Sister Olive, with her funnybone-tickling sense of humor, liked to say, “I think I’ll spend a quiet day at home today,” and she would say that with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. As it is, all she ever did was stay at home, resting in her red recliner.
And so, when my caretaker teasingly asks me, “What are you going to do today?” I have the reply all ready, “I’m going to spend a quiet day at home.” Very funny! Day after quiet day, here I am on my back, in my blue recliner chair, as well as night after quiet night.
That picture of Saint Joseph on his death bed, which you all received last time, may need a different arrangement sooner or later. Saint Joseph will be politely asked to give up his bed and go stand between Jesus and Mary, while I will want to rest in his bed. Only, I will not have that white beard which he has. But that’s okay, just so I get into his bed, with Jesus and Mary and Joseph watching over me.
As it is, my frequent prayer has for some time been: Lord Jesus, when my time comes to depart from this land of exile (as St. Therese liked to call it) and from this vale of tears (of both tears of sorrow and of joy) come quickly, with Mary and Joseph, and bring me home, to the Eternal Home of the heavenly Father.
On the Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, September 29, it is easy to recall the great battle of primordial times between Saint Michael with his faithful angels and Lucifer and his rebel angels that Saint John’s Apocalypse tells us about, and The Mystical City of God gives plenty of details.
That is when rebellion against God began. That is when Lucifer, whose name means “light-bearer,” stopped being a “light-bearer,” but became instead the “prince of darkness.” And it was later on, in the Garden of Eden, that he showed himself to be the first liar and the father of lies, a title given to him by Our Lord.
But it wasn’t only unfaithful angels who followed the wrongway lead of the prince of darkness. Unfaithful humans also let themselves be led astray. And so it turned out that there is so much sin and error and opposition and division among men. Heresies of various names kept misleading the faithful, beginning in the earliest centuries and continuing right into our own times.
There have always been great defenders of the true, infallible and unchangeable Catholic Faith, beginning with the Apostles and continuing with the great Fathers of the early Church and the outstanding Theologians of the 13th century and various other defenders of the faith all through the centuries.
In our times, the monster heresy that has caused so much damage to the faithful of Catholics is called modernism, which Pope St. Pius X described as the “synthesis of all heresies,” that is, a combination of all heresies.
The big aim of modernists, since St. Pius X condemned modernism very forcefully in the early 1900s, was to invade the Vatican and take over complete control of the Church. And they succeeded, most incredibly, beginning during the reign of Pope Pius XII, regarded by all of us as an outstanding defender of the True Faith already long before he was elected to the Papacy. Only God will have to explain to us, in His own chosen time, how that could have happened.
The first alarming pro-modernism action attributed to Pius XII was his wholly unexpected creation of a new Easter Vigil Liturgy, plus that of a new tradition-breaking liturgical calendar.
We old-timers, who were long well acquainted personally with the pre-1950s liturgy, were stunned. But what could we do? The name of Pius XII was appended to the new liturgical decrees, and that was the deciding factor. So we did the normal Catholic thing, that is, we accepted the new tradition-breaking decrees, and we stayed with that tradition-breaking liturgy for quite a few years later.
One hidden factor that we did not yet know about was the presence of hardcore modernists on the Vatican staff of Pius XII. To us, names like Montini and Bugnini were just more of those endless names in the Vatican. We did not at first suspect those names to be names of super-dangerous modernists.
So, after the death of Pius XII, off we went into the bewildering few years of the reign of old modernist Roncalli, John 23, not realizing that the Vatican was already in modernist hands. And after his death, the modernist control of the Vatican became total and complete. It all began under Pius XII in the mid-1950s.
We went along with the untraditional liturgical changes for a while under Paul6 (Montini), until someone exclaimed, “There’s something radically wrong with Paul 6!” And there was, so we finally realized.
Then, in late 1967, the time for a definite decision came for a return to the pre-1950s, and pre-Pius XII, liturgy. Yes, “pre-Pius XII.” It would have made no sense at all to return to the liturgical changes attributed to Pius XII. It had to be, and it was, a return on our part to the centuries-old liturgy of pre-Pius XII times. And that’s where we are today, with the pre-Pius XII liturgy, the only safe and truly traditional Catholic liturgy.