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| Massachusetts Passes 'Passive Infanticide' Bill |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-05-2021, 08:51 AM - Forum: Abortion
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Massachusetts lawmakers override governor’s veto, expand abortion access for minors
The pro-life Massachusetts Family Institute called the legislation ‘Infanticide Act.’
BOSTON, Massachusetts, January 4, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Despite efforts on the part of local pro-life activists, Massachusetts legislators last week overrode a veto of Governor Charlie Baker ® and enacted a significant expansion of decriminalized abortion access in the state.
With required supermajorities in both legislative chambers, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted 107 to 46 on Monday, December 28th; and without a statement or any debate, the Senate followed suite the next day with a vote of 32 to 8, effectively overriding the governor’s veto.
According to the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), the legislation enshrines the decriminalization of abortion prior to 24 weeks for any reason, while, for all practical purposes, extending abortion access up to the moment of birth.
Massachusetts law had allowed abortion after 24 weeks if the mother’s life is at risk. Under this new provision, that exception is expanded “to preserve the patient’s physical or mental health” — criteria which can be broadly interpreted to make almost any abortion legal.
But, according to MFI, the legislation goes even further and allows “passive infanticide.” Instead of directing abortionists to “take all reasonable steps” to save a child who has survived a botched abortion, the new law “simply requires that there be life-saving equipment present, but doesn’t require that the physician actually USE it.” Thus, MFI has labeled this legislation the “Infanticide Act.”
Further, the new law no longer requires abortions procured prior to 24 weeks to be performed by a physician, but allows non-doctors such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners or nurse midwives to kill preborn babies as well.
Finally, the law lowers parental consent for a minor to obtain an abortion from the age of 18 to 16. MFI considers this a “horrifying” prospect for “any sane parent” and “[f]or those concerned about sex trafficking,” as it “allows abusers to cover their crimes by taking underage girls to a Planned Parenthood clinic themselves and keeping parents out of the picture.”
Even though he is a pro-abortion Republican, Gov. Baker expressed concerns about this latter measure, along with the expansion of access to “later-term abortions” in vetoing the bill and sending it back to the legislature on Christmas Eve.
Speaker of the Massachusetts House Bob DeLeo (D) promised on the same evening that his chamber “will seek to override the Administration’s veto,” in order to expand access to abortion, which they did on Monday, December 28.
Andrew Beckwith, president of MFI, noted the significance of these dates. In response to Baker’s veto, MFI expressed hope that a “Christmas Eve Miracle” would stop the “Infanticide Act.” Following the House override vote, Beckwith observed that December 28th “is also the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the day in the church calendar when we remember the baby boys killed by Herod’s decree.”
Beckwith concludes, “there is a deeper struggle at play here … [t]hese are all moral, spiritual battles with real, and often devastating, consequences.”
Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, stated, “Pro-lifers know setbacks. What we don’t know how to do is give up, look the other way, and allow injustice to stand.”
“We know the truth is worth pursuing!” she continued. “We know the lives we work to protect are worth every minute of our time in this life … And we look forward to continuing our work alongside the citizens of Massachusetts, who already know the value of human life and are eager to educate and support others and to ultimately illuminate the inherent right to life of the unborn.”
“As we have done since January 23, 1973, Massachusetts Citizens for Life will work tirelessly to make abortion unthinkable. And we will prevail.”
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| Moderna Likens Its Vaccine to an "Operating System" |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-05-2021, 08:40 AM - Forum: COVID Vaccines
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Moderna Likens Its Vaccine to an "Operating System"
From the Moderna Website
Our Operating System
Recognizing the broad potential of mRNA science, we set out to create an mRNA technology platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer. It is designed so that it can plug and play interchangeably with different programs. In our case, the "program” or “app” is our mRNA drug - the unique mRNA sequence that codes for a protein.
We have a dedicated team of several hundred scientists and engineers solely focused on advancing Moderna's platform technology. They are organized around key disciplines and work in an integrated fashion to advance knowledge surrounding mRNA science and solve for challenges that are unique to mRNA drug development. Some of these disciplines include mRNA biology, chemistry, formulation & delivery, bioinformatics and protein engineering.
Our mRNA Medicines – The ‘Software of Life’
When we have a concept for a new mRNA medicine and begin research, fundamental components are already in place.
Generally, the only thing that changes from one potential mRNA medicine to another is the coding region – the actual genetic code that instructs ribosomes to make protein. Utilizing these instruction sets gives our investigational mRNA medicines a software-like quality. We also have the ability to combine different mRNA sequences encoding for different proteins in a single mRNA investigational medicine.
[Emphasis mine.]
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| +Vigano Exclusive on "The Great Reset" |
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Posted by: kelley - 01-04-2021, 09:31 PM - Forum: Archbishop Viganò
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Exclusive Interview with Archbishop Vigano on The Great Reset
The exclusive transcript of an interview conducted by War Room show host and former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon with His Excellency Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop. The National Pulse is publishing the interview – which primarily concerns the Catholic Church, the deep state, and the key actors involved – without edits.
Bannon: Now that the Vatican has renewed its insidious secret agreement with China, a deal which you have repeatedly condemned as promoted by Bergoglio with the assistance of McCarrick, what can the “children of light” of the Great Awakening concretely do to undermine this unholy alliance with this brutal Communist regime?
Vigano: The dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party is allied to the global deep state, on the one hand so that together they can attain the goals that they have in common, on the other hand because the plans for the Great Reset are an opportunity to increase the economic power of China in the world, beginning with the invasion of national markets. At the same time that it pursues this project in its foreign policy, China is pursuing a domestic plan to restore the Maoist tyranny, which requires the cancellation of religions (primarily the Catholic religion), replacing them with a religion of the State which definitely has many elements in common with the universal religion desired by globalist ideology, whose spiritual leader is Bergoglio.
The complicity of Bergoglio’s deep church in this infernal project has deprived Chinese Catholics of the indefectible defense that the Papacy had always been for them. Up until the papacy of Benedict XVI, the papacy had not made any agreements with the Beijing dictatorship, and the Roman Pontiff retained the exclusive right to appoint bishops and govern dioceses. I recall that even at the time of the Bill Clinton administration during the 1990’s, former Cardinal McCarrick was the point of contact between the deep church and the American deep state, carrying out political missions in China on behalf of the US administration. And the suspicions that the resignation of Benedict XVI involved China are quite strong and coherent with the picture that has been emerging in recent months.
Thus we find ourselves faced with an infamous betrayal of the mission of the Church of Christ, carried out by her highest leaders in open conflict with those members of the Chinese Catholic underground hierarchy who have remained faithful to Our Lord and to His Church. My affectioned thoughts and prayers are with them and with Cardinal Zen, an eminent confessor of the faith, whom Bergoglio recently shamefully refused to receive.
We believers must act on the spiritual level by fervent prayer, asking God to give special protection to the Church in China, and also by continually denouncing the aberrations carried out by the Chinese regime. This action must be accompanied by a work of raising awareness within governments and international institutions that have not been compromised by the Chinese communist dictatorship, so that the violations of human rights and the attacks on the freedom of the Catholic Church in China may be denounced and punished with sanctions and strong diplomatic pressure. And this is the line that President Trump is pursuing with decisive courage. Beijing’s complicity with political and religious elements that are involved in murky operations of speculation and corruption must likewise be exposed. These profit-driven dealings constitute a very grave act of treason by politicians and public officials against their nation and also a grave betrayal of the Church by the men who lead her. I also think that in some cases this betrayal is not only carried out by individuals but also by the institutions themselves, as in the case of the European Union, which is currently finalizing a commercial agreement with China despite its systematic violation of human rights and its violent repression of dissent.
It would be an irreparable disaster if Joe Biden, who is heavily suspected of being complicit with the Chinese dictatorship, would be designated as President of the United States.
Bannon: You have been very confident that God desires a Trump victory in order to defeat the forces of evil inherent in the globalists’ Great Reset. What would you say to convince the naysayers who are ambivalent to the idea that this is a momentous battle between the children of light and the children of darkness?
Vigano: I simply consider who Trump’s adversary is and his numerous ties to China, the deep state, and the advocates of globalist ideology. I think of his intention to condemn us all to wear masks, as he has candidly admitted. I think of the fact that, incontestably, he is only a puppet in the hands of the elite, who are ready to remove him as soon they decide to replace him with Kamala Harris.
Beyond the political alignments, we must further understand that – above all in a complex situation like the present one – it is essential that the victory of the one who is elected President must be guaranteed in its absolute legal legitimacy, avoiding any suspicion of fraud and taking note of the overwhelming evidence of irregularities that has emerged in several states. A President who is simply proclaimed as such by the mainstream media affiliated with the deep state would be deprived of all legitimacy and would expose the nation to dangerous foreign interference, as has already been shown to have happened in the current election.
Bannon: You seem to suggest that the Trump Administration could be instrumental in helping to return the Church to a pre-Francis Catholicism. How does the Trump Administration accomplish that, and how can American Catholics work to save the world from this globalist ‘reset’?
Vigano: Bergoglio’s subservience to the globalist agenda is obvious, as well as his active support for the election of Joe Biden. In the same way, Bergoglio’s hostility to Trump and his repeated attacks against the President are evident. It is clear that Bergoglio considers Trump as his principal adversary, the obstacle that needs to be removed, so that the Great Reset can be put in motion.
Thus on the one hand we have the Trump administration and the traditional values that it holds in common with those of Catholics; on the other hand we have the deep state of the self-styled Catholic Joe Biden, who is subservient to the globalist ideology and its perverse, anti-human, antichristic, infernal agenda.
In order to put an end to the deep church and restore the Catholic Church, the extent of the involvement of the leaders of the Church with the Masonic-globalist project will have to be revealed: the nature of the corruption and crimes that these men have carried out, thereby making themselves vulnerable to blackmail, just as happens in a similar way in the political field to members of the deep state, beginning with Biden himself. Thus it is to be hoped that any proof of such crimes that is in the possession of the Secret Services would be brought to light, especially in relation to the true motives that led to the resignation of Benedict XVI and the conspiracies underlying the election of Bergoglio, thereby permitting the expulsion of the mercenaries who have seized control of the Church.
American Catholics still have time to denounce this global subversion and stop the establishment of the New Order: let them think about what sort of future they want for the coming generations, and of the destruction of society. Let them think about the responsibility that they have before God, their children, and their nation: as Catholics, as fathers and mothers of their families, and as patriots.
Bannon: Against all odds, average Americans are fighting to expose the massive and coordinated theft of our election: what advice would you give to our recalcitrant politicians about what is at stake for our nation and the world if we submit to this theft?
Vigano: The Truth can be denied by the majority for a certain amount of time, or by some people forever, but it can never be hidden from everyone forever. This is the lesson of History, which has inexorably revealed the great crimes of the past and those who perpetrated them.
Thus I invite politicians, beyond their political loyalties, to become champions of the Truth, to defend it as an indispensable treasure which alone can guarantee the credibility of institutions and the authority of the people’s representatives, in accord with the mandate they have received, the oath they have sworn to serve their country, and their moral responsibility before God. Each one of us has a role that Providence has entrusted to us, and which it would be culpable to shrink from. If the United States misses this opportunity, now, it will be wiped out from History. If it allows the idea to spread among the masses that the electoral choice of the citizens – the first expression of democracy – can be manipulated and thwarted, it will be complicit in the fraud, and will certainly deserve the execration of the entire world, which looks to America as a nation which has fought for and defended its freedom.
Bannon: In your letter to the President on October 25, the Solemnity of Christ the King, you spoke of the efforts of the deep state as “the final assault of the children of darkness.” There is a concerted effort by the globalists and their media partners to conceal and obscure the true tyrannical agenda implicit in the Great Reset, by calling it a wild conspiracy theory. What would you say to the skeptics who blissfully ignore the signs and plan to submit humanity to the domination of the global elites?
Vigano: The plan of the Great Reset makes use of the mainstream media as an indispensable ally: the media corporations are almost all actively part of the deep state and know that the power that will be guaranteed to them in the future depends exclusively on their slavish adherence to its agenda.
Labeling those who denounce the existence of a conspiracy as “conspiracy theorists” confirms, if anything, that this conspiracy exists, and that its authors are very upset at having been found out and reported to public opinion. And yet they themselves have said it: Nothing will be the same again. And also: Build Back Better, in an effort to make us believe that the radical changes they want to impose have been made necessary by a pandemic, by climate change, and by technological progress.
Years ago, those who spoke of the New World Order were called conspiracy theorists. Today, all of the world’s leaders, including Bergoglio, speak with impunity about the New World Order, describing it exactly in the terms that were identified by the so-called conspiracy theorists. It is enough to read the globalists’ declarations to understand that the conspiracy exists and that they pride themselves on being its architects, to the point of admitting the need for a pandemic in order to reach their objectives of social engineering.
To the skeptics I ask: if the models that are proposed to us today are so terrible, what will our children be able to expect when the elite will have succeeded in taking total control over the nations? Families without father and mother, polyamory, sodomy, children who can change their sex, the cancellation of Religion and the imposition of an infernal cult, abortion and euthanasia, the abolition of private property, a health dictatorship, a perpetual pandemic. Is this the world that we want, that you want for yourselves, your children, and your family and friends?
We must all become aware of how much the proponents of the New World Order and the Great Reset hate the inalienable values of our Greco-Christian civilization, such as Religion, the family, respect for life and the inviolable rights of the human person, and national sovereignty.
Bannon: You have repeatedly warned that the ‘deep state’ and ‘deep church’ have colluded to plot in various ways to overthrow Benedict as well as President Trump. Besides Theodore McCarrick, who else is behind this infernal alliance, and how do Catholics undermine and expose it?
Vigano: It is apparent that McCarrick acted on behalf of the deep state and the deep church, but he certainly did not do it alone. All of his activity suggests a very efficient organizational structure composed of people whom McCarrick had promoted and covered by other accomplices.
The events that led to the resignation of Benedict XVI still need to be clarified, but one of the members of the deep church, the deceased Cardinal Danneels, a Jesuit like Bergoglio, admitted that he was a part of the so-called Saint Gallen Mafia, which essentially worked to bring about the “springtime of the Church” which John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, wrote about in his emails published by Wikileaks.
Thus there is a group of conspirators who have worked and still work in the heart of the Church for the interests of the elite. Most of them are identifiable, but the most dangerous are those who do not expose themselves, those whom the newspaper never mentions. They will not hesitate to force Bergoglio to resign also, just like Ratzinger, if he does not obey their orders. They would like to transform the Vatican into a retirement home for popes emeriti, demolishing the papacy and securing power: exactly the same as what happens in the deep state, where, as I have already said, Biden is the equivalent of Bergoglio.
In order to bring down the deep state and the deep church, three things are essential:
- first of all, becoming aware of what globalism’s plan is, and to what extent it is instrumental to the establishment of the kingdom of the Antichrist, since it shares its principles, means, and ends;
- secondly, firmly denouncing this infernal plan and asking the Shepherds of the Church – and also the laity – to defend her, breaking their complicit silence: God will demand of them an account for their desertion;
- finally, it is necessary to pray, asking the Lord to grant each one of us the strength to resist – resistite fortes in fide, Saint Peter warns us – against the ideological tyranny that is daily imposed on us not only by the media but also by the cardinals and bishops who are under Bergoglio’s thumb.
If we can prove ourselves strong in facing this trial; if we know how to hold ourselves anchored to the rock of the Church without allowing ourselves to be seduced by false christs and false prophets, the Lord will permit us to see – at least for now – the defeat of the assault of the children of darkness against God and men. If out of fear or complicity we follow the prince of this world, denying our Baptismal promises, we will be condemned with him to inexorable defeat and eternal damnation. I tremble for those who do not realize the responsibility that they have before God for the souls that He has entrusted to them. But to those who fight courageously to defend the rights of God, the Nation, and the Family, the Lord assures his protection. He has placed His Most Holy Mother at our side, the Queen of Victories and the Help of Christians. We invoke Her faithfully during these difficult days, confidently certain of Her intervention.
Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop, Die Octavæ Nativitatis Domini, January 1st, 2021
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| St. Robert Southwell Teaches Us How to Survive |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-04-2021, 05:53 PM - Forum: Articles by Catholic authors
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St. Robert Southwell Teaches Us How To Survive
In the face of what looks like unprecedented crisis a good thing to do is to pick up the nearest history book and start reading in the presence of God. As the ancient Preacher said, “What is it that hath been? The same that shall be. What is it that hath been done? The same that shall be done. Nothing under the sun is new, neither is there any man able to say: Behold this is new. For it has already gone before in the ages that were before us” (Eccles. 1:9-10). The past isn’t just prologue, but the very pre-enactment of the present and the future.
People, especially the pious, often believe they are facing some dilemma no one has ever faced before. That’s because most of them don’t live more than 80 years, and a third of that had to be spent in sleeping just to keep going. And people forget. Even when they remember, they are tied to their senses and all the confusing momentary data these relay to mind and passions for tabulation. It’s normal to draw conclusions relating only to the immediate surroundings.
The devil, on the other hand, never forgets. His life span is forever, and he never sleeps. Being pure spirit he is furthermore unimpeded by matter in his thought process, and his will is set undeniably in one direction – “seeking someone to devour.” Instantly present wherever he acts, he has had thousands of years in which to study us, noting with satisfaction that human nature never changes. He better than anyone knows that man doesn’t “evolve.” This means he can use the same tricks on us over and over. When we fall for them, often as not he has persuaded us that we are confronted with a situation for which no rules have yet been worked out, and that the solution is all up to us.
Formal disobedience easily follows. Vows and laws, designed precisely in anticipation of the extraordinary – the very ropes keeping Ulysses lashed to the mast of the ship when the sirens start singing – are discarded in the name of the emergency itself. The old serpent told Mother Eve that God’s law couldn’t really apply in the case of the forbidden fruit, which could hardly cause death, for “God knows that in what day soever you [a plural pronoun in the Vulgate, by the way] shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be open” (Gen. 3:5). God, the devil implied, was waiting for Eve to grow up and show some initiative. He was simply testing her – as indeed He was.
The trick still works. Schismatics of every shade, professing the most orthodox doctrine (which is what makes them schismatics and not heretics) are proliferating among traditionalists today, setting up ecclesiastical structures of all shapes! Good Catholics seek to justify these schemes by maintaining that they have been betrayed by the heads of the Church herself, even by her Supreme Head.
So what’s new? When Adam ratified Eve’s initiative, each and every one of us was formally betrayed by the head of the whole human race long before we were ever conceived. The pattern of “revolution from above” has not changed. The Son of God himself was condemned not by underlings, but by the highest ecclesiastical and secular authorities. He showed us how to defer to their authority even unto death, all the while refusing in His actions to do “according to their works.” He showed us the Cross.
Like everyone else, the devil has to work through divinely established channels to perpetrate any real evil. He can’t create any new situations, but only shuffle the scenery. Only God can say, “Behold I make all things new” (Apo. 21:5) . . . “A new commandment I give unto you” (John 13:34). Only He can put the “new song” into our mouths, reveal our new name written or seal a new Testament in His own Precious Blood (Apo. 14:3, 2:17; Matt. 26:28). Power to produce something new is a prerogative of divine omnipotence, closely akin to forgiving sins. Where men seem to have created a new situation, we need only look under the stage dressing to find the same old one which confronted Adam and then our Lord. One succumbed to the siren song of revolution, the Other did not.
With the same thing happening all the time, prophecy comes easily to those with grace to read the past correctly. Scripture itself, says St. Paul, was given as a prefiguration of what will happen to us, “upon whom the ends of the world are come” (1 Cor. 10:11). Although things will be essentially the same, however, there will be this difference: they will grow steadily worse until the climax is reached. Our Lord promised us, “There shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world” (Matt. 24:21). St. Paul wrote the young Bishop Timothy, “In the last days shall come dangerous times” ( 2 Tim. 3:1), so dangerous that we have our Lord’s word for it that if those future days were not shortened by the divine mercy, no one could be saved (Matt. 24:22). As the devil gains ascendancy over sinful men, choices will narrow, deceptions become more subtle in the fading light of the eclipsing Church.
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The Jesuit martyr St. Robert Southwell thought it was bad enough in England four centuries ago when he wrote, “Now is the time in which many of our forefathers desired to live!” What would he say today?
Addressing his Catholic contemporaries, he declared,
Quote:“You it is, whom God hath allotted to be the chief actors in this contest. From your veins He means to derive the streams that shall water His Church. He hath made choice of you to delight His friends and confound His enemies, with the beauty and grace of your virtuous life and patient constancy. Now is the time come for the light of the world to blaze out; for the salt of the earth to season weak souls tending to corruption; yea, for the good shepherd to spend his life for the defense of his silly flock. The pruning-time is come, and in order that the tree of the Church may sprout out more abundantly, the branches and boughs of full growth are lopped off. Now is the time come of which Christ forewarned us: ‘It shall come to pass that he who killeth you shall think he doth God a service.’ Lo, the things that were said are now done; and now, since that is fulfilled which was foretold, that which was promised will also be performed; our Lord himself assuring us: ‘When you see all these things come to pass, then know you that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”
Where these words do not apply to some extent, there can be only one reason, for St. Paul told St. Timothy categorically that all “that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Tim. 3:12). Where some persecution is not felt in God’s Church is where faith has come to terms with the world – if not battling to maintain the status quo in the name of religion. As Fr. Southwell wrote, “When England was Catholic, she had many glorious confessors; it is for the honor and benefit of our country that it should be well stored with a number of martyrs; and we have now, God be thanked! such martyr-makers in authority as mean, if they have their will, to make saints enough to furnish all our churches with treasure, when it shall please God to restore them to their true honors; and doubt not but either they or their posterity shall see the very prisons of execution become places of reverence and devotion.”
England as a nation has yet to return to the Faith, for although bloody martyrdoms are no longer the rule, the times have only worsened. Reading English history we can learn some of the things to expect, for the situation that pertained there can now be said to exist within the Church herself. As a seminarian in Douai and Rome, Fr. Southwell searched like us for some historical precedent to enlighten him, and found a satisfactory one in the storm which decimated the Church in North Africa in the third century. There was indeed a close resemblance between what happened there and in England, a Catholic country long known as “our Lady’s bower.” At a time when the Church in Africa appeared to be so flourishing that there seems to have been serious talk of shifting some of her Roman administration to Carthage, two persecutions were unleashed upon it, the first under the Emperor Decius, the second under Valerian.
From the first moment, thousands of Catholics, both priests and laity, rushed to the pagan temples to sacrifice or burn incense to the gods without waiting to be asked, rather than risk confiscation of their property, let alone death. The more wily among them, called the libellatici, bought certificates from the Roman magistrates stating they had complied with the government order of worship whereas in reality they had not. The martyrs – among them St. Perpetua and St. Felicity mentioned in the Holy Mass – were great, but few and far between.
St. Cyprian, native Bishop of Carthage, ran for cover during the first persecution, but vehemently excoriated both kinds of lapses. He managed to ready a valiant remnant for the second persecution, during which he laid down his own life along with many others; but as later in England, Christianity never recovered its former preeminence in Africa, being furthermore left in the grip of the Novatian schism, which raged for generations. Arising from the controversy over the canonical standing of former defectors, this schism eventually set up an anti-Pope to enforce its rigid disciplines against these lapsed Catholics, so characteristic of the schismatic mentality is merciless orthodoxy, St. Cyprian, Pope St. Cornelius and other Popes pled in vain for leniency toward those who repented.
Having never before fallen away in such unheard of numbers, many African Christians sincerely believed that this was the Great Apostasy of the last days, a normal assumption ever since then, wherever the Church herself seems to be defecting. Although many of the predicted signs are often present, and some major political figure would seem to fit the description of the Antichrist, so far the conclusive proof postulated by our Lord has been conspicuously missing, for He told the Jews, “I am come in the name of my Father, and you receive me not; if another shall come in his own name, him you will receive” (John 5:43).
So far no persecutor has been publicly acclaimed by the Jews as their Messiah, although by now the time may not be far off. Even St. Cyprian, like Fr. Southwell and all of us, seemed to have expected this false Messiah momentarily. He exhorted his flock, “Nor let any one of you, beloved brethren, be so terrified by the fear of persecution, or the coming of the threatening Antichrist, as not to be found armed for all things by the evangelical exhortations and precepts, and by the heavenly warnings. Antichrist is coming, but above him comes Christ also!”
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Today, amid clearer and clearer apocalyptic signs, the number of apostates only continues to grow. Once in the thousands, they can now be counted in the millions, all the while God continues to distill His saints at His divine leisure. As Fr. Southwell looked to St. Cyprian of Carthage for inspiration in his apostolate to the abandoned sheep of Elizabethan England, we can now look to him. The afore-cited quotation from him occurs in his Epistle of Comfort. Now a spiritual classic, it survives today in a huge body of some 300 volumes of English recusant literature now thumbed almost exclusively by scholars, but which represent the Herculean efforts of Catholic writers to keep the true Faith alive and in print amid the avalanche of poisonous heretical works then only beginning to engulf the faithful the world over.
To the general run of posterity Robert Southwell is merely an English poet of acknowledged genius who authored the famous poem “The Burning Babe.” Anthologies occasionally mention his Catholic priesthood, but more likely limit themselves to pointing out his uncanny ability to make Elizabethan conceits and verse forms serve sacred subjects. His prose works, also using brilliant imagery, are always to the same religious purpose.
The English persecution can be said to have officially begun with Elizabeth’s first Parliament, which introduced by law actual changes in worship and put legal sanctions behind them. By the close of 1587 the Epistle was ready to strengthen the faithful who had taken a stand against Cranmer’s Mass, mostly by preparing them for the worst. Although its original title page read “Imprinted at Paris,” the work is printed on English paper and generally known to have been rolled off the secret press operated in the very heart of London by Fr. Southwell’s religious Superior, Fr. Henry Garnet, S.J.
Its main theme is the same as St. Thomas More’s great Dialogue of Comfort penned in the Tower nearly a half century before. Both expound the great supernatural reasons for standing firm against the enemy, but whereas the layman More approaches the problem speculatively, Fr. Southwell approaches it as a priest and pastor of souls. Exuding immediacy and urgency, the Epistle is intensely practical, and small wonder, for it began as a series of letters smuggled to the imprisoned St. Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, to sustain him during the long captivity in which he finally died, bereft all the while of the Sacraments and Catholic companionship of any kind. A godson of Philip II of Spain and an erstwhile favorite of Elizabeth’s, the young Earl had cut short a worldly, pleasure-seeking court life which caused his wife much suffering, by a sudden fervent conversion to the old Faith and an impolitic refusal to attend the new church services.
The Jesuit martyr never actually met him, but a deep spiritual friendship developed between them by correspondence, and eventually both were canonized on the same day in 1970. It is his letters to the young Earl that Fr. Southwell later collected and revised for general consumption by deleting from them particulars which would have applied only to the original recipient. The Epistle makes fulsome use of what the Earl’s pious wife dubbed “the blessed Fr. Southwell’s remedy” against fear: To imagine the worst, to expect it, and to offer it up beforehand to almighty God in union with the sufferings of the Redeemer before anything happened to shake one’s resolve.
Keeping before his readers the supernatural nature of their trial, he bids them look at the four great consolations persecution offers them:
Quote:“First, it must needs be a great comfort to those that, either reclaimed from schism or heresy, or from a dissolute life to the constant profession of the Catholic faith, are for that cause persecuted by Satan and his instruments: for it is a very great sign that they are delivered out of his power and accounted by him as sheep of God’s flock, seeing that otherwise he would never so heavily pursue them. . . . It is not for us to regard the slanders of men, or to desert the service of God for them, seeing that it is but a very slender excuse to allege the fear of words of a vassal as a just impediment for not performing our duty towards our Sovereign. The friendship of this world is an enemy to God. . . .
“Secondly, we should willingly undergo persecution also because ‘whom God loveth He chastiseth, and scourgeth every child He receiveth. . . .’ The vanities of this world cast the soul into so delightsome a frenzy, and lull it so dangerously asleep, that many in a fit of licentiousness run headlong to perdition, and while they rejoice they rave; and others, in a careless and remiss kind of life, sleep themselves to death. . . . To wean us from an unnatural nurse, God anointeth her breast with the bitterness of tribulation.
“And in the third place, one . . . cannot but think that it is a most comfortable thing to suffer adversity for a good cause; seeing that it is not only the livery and cognizance of Christ, but the very garment of royalty which He chose to wear in this life. . . . And surely now is the time that we are called by Christ through fire and water, and now with loud voice doth He renew His old proclamation: ‘Whoever loveth father, mother, wife, children, house or living more than Me, is not worthy of Me; and he that taketh not up his cross and follow Me, cannot be My disciple. . . .’ What comfort can a man reap in a place that is governed by the Prince of darkness and peopled with our enemies and the enemies of God; where vice is advanced, virtue scorned, the bad rewarded and the good oppressed?
“But in the fourth place, to come to the principal drift of my discourse, what more forcible things can I set before your eyes as motives to comfort you in your tribulation, than the cause of your persecution, the honor of your present estate and the future reward of your patient and constant sufferance? And first, as to the cause that you defend – which is no less than the only true and Catholic religion. You defend that Church which is avouched by all antiquity; confirmed by the blood of martyrs; gainsaid by the heretics of all ages and most undoubtedly approved by all concurring testimonies. You defend that Church of Rome to which, as St. Cyprian says, ‘misbelief can have no access, and which can receive no forgery.’
“But, on the other side, two hundred founders of new sects that have been since Christ’s time, though they have for a season flourished and prevailed, having emperors and potentates to defend them, infinite books and writings to divulge their doctrines and all temporal aids to set them forward; yet we see that their memory is quite abolished, their names commonly unknown and no more mention of them than the condemnation and disproof of their errors recorded by Catholic writers. The same doubtless will be the end of the novelties of our days, which being only parts of their corruptions, revived and raked out of oblivion, as heretofore they vanished with their devisers, so will they now with their revivers. More than other things under the sun, heresy is never new!
“Yet, so ripe is heresy grown, so infinite the sects and divisions into which it has spread, besides new ones daily uprising, that the variety of religions and the uncertainty which among so many is truest, hath made the greater part of our country to believe none at all. And this, in truth, is the end and last step to which heresy bringeth a man. Seeing therefore that the ship of St. Peter now saileth, not against the wind of one evil spirit, or against the stress of one flood of heresy, but against a tide of all the pestilent spirits of former ages, and against the mainstream of all heresy; it is no less necessary than glorious for us to employ our last endeavors in the defense thereof; and think our limbs happily lost, our blood blessedly bestowed, our lives most honorably spent in this so noble and important a cause.”
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St. Robert sealed these words with his own blood and dismembered limbs at Tyburn on February 21, 1595. It would be hard to believe he wasn’t writing for us who are now at grips with an evil Pope St. Pius X labeled “the compendium of all heresies,” which has decimated Christendom not only as a political entity, but is now leaving gaping holes in every family. That so far it has had to rely so little on open physical violence is proof of its power and virulence. St. Robert reminds us,
Quote:“Your adversaries are mighty, their forces very great, their vantage not unknown, their malice experienced: but your Captain has always conquered, your cause has in the end always advanced, your predecessors never lost the field; wherefore then should you have less hope of the victory? Christianity is a warfare, and Christians spiritual soldiers. . . . Now cometh the winnower with his fan to see who is blown away like light chaff and who resists the blasts like massy wheat. . . . Many may seem faithful in the calm of the Church, but when the blasts of diversity bluster against them, few are found in the fruit of martyrdom.”
Ever envisaging the worst, St. Robert proceeds to show the tremendous spiritual advantages to be found in prison: “For though prisons in themselves be the folds of Satan, to harbor his lewd flock, yet when the cause ennobles the name of prisoner, the prisoner abolishes the dishonor of the place. What thing of old more odious than the cross? What place more abhorred than the Mount of Calvary? . . .Think not of the name prison and you will find it a retiring place fittest to serve God. . . a school of divine and hidden mysteries to God’s friends, where Joseph learned to decipher dreams, Samson recovered his strength and Manassas was converted. The saint’s knowledge of prison life was far from academic. Before undergoing torture and imprisonment himself, he had contrived to visit many prisoners secretly, even whole groups of them. His one recorded sermon and one of his finest prose works, “Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears,” was delivered on her feast day in London’s famous Clink only a month after his return from the Continent. So, if it comes to martyrdom, so much the better. We must all die anyway. “Why, therefore, should we fear that which cannot be avoided?. . . He dies old enough who dies good. . . . The baptism of blood surpasses that of water, for it is the greatest point of charity by God’s testimony.
Fr. Southwell concludes his Epistle by upbraiding those Catholics who have submitted to the new English religion out of false obedience to their superiors for the scandal they give “in confirming the obstinacy of misbelievers, in weakening and overthrowing the faith of the faint-hearted and wavering.” He speaks of the “danger of infection by contagious speeches that creep and corrode like canker.”
To the would-be ecumenists he says, Quote:“I wish not to expose your contempt of the canon of the Apostles, of the Council of Laodicea and others forbidding to resort to the prayers or conventicles of heretics; of the example of all antiquity condemning the same; of the verdict and common consent of the profoundest writers in Christendom; and in particular, of the choice men in the Tridentine Council who, after long sifting and examining this point, in the end found it altogether unlawful and avouched it better to suffer all kinds of torment than yield to it. Yea, although they were desired not to make this a public decree, in respect to the troubles that might arise to the Catholics in England, in whose behalf the question of going to church was proposed; yet the Legate and the aforesaid Fathers gave this answer: that they would have their resolution no less accounted of than if it were the censure of the whole Council.”
Fr. Southwell reminds his readers of their duty to give good example. “The more exquisite the rigors our enemies exercise against us, the greater is the allurement of others to our religion. . . everyone seeing such constancy is cast into some scruple. But alas, many of them, yielding before the battle. . . have not left themselves so much as this excuse – that they went to church unwillingly. They offer themselves voluntarily; they run unwittingly to their ruin and seem rather to embrace a thing before desired than to yield to an occasion they would fain have avoided. And did not your feet stumble, your eyes grow dim, your hearts quake and your bodies tremble when you came into the polluted synagogue? Could the servant of Christ abide in that place?. . . Could you come hither to offer your prayers unto God? . . . Will you seek to shelter yourselves under the pretext that you are in mind Catholics and that you come to church only to obey the law?”
He reminds these weak Catholics, “You carry also with you your dear innocents, . . . thus training your little ones to destruction, unlike the good mother in Machabees who rather exhorted her children to martyrdom than to offend by saving their lives.” He warns, “Divers heretics will be witnesses against you in the day of judgment, for,” quoting St. Cyprian, “if the faith that conquers be crowned, the perfidiousness that betrays shall be chastised.” In every age the wavering side with an illusory majority, lacking the spiritual sight of the prophet Eliseus, who reminded the Israelites besieged by the Syrian multitudes, “Fear not, for there are more with us than with them” ( 4 Kgs. 6:16).
In St. Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort there is a fine passage underscoring this truth:
Quote:“Now, if it were . . . that you should be brought through the broad high street of a great city and that all along the way that you were going there were on the one side of the way a rabble of ragged beggars and madmen that would despise and dispraise you, with all the shameful names that they could call you, and all the villainous words that they could say to you: and that there were then all along the other side of the same street . . . a goodly company standing in a fair range, a row of wise and worshipful folk allowing and commending you, more than fifteen times as many as that rabble of ragged beggars and railing madmen are: would you cease your progress willingly, believing that you went unto your shame because of the shameful jesting and railing of those mad, foolish wretches? Or hold on your way with a good cheer and a glad heart, thinking yourself much honored by the laud and approbation of that other honorable sort? A trenchant appraisal of the militant Catholic here below who sides with the real majority in the Church – the countless angelic hosts and multitudes of the blessed martyrs and saints who witness his trials.”
St. Robert likewise begs us not to go to perdition with the faithless “for company’s sake. . . . Let not the example of those that fall make you weaker. If they had been of us they would have stayed with us. We should rejoice when the wolves are separated from the sheep of Christ. . . Let no man imagine that the good go out of the Church. The wind carries not away the wheat, neither does the storm overthrow the trees that are strong rooted.” He closes with a description of what heaven will be like, and the words, “Not he who begins, but he who perseveres unto the end shall be saved.”
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Although responsible for many conversions in the course of the strenuous underground ministry he exercised for some six miraculous years around London before being caught, St. Robert was not concerned with non-Catholics. He saw his duty in supplying the desperate needs of the uprooted faithful who were merely trying to save their souls amid the general apostasy. He contrived to reach not only those who were incarcerated, like the Earl, and perhaps facing the death penalty, but larger numbers like the Earl’s wife, the Countess Anne Dacres, who were trying to lead good Catholic lives at large, isolated from most of society and yet courting almost certain danger by worshiping in secret. To this end he wrote the Short Rule of a Good Life, which issued from Fr. Garnet’s press shortly after its author’s martyrdom. It was coupled with the beautiful, poignant and long Letter to his Father,[1] Richard Southwell, exhorting him to return to the Faith. This gentleman had made fatal compromises in hopes of saving the family fortune, but found grace with God after his son’s sacrifice. In 1600 Fr. Garnet was able to write his Jesuit Superior, “Mr. Southwell, Robert’s father, has just died a Catholic.”
The saint’s name did not appear on the volume, but everyone knew the notorious Fr. Southwell had written it, and so great was his literary reputation throughout England that it circulated freely. After a half century of religious chaos the English were so desperate for good spiritual direction that even the heretics made use of it. Some of the editions even boasted official sanction. Purged of references to saints, mortal and venial sins and Catholic practices, the Short Rule/i] emerged in Anglican dress as the reformers’ own doctrine. This was not uncommon practice on their part, for tampering was easier and more profitable than outright suppression, always difficult to enforce. A like fate overtook Fr. Persons’ edition of Loarte’s Christian Directory, cleverly modified by a Calvinist divine.
As practical and immediate as the Epistle, the Short Rule is generally acknowledged to have been written for the Countess of Arundel. In any case her saintly personal life was a great credit to Fr. Southwell’s spiritual direction, for this gracious, valiant woman daily risked her life to help him and many other priests reach as many Catholics as possible, affording the lodging, material helps and protection without which their ministry would soon have foundered. Not the least of her contributions to the cause was the aforementioned printing press. One of the Catholic counties of Maryland bears her name to this day.
On reading the [i]Rule one is struck first by its crashing lack of originality. The work of a highly gifted, imaginative poet, its contents are pretty much an Ignatian version of hard-headed old Catholic doctrine and precepts handed down for generations. If the author were not known, it would be hard to discern from the text alone that it was written during a period of intense persecution, when the most respected, long-standing Catholic families were being systematically shattered, robbed and humiliated for refusing to accept a man made reform soon to cast out an entire Christian nation for hundreds of years from the Church Christ founded. One of the few clues to the contemporary scene occurs in a section headed “On the Care of My Children,” where parents are urged to “tell them often of the abbeys, and the virtue of the old monks and friars and other priests and religious women.” Needless to say, this passage did not escape the Anglican editor, who substituted, “tell them often of the virtue of their predecessors, and of the truth and honesty of the old time and the iniquity of ours.”
Never at any time does the author descend to personal invective or mention those laboring to destroy the Faith among his contemporaries. He lays down in the first chapter: “I cannot serve God in this world, nor go about to enjoy Him in the next, but that God’s enemies and mine will repine and seek to hinder me: which are three.” Elizabeth? Cranmer? Perhaps Sir Henry Walsingham and his bloodhound Richard Topcliffe? Hardly. The enemies he speaks of are far more formidable, and more ancient: the world, the flesh and the devil.
Quote:“Wherefore I must resolve myself and set it down as a thing undoubted that my whole life must be a continual combat with these adversaries, whom I must assuredly persuade myself do lie hourly in wait for me to seek their advantage, and that their malice is so implacable and their hatred against me so rooted in them that I must never look to have one hour secure from their assaults, but that they will from time to time, so long as there is breath in my body, still labor to make me forsake and offend God, allure me to their service and draw me to my damnation.”
Thus does he strike the nub of all persecution in England or anywhere. Had every English Catholic been living by the principles outlined in the Countess’ Rule, Cranmer and his revolution would not have collapsed, but never happened, because there would have been no need to purify their souls.
How reassuring therefore to find nothing new in all these pages! Their whole tenor is how to maintain union with God by the perfect accomplishment of His holy will. It is the ancient science of the saints, for whom God’s will soars above every other means of union, even the Eucharist.. For instance, Fr. Southwell makes no mention of spiritual Communion, a practice so useful, consoling, and so often recommended to those deprived of the Sacraments. But why should he? If the Rule is followed, one’s whole life becomes one unbroken spiritual Communion, continuing without interruption into eternity.
The baptized under persecution may not be able to attend Mass, but they can live it in their flesh by mystical union with Christ in prayer and suffering. Where it is impossible to do both, mere attendance pales by comparison in cases where God himself has removed the liturgical wraps from the essential reality. Sometimes it would seem that we must be torn periodically from the Sacraments and liturgy in order to be forcibly reminded of their divine Source. Many saints have suffered this trial. Persecution stands at the summit of the Beatitudes, for “your reward is very great in heaven” (Matt. 5:12).
St. Cyprian, who fought to preserve the same Latin Rite Mass which is proscribed nearly everywhere today, and for which Fr. Southwell laid down his life, had this to say to the heretics of his day:
Quote:“If in the sacrifice Christ offered no one is to be imitated but Christ, we must beyond doubt obey and do what Christ did, and what He commanded to be done: since in the Gospel He tells us: ‘You are my friends if you do the things I command you’ (John 15:14). . . So if Christ alone is to be listened to, we must pay no attention to what another thinks is to be done, but do what Christ who is above all first did. We are not to follow after the notions of men, but the truth of God; since God says to us by His prophet Isaiah: ‘In vain do they worship Me, teaching the doctrines and the commands of men’ (29:13).
“And in the Gospel He says this same thing: ‘Making void the word of God by your own tradition, which you have given forth’ (Mk. 4:13). And He lays it down in another place and says, ‘He therefore that shall break one of these least commandments, and shall so teach men, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:19). And if it is not lawful to undo even the least of the Lord’s commandments, how much more unlawful is it to break those that are so grave, so serious, so closely related to the mystery of the Lord’s Passion and to our own Redemption, or to change into something else, because of some human notion, that which has been divinely handed down to us?”
Living the Mass in prefiguration in the midst of the fiery furnace in Babylon, the good Azarias prayed, “We, O Lord, are diminished more than any nation and are brought low in all the earth this day for our sins. Neither is there at this time prince or leader, or prophet, or holocaust, or sacrifice, or oblation, or incense, or place of first-fruits before Thee, that we may find mercy: nevertheless in a contrite heart and humble spirit let us be accepted. As in holocausts of rams and bullocks, and as in thousands of fat lambs: so let our sacrifice be made in Thy sight this day, that it may please Thee: for there is no confusion to them that trust in Thee” (Dan. 4:37-40).
The picture was just as bleak for English Catholics in Fr. Southwell’s day. Although St. Pius V had excommunicated and deposed Elizabeth as Queen of England, relieving her subjects of all allegiance to her, he had died before being able to organize the military expedition designed to enforce the Bull, and the two organized by his successor Gregory XIII had both failed through treachery. The spiritual state of Europe was such that exterior means had lost all power. In the Short Rule St. Robert therefore counsels the penitent, “a perfect resignation of myself into God’s hands, with a full desire that He should me as it were to His glory, whether it were to my temporal comfort or no. And to be as ready to serve Him in misery, need and affliction as in prosperity and pleasure, thinking it my chiefest delight to be used as God will, and to have His pleasure and providence fully accomplished in me, which is the end for which I was created and for which I do now live. . . To which these considerations may help me:
“First, the end I aim at is God’s glory in this world and His reward in the next; and therefore, knowing that nothing but my voluntary sin can bar me from this end, what need I much care by what means God will have me attain it? For the means can last but a little, and the end endureth forever and is so much the more comfortable in that it has been achieved with more discomfortable toils.
“Secondly, God loves me more than I love myself, and is so wise that He best sees what is fittest for me, all present and future circumstances considered. He is so mighty that what His wisdom and love shall conclude for my good His power can put into execution; and therefore let me rather yield myself wholly to His providence than mine own desires.
“Thirdly, whatsoever moves me to fear or dislike anything which I could not frame my mind to bear, God sees it as well and far better than I, yea, and all other secret and unknown hazards that are annexed to that thing. If then He, knowing all these things, will nevertheless let it happen to me, I must assure myself that it proceeds of love and is for my greater good, and that having laid a heavy burden upon weak forces will by His grace supply all my fears, wants and frailties.”
We can imagine what impact such words must have had when the public first read them, so soon after the cruel martyrdom God had let happen to their author. Fr. Garnet’s Preface to the Reader runs, “The author of this little book, gentle reader, I nothing doubt but is very well known to thee, as also for his learning, piety, zeal, charity, fortitude and other rare singular qualities, but especially for his precious death he is renowned to the world abroad. Neither needeth there any extraordinary vision, but the sound and certain doctrine of the Catholic Church is sufficient to persuade that he is a most glorious saint in heaven. . . . But because thou shouldst not be ignorant of the way by which this valiant champion of Christ arrived unto so happy a country, he himself hath left behind him for thy benefit, and even among the last of his fruitful labors for the good of souls had designed to publish unto the world the description of this most gainful voyage to heaven . . . the Short Rule of a Good Life.
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For Fr. Southwell and many other martyrs the more apt title might have been Good Rule for a Short Life. As St. Thomas More put it in his Dialogue of Comfort, “There is no born Turk so cruel to Christian folk as is the false Christian that falleth from the faith.” Where Master Rich was not lacking to St. Thomas, nor Judas to Christ, neither were false brethren lacking to the besieged Catholics of England. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State and Chief of Security, had agents even among the English seminarians studying abroad for the priesthood, who not only served as informants, but fomented every possible dissension among clergy and students.
Others, posing as Catholics and moving in the clandestine Mass groups, became adept at enrolling the weaker members in little plots and counter-plots and then denouncing them to the authorities. The most famous of these machinations by far was the so-called Babington Plot, named after the unfortunate Anthony Babington whom Walsingham chose for the role of patsy, as we would say today. Ostensibly rigged to assassinate Elizabeth and enthrone Mary Queen of Scots as the rightful English monarch, this conspiracy was entirely concocted by the enemy. It brought to ruin and the gallows not only the Catholics directly implicated, together with those who unknowingly befriended them, but provided the long sought for pretext for the execution of Mary, who had in no way promoted it, although she had been told of it.
Even Fr. Southwell, lately arrived in England, had barely escaped being innocently involved. So consummate had been the deception, he had at first believed the plot was indeed the work of Catholics. In his Humble Supplication to Her Majesty – penned to protest the Proclamation of 1591 branding priests like himself as dissolute agents of Spain – the nobly born Jesuit is able later to inform Elizabeth that Walsingham’s spy Robert Poley was “the chief instrument to contrive and prosecute the matter, to draw into the net such green wits as . . . might easily be overwrought by Mr. Secretary’s subtle and sifting wit. For Poley masking his secret intentions under the face of religion, and abusing with irreligious hypocrisy all rites and sacraments to borrow the false opinion of a Catholic, still fed the poor gentleman [Babington] with his master’s baits, and he holding the line in his hand, suffered them like silly fishes to play themselves upon the hook till they were thoroughly fastened, that then he might strike at his own pleasure, and be sure to draw them to a certain destruction.”
The destruction was thorough once the trap was sprung. In An Autobiography from the Jesuit Underground, Fr. William Weston later wrote, “On one side of my room was the public road. On the other the river Thames. Throughout the day and, I think, for several days that followed, great crowds gathered in the street cheering and making merry. They piled up masses of wood and set fire to them, then stood around talking wildly all the time against the Pope, the King of Spain, against Catholics and the Queen of Scots; and not the least, as you can guess, against the Jesuits. . . On the other side of the river the sight was more terrible still. Catholics tied hand and foot were ferried across the river, up and down between the Tower and Westminster where the trials were held. . . For the space of at least six or seven weeks this was my daily spectacle. During all that time the trials were conducted, death sentences pronounced on many gentlemen and the executions carried out.
Fr. Southwell writes in the Supplication: “All highways were watched, infinite houses searched, hues and cries raised, frights bruited in people’s ears, as though the whole realm had been on fire, whereas in truth it was but the hissing of a few green twigs of their own kindling, which they might without any such uproar have quenched with a handful of water.” And again, “As for this action of Babington, it was in truth rather a snare to entrap them than any device of their own, since it was both plotted, furthered and finished by Sir Francis Walsingham and his other complices, who laid and hatched all the particulars thereof, as they thought it would best fall out of the discredit of Catholics and cutting off the Queen of Scots.”
His personal estimation of the Scottish queen is best revealed in a stanza of a poem he composed at her death which is rarely found in anthologies:
Alive a Queen, now dead a Saint;
Once Mary called, my name now Martyr is;
From earthly reign debarred by restraint,
In lieu whereof I reign in heavenly bliss.
Using poetic license to the full, Fr. Southwell found no difficulty in canonizing England’s and Scotland’s rightful sovereign. May the Church set her seal on her in time! Like her eulogizer, Mary by God’s grace achieved the perfect solution to religious persecution. As St. Cyprian said, “This is He, our God! Not the God of all men, but of the faithful, and of those who believe in Him, who when He comes at His second coming, shall appear openly and not keep silence. . . Let us wait for Him, dearly beloved, our Judge and our Avenger; who shall revenge, together with Himself, the people of His Church and the number of all the just from the beginning of the world.”
There is no such thing as a political solution to a battle not waged against flesh and blood, beyond the sphere of politics, and Fr. Southwell never proposed any by either word or deed. In any age what is a political solution but an escape from suffering by substituting the natural for the supernatural? At the dawn of Marxism the Russian philosopher Berdyaev pointed out how this modern political solution is nothing but a categorical flight from the Cross. The Marxist, says he in The Russian Revolution, “will not accept a world whose creation is accompanied by the sufferings of human beings. He wants to destroy that world and create a new one where suffering does not exist. God created an unjust world full of suffering, and therefore He must be rejected for moral reasons. . . The only thing to pit against integral Communism, materialistic Communism, is integral Christianity.”
Like Isaias pleading with Achaz “at the conduit of the upper pool” to trust God and not come to terms with the enemies besieging Jerusalem (Is. 7), Fr. Southwell never ceased proposing integral Christianity, but he was heeded little more than the old prophet, for by the 17th century the enemy had literally poisoned the whole recusant body with the bait of political solutions. Suspicion and in-fighting reduced Catholic resistance to abject begging for peaceful co-existence with the “separated brethren.” Under Lord Baltimore the “political solution” came to America, where it soon developed into the heresy of Americanism which is now infecting the whole world.
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If Fr. Southwell, like Christ our Lord, was immune to political temptations, again like His Master, he was not immune to betrayal. He was caught at Uxenden, home of the Bellamys, a staunch Catholic family who had also befriended St. Edmund Campion, Fr. Persons, Fr. Weston, Fr. Garnet and many other underground priests. Two of its sons were put to death, a third tortured and exiled, with the mother left to die in prison, as innocent victims of the Babington Plot. Tragically, it was a daughter of the house, Anne Bellamy, who was prevailed upon to betray Robert Southwell. This unfortunate young woman had gone valiantly to prison for her faith, but was raped there by Topcliffe and became pregnant.
Christopher Devlin puts the story thus in his biography of the Saint: “Anne in her misery was to be offered the hope of saving her family from all future vexation by enticing Southwell to spend one night under their roof, informing Topcliffe meanwhile of the time and hiding-place. Thus the Bellamys would be caught in a position where only Topcliffe’s personal favor could preserve their lives and property. The ploy had actually been concocted by one Nicholas Jones, a servant of Topcliffe’s with high ambitions. Well before her child was due, Anne would be married to Nicholas Jones – but married in the Church with the blessing of her parents, and with the rich manor of Preston from the Bellamy lands as her dowry. In the event, five innocent people, three men and two women, died in great pain, and several others were ruined, in order to provide the weaver’s son [Jones] with a country-house.
It was as Mrs. Nicholas Jones that Anne Bellamy testified against St. Robert Southwell at his trial. He was executed the following day. So what’s new? He was only 34, but as he had put it to the young Earl of Arundel, “He dies old enough who dies good!”
St. Robert Southwell, pray for us!
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| The peril of buying into the big lie |
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Posted by: Scarlet - 01-04-2021, 11:59 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular]
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These classic children’s stories warn us of the peril of buying into the big lie — a COVID lesson
These stories provide a lens that can help us interpret events that are happening right now. They are frighteningly prophetic.
By Pete Baklinski
December 24, 2020 ( LifeSiteNews) — This might be the most surprising article you will read about the psychological, and ultimately spiritual, warfare being waged against you and your loved ones every moment of every day in the name of keeping all of us “safe” from the coronavirus.
Here is what has happened so far. The coronavirus originated in China in the latter part of 2019. COVID-19 spread throughout the world, creating a worldwide crisis. Governments around the world reacted to the crisis to stop the spread. Government reactions included lockdowns, social distance orders, mask mandates, curfews, and a push to develop a vaccine, all in the name of keeping us “safe” from the virus.
But such safety comes with a price.
Rights and freedoms have been crushed. Churches have been closed. Worshiping God in public has been banned. Many have lost their jobs. Lockdowns are destroying businesses. Economies are in shambles. People walk around in masks with fear in their eyes. Fear is everywhere. Most are controlled by it. Many have come to the point mentally and emotionally where they are willing to do almost anything to secure their safety, to live in peace and freedom once again, to go back to the way things were just one short year ago.
This is exactly the place where people, who are scared into submission out of fear to preserve their lives, are most useful to those with plans to use the crisis as a golden opportunity for social engineering and the restructuring of society.
Well crafted messaging communicated to us by so-called experts in the fields of medicine and health that influences government policy and is reinforced by mainstream media is well on the way to achieving a number of goals that are becoming more and more apparent with each passing day.
But I am jumping ahead of myself. I want to relate a children’s story that I think rather brilliantly summarizes the situation we find ourselves in today. The story provides a lens that can help us interpret events that are happening right now. The story, especially the 1943 version retold by Walt Disney, is frighteningly prophetic.
Psychological warfare
The story of Chicken Little opens in a nice, cozy little farmyard, where there thrives a community of chickens protected from wild animals by an impenetrable fence. The community includes a rooster who is headman, chicken inspector, and supervisor of egg production. There are a host of other birds who make up the well rounded community, including the do-gooders; the gossipers; the intellectuals; the irresponsible; and last, but not least, Chicken Little, who is a “little shy on brains.”
The chickens are happy and contented, knowing they are protected by a big, strong fence.
But then, one day, along comes a fox who takes a culinary interest in the chickens. Seeing the fence, the locked door, and the farmer’s gun on a nearby porch, the fox turns to “psychology” to get what he wants — not just one bird, but them all.
From a book titled Psychology, the fox reads: “To influence the masses, aim first at the least intelligent.”
He then sets upon a plan to manipulate Chicken Little into believing that the sky is falling and all are doomed.
“If you tell ’em a lie, don’t tell a little one, tell a big one,” the fox reads from Psychology, a book that reads as if it was drawn from the pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Grabbing a piece of a blue sign with a star painted on it, the fox throws it at Chicken Little accompanied by smoke, water, and loud noises that the fox has orchestrated for dramatic effect. The fox speaks to Chicken Little through the fence as the “voice of doom,” convincing him that the sky is falling and that he must run for his life. Chicken Little immediately races through the chicken pen, shouting to everyone who will listen that the sky is falling, pointing to the bump on his head to prove it.
The chickens are at first alarmed: “Oh, my goodness, how awful. What will we do? We’ll all be killed.”
When the rooster points out that it’s just a piece of wood that fell on Chicken Little, the fox is temporarily defeated. But, using his trusted book of Psychology, the fox begins to undermine the faith of the chickens in their leader, the rooster, by spreading falsehoods about him.
At the critical moment, the fox whispers through the fence to Chicken Little that the chickens will now listen to him and that Chicken Little was born to be their leader. Chicken Little promptly tells the chickens he’s going to save their lives by telling them what to do. The chickens, driven by fear after seeing the rooster hit on the head by a “piece of the sky,” beg Chicken Little to save them. All Chicken Little can tell them is what he heard whispered to him by the Fox: “Run to the cave!”
The chickens collectively burst through their protective fence and rush to the cave, following the carefully marked signposts that the fox has erected to point the way. The story ends with the fox eating all the chickens and paying tribute to Psychology for helping him to get what he wanted.
There are a number of important lessons to be drawn from this story:
- Creating or capitalizing on a crisis is the best way to move the masses toward a goal that has been predetermined by the controllers.
- Lies can control people, especially the ignorant and those who can’t think for themselves.
- “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
- Fear for one’s safety is the best way to motivate the masses to accept the controllers’ solution to the crisis and engage in actions that lead to the predetermined goal.
- Once the lie is bought by the masses, the solution proposed by the controllers is logical.
- There will always be obvious signs that the lies and fear-based narrative crafted by the controllers are contrary to reality, contradicting reason, common sense, and right judgment.
- The only way to escape arriving at the predetermined end is to act according to reason, common sense, and right judgment and not according to the narrative crafted by the controllers.
I’ll summarize how these lessons play out in the story of Chicken Little.
- The fox (the controller) wants to eat the chickens (predetermined goal). He manufactures a crisis (sky is falling) to move the chickens toward his goal.
- The lie that the sky is falling creates fear in the chickens that they will all die. This fear drives the chickens to submit to the control of the fox.
- The chickens come to believe the “big lie” that the sky is falling through the clever messaging of the fox and the persistence of Chicken Little.
- The chickens become willing to do anything to be kept safe from the sky falling on their heads.
- The solution of running to the cave for safety is, at first glance, a logical solution to the threat of the sky falling.
- There were numerous signs that the narrative created by the fox was false, such as the “piece of sky” really being a hunk of painted wood, such as the fact that the sky is not a material object that can fall, and such as the fact that if the Earth’s atmosphere were collapsing, running to a cave would not save anyone from the twofold doom of oxygen deprivation and sudden plummet in temperature to uninhabitable levels.
- Only the chickens who refused to run to the cave were actually the ones who, in the end, were safe.
Signs of the lie
I believe that the story of Chicken Little has much to teach us about the current situation we find ourselves in. There are many signs that we are being lied to, manipulated, and being moved to a predetermined end in the COVID-19 crisis. Who the controllers are and what their predetermined goal is are becoming more evident with each passing day.
Let’s go through the lessons we learned from the story of Chicken Little to see how they apply to the coronavirus crisis.
- When news first started to break about a new virus that was spreading like wildfire throughout the world, we were told that millions upon millions would die. Thus emerged the crisis.
- The crisis created fear in people around the world that they and their loved ones were in danger of becoming infected with the virus and could quickly and painfully die from it.
- Many people, watching mainstream media’s interpretation of the crisis, became utterly convinced of the reality of the crisis.
- The masses, driven by fear of contracting the virus and dying from it, were scared into submitting to government laws, created by newly seized powers, to keep people “safe.” Thus came the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the social distancing, the sanitizer, the vaccines.
- Many of the solutions provided, if it were true that a deadly virus was in the process of wiping out millions upon millions of the world’s inhabitants, appear at first glance to be logical.
- There are numerous signs, however, that the COVID narrative being put forward by governments around the world and being backed by mainstream media is simply not true. This point could be backed by thousands of pages of evidence. I will simply provide resources to real-world data, statements, and position papers by qualified and respected doctors and scientific studies that you can examine to ascertain for yourself that what you are being told by government and mainstream media about COVID-19 doesn’t reflect reality. If the information below is any indication that the COVID narrative put forward by government and mainstream media is not true, what this means is that the solutions to the crisis being offered by authorities may not in the end save you or anyone and may, in fact, lead to an unexpected and unpleasant result.
- Masks offer little protection from virus
- Dr. Jim Meehan: An evidence-based scientific analysis of why masks are ineffective, unnecessary, and harmful
- Neurosurgeon: Face masks pose serious risks to the healthy
- Dr. Roger Hodkinson, MA, MB, FRCPC, FCAP, CEO and medical director of Western Medical Assessments: Masks are utterly useless, COVID rules are politics playing medicine
- Masks don’t stop COVID-19 spread, peer-reviewed study finds
- Physicians: ‘Masks don’t control viruses, they control you’
- Dr. Fauci claims masks don’t provide COVID protection, only help people ‘feel…better’
- Medical doctor lays out hazards of COVID-19 face masks
- New England Journal of Medicine: ‘Wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection’
- If it’s true that we’ve been lied to and manipulated, we must resist and oppose solutions that are intended to move us little by little toward the predetermined goal.
‘Diabolic conspiracy’
A faithful Catholic priest who is an exorcist recently told LifeSiteNews that he has discerned a diabolical component to the coronavirus crisis. Some of you may be skeptical of demonic influence in the world. It’s been said that the greatest trick Satan ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
The priest laid out what he believes is the strategy Satan is using to bring about the goal of preparing the world for the inevitable coming of the Antichrist, the lawless one, who, while being entirely opposed to God, will style himself the savior of the world and attempt to draw all men to himself (1 Thess. 5:2-3; 2 Thess. 2:4-12; 2 Jn. 7).
The priest laid out the plan this way:
- The crisis created by the coronavirus outbreak is being used by globalist financial elites to consolidate power and bring about control.
- The “great reset” agenda (here, here, and here) is ultimately a plan to bring everything under the control of the globalist financial elite. Satan has been “working towards creating a society where everybody is under control by means of the financial side of things.”
- A world controlled by the elites who run a unified economy is the “necessary precursor” for the Antichrist to come.
- When the Antichrist comes, he will rule the masses not via individual political governments, but via a unified global economy that will micromanage all things.
- COVID vaccination programs are part of a process of getting people to comply with this new world order. “This is why you have people like Bill Gates and the like talking about the necessity of having people's vaccination records connected to their bank records, and things of this sort, so that they can basically shut you off financially if you don't comply with what their dictates are.”
- The demons are using the current crisis to “drive and amplify fear” so that people will go along with the agenda.
- The Antichrist is not coming “anytime soon,” but the world is being prepared for his coming.
The priest said human beings don’t have the “intelligence and the ability” to bring about such a plan for a “great reset,” “but the demons do, and they'll drive these people [the globalist financial elite] to do this.”
The priest sees the coronavirus crisis and the global response to it as part of a “diabolic conspiracy” to prepare the way for the Antichrist. He sees that God ultimately is allowing these things to happen not only as a “chastisement” to bring people to their senses, but also as a time of “purification” to help people become detached from sin and to lead godly lives.
The priest’s warning that the consolidation of worldly powers and the control leveraged through the coronavirus crisis may be playing a part in the eventual coming of the Antichrist reminded me of a passage in the book of Revelation. In the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the Apocalypse, we read about a future time when people will not be able to “buy or sell” unless they have a special “character” which is placed “in their right hand, or on their foreheads.”
Some governments have already floated the idea ( here, here, and here for how it works) of an “immunity passport” that would allow people to shop, go to work, travel, and go to sporting and cultural events only if they have received a COVID-19 vaccine. In other words, the day may be approaching quickly where people will not be able to “buy or sell” unless they have received such a vaccine and have proof that they have received it. For now, such proof could be a written document or an app on your phone. Later, it could be a quantum dot dye system or an implanted chip that stores not only medical, but also financial information beneath one’s skin.
While many governments are not at this moment making COVID vaccines mandatory, some are certainly threatening that those who refuse to take it will not be able to engage in the public forum. The “choice” to take the vaccine is suddenly becoming “an offer one can’t refuse.”
It remains to be seen if there is anything nefarious behind the vaccines themselves and the global push to have the world’s population vaccinated. There are many qualified doctors and researchers along with other experts who are warning people not to take the vaccine for various reasons. These include the vaccines’ rushed development, their lack of normal testing, their largely experimental nature, their use of aborted fetal cell line either in production or testing, the high number of adverse reactions, and the standard medical doctrine that you don’t vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease.
One Catholic bishop has suggested that mandating COVID vaccines connected in some way to abortion is part of Satan’s strategy to force the whole world to “collaborate” in abortion. “This is for me the last step of Satanism, that Satan and the world government — ultimately the Masonic world government — will oblige all, even the Church, to accept abortion in this way,” said Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan, in an October interview.
The Catholic priest and exorcist mentioned above told LifeSiteNews that there is a “diabolic component” to mandating vaccines connected to abortion because it will make people who receive them a “physical walking offense” to God, which is “what the demons want us all to be, even if it’s not volitional on our part.”
When I was thinking about this priest’s words, it dawned on me that many of the COVID rules and protocols imposed on us by the authorities, such as mask mandates and social distancing protocols, make us physical walking offenses to God.
Mankind is created in the image and likeness of God. It is especially the face, the transparent medium of our rational soul, that reveals the divine spark that makes us different from every other creature. Heaven is described by St. Paul as a “face to face” encounter with God (1 Cor. 13:12). Masks cover the face. They obscure that part of us that especially reveals our divine origin. In the end, masks cover our true identity as children of God who are called to live not in fear, but in freedom.
Men and women are called to be in communion with one another and receive this call from the Trinitarian Communion of Persons. Jesus prays that we all “may be one” as he is in the Father and the Father is in him (Jn. 17:21). We are communal beings. We flourish when we are together. We decline when we are apart. In his book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes hell as a place where its inhabitants are “getting further apart” from one another because of how much they despise and hate one another. For Lewis, hell is social distancing. Treating one another as potential virus-infected killers from whom we must keep our distance is a direct assault on our divine call to communion.
One final point I want to make about a diabolic component to the coronavirus crisis is Satan’s stroke of genius in using the crisis to close churches and deny the faithful access to the sacraments, something that atheists and communists have been striving to do for a long time. It is no coincidence that assaults on freedom of worship are a consequence of coronavirus measures. From Satan’s perspective, stopping Christian worship, stopping the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, stopping the faithful from being able to access the sacraments would be one of the first main objectives in his battle plan. And, unfortunately, weak and unfaithful shepherds played right into Satan’s hands, often going above and beyond what secular authorities mandated in lockdown measures. Thus far, the major lockdowns have happened around the two most important Christian feasts of the year, Easter and Christmas.
The Christian faith teaches that Jesus Christ will one day return. But, before he does, the Church will pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. There will be persecution. The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the coming of a “religious deception” that will offer men an “apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.” No one can tell if we are now beginning to live in such times, but, just as a mountain begins to rumble and smoke before the volcanic explosion, so too might many things happening today be interpreted as signs of things to come.
‘But he hasn’t got anything on’
I want to end with another classic children’s story and the important lesson it has to offer us in these times. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes tells the story of a vain emperor exceedingly fond of clothes who is taken in by two swindlers.
One day, posing as weavers, the two swindlers offer the emperor the most magnificent clothes that have a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or unusually stupid. The emperor falls for the trap, saying that such clothes would help him discover which men in his empire are unfit for their posts and help him tell the wise from the foolish.
The swindlers set up looms and begin their work. The emperor sends officials, and later goes himself, to examine their progress. All of them see that the looms are empty, but they pretend to see the “excellent pattern, the beautiful colors” so as to avoid being called out as fools and unfit for their offices. The weavers finally finish making the clothes and pretend to dress the emperor, preparing him for a parade in front of the entire kingdom.
“Everyone in the streets and the windows said, ‘Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes! Don’t they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!’ Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.”
A child, governed by reason, common sense, and right judgment, finally exclaims: “But he hasn’t got anything on.”
It is at that moment that the citizens realize that they have been fooled.
It’s time for us to examine the evidence and to judge the situation we find ourselves in with right judgment. If the foxes of our day are telling us to run to the cave to be safe, we need to question everything and refuse to go along with their narrative if it does not correspond to reality. If the emperors of our day are telling us to go along with their schemes that in the end are contrary to plain sight, reason, and common sense, we’re the fools if we go along with it. In the end, only the truth will set us free. And it is in living according to truth that we live in freedom as children of God.
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| The Three Days of Darkness |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-04-2021, 12:15 AM - Forum: Catholic Prophecy
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Please note that everything in red is mine.
When the saints and mystics talk about blessed candles they are referring to the candles blessed at Candlemas, February 2nd. In their days, which is also tradition, the Church would only bless candles on Candlemas (which includes all the ones for the altars, as well as those that the laity could light in the churches) and would give a few to each faithful to have to burn for special favors, storms, etc.
I have done research on the blessed candles to ensure that God meant that it was those blessed on February 2nd. After looking in several Catholic books and researching on the internet, the conclusion is that it is those blessed at Candlemas. Any time you put in "blessed candles" in the search bar, Candlemas is what comes up immediately and when you do further research you learn that it is tradition to bless candles on February 2nd and that was the only time that the Church blessed them. It is the same as only being able to bless Holy Chrism on Holy Thursday or the Baptismal water on Holy Saturday. Now that does not mean that those blessed with the ordinary blessing done outside of Candlemas don't have any benefits, of course when you burn them they prayers are then said, for example, for the Purgatory Souls, but they aren't going to help against storms because only the prayer done for the Candlemas candles have that power.
The biggest difference between the ordinary blessing and the Candlemas blessing is that the candles done at Candlemas are good against storms, which for the Three Days of Darkness is key. (A priest was asked what the difference was between the Candlemas candles and those blessed with the ordinary blessing)
When you read the Three Days of Darkness from multiple saints and visionaries, you realize that the description of those days fit the descriptions of severe storms, so the only blessed candle that would work for those days would be the candles blessed at Candlemas.
I understand that in these times it is difficult to get candles blessed at Candlemas, but if you pray to God and Mother Mary, They will help guide you to a solution. For example, maybe a laity has some extra candles from Candlemas and God may inspire them to send some to those to have none. Another idea would be to send a candle to a priest for him to bless at Candlemas.
I tried to find when the Church started using the ordinary blessing to bless candles all the time, but I was unable to find any history or tradition of it, which is odd and a little concerning. If anyone has any information in regards to when the Church started this practice, please feel free to share. You can either reply in this thread or private messaging, which ever you prefer.
“God will send two punishments: one will be in the form of wars, revolutions and other evils; it shall originate on earth. The other will be sent from Heaven. There shall come over the whole earth an intense darkness lasting three days and three nights. Nothing can be seen, and the air will be laden with pestilence which will claim mainly, but not only, the enemies of religion. It will be impossible to use any man-made lighting during this darkness, except blessed candles (blessed at Candlemas). He, who out of curiosity, opens his window to look out, or leaves his home, will fall dead on the spot. During these three days, people should remain in their homes, pray the Rosary and beg God for mercy.”
“On this terrible occasion so many of these wicked men, enemies of His Church, and of their God, shall be killed by this divine scourge, that their corpses around Rome will be as numerous as the fishes, which a recent inundation of the Tiber had carried into the city. All the enemies of the Church, secret as well as known, will perish over the whole earth during that universal darkness, with the exception of some few, whom God will soon after convert. The air shall be infested by demons, who will appear under all sorts of hideous forms.
“After the three days of darkness, Saints Peter and Paul, having come down from heaven, will preach throughout the world and designate a new Pope. A great light will flash from their bodies and settle upon the cardinal, the future pontiff. Then Christianity will spread throughout the world. Whole nations will join the Church shortly before the reign of the Antichrist. These conversions will be amazing. Those who survive shall have to conduct themselves well. There shall be innumerable conversions of heretics, who will return to the bosom of the Church; all will note the edifying conduct of their lives, as well as that of other Catholics. Russia, England and China will come into the Church."
Blessed Anna-Maria Taigi
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| February 4th - St. Andrew Corsini and St. Jane of Valois |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-03-2021, 04:52 PM - Forum: February
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Saint Andrew Corsini
Bishop of Fiesole
(1302-1373)
Saint Andrew was born in Florence in 1301 of the illustrious Corsini family. A short time before the birth of Saint Andrew, his mother experienced a strange dream, in which she had given birth to a wolf which became a lamb upon entering a Carmelite church. After a dissolute youthful life Andrew repented, when one day in 1318 his desolate mother told him of her dream. He rose and went to the altar in the church where his parents had offered to God the child they hoped to obtain from His mercy; there he prayed to the Blessed Virgin with tears, then went to beg his admission to the Carmelite Order.
He began a life of great mortification. Ordained a priest in 1328, he studied in Paris and Avignon, and on his return became the Apostle of Florence, and Prior of his convent there. In 1360 he was consecrated Bishop of Fiesole, near Florence, and gained a great reputation as a peacemaker between rival political factions and for his love of the poor. He was also named papal nuncio to Bologna, where he pacified dissenting factions and won the hearts of the nobility with whom he was associating. He wrought many miracles of healing and conversion during his lifetime.
At the age of 71, while he was celebrating the midnight Mass of Christmas, the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and told him he would leave this world on the feast of the Epiphany, to meet the beloved Master he had served so faithfully. In effect, he died on that day in 1373, in the thirteenth year of his episcopacy. Miracles were so multiplied thereafter that Pope Eugenius IV permitted a public cult immediately. The city of Florence has always invoked him with confidence and happy results. He was canonized in 1629.
He is often represented holding his crosier, with a wolf and a lamb at his feet, or hovering over a battlefield on a cloud or a white steed — this in memory of his miraculous intervention in a battle the Florentine people won by his assistance.
Saint Jane of Valois
Queen
(1464-1505)
Born of the royal blood of France, herself a queen, Jane of Valois led a life remarkable for its humiliations even in the annals of the Saints. Her father, Louis XI, who had hoped for a son to succeed him, banished Jane from his palace, and, it is said, even attempted her life. At the age of five the neglected child offered her whole heart to God, and yearned to do some special service in honor of His blessed Mother. At the king's wish, though against her own inclination, she was married to the Duke of Orleans.
Towards an indifferent and unworthy husband her conduct was always patient and dutiful. Her prayers and tears saved him from a traitor's death and shortened a captivity which his rebellion had merited. Still nothing could win a heart which was already given to another. When her husband ascended the throne as Louis XII, his first act was to repudiate, by false representations, one who through twenty-two years of cruel neglect had been his true and loyal wife. At the final sentence of separation, the saintly queen exclaimed, God be praised who has allowed this, that I may serve Him better than I have heretofore done.
Retiring to Bourges, she there undertook to realize her long-formed desire of founding the Order of the Annunciation, in honor of the Mother of God. Under the guidance of Saint Francis of Paula, the director of her childhood, Saint Jane was enabled to overcome the serious obstacles which even good people raised against the foundation of her new Order. In 1501 the rule of the Annunciation was finally approved by Alexander VI. The chief aim of the institute was to imitate the ten virtues practiced by Our Lady in the mystery of the Incarnation. Its Superior was called Ancelle, handmaid, in honor of Mary's humility. Saint Jane built and endowed the first convent of the Order in 1502. She died in heroic sanctity in 1505, and was buried in the royal crown and purple, beneath which she wore the habit of her Order.
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| February 3rd - St. Blaise |
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Posted by: Elizabeth - 01-03-2021, 04:49 PM - Forum: February
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Saint Blaise
Bishop and Martyr
(† 316)
Saint Blaise devoted the earlier years of his life to the study of philosophy, and afterwards became a physician. In the practice of his profession he saw so much of the miseries of life and the hollowness of worldly pleasures, that he resolved to spend the rest of his days in the service of God. From being a healer of bodily ailments, he became a physician of souls, then retired for a time, by divine inspiration, to a cavern where he remained in prayer.
When the bishop of Sebaste in Armenia died, Blaise, much to the gratification of the inhabitants of that city, was chosen to succeed him. Saint Blaise at once began to instruct his people, as much by his example as by his words, and the great virtues and sanctity of the servant of God were attested by many miracles. From all parts, the people came flocking to him for the cure of bodily and spiritual ills.
When the governor of Cappadocia and Lesser Armenia, Agricolaus, began a persecution by order of the Emperor Licinius, Saint Blaise was seized. After interrogation and a severe scourging, he was hurried off to prison. While he was under custody, a distraught mother, whose only child was dying of a throat disease, threw herself at his feet and implored his intercession. Touched at her grief, he offered up his prayers, and the child was cured.
The prisoner was brought before Agricolaus again for further questioning, and again was whipped while tied to a pillar. He was spared from drowning when thrown into a lake; the governor ordered then that he be beheaded. At the execution site he prayed aloud to God for his persecutors, and asked that in the future those who would invoke him might be aided, as he had been permitted to assist them during his lifetime. Our Lord appeared to him and said in a voice which all bystanders heard, that He granted his prayer. Since that time his intercession has often been effectually solicited, especially in cases of all kinds of throat problems.
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| Vatican City set to launch COVID-19 vaccinations in January 2021 |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-03-2021, 12:27 PM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Spiritual]
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Vatican City set to launch COVID-19 vaccinations this month
Vatican City, Jan 2, 2021 / 09:00 am MT (CNA).- Coronavirus vaccines are scheduled to arrive in Vatican City next week, according to the Vatican director of health and hygiene.
In a statement released Jan. 2, the head of the Vatican health service, Dr. Andrea Arcangeli, said that the Vatican has purchased a low temperature refrigerator to store the vaccine and expects to begin administering vaccinations in the second half of January in the atrium of Paul VI Hall.
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...%3DApi&f=1]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.qAn6xY9zr420-FWHSUGyzwAAAA%26pid%3DApi&f=1)
Audience Hall of Pope Paul VI
“Priority will be given to health and public safety personnel, to the elderly and to personnel most frequently in contact with the public,” he said.
The Vatican health service director added that Vatican City State expects to receive enough vaccine doses in the second week of January to cover the needs of the Holy See and the Vatican City State.
Vatican City State, the world’s smallest independent nation-state, has a population of only around 800 people, but together with the Holy See, the sovereign entity that predates it, it employed 4,618 people in 2019.
In an interview with Vatican News last month, Arcangeli said the Pfizer vaccine was expected to be made available to Vatican City residents, employees and their family members over the age of 18 in the first months of 2021.
“We believe it is very important that even in our small community a vaccination campaign against the virus responsible for COVID-19 is started as soon as possible,” he said.
“In fact, only through widespread and widespread immunization of the population can real benefits in terms of public health be obtained to gain control of the pandemic.”
Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, a total of 27 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Vatican City State. Among them, at least 11 members of the Swiss Guard tested positive for the coronavirus.
The Vatican statement did not say if or when Pope Francis might be administered the vaccine, but stated that vaccinations will be provided on a voluntary basis.
Pope Francis has repeatedly appealed to international leaders to grant the poor access to vaccines against the coronavirus which has claimed more than 1.8 million lives worldwide as of Jan. 2.
In his Christmas “Urbi et Orbi” address, Pope Francis said: “Today, in this time of darkness and uncertainty regarding the pandemic, various lights of hope appear, such as the discovery of vaccines. But for these lights to illuminate and bring hope to all, they need to be available to all. We cannot allow the various forms of nationalism closed in on themselves to prevent us from living as the truly human family that we are.”
“Nor can we allow the virus of radical individualism to get the better of us and make us indifferent to the suffering of other brothers and sisters. I cannot place myself ahead of others, letting the law of the marketplace and patents take precedence over the law of love and the health of humanity.”
“I ask everyone -- government leaders, businesses, international organizations -- to foster cooperation and not competition, and to seek a solution for everyone: vaccines for all, especially for the most vulnerable and needy of all regions of the planet. Before all others: the most vulnerable and needy.”
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| Feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-03-2021, 10:01 AM - Forum: Christmas
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FEAST OF THE HOLY NAME OF JESUS
(Sunday after the Octave of the Nativity or January 2)
Who instituted this festival?
Pope Innocent XIII in the year 1721 commanded that the most Holy Name of Jesus should be solemnly honored throughout the Catholic world. St. Bernard, with the sanction of the Apostolic See, had established the solemn veneration of this most Holy Name in his order a few centuries before.
In the Introit of this day's Mass, the Church proclaims the glory of this name:
INTROIT In the name of Jesus let every knee bow of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth; and let every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:10-11). O Lord our Lord, how wonderful is thy name in the whole earth! (Ps. 8:2). Glory be to the Father.
COLLECT O God, Who didst ordain Thine only-begotten Son to be the Savior of mankind, and didst command that he should be called Jesus: mercifully grant that we may enjoy in heaven the blessed vision of him whose holy name we venerate upon earth. Through our Lord.
EPISTLE (Acts 4:8-12). In those days, Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said: Ye princes of the people and ancients, hear: If we this day are examined concerning the good deed done to the infirm man, by what means he hath been made whole, be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God hath raised from the dead, even by him this man standeth here before you whole. This is the stone which was rejected by you the builders; which is become the head of the corner: neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.
EXPLANATION This Epistle speaks of the omnipotent power of the name of Jesus, through which miracles are not only performed, but also on which our salvation depends. Jesus alone can give us redemption and happiness; He alone under heaven has been given to man by God, that through Him happiness could be reached; He alone can break the fetters of error and sin in which all mankind lies captured. He alone is the truth, He alone, as the Son of God, has power to render perfect satisfaction for sin, and to make us truly good; and the good alone can be saved. Cling, therefore, ever faithfully and firmly to Jesus, and depart not from Him; without Him you can accomplish nothing; with Him, through Him, you can accomplish all things.
GOSPEL (Lk. 2:21). At that time, after eight days were accomplished that the child should be circumcised, his name was called Jesus, which was called by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
REMARKS OF ST. BERNARD ON THE SWEET NAME OF JESUS
The sweet name of Jesus produces in us holy thoughts, fills the soul with noble sentiments, strengthens virtue, begets good works, and nourishes pure affections. All spiritual food leaves the soul dry, if it contain not that penetrating oil, the name Jesus. When you take your pen, write the name Jesus: if you write books, let the name of Jesus be contained in them, else they will possess no charm or attraction for me; you may speak, or you may reply, but if the name of Jesus sounds not from your lips, you are without unction and without charm. Jesus is honey in our mouth, light in our eyes, a flame in our heart. This name is the cure for all diseases of the soul. Are you troubled? think but of Jesus, speak but the name of Jesus, the clouds disperse, and peace descends anew from heaven. Have you fallen into sin? so that you fear death? invoke the name of Jesus, and you will soon feel life returning. No obduracy of the soul, no weakness, no coldness of heart can resist this holy name; there is no heart which will not soften and open in tears at this holy name. Are you surrounded by sorrow and danger? invoke the name of Jesus, and your fears will vanish. Never yet was human being in urgent need, and on the point of perishing, who invoked this help-giving name, and was not powerfully sustained. It was given us for the cure of all our ills; to soften the impetuosity of anger, to quench the fire of concupiscence, to conquer pride, to mitigate the pain of our wounds, to overcome the thirst of avarice, to quiet sensual passions, and the desires of low pleasures. If we call to our minds the name of Jesus, it brings before us His most meek and humble heart, and gives us a new knowledge of His most loving and tender compassion. The name of Jesus is the purest, and holiest, the noblest and most indulgent of names, the name of all blessings and of all virtues; it is the name of the God-Man, of sanctity itself. To think of Jesus is to think of the great, infinite God Who, having given us His life as an example, has also bestowed the necessary understanding, energy and assistance to enable us to follow and imitate Him, in our thoughts, inclinations, words and actions. If the name of Jesus reaches the depths of our heart, it leaves heavenly virtue there. We say, therefore, with our great master, St. Paul the Apostle: If any man love not our Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema (I Cor. 16:22).
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| Antipolice Protesters Graffiti St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC on New Year’s Day |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-03-2021, 08:36 AM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
- Replies (1)
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Police: Protesters Graffiti St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC on New Year’s Day
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...%3DApi&f=1]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.1vy-o827fglSPJ0Yg_H6VAHaEK%26pid%3DApi&f=1)
Breitbart |2 Jan 20210
Approximately 150 protesters blocked traffic Friday in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, and someone graffitied the front of the church, according to police.
Officers responded to the disorderly group gathered at 51st Street and Fifth Avenue at about 1:30 a.m., the New York Post reported.
Freelance reporter Oliya Scootercaster tweeted video footage of the demonstration, showing protesters surrounding a New York Police Department (NYPD) vehicle:
Quote:Protesters confront NYPD by stopping them and banging on the hood of the cars in Manhattan outside St Patrick's Cathedral
Video by @ScooterCasterNY (FNTV https://t.co/KCfJ0kwvkq) desk@freedomnews.tv for pic.twitter.com/bKXw8g8Lz3
At one point, the protesters began banging on the car’s hood.
Scootercaster also shared a video clip of someone trying to wipe the spraypainted letters “ACAB” off the cathedral’s wall:
Quote:pic.twitter.com/RN5kbxjALy
The Post article continued:
Quote:The protesters, affiliated with Black Lives Matter Brooklyn and Justice for George, started marching at the Stonewall Inn and had stopped at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, police sources said. While inspecting the scene, cops found the letters “ACAB” — which stands for “All cops are bastards” — newly graffitied in pink, about 2 feet by 4 feet, on the facade of the cathedral, police said.
The group later dispersed, and no arrests were made at the scene, according to authorities.
Earlier on New Year’s Eve, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife danced together in Times Square while keeping other New Yorkers out thanks to his coronavirus restrictions.
As Reuters reported:
Quote:Mayor Bill de Blasio and police officials have told New Yorkers and out-of-towners alike to stay away and watch pared-down festivities on television. A large contingent of police officers will barricade the area to prevent unauthorized people from gathering, aiming to prevent an event that could accelerate the spread of the virus in a city already struggling to contain it.
“It’s going to be actually, arguably, the most special, the most poignant, the most moving New Year’s Eve,” de Blasio, who will push the button to start the crystal’s ball descent, told reporters. “In 2021, we’re going to show people what it looks like to recover, to come back.”
However, Twitter users expressed their disagreement with the restrictions and apparent double standard:
Quote:"Stay at home, save lives" oh and you're not allowed to go to church. Unless you're De Blasio, then you can do anything you want. pic.twitter.com/6UDXSAxEqW
“If you don’t see communism in New York City, You should reevaluate yourself immediately,” wrote user Joel Fischer:
Quote:Ladies and gentlemen: Everybody should stay home this year. You cannot come to Times Square.
Also, Ladies and gentlemen: Bill de Blasio will be dancing in Times Square.
If you don't see communism in New York City, You should reevaluate yourself immediately. https://t.co/CHP3fbGCRO
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| Pope Pius XI: Mortalium Animos - On Religious Unity |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-02-2021, 03:04 PM - Forum: Encyclicals
- No Replies
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Mortalium Animos
On Religious Unity
Pope Pius XI - 1928
To Our Venerable Brethren the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Local Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See.
Venerable Brethren, Health and Apostolic Benediction.
Never perhaps in the past have we seen, as we see in these our own times, the minds of men so occupied by the desire both of strengthening and of extending to the common welfare of human society that fraternal relationship which binds and unites us together, and which is a consequence of our common origin and nature. For since the nations do not yet fully enjoy the fruits of peace — indeed rather do old and new disagreements in various places break forth into sedition and civic strife — and since on the other hand many disputes which concern the tranquillity and prosperity of nations cannot be settled without the active concurrence and help of those who rule the States and promote their interests, it is easily understood, and the more so because none now dispute the unity of the human race, why many desire that the various nations, inspired by this universal kinship, should daily be more closely united one to another.
2. A similar object is aimed at by some, in those matters which concern the New Law promulgated by Christ our Lord. For since they hold it for certain that men destitute of all religious sense are very rarely to be found, they seem to have founded on that belief a hope that the nations, although they differ among themselves in certain religious matters, will without much difficulty come to agree as brethren in professing certain doctrines, which form as it were a common basis of the spiritual life. For which reason conventions, meetings and addresses are frequently arranged by these persons, at which a large number of listeners are present, and at which all without distinction are invited to join in the discussion, both infidels of every kind, and Christians, even those who have unhappily fallen away from Christ or who with obstinacy and pertinacity deny His divine nature and mission. Certainly such attempts can nowise be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy, since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgment of His rule. Not only are those who hold this opinion in error and deceived, but also in distorting the idea of true religion they reject it, and little by little. turn aside to naturalism and atheism, as it is called; from which it clearly follows that one who supports those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them, is altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion.
3. But some are more easily deceived by the outward appearance of good when there is question of fostering unity among all Christians.
4. Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity? Who would dare to say that he loved Christ, unless he worked with all his might to carry out the desires of Him, Who asked His Father that His disciples might be “one.”[1] And did not the same Christ will that His disciples should be marked out and distinguished from others by this characteristic, namely that they loved one another: “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another”?[2] All Christians, they add, should be as “one”: for then they would be much more powerful in driving out the pest of irreligion, which like a serpent daily creeps further and becomes more widely spread, and prepares to rob the Gospel of its strength. These things and others that class of men who are known as pan-Christians continually repeat and amplify; and these men, so far from being quite few and scattered, have increased to the dimensions of an entire class, and have grouped themselves into widely spread societies, most of which are directed by non-Catholics, although they are imbued with varying doctrines concerning the things of faith. This undertaking is so actively promoted as in many places to win for itself the adhesion of a number of citizens, and it even takes possession of the minds of very many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed.
5. Admonished, therefore, by the consciousness of Our Apostolic office that We should not permit the flock of the Lord to be cheated by dangerous fallacies, We invoke, Venerable Brethren, your zeal in avoiding this evil; for We are confident that by the writings and words of each one of you the people will more easily get to know and understand those principles and arguments which We are about to set forth, and from which Catholics will learn how they are to think and act when there is question of those undertakings which have for their end the union in one body, whatsoever be the manner, of all who call themselves Christians.
6. We were created by God, the Creator of the universe, in order that we might know Him and serve Him; our Author therefore has a perfect right to our service. God might, indeed, have prescribed for man’s government only the natural law, which, in His creation, He imprinted on his soul, and have regulated the progress of that same law by His ordinary providence; but He preferred rather to impose precepts, which we were to obey, and in the course of time, namely from the beginnings of the human race until the coming and preaching of Jesus Christ, He Himself taught man the duties which a rational creature owes to its Creator: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days, hath spoken to us by his Son.”[3] From which it follows that there can be no true religion other than that which is founded on the revealed word of God: which revelation, begun from the beginning and continued under the Old Law, Christ Jesus Himself under the New Law perfected. Now, if God has spoken (and it is historically certain that He has truly spoken), all must see that it is man’s duty to believe absolutely God’s revelation and to obey implicitly His commands; that we might rightly do both, for the glory of God and our own salvation, the Only-begotten Son of God founded His Church on earth. Further, We believe that those who call themselves Christians can do no other than believe that a Church, and that Church one, was established by Christ; but if it is further inquired of what nature according to the will of its Author it must be, then all do not agree. A good number of them, for example, deny that the Church of Christ must be visible and apparent, at least to such a degree that it appears as one body of faithful, agreeing in one and the same doctrine under one teaching authority and government; but, on the contrary, they understand a visible Church as nothing else than a Federation, composed of various communities of Christians, even though they adhere to different doctrines, which may even be incompatible one with another. Instead, Christ our Lord instituted His Church as a perfect society, external of its nature and perceptible to the senses, which should carry on in the future the work of the salvation of the human race, under the leadership of one head,[4] with an authority teaching by word of mouth,[5] and by the ministry of the sacraments, the founts of heavenly grace;[6] for which reason He attested by comparison the similarity of the Church to a kingdom,[7] to a house,[8] to a sheepfold,[9] and to a flock.[10] This Church, after being so wonderfully instituted, could not, on the removal by death of its Founder and of the Apostles who were the pioneers in propagating it, be entirely extinguished and cease to be, for to it was given the commandment to lead all men, without distinction of time or place, to eternal salvation: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations.”[11] In the continual carrying out of this task, will any element of strength and efficiency be wanting to the Church, when Christ Himself is perpetually present to it, according to His solemn promise: “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world?”[12] It follows then that the Church of Christ not only exists to-day and always, but is also exactly the same as it was in the time of the Apostles, unless we were to say, which God forbid, either that Christ our Lord could not effect His purpose, or that He erred when He asserted that the gates of hell should never prevail against it.[13]
7. And here it seems opportune to expound and to refute a certain false opinion, on which this whole question, as well as that complex movement by which non-Catholics seek to bring about the union of the Christian churches depends. For authors who favor this view are accustomed, times almost without number, to bring forward these words of Christ: “That they all may be one…. And there shall be one fold and one shepherd,”[14] with this signification however: that Christ Jesus merely expressed a desire and prayer, which still lacks its fulfillment. For they are of the opinion that the unity of faith and government, which is a note of the one true Church of Christ, has hardly up to the present time existed, and does not to-day exist. They consider that this unity may indeed be desired and that it may even be one day attained through the instrumentality of wills directed to a common end, but that meanwhile it can only be regarded as mere ideal. They add that the Church in itself, or of its nature, is divided into sections; that is to say, that it is made up of several churches or distinct communities, which still remain separate, and although having certain articles of doctrine in common, nevertheless disagree concerning the remainder; that these all enjoy the same rights; and that the Church was one and unique from, at the most, the apostolic age until the first Ecumenical Councils. Controversies therefore, they say, and longstanding differences of opinion which keep asunder till the present day the members of the Christian family, must be entirely put aside, and from the remaining doctrines a common form of faith drawn up and proposed for belief, and in the profession of which all may not only know but feel that they are brothers. The manifold churches or communities, if united in some kind of universal federation, would then be in a position to oppose strongly and with success the progress of irreligion. This, Venerable Brethren, is what is commonly said. There are some, indeed, who recognize and affirm that Protestantism, as they call it, has rejected, with a great lack of consideration, certain articles of faith and some external ceremonies, which are, in fact, pleasing and useful, and which the Roman Church still retains. They soon, however, go on to say that that Church also has erred, and corrupted the original religion by adding and proposing for belief certain doctrines which are not only alien to the Gospel, but even repugnant to it. Among the chief of these they number that which concerns the primacy of jurisdiction, which was granted to Peter and to his successors in the See of Rome. Among them there indeed are some, though few, who grant to the Roman Pontiff a primacy of honor or even a certain jurisdiction or power, but this, however, they consider not to arise from the divine law but from the consent of the faithful. Others again, even go so far as to wish the Pontiff Himself to preside over their motley, so to say, assemblies. But, all the same, although many non-Catholics may be found who loudly preach fraternal communion in Christ Jesus, yet you will find none at all to whom it ever occurs to submit to and obey the Vicar of Jesus Christ either in His capacity as a teacher or as a governor. Meanwhile they affirm that they would willingly treat with the Church of Rome, but on equal terms, that is as equals with an equal: but even if they could so act. it does not seem open to doubt that any pact into which they might enter would not compel them to turn from those opinions which are still the reason why they err and stray from the one fold of Christ.
8. This being so, it is clear that the Apostolic See cannot on any terms take part in their assemblies, nor is it anyway lawful for Catholics either to support or to work for such enterprises; for if they do so they will be giving countenance to a false Christianity, quite alien to the one Church of Christ. Shall We suffer, what would indeed be iniquitous, the truth, and a truth divinely revealed, to be made a subject for compromise? For here there is question of defending revealed truth. Jesus Christ sent His Apostles into the whole world in order that they might permeate all nations with the Gospel faith, and, lest they should err, He willed beforehand that they should be taught by the Holy Ghost:[15] has then this doctrine of the Apostles completely vanished away, or sometimes been obscured, in the Church, whose ruler and defense is God Himself? If our Redeemer plainly said that His Gospel was to continue not only during the times of the Apostles, but also till future ages, is it possible that the object of faith should in the process of time become so obscure and uncertain, that it would be necessary to-day to tolerate opinions which are even incompatible one with another? If this were true, we should have to confess that the coming of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles, and the perpetual indwelling of the same Spirit in the Church, and the very preaching of Jesus Christ, have several centuries ago, lost all their efficacy and use, to affirm which would be blasphemy. But the Only-begotten Son of God, when He commanded His representatives to teach all nations, obliged all men to give credence to whatever was made known to them by “witnesses preordained by God,”[16] and also confirmed His command with this sanction: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be condemned.”[17] These two commands of Christ, which must be fulfilled, the one, namely, to teach, and the other to believe, cannot even be understood, unless the Church proposes a complete and easily understood teaching, and is immune when it thus teaches from all danger of erring. In this matter, those also turn aside from the right path, who think that the deposit of truth such laborious trouble, and with such lengthy study and discussion, that a man’s life would hardly suffice to find and take possession of it; as if the most merciful God had spoken through the prophets and His Only-begotten Son merely in order that a few, and those stricken in years, should learn what He had revealed through them, and not that He might inculcate a doctrine of faith and morals, by which man should be guided through the whole course of his moral life.
9. These pan-Christians who turn their minds to uniting the churches seem, indeed, to pursue the noblest of ideas in promoting charity among all Christians: nevertheless how does it happen that this charity tends to injure faith? Everyone knows that John himself, the Apostle of love, who seems to reveal in his Gospel the secrets of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and who never ceased to impress on the memories of his followers the new commandment “Love one another,” altogether forbade any intercourse with those who professed a mutilated and corrupt version of Christ’s teaching: “If any man come to you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house nor say to him: God speed you.”[18] For which reason, since charity is based on a complete and sincere faith, the disciples of Christ must be united principally by the bond of one faith. Who then can conceive a Christian Federation, the members of which retain each his own opinions and private judgment, even in matters which concern the object of faith, even though they be repugnant to the opinions of the rest? And in what manner, We ask, can men who follow contrary opinions, belong to one and the same Federation of the faithful? For example, those who affirm, and those who deny that sacred Tradition is a true fount of divine Revelation; those who hold that an ecclesiastical hierarchy, made up of bishops, priests and ministers, has been divinely constituted, and those who assert that it has been brought in little by little in accordance with the conditions of the time; those who adore Christ really present in the Most Holy Eucharist through that marvelous conversion of the bread and wine, which is called transubstantiation, and those who affirm that Christ is present only by faith or by the signification and virtue of the Sacrament; those who in the Eucharist recognize the nature both of a sacrament and of a sacrifice, and those who say that it is nothing more than the memorial or commemoration of the Lord’s Supper; those who believe it to be good and useful to invoke by prayer the Saints reigning with Christ, especially Mary the Mother of God, and to venerate their images, and those who urge that such a veneration is not to be made use of, for it is contrary to the honor due to Jesus Christ, “the one mediator of God and men.”[19] How so great a variety of opinions can make the way clear to effect the unity of the Church We know not; that unity can only arise from one teaching authority, one law of belief and one faith of Christians. But We do know that from this it is an easy step to the neglect of religion or indifferentism and to modernism, as they call it. Those, who are unhappily infected with these errors, hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute but relative, that is, it agrees with the varying necessities of time and place and with the varying tendencies of the mind, since it is not contained in immutable revelation, but is capable of being accommodated to human life. Besides this, in connection with things which must be believed, it is nowise licit to use that distinction which some have seen fit to introduce between those articles of faith which are fundamental and those which are not fundamental, as they say, as if the former are to be accepted by all, while the latter may be left to the free assent of the faithful: for the supernatural virtue of faith has a formal cause, namely the authority of God revealing, and this is patient of no such distinction. For this reason it is that all who are truly Christ’s believe, for example, the Conception of the Mother of God without stain of original sin with the same faith as they believe the mystery of the August Trinity, and the Incarnation of our Lord just as they do the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, according to the sense in which it was defined by the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. Are these truths not equally certain, or not equally to be believed, because the Church has solemnly sanctioned and defined them, some in one age and some in another, even in those times immediately before our own? Has not God revealed them all? For the teaching authority of the Church, which in the divine wisdom was constituted on earth in order that revealed doctrines might remain intact for ever, and that they might be brought with ease and security to the knowledge of men, and which is daily exercised through the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops who are in communion with him, has also the office of defining, when it sees fit, any truth with solemn rites and decrees, whenever this is necessary either to oppose the errors or the attacks of heretics, or more clearly and in greater detail to stamp the minds of the faithful with the articles of sacred doctrine which have been explained. But in the use of this extraordinary teaching authority no newly invented matter is brought in, nor is anything new added to the number of those truths which are at least implicitly contained in the deposit of Revelation, divinely handed down to the Church: only those which are made clear which perhaps may still seem obscure to some, or that which some have previously called into question is declared to be of faith.
10. So, Venerable Brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it. During the lapse of centuries, the mystical Spouse of Christ has never been contaminated, nor can she ever in the future be contaminated, as Cyprian bears witness: “The Bride of Christ cannot be made false to her Spouse: she is incorrupt and modest. She knows but one dwelling, she guards the sanctity of the nuptial chamber chastely and modestly.”[20] The same holy Martyr with good reason marveled exceedingly that anyone could believe that “this unity in the Church which arises from a divine foundation, and which is knit together by heavenly sacraments, could be rent and torn asunder by the force of contrary wills.”[21] For since the mystical body of Christ, in the same manner as His physical body, is one,[22] compacted and fitly joined together,[23] it were foolish and out of place to say that the mystical body is made up of members which are disunited and scattered abroad: whosoever therefore is not united with the body is no member of it, neither is he in communion with Christ its head.[24]
11. Furthermore, in this one Church of Christ no man can be or remain who does not accept, recognize and obey the authority and supremacy of Peter and his legitimate successors. Did not the ancestors of those who are now entangled in the errors of Photius and the reformers, obey the Bishop of Rome, the chief shepherd of souls? Alas their children left the home of their fathers, but it did not fall to the ground and perish for ever, for it was supported by God. Let them therefore return to their common Father, who, forgetting the insults previously heaped on the Apostolic See, will receive them in the most loving fashion. For if, as they continually state, they long to be united with Us and ours, why do they not hasten to enter the Church, “the Mother and mistress of all Christ’s faithful”?[25] Let them hear Lactantius crying out: “The Catholic Church is alone in keeping the true worship. This is the fount of truth, this the house of Faith, this the temple of God: if any man enter not here, or if any man go forth from it, he is a stranger to the hope of life and salvation. Let none delude himself with obstinate wrangling. For life and salvation are here concerned, which will be lost and entirely destroyed, unless their interests are carefully and assiduously kept in mind.”[26]
12. Let, therefore, the separated children draw nigh to the Apostolic See, set up in the City which Peter and Paul, the Princes of the Apostles, consecrated by their blood; to that See, We repeat, which is “the root and womb whence the Church of God springs,”[27] not with the intention and the hope that “the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”[28] will cast aside the integrity of the faith and tolerate their errors, but, on the contrary, that they themselves submit to its teaching and government. Would that it were Our happy lot to do that which so many of Our predecessors could not, to embrace with fatherly affection those children, whose unhappy separation from Us We now bewail. Would that God our Savior, “Who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,”[29] would hear us when We humbly beg that He would deign to recall all who stray to the unity of the Church! In this most important undertaking We ask and wish that others should ask the prayers of Blessed Mary the Virgin, Mother of divine grace, victorious over all heresies and Help of Christians, that She may implore for Us the speedy coming of the much hoped-for day, when all men shall hear the voice of Her divine Son, and shall be “careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”[30]
13. You, Venerable Brethren, understand how much this question is in Our mind, and We desire that Our children should also know, not only those who belong to the Catholic community, but also those who are separated from Us: if these latter humbly beg light from heaven, there is no doubt but that they will recognize the one true Church of Jesus Christ and will, at last, enter it, being united with us in perfect charity. While awaiting this event, and as a pledge of Our paternal good will, We impart most lovingly to you, Venerable Brethren, and to your clergy and people, the apostolic benediction.
Given at Rome, at Saint Peter’s, on the 6th day of January, on the Feast of the Epiphany of Jesus Christ, our Lord, in the year 1928, and the sixth year of Our Pontificate.
REFERENCES:
1. John xvii, 21.
2. John xiii, 35.
3. Heb. i, I seq.
4. Matt. xvi, 18 seq; Luke xxii, 32; John xxi, 15-17.
5. Mark xvi, 15.
6. John iii, 5; vi, 48-59; xx, 22 seq; cf. Matt. xviii, 18, etc.
7. Matt. xiii.
8. cf. Matt. xvi, 18.
9. John x, 16.
10. John xxi, 15-17.
11. Matt. xxviii, 19.
12. Matt. xxviii, 20.
13. Matt. xvi, 18.
14. John xvii, 21; x, 16.
15. John xvi, 13.
16. Acts x,41.
17. Mark xvi, 16.
18. 11 John 10.
19. Cf. I Tim. ii, 15.
20. De Cath. Ecclesiae unitate, 6.
21. Ibid.
22. I Cor. xii, 12.
23. Eph. Iv, 16.
24. Cf. Eph. v, 30; 1, 22.
25. Conc. Lateran IV, c. 5.
26. Divin. Instit. Iv, 30. 11-12.
27. S. Cypr. Ep. 48 ad Cornelium, 3.
28. I Tim. iii, 15.
29. I Tim. ii, 4.
30. Eph. iv, 3.
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| NY Legislature [2021]: 'Removal of Contacts and Carriers of Communicable Diseases' |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-02-2021, 08:20 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular]
- Replies (2)
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Well dear friends, this is what Communism looks like:
Relates to the removal of cases, contacts and carriers of communicable diseases who are potentially dangerous to the public health
A416 (ACTIVE) - Bill Text download pdf
AN ACT to amend the public health law, in relation to the removal of cases, contacts and carriers of communicable diseases who are potentially dangerous to the public health
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, REPRESENTED IN SENATE AND ASSEMBLY, DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:
Section 1. The public health law is amended by adding a new section 2120-a to read as follows:
§ 2120-A. REMOVAL AND DETENTION OF CASES, CONTACTS AND CARRIERS WHO ARE OR MAY BE A DANGER TO PUBLIC HEALTH; OTHER ORDERS.
1. THE PROVISIONS OF THIS SECTION SHALL BE UTILIZED IN THE EVENT THAT THE GOVERNOR DECLARES A STATE OF HEALTH EMERGENCY DUE TO AN EPIDEMIC OF ANY COMMUNICABLE DISEASE.
2. UPON DETERMINING BY CLEAR AND CONVINCING EVIDENCE THAT THE HEALTH OF OTHERS IS OR MAY BE ENDANGERED BY A CASE, CONTACT OR CARRIER, OR SUSPECTED CASE, CONTACT OR CARRIER OF A CONTAGIOUS DISEASE THAT, IN THE OPINION OF THE GOVERNOR, AFTER CONSULTATION WITH THE COMMISSIONER, MAY POSE AN IMMINENT AND SIGNIFICANT THREAT TO THE PUBLIC HEALTH RESULTING IN SEVERE MORBIDITY OR HIGH MORTALITY, THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE COMMISSIONER OR THE HEADS OF LOCAL HEALTH DEPARTMENTS, MAY ORDER THE REMOVAL AND/OR DETENTION OF SUCH A PERSON OR OF A GROUP OF SUCH PERSONS BY ISSUING A SINGLE ORDER, IDENTIFYING SUCH PERSONS EITHER BY NAME OR BY A REASONABLY SPECIFIC DESCRIPTION OF THE INDIVIDUALS OR GROUP BEING DETAINED. SUCH PERSON OR GROUP OF PERSONS SHALL BE DETAINED IN A MEDICAL FACILITY OR OTHER APPROPRIATE FACILITY OR PREMISES DESIGNATED BY THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE AND COMPLYING WITH SUBDIVISION FIVE OF THIS SECTION.
3. A PERSON OR GROUP REMOVED OR DETAINED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION SHALL BE DETAINED FOR SUCH PERIOD AND IN SUCH MANNER AS THE DEPARTMENT MAY DIRECT IN ACCORDANCE WITH THIS SECTION.
4. NOTWITHSTANDING ANY INCONSISTENT PROVISION OF THIS SECTION:
(A) A CONFIRMED CASE OR A CARRIER WHO IS DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION SHALL NOT CONTINUE TO BE DETAINED AFTER THE DEPARTMENT DETERMINES THAT SUCH PERSON IS NO LONGER CONTAGIOUS.
(B) A SUSPECTED CASE OR SUSPECTED CARRIER WHO IS DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION SHALL NOT CONTINUE TO BE DETAINED AFTER THE DEPARTMENT DETERMINES, WITH THE EXERCISE OF DUE DILIGENCE, THAT SUCH PERSON IS NOT INFECTED WITH OR HAS NOT BEEN EXPOSED TO SUCH A DISEASE, OR IF INFECTED WITH OR EXPOSED TO SUCH A DISEASE, NO LONGER IS OR WILL BECOME CONTAGIOUS.
© A PERSON WHO IS DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION AS A CONTACT OF A CONFIRMED CASE OR A CARRIER SHALL NOT CONTINUE TO BE DETAINED AFTER THE DEPARTMENT DETERMINES THAT THE PERSON IS NOT INFECTED WITH THE DISEASE OR THAT SUCH CONTACT NO LONGER PRESENTS A POTENTIAL DANGER TO THE HEALTH OF OTHERS.
(D) A PERSON WHO IS DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION AS A CONTACT OF A SUSPECTED CASE SHALL NOT CONTINUE TO BE DETAINED:
(I) AFTER THE DEPARTMENT DETERMINES, WITH THE EXERCISE OF DUE DILIGENCE, THAT THE SUSPECTED CASE WAS NOT INFECTED WITH SUCH A DISEASE, OR WAS NOT CONTAGIOUS AT THE TIME THE CONTACT WAS EXPOSED TO SUCH INDIVIDUAL; OR
(II) AFTER THE DEPARTMENT DETERMINES THAT THE CONTACT NO LONGER PRESENTS A POTENTIAL DANGER TO THE HEALTH OF OTHERS.
5. A PERSON WHO IS DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION SHALL, AS IS APPROPRIATE TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES:
(A) HAVE HIS OR HER MEDICAL CONDITION AND NEEDS ASSESSED AND ADDRESSED ON A REGULAR BASIS, AND
(B) BE DETAINED IN A MANNER THAT IS CONSISTENT WITH RECOGNIZED ISOLATION AND INFECTION CONTROL PRINCIPLES IN ORDER TO MINIMIZE THE LIKELIHOOD OF TRANSMISSION OF INFECTION TO SUCH PERSON AND TO OTHERS.
6. WHEN A PERSON OR GROUP IS ORDERED TO BE DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION FOR A PERIOD NOT EXCEEDING THREE BUSINESS DAYS, SUCH PERSON OR MEMBER OF SUCH GROUP SHALL, UPON REQUEST, BE AFFORDED AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE HEARD. IF A PERSON OR GROUP DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION NEEDS TO BE DETAINED BEYOND THREE BUSINESS DAYS, THEY SHALL BE PROVIDED WITH AN ADDITIONAL COMMISSIONER'S ORDER PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISIONS TWO AND EIGHT OF THIS SECTION.
7. WHEN A PERSON OR GROUP IS ORDERED TO BE DETAINED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION FOR A PERIOD EXCEEDING THREE BUSINESS DAYS, AND SUCH PERSON OR MEMBER OF SUCH GROUP REQUESTS RELEASE, THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE SHALL MAKE AN APPLICATION FOR A COURT ORDER AUTHORIZING SUCH DETENTION WITHIN THREE BUSINESS DAYS AFTER SUCH REQUEST BY THE END OF THE FIRST BUSINESS DAY FOLLOWING SUCH SATURDAY, SUNDAY, OR LEGAL HOLIDAY, WHICH APPLICATION SHALL INCLUDE A REQUEST FOR AN EXPEDITED HEARING. AFTER ANY SUCH REQUEST FOR RELEASE, DETENTION SHALL NOT CONTINUE FOR MORE THAN FIVE BUSINESS DAYS IN THE ABSENCE OF A COURT ORDER AUTHORIZING DETENTION. NOTWITHSTANDING THE FOREGOING PROVISIONS, IN NO EVENT SHALL ANY PERSON BE DETAINED FOR MORE THAN SIXTY DAYS WITHOUT A COURT ORDER AUTHORIZING SUCH DETENTION. THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE SHALL SEEK FURTHER COURT REVIEW OF SUCH DETENTION WITHIN NINETY DAYS FOLLOWING THE INITIAL COURT ORDER AUTHORIZING DETENTION AND THEREAFTER WITHIN NINETY DAYS OF EACH SUBSEQUENT COURT REVIEW. IN ANY COURT PROCEEDING TO ENFORCE AN ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE FOR THE REMOVAL OR DETENTION OF A PERSON OR GROUP ISSUED PURSUANT TO THIS SUBDIVISION OR FOR REVIEW OF THE CONTINUED DETENTION OF A PERSON OR GROUP, THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE SHALL PROVE THE PARTICULARIZED CIRCUMSTANCES CONSTITUTING THE NECESSITY FOR SUCH DETENTION BY CLEAR AND CONVINCING EVIDENCE.
8. (A) A COPY OF ANY DETENTION ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE ISSUED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION SHALL BE GIVEN TO EACH DETAINED INDIVIDUAL; HOWEVER, IF THE ORDER APPLIES TO A GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS AND IT IS IMPRACTICAL TO PROVIDE INDIVIDUAL COPIES, IT MAY BE POSTED IN A CONSPICUOUS PLACE IN THE DETENTION PREMISES. ANY DETENTION ORDER OF THE COMMISSIONER ISSUED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION SHALL SET FORTH:
(I) THE PURPOSE OF THE DETENTION AND THE LEGAL AUTHORITY UNDER WHICH THE ORDER IS ISSUED, INCLUDING THE PARTICULAR SECTIONS OF THIS ARTICLE OR OTHER LAW OR REGULATION;
(II) A DESCRIPTION OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES AND/OR BEHAVIOR OF THE DETAINED PERSON OR GROUP CONSTITUTING THE BASIS FOR THE ISSUANCE OF THE ORDER;
(III) THE LESS RESTRICTIVE ALTERNATIVES THAT WERE ATTEMPTED AND WERE UNSUCCESSFUL AND/OR THE LESS RESTRICTIVE ALTERNATIVES THAT WERE CONSIDERED AND REJECTED, AND THE REASONS SUCH ALTERNATIVES WERE REJECTED;
(IV) A NOTICE ADVISING THE PERSON OR GROUP BEING DETAINED THAT THEY HAVE A RIGHT TO REQUEST RELEASE FROM DETENTION, AND INCLUDING INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW SUCH REQUEST SHALL BE MADE;
(V) A NOTICE ADVISING THE PERSON OR GROUP BEING DETAINED THAT THEY HAVE A RIGHT TO BE REPRESENTED BY LEGAL COUNSEL AND THAT UPON REQUEST OF SUCH PERSON OR GROUP ACCESS TO COUNSEL WILL BE FACILITATED TO THE EXTENT FEASIBLE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES; AND
(VI) A NOTICE ADVISING THE PERSON OR GROUP BEING DETAINED THAT THEY MAY SUPPLY THE ADDRESSES AND/OR TELEPHONE NUMBERS OF FRIENDS AND/OR RELATIVES TO RECEIVE NOTIFICATION OF THE PERSON'S DETENTION, AND THAT THE DEPARTMENT SHALL, AT THE DETAINED PERSON'S REQUEST AND TO THE EXTENT FEASIBLE, PROVIDE NOTICE TO A REASONABLE NUMBER OF SUCH PEOPLE THAT THE PERSON IS BEING DETAINED.
(B) IN ADDITION, AN ORDER ISSUED PURSUANT TO SUBDIVISIONS TWO AND SEVEN OF THIS SECTION, REQUIRING THE DETENTION OF A PERSON OR GROUP FOR A PERIOD EXCEEDING THREE BUSINESS DAYS, SHALL:
(I) ADVISE THE PERSON OR GROUP BEING DETAINED THAT THE DETENTION SHALL NOT CONTINUE FOR MORE THAN FIVE BUSINESS DAYS AFTER A REQUEST FOR RELEASE HAS BEEN MADE IN THE ABSENCE OF A COURT ORDER AUTHORIZING SUCH DETENTION;
(II) ADVISE THE PERSON OR GROUP BEING DETAINED THAT, WHETHER OR NOT THEY REQUEST RELEASE FROM DETENTION, THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE MUST OBTAIN A COURT ORDER AUTHORIZING DETENTION WITHIN SIXTY DAYS FOLLOWING THE COMMENCEMENT OF DETENTION AND THEREAFTER MUST FURTHER SEEK COURT REVIEW OF THE DETENTION WITHIN NINETY DAYS OF SUCH COURT ORDER AND
WITHIN NINETY DAYS OF EACH SUBSEQUENT COURT REVIEW; AND
(III) ADVISE THE PERSON OR GROUP BEING DETAINED THAT THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO REQUEST THAT LEGAL COUNSEL BE PROVIDED, THAT UPON SUCH REQUEST COUNSEL SHALL BE PROVIDED IF AND TO THE EXTENT POSSIBLE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, AND THAT IF COUNSEL IS SO PROVIDED, THAT SUCH COUNSEL WILL BE NOTIFIED THAT THE PERSON OR GROUP HAS REQUESTED LEGAL REPRESENTATION.
9. A PERSON WHO IS DETAINED IN A MEDICAL FACILITY, OR OTHER APPROPRIATE FACILITY OR PREMISES, SHALL NOT CONDUCT HIMSELF OR HERSELF IN A DISORDERLY MANNER, AND SHALL NOT LEAVE OR ATTEMPT TO LEAVE SUCH FACILITY OR PREMISES UNTIL HE OR SHE IS DISCHARGED PURSUANT TO THIS SECTION.
10. WHERE NECESSARY AND FEASIBLE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, LANGUAGE INTERPRETERS AND PERSONS SKILLED IN COMMUNICATING WITH VISION AND HEARING IMPAIRED INDIVIDUALS SHALL BE PROVIDED.
11. THE PROVISIONS OF THIS SECTION SHALL NOT APPLY TO THE ISSUANCE OF ORDERS PURSUANT TO § 11.21 OF THE NEW YORK CITY HEALTH CODE.
12. IN ADDITION TO THE REMOVAL OR DETENTION ORDERS REFERRED TO IN SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION, AND WITHOUT AFFECTING OR LIMITING ANY OTHER AUTHORITY THAT THE COMMISSIONER MAY OTHERWISE HAVE, THE GOVERNOR OR HIS OR HER DELEGEE MAY, IN HIS OR HER DISCRETION, ISSUE AND SEEK ENFORCEMENT OF ANY OTHER ORDERS THAT HE OR SHE DETERMINES ARE NECESSARY OR APPROPRIATE TO PREVENT DISSEMINATION OR TRANSMISSION OF CONTAGIOUS DISEASES OR OTHER ILLNESSES THAT MAY POSE A THREAT TO THE PUBLIC HEALTH INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ORDERS REQUIRING ANY PERSON OR PERSONS WHO ARE NOT IN THE CUSTODY OF THE DEPARTMENT TO BE EXCLUDED; TO REMAIN ISOLATED OR QUARANTINED AT HOME OR AT A PREMISES OF SUCH PERSON'S CHOICE THAT IS ACCEPTABLE TO THE DEPARTMENT AND UNDER SUCH CONDITIONS AND FOR SUCH PERIOD AS WILL PREVENT TRANSMISSION OF THE CONTAGIOUS DISEASE OR OTHER ILLNESS; TO REQUIRE THE TESTING OR MEDICAL EXAMINATION OF PERSONS WHO MAY HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO OR INFECTED BY A CONTAGIOUS DISEASE OR WHO MAY HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO OR CONTAMINATED WITH DANGEROUS AMOUNTS OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS OR TOXIC CHEMICALS; TO REQUIRE AN INDIVIDUAL WHO HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO OR INFECTED BY A CONTAGIOUS DISEASE TO COMPLETE AN APPROPRIATE, PRESCRIBED COURSE OF TREATMENT, PREVENTIVE MEDICATION OR VACCINATION, INCLUDING DIRECTLY OBSERVED THERAPY TO TREAT THE DISEASE AND FOLLOW INFECTION CONTROL PROVISIONS FOR THE DISEASE; OR TO REQUIRE AN INDIVIDUAL WHO HAS BEEN CONTAMINATED WITH DANGEROUS AMOUNTS OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS OR TOXIC CHEMICALS SUCH THAT SAID INDIVIDUAL MAY PRES-
ENT A DANGER TO OTHERS, TO UNDERGO DECONTAMINATION PROCEDURES DEEMED NECESSARY BY THE DEPARTMENT. SUCH PERSON OR PERSONS SHALL, UPON REQUEST, BE AFFORDED AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE HEARD, BUT THE PROVISIONS OF SUBDIVISIONS TWO THROUGH ELEVEN OF THIS SECTION SHALL NOT OTHERWISE APPLY.
13. THE PROVISIONS OF THIS SECTION SHALL NOT BE CONSTRUED TO PERMIT OR REQUIRE THE FORCIBLE ADMINISTRATION OF ANY MEDICATION WITHOUT A PRIOR COURT ORDER.
§ 2. This act shall take effect on the thirtieth day after it shall have become a law. Effective immediately the addition, amendment and/or repeal of any rule or regulation necessary for the implementation of this act on its effective date are authorized to be made and completed on or before such date.
[Emphasis mine.]
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