The Modernists said: there may be difficulties about the dogmas of faith from the point of view of philosophy and historical criticism; they may not be philosophically and historically true; but, even so, their religious value remains, for they can be believed by faith. To the ordinary faithful Faith meant intellectual assent to truths on the authority of the word of God. It seemed, then, as if the Catholic Modernists were not impugning the intellectual truth of the dogmas of faith. But the Modernists meant by Faith the use of dogmas as rules of action; we should live and act, they said, as if Christ were God, as if He had arisen from the dead, as if He were really present in the Blessed Eucharist. There was then an equivocal use of the word "faith".

The true faith of the Church was being undermined. Intellectual assent to the dogmas of faith on the authority of God would be impossible if the dogmas themselves were philosophically or historically false. Thus Modernism was a formula or prescription for an easy imperceptible death to Christianity. But Pope Pius X. intervened, and saved his people from the poisoned prescriptions of the Modernists." The Catholic Book Bulletin, Vol 1 P33-34 1911, Modernism and the Old Faith by Very Rev. Fr. Daniel Goghlan, D.D.

Prayer to the Holy Angels for Parishes
All you legions and choirs of Angels, please make haste to come to the aid and defense of our One Holy Roman Catholic Church. Led by St. Michael, may She be protected from destruction within by all modernistic attempts that try to diminish the true presence of God and take away His proper and due respect! In particular, come to the aid of my parish (name your parish) that it may remain or be remade to be a place of reverence and a stronghold from which the One True Triune God may continue to lead and strengthen us. Amen.

"Even the Devil came to Ars. Indeed, he had a reason. By the mouth of a possessed woman, he exclaimed one day to the Curé, “How thou makest me suffer! If there were three men on earth like thyself, my kingdom would be destroyed.” Father Vianney was outwitting the proud devil by saving so many souls. The kingdom of Heaven seemed to be growing faster than the kingdom of Hell. Frustrated, the devil would roar like a bull, growl like a bear, or snarl like a dog in an effort to intimidate the Curé. With a fearful voice he would cry out: “Vianney! Vianney! Potato eater! Ah, thou art not yet dead! I shall get thee, all right.”

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Papal Bull: Horrendum illud scelus ( August 30, 1568):

"That horrible crime, on account of which corrupt and obscene cities were destroyed by fire through divine condemnation, causes us most bitter sorrow and shocks our mind, impelling us to repress such a crime with the greatest possible zeal.

Quite opportunely the Fifth Lateran Council [1512-1517] issued this decree: "Let any member of the clergy caught in that vice against nature, given that the wrath of God falls over the sons of perfidy, be removed from the clerical order or forced to do penance in a monastery" (chap. 4, X, V, 31).

So that the contagion of such a grave offense may not advance with greater audacity by taking advantage of impunity, which is the greatest incitement to sin, and so as to more severely punish the clerics who are guilty of this nefarious crime and who are not frightened by the death of their souls, we determine that they should be handed over to the severity of the secular authority, which enforces civil law.

Therefore, wishing to pursue with greater rigor than we have exerted since the beginning of our pontificate, we establish that any priest or member of the clergy, either secular or regular, who commits such an execrable crime, by force of the present law be deprived of every clerical privilege, of every post, dignity and ecclesiastical benefit, and having been degraded by an ecclesiastical judge, let him be immediately delivered to the secular authority to be put to death, as mandated by law as the fitting punishment for laymen who have sunk into this abyss."

Effigy of Sainte Louise de Marillac at Rue du Bac, Paris France

" The Son of God took a human body in the womb of the Blessed Virgin in a state of innocence more perfect than that of the first man. This action was sufficient to satisfy divine justice for the disobedience of our first parents and to reveal to us the truth of the plan of God expressed in the words, “My delight is to be with the children of men.”

   Nevertheless, this did not satisfy His great love for us. He desired an inseparable union of divine nature with human nature. He accomplished this after the Incarnation by the admirable institution of the most Holy Sacrament of the Altar in which the fullness of the divinity dwells continually in the Second Person of the most Blessed Trinity. This union is a means for uniting the Creator to His creature. However, all do not participate in this mystery because free will enables man to bring about his own damnation by following his evil inclinations and the temptations of the devil, or to earn his salvation by grace which applies to him the merits of the Son of God.

  We have reason to believe that the assurance which Our Lord gave us that He would always be with us was designed to sanctify souls by means of this continual, albeit invisible, presence and by the application of the merits of His actions to those of His creatures. Our Lord does this either by asking pardon of His Father so as to wash away the sins which we have committed in opposition to the virtues which He Himself practiced, or by rendering the virtuous deeds which men accomplish by the power of His grace pleasing to God by uniting them to His meritorious actions. It seemed to me that it is in this way that the holy humanity of Our Lord is continually present to us. He is among us by the application of His merits and by the sanctification of souls. His presence is like air without which the soul is lifeless. It is thus that I see the Redemption of men in the Incarnation and their sanctification by means of this union of man with God in the person of His Son and by this continual presence, whereby His merits are applied to each soul joined to the personal union of a God to man. All of nature is thereby honored since it causes God to see His image in all mankind, if it has not been disfigured by the refusal of the application of the merits of His Son which sin alone can effect.

  This thought came to me after a long period during which I prayed for a great love for the humanity of Our Lord as a means for moving me to practice His virtues especially gentleness, humility, forbearance and love of my neighbor in order to overcome the sins which I so often commit against them."

Source: Spiritual writings of Louise de Marillac : correspondence and thoughts

"At Castelnuovo, where there was a family gathering and great rejoicing, his mother said to him, what he calls "these memorable words": You are a priest. In saying Mass henceforward you are then nearest to Jesus Christ. Remember, however, that to begin to say Mass means to begin to suffer. You will not realize it at once, but little by little you will see that your mother has told you the truth. I am confident that every day you will pray for me, whether I am living or dead: that is enough for me. Henceforward, think only of the salvation of souls, and don't be troubled in mind about me."

Source:  R.F. O'Connor Venerable Don Bosco The American Catholic Quarterly Review ..., Volume 46 1921