May 5, 1995
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
What does Our Lady wish to say to us in her month of May, 1995? Answer, she is weeping tears of blood in several places. Here are extracts from a recent newswire report from Rome, which some of you may have seen:—
"Two reddish trickles run down a saint's ceramic portrait in Salerno. Red rivulets form on the face of a plaster Madonna near Rome. The cases are among at least nine similar reports by the faithful in the past two months, an unusual proliferation in Roman Catholic Italy.
"Tuesday, a forensic pathologist said more blood was found on a Madonna statue in Civitavecchia, a small port city about an hour north of Rome, after it had been taken for safekeeping to the bishop’s residence.
"The incidents have drawn thousands of the curious and faithful. Newspapers and state television detail each twist and turn of the cases. Prosecutors are investigating possible fraud.
"The Church is slow to judge such events as miracles. Some lay activists are condemning the phenomena. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Church's guardian of orthodoxy, has agreed to study the Civitavecchia Madonna, the Vatican said in a statement.
"Prominent experts asked in by the Church said the liquid was human blood. An X-ray and CAT scan found no cavities that could be used to house a device to squirt liquid."
Indeed the Church is slow to judge such events as miracles, but such events have happened all down the history of the Church — a famous Church-approved case in modern times was the weeping Madonna of Syracuse, Sicily, in 1954— and the more technology advances with its X-rays, CAT scans, etc., surely the more discoverable a human fraud must be.
Now invisible devils or fallen angels might fake a flow of blood from a dry statue in order to confuse the faithful, something that would have to be judged from the fruits, but there would be, no confusion unless the devils had a genuine product to imitate. It is reasonable then to assume that several of these "at least nine similar reports" correspond to real interventions of the Madonna — why is she so weeping?
If she is choosing to obtain from Heaven miracles of blood being wept from dry statues, surely that may be firstly because such occurrences are — are they not? — difficult to fake and easy to authenticate. It may be comparatively easy to argue or to believe that little girls are hallucinating if they claim to be receiving messages from the Mother of God. It is comparatively difficult after photographs and X-rays and CAT scans to explain away blood being wept from a dry statue.
Secondly, such occurrences are surely difficult also to misinterpret. Once the official Church had authenticated the weeping Madonna of Syracuse in 1954, the message was unmistakable: the Sorrowful Heart of Mary was being given as much cause for sorrow as ever. Men were misbehaving. Men were offending her Son with their sins. And if forty years later there seems to be an outbreak of weeping statues, then men would seem to be offending her Son more than ever. Is that likely?
Surely it is. Horror a few weeks ago struck in the United States with the car-bombing supposedly by two militia-men of a Federal Government building in Oklahoma City. Clips of the news-reels were hardly distinguishable from clips of the horrible film "Natural Born Killers", I was told by somebody who saw them both, and a picture became famous around the nation of a fireman holding in his arms from among the one hundred and fifty casualties a crumpled and bloody child.
One cartoonist reproduced the picture and for caption put underneath the one word, "Why?" Did it cross his mind that four thousand American children are crumpled and bloodied every day in their mothers' wombs? That maybe the United States needed an explosive audio-visual to grasp the crumpling and bloodying of children's bodies? Probably not. Probably his "Why?" was pointed at God rather than men! Enough to make many statues of the Madonna weep.
However, she must also be weeping at the diabolical confusion in millions of minds which, if it is not cleared up, risks producing a social explosion that will make the Oklahoma bombing look like no more than the advance tremors of an earthquake. This confusion is the tension between government and citizens.
Governments have rights and citizens have rights, but post-Protestant liberalism so mixes true and false in presenting both sets of rights that unless the Catholic Church comes to the aid of common sense, that. social explosion seems inevitable. Thus militia-men and the Federal Government, honoured by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln respectively, are two honourable American traditions, but when Protestantism so undermines true religion that liberalism gilds with the glamour of a substitute religion both resistance to tyranny and governmental law and order, then it is simply a matter of time before citizens and government are on a crusade, only they are on two different crusades which are on a collision course. Right now we are certain that the Oklahoma bombers chose for the day of their attack the second anniversary of the Federal Government's burning alive of dozens of its relatively harmless citizens in Waco, Texas. On the other hand the media are now preparing us for the Federal Government to respond by an increased clamp-down on all "home- grown terrorists" who resist it. Whereupon, either the people submit for the sake of peace to losing their liberties, or the resistance merely stiffens. Either the Antichrist, or civil war. As the Mother of God weeps, so the Devil laughs.
Certainly if the Catholic Church was listened to, she could clear up the confusion. She would teach, like Leo XIII in "Diuturnum Illud", that the people on the one hand are not sovereign, that authority to govern does not come from the people, that all power to govern, or rightful authority, comes from God, and so there is no such thing as a right of the people to revolt or to change their government when they like. On the other hand the Catholic Church would also teach the members of any government that since all authority does come from God, they have no right to use theirs how they like, that God judges rulers with a special severity on how they have used their authority (Wisd. VI,b,7), and they have no right to be obeyed by the people if they gravely misuse it, by working for instance for the arrival of the Antichrist. Surely Waco was the detonator of the Oklahoma explosion.
This Catholic doctrine, harmonizing rulers and ruled whose interests clash irreconcilably if God and His Catholic Church are pushed aside, could clear up the confusion and de-fuse the bombs if rulers and ruled would heed it. Alas, not only does modern man pay no heed to the doctrine that would heal his wounds, but, worse cause for the Madonna's tears, the Catholic Churchmen, since the true doctrine went unheeded, have given up teaching it! Instead, they have joined in teaching the very doctrines that are the cause of the trouble; religious liberty (discrediting all religion), then separation of Church and State, freeing rulers to pursue the godless New World Order, and then sovereignty of the people, freeing ruled to blow up the government. Now if it were only the Protestants and liberals who were teaching revolution to governments and peoples, as was the case for 400 years, the damage would be limited; but as soon as the Catholic Church which is the pillar of truth (I Tim. III, 15) joined in preaching Revolution, as since Vatican II, then confusion reigned unchecked.
Worst of all as one might think, and leaving the Mother of God with no alternative to multiplying her tears, is the perversity of these Churchmen pretending that they have not changed Catholic doctrine nor altered the Church. They say, we have renovated the Mass, but it is no different, but you must accept the renovations; we have up-dated the doctrine, but it is just the same doctrine, but you must not remain stuck in the old doctrine; we have adapted the Church to modern times, but it is still exactly the same Church, but you must go along with all the adaptations.
George Orwell called it "doublethink". Take a moment to ponder this marvelous analysis of intellectual perversity taken from his novel "1984" (inspired, dear friends, by his experiences neither in Russia nor in the USA but in the British Broadcasting Corporation!), then apply the analysis of doublethink to the present-day official churchmen, and ask yourself how the Mother of God could be doing anything other than multiplying her statues that weep:-.
"Winston's mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then draw it back into memory again at the moment when it is needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the world ‘doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
In medicine, politics, finance, whatever, today's world is awash in doublethink: "Abortion is good for us", "Our financial system is healthy", "Democracy is thriving", "There is more education than ever", "Never have women and children been so respected", "Communism has collapsed", etc., etc.. When one stops to consider that what is common to these examples is men straining to exclude God from what is still His world, it stands to reason that the worst doublethink is that practised by the guardians of the interests of God. Pray for the militiamen and for the Government agents, but pray especially for the priests and bishops. They are the especial cause of the Madonna's tears.
To help restore Catholic balance to minds, this summer's Doctrinal Session for men, July 25 to 29, will be entitled "Antidote to Oklahoma", arid it will concentrate on four famous Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, presenting God's design for government and society: "Libertas", "Diuturnum Illud", "Immortale Dei" and "Rerum Novarum". We will be for both government, and people. We will be for Catholic government and for Catholic people.
We hope that the four deacons and seven sub-deacons due to be ordained to the priesthood and diaconate respectively here in Winona on Saturday, June 24, will be imbued with this Catholic doctrine, which alone can save the world. On their behalf we thank you for your unfailing support which has sustained their Seminary, and we recommend them to your prayers as you are always in theirs.
Most sincerely yours in the Sorrowful Heart of Mary,
