In War or Peace, God Has His Plan

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Every true Christian, but especially Catholics, should understand that in God’s field of view there are no such things as accidents. That is why the often used term “accidental pregnancy” is a laughable concept when considered from the Divine perspective. The same reasoning can be applied to suffering and evil, which God allows all of us to experience, not out of any sadistic motive but rather so that He can elicit some greater good from it ~ assuming that we are willing to cooperate. God sees the “big picture,” we only get to observe a few pixels, and so it is only through faith and trust in His providential plan that we can ultimately share in whatever good He has in mind. The extreme example of this transforming a horrific evil into the greatest possible good is the crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, an event which destroyed the power of sin and death while reconciling mankind to its Father and Creator. But it was anything but painless.

Each one of us is here for a reason, we didn’t just accidentally materialize. Rather, God foresaw and prepared well for our existence, including the particular circumstances of our lives, from the very beginning of time. And in virtually every case this plan required a great deal of suffering on the part of those who came before us in order for it to be effected. Here I am not simply referring to a mother’s labor pains but to the whole historic gamut of trials, sufferings, and yes, manifest evils endured by others, all orchestrated like clockwork over centuries, yet without which I would not now be sitting here composing this particular post. In my case this means that if the American Civil War, which cost some 600,000 lives, had never been waged there would be no Fran Pierson today relating this story. Neither would my siblings, father, grandfather, uncles, aunts, and countless first and second cousins have ever existed if our great grandfather, Aaron E. Pierson, had not signed up in the 44th Indiana volunteer infantry regiment in that pivotal fall of 1861.

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Vatican II and the Traditional Roman Rite

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October 11, 1962 is a day I well remember. It was the day Pope John XXIII opened the vaunted Second Vatican Council in Rome, but that is not why I remember it. October 11 was my parents’ silver wedding anniversary and our family held a joyous, and for me unforgettable, celebration of that momentous event. I was a ten year old product of a staunchly Catholic family just beginning the fifth grade in parochial school. My world was family, neighborhood, and St. Vincent de Paul parish where I had been baptized and received the sacraments. Though I was only dimly aware of it, in far off Italy the Pope and 3,000 bishops were assembled and talking excitedly about a new “springtime in the Church.”

At the time such a promise seemed plausible enough. After all Masses were packed every Sunday, Catholic schools were bursting at the seams, seminaries couldn’t handle all the new vocations – all attested to by relentless parish building campaigns. Religious communities were flourishing and missionaries around the world were making tremendous strides in bringing the Gospel into remote regions which had never been evangelized. In the United States the first ever Catholic president was bravely standing down the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis. Among Catholics there was every reason for optimism. The Church had never been stronger or more sure of her divine mission, or so it appeared.

Ten years later a far different picture had emerged, that of a Church in crisis. Priests and religious were leaving their vocations in droves. Catechesis had fallen off a cliff along with Mass attendance. Seminaries were closing for lack of vocations even as the Pope himself was under siege by many of his own clergy for daring to restate the Church’s timeless teachings regarding openness to human life in Humanae Vitae. Catholics were struggling to adapt to a new, diluted Liturgy promulgated by that same Pontiff, Paul VI, and which seemed to be enervating Catholicism across the board. The Holy Mass somehow no longer felt as holy as it had been before 1962. The Council’s oft stated goal of a more active lay participation had instead manifested as restless boredom in the pews and indifference towards fulfilling one’s Sunday obligations.

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The Battle Has Only Begun

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Unbelievable! We are now a quarter of a century into the new millennium; on Monday we witnessed the seemingly miraculous return to office of President Donald Trump as our 47th president, after four years of suffering Biden’s banana republic quagmire (as though real adults have finally returned to a very messed up room). Windmills are out and oil drilling is again okay. J6rs and pro-life victims of a deranged and vengeful ‘Justice’ Department have been restored to their families and freedom, while Mr. Trump proudly hoisted a middle finger salute to the globalist elites at the WHO and Paris Climate Accord. He is further insuring that finally, after 60 years of bureaucratic stonewalling and deception, we just may discover who were the real criminals responsible for the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK. Yet in the midst of all these earth shattering headlines, yours truly comes down with a case of classic writer’s block! Say it ain’t so Fran.

I believe that every honest, God fearing American has a right to enjoy this moment of euphoria, realizing that we collectively beat back the globalist swamp creatures to carve out a little breathing room for the largely despised citizenry. Americans did so by sending a clear message to the Party of Death and Wokeism that their degenerate ‘utopian’ vision is not so universally appreciated as they had presumed (although in their ‘echo chamber’ world they will undoubtedly spin and garble even that message of disapproval as a clarion call for more ‘re-education’). What we must now realize, however, is that we have only gained a temporary advantage. We have not won the war but only planted our flag. The real fight is just about to begin. This battle is not a political or social contest but truly a spiritual war against the principalities and powers of the underworld. If we loose sight of that reality for only a moment, the enemy will overrun us before we ever realize what happened.

Now is the time for greater vigilance than ever before, and our best weapon is prayer, especially daily Mass and the rosary. Our enemy is Satan and his dark legions. Realize that no matter how good or noble the intentions of our new president and his staff may be, without the constant raising of our voices to heaven the best of those intentions will become corrupted and thwarted. That is why Fr. Chad Ripperger, our country’s foremost exorcist is pleading for all faithful Christians to pray this act of consecration for our president and civil leaders and for the sincere conversion of this One Nation Under God. Please join this crucial battle by praying it daily, copying it and sharing it with your families, friends, and prayer groups:

Prayer of Consecration for our Land

Immaculate Mary, patroness of the United States of America, Queen of Heaven and earth, beneath whose sway are subject all things that are lower than God, sorrowful and mindful of our own sinfulness and the sins of our nation, we come to thee our refuge and hope, knowing that our country cannot be saved by our own works, and mindful of how much our nation has departed from the ways of thy Son, we humbly ask that thou woudst turn thine eyes upon our country to bring about its conversion.

We consecrate to thee all of those governing our Republic, so that what is spiritually and morally best for the citizens of our nation may be accomplished, and that they would govern according to the spiritual and moral principles which will bring our nation into conformity with the teachings of thy Son. Bind any forces, spiritual and human, that would seek to inflict harm or evil on our country, or against those who do good for our nation by their governance.

Give grace to the citizens of this land, so that they may merit leaders who will govern according to the Sacred Heart of thy Son, that His glory may be made manifest, lest we be given the leaders we deserve. Trusting in the providential care of God the Father and thy maternal care, we have perfect confidence that thou will take care of us and will not leave us forsaken. O Mary Immaculate, pray for us!

Viva Cristo Rey! Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.

There’s Little Peace in Bethlehem

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Christmas is a time to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Sadly, the very ground where Christ once lived and taught and died to redeem mankind knows no peace today. The little town of Bethlehem, which witnessed the birth of the divine Prince of Peace, lies at the heart of the besieged West Bank of Palestine, held hostage to a twisted plot of diabolic sophistication which has enlisted even Christians and Western nations into its confused web of intrigue. The sudden fall of Syria to a Zionist-globalist funded and armed cabal of ‘good’ terrorists should hardly be a cause for celebration but for deep concern among Christians.

If recent history means anything it will be our Christian brothers and sisters, nearly a million strong in Syria, who will be targeted, killed, and driven out just as happened to Iraq’s Chaldean Christians after 20004. Christians in fact are the most vulnerable group in the Middle East, invariably caught in any crossfire between between Muslim and Zionist factions. Unsurprisingly, Israel has wasted no time in opportunistically moving their tanks even as far as the outskirts of Damascus to expand the Zionist influence and power. Nothing new there.

Here at home, for millions of so-called Christian Zionists, the sweeping away of one more Israeli enemy represents a victory, and yet they fail to understand that their pro-Zionism stems from a Christian heresy, wholly based on a literalist and selective interpretation of Sacred Scriptures as found in the Scofield Reference Bible, a mainstay of millions of Evangelical Christians. For example, the Scofield commentary (italicized) on Genesis 12:3: “I will bless them that bless thee. and curse them that curse thee” reads: “Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew—well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

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Unfinished Business

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Has the Catholic Church under Francis fully retreated from her core Divine mandate to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19) by adopting a cozy kind of doctrinal “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” mindset? This past September 13, the putative leader of the Roman Catholic Church admonished his young listeners in Singapore, “Every religion is a way to arrive at God… There is only one God and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian: they are different paths.” This stunning revelation followed on the heels of his earlier statement to the Grand Imam of Indonesia, “…each cultivating his or her own spirituality and practicing his or her religion, may walk in search of God.”

If the Church, as we truly believe, was established by Christ to be a light to all the nations; not merely one light among many but the light which illumines the darkness, this means that until there is one fold and one shepherd then Christ’s Church on earth has unfinished business. Allegorically speaking, why would God’s building contractor (the Church) set down its toolbox with the house only half finished? Consider how the missionary zeal that was a defining hallmark of the Catholic Church as late as the 1950s has slowly fizzled out during the intervening decades. In fact, it is now Catholics who are now being recruited in vast numbers into Pentecostal and other sects, particularly in Latin America. But this particular dereliction of missionary zeal has been particularly unfortunate for the Jews, our elder brothers in God’s Covenant, who are thereby being denied access to the promise of its fulfillment, which is Christ. It is a false charity to withhold a vital truth from someone simply because it might offend their ears.

Case in point is the Solemn Intercessions which form an integral part of the Good Friday Liturgy. Among those intercessory prayers is one now designated “For the Jewish People.” Pre-1962 Catholics prayed “For the Conversion of the Jews.” Notice that already the operative word “Conversion” has been deleted, apparently because it denotes some implicit threat or form of hostility. But is conversion not required of each and every one of us on some level? Conversion, regardless of our present state, is designed to bring us closer to God, not to threaten our peace of mind. It is a positive value, not a negative one. So why are we afraid to speak of conversion in regard to the Jews, or anyone else for that matter?

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A Prelude to Armageddon?

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One should only wade into the mine-infested waters of political Zionism with the greatest trepidation, for fear of being instantly tarred as ‘anti-semitic.’ Still, I feel compelled to take note of a savagely brutal war being waged by Israeli Semites on their fellow Semites whether of Christian or Muslim persuasion, namely the Palestinian people. The issue involves much more than a simplistic appraisal of whoever is claiming to be wearing white hats v. black hats if we are to arrive at even a modicum of actual truth.

In the first place a bit of context to a very complicated historical situation is needed. That involves drawing a distinction between the Jewish religion and the Nation of Israel. The confusion lies in the fact that in the Old Testament a theocratic state existed combining the two and which lasted shortly beyond the time of Christ. The Jewish religion was liturgical, revolving around the Aaronic priesthood and Temple sacrifice. But with Jesus, a new high priesthood in the person of Christ himself fulfilled the “promise” and the former rites of sacrifice were enfolded into the new rite which Christ instituted at the Last Supper and consummated on the cross. Thus the old religious liturgy was renewed and restored in the form of the Catholic Mass, Christ himself being the New Temple not made by human hands. He founded a new priesthood based not on a bloodline but on the twelve men chosen by Christ, as eternal high priest, to be his apostles and heirs, all of them Jewish.

But the leaders of the ‘Nation’ of Israel whose responsibility had been to welcome the Messiah when he arrived did the opposite. They rejected Christ because His stated messianic objective was not to elevate the nation to geopolitical supremacy as they had anticipated. They were more interested in being liberated from the Romans than being liberated from the ancient curse of sin. So the tree which should have had one strong trunk branched out into two competing trunks, both coming from the same shoot. But only one thrived even as the other withered. The Jewish ‘nation’ followed its own path, even persecuting Jewish followers of Christ, until the year 70 AD when, in a suicidal rebellion against Rome, it was utterly destroyed. The Temple was smashed and the survivors scattered to the winds. Even today one can read the Jewish historian Josephus’ tragic account of Jerusalem’s destruction in his History of the Jews, it is a truly heart rending account.

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Can this be Real?

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The political landscape in this land of e Pluribus Unum continues to dissolve into a tapestry of absurd images and surreal gestures, as evidenced by the Democratic National Party Convention in Chicago this past week. Nothing was quite so disturbing, however, as the image of a prince of the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Blase Cupich, leading a pious invocation for “peace” even as a hundred feet or so away a mobile abortion clinic was busy offering blood sacrifices (free of charge) to the demons of death. Is Cardinal Cupich blindly unaware that the Democratic party has enshrined “womb-slaughter” as the defining plank of its campaign, because abortion in their eyes is no longer a “necessary evil” but a “positive good” and basic human right? So how does he ever imagine that “peace” will somehow flower out of the soil of this party’s genocidal campaign of cold blooded killing? If he had any personal doubts as to whether his vaunted “peace” could somehow flourish amidst such industrial scale slaughter he clearly kept those misgivings to himself.

Does the cardinal even realize that this same party of death, for which he so heartily carries water, is equally committed to walking all over the conscience rights of those who find abortion to be a reprehensible evil? His own state of Illinois recently passed a law which mandates that all insurance carriers must cover abortion services and likewise prohibits any employer, even religious ones, from firing or disciplining any employee who may have had or is planning to obtain an abortion. Illinois bill #4867 was enthusiastically signed into law by J.B. Pritzker, considered the most pro-abortion governor in the country, who actually proclaimed this past March 10 as “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day,” while incoherently thanking abortion providers for their “life saving work.” Yet such twisted logic has become the norm among the progressive left political establishment, a faction which can no longer even define who is, or is not, a woman. None of this rhetorical lunacy seemed to phase Cardinal Cupich as he blithely invoked the blessings of God for “peace” upon unrepentant and murderous zealots who have publicly proclaimed that they will stop at nothing to impose their perverted ideology on the rest of mankind, by force if necessary.

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The Pruning of Vines, and CREDO

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As an avid gardener I am constantly amazed how God uses the natural world as a living parable of the supernatural order. My garden includes 15 grape vines which in summer literally explode with new shoots and foliage. Every vine dresser knows that in order to produce large and abundant grapes vigilant pruning is required, so I spend many hours cutting back excess foliage. While thus engaged I am constantly mindful of Christ’s teaching, “I am the true vine and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does He prunes so that it bears more fruit.” (Jn 15:1,2)

What I never fully understood until I began raising vines was just how few branches on a vine actually produce fruit. I have seen new shoots, or suckers, which can run for 8 or 10 feet without ever sprouting a single runty grape cluster. In fact, I have noticed with certain varieties that 90% of shoots which branch off from the main vine will never produce a single grape. These must all be cut away in order to redirect the vine’s energy into the branches that are actually forming fruit. And pruning is not a one time thing but a continual process throughout the entire growing season. In other words, the vast majority of any vine’s growth is ultimately removed and cast into the mulch pile. It is no accident that Our Lord used the analogy of dressing vines because his listeners in that intensive grape growing culture around the Mediterranean would have clearly understood his meaning, namely that “Many are called but few are chosen.”

It is not enough to simply know about Christ or even to believe in Him in a casual or haphazard way. To wear the label of a nominal Catholic or a Christian who has “accepted the Lord Jesus as my personal Savior” is to be like that long branch with lots of beautiful leaves but no fruit. For those whose faith is all about interior feelings yet have nothing concrete to show for it, they are like those barren branches cut away from the source of life which is the vine. “What good is it my brothers if someone says he has faith but does not have works?… So also faith of itself, without works, is dead.” Jas 2:14;17)

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Prayers We No Longer Pray at Mass

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Introibo ad altare Dei – “I will go up to the altar of God.” For centuries this was the way every Mass began, invoking the beautiful Psalm 42, the Judica me, a Psalm of deliverance and praise. “Judge me O God and plead my cause against an ungodly nation; deliver me from the unjust and sinful man, For you are my God and my strength… Send forth your light and your truth; they have led me and brought me to your holy mountain, and to your tabernacle.”

Before approaching the sacred space in those dark, pre-Vatican II days, priest and servers would humbly pray at the foot of the altar, confessing their sins in the Confiteor and begging God’s mercy, pardon, and absolution. Only then would the priest ascend the steps to the altar even as he entreated God, “Take away from us our iniquities, we implore thee, Lord, that with pure minds we may worthily enter into the holy of holies: through Christ Our Lord, Amen.” Foremost in the former Mass ritual was the sense of man’s unworthiness and abject humility before God, for what priest and people were about to enter into was the most profound worship of the infinite, all powerful Godhead. This supreme act of adoration entailed man’s most solemn duty toward his Creator and Savior, and so one had to carefully prepare oneself carefully before performing it.

In the wake of Vatican II those prayers at the foot of the altar as well as many other Mass prayers were suppressed, ostensibly to make this, the highest prayer of the Church, “more understandable” to the faithful. With the introduction of the so called Novus Ordo or New Mass in 1970 even more prayers from the Sacred Liturgy disappeared. Today, with no utterance of preparatory prayer, the priest boldly processes without pause up to the altar itself, then begins the Mass not by addressing God, but rather the people. “The grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” He may even add a little chit chat or introduce various guests. In any event the priest’s initial dialogue is clearly directed not towards God but to the assembly. The emphasis has shifted from the once humble reverence and piety prerequisite to approaching the Divine (“Moses, take off your sandals, for the ground on which you are standing is holy ground”) to a self-congratulatory, gee, it’s great we all showed up to engage in our little tea party with God.

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In Remembrance of 15 Years

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Today, the great Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, marks the 15th anniversary of marriage to my wonderful wife, Jeanne. Pondering our anniversary I am reminded of some of those great men and women saints whose holy friendships have so profoundly influenced the Church and the world: Augustine and Monica; Benedict and Scholastica; Francis and Clare. God, in His inscrutable providence, often pairs up individuals who will inspire and even incite one another to ever higher degrees of humility, charity, and ultimately sanctity which overflows into love of God and neighbor. I hereby share with you a brief sketch of two of these holy collaborators who lived in very difficult times, not unlike those that we are experiencing in today’s Church and world.

St. Francis de Sales  (1567-1622)

Francis was born to a noble family in Savoy in the southeast corner of France on August 21, 1567, the eldest of six sons. Studying theology in Paris he was came under a spiritual temptation to despair from which he was freed after making a vow of perpetual chastity and consecrating himself to the Blessed Mother Mary. He then went to Padua to take a law degree in 1591, returning to Savoy where a prosperous career awaited him. His father had even arranged an advantageous marriage for him. Instead, under the direction of his Jesuit spiritual director, Francis revealed his intention to enter the priesthood which caused a serious rift with his father. Francis patiently worked to convince his father of his true vocation who finally yielded, but only after the Bishop of Geneva obtained a papal patronage position for the young man. Francis was then allowed to be ordained in 1593.

Geneva was at the very center of Calvinist Protestantism so the Catholic bishopric had relocated to Annecy, some 20 miles away. In the second year of his priesthood Francis volunteered as a missionary to Le Chablais which had succumbed to the Calvinist doctrine. At great risk to his own life Francis began the daunting task of bringing the district back to the Catholic faith, even confounding Calvinist preachers sent out from Geneva. Several attempts against his life failed. By his heroic patience, kindness, and perseverance the young priest slowly began winning the hearts and minds of his listeners. For those who would not hear him he printed little tracts on the truths of the faith which he would slip under the household doors.

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