The Great Catholic Battle - Spirit of Penance

+

J.M.J.

Ember Wednesday in the First Week of Lent

Do penance... I say to you: but unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish (Mt. 4.17; Lk. 13.3 - Our Lord seems to recall to us today in pointing to the rebellious Jews their folly compared to the humility exhibited by the men of Ninive, doing penance in sackcloth and ashes, who were but pagans in hearing the penitential preaching of the Prophet Jonas, Mt. 12-38-50). Thus the authentic Catholic spirit has this note of fellowship of the Crucified - fellowship of His sufferings (Phil. 3.10); not content with merely 'feeling sorry' but of exercising (cf., 1 Tim. 4.7) our whole being - body and soul - in reparative sorrow for our sins and that of others. And given the disastrous moral upheaval around us which the Immaculata long foresaw coming, the Great Sign in heaven" appearing at Fatima in Portugal insisted all the more: "Penance! Penance! Penance!" Did the Church, especially the hierarchy, took it seriously? Almost the whole of the hierarchy was even instrumental in lessening the sense of our need to do more penance actually (which implies a prior weakening of the Catholic sense of the evil of sin and of the corruption and disorder in us inflicted by Original Sin): in the revised Calendar they devised for the "New 'Catholic Church'" or the Vatican II-'Church', for example, they dropped the Ember Days (which call for fasting and abstinence for three days: Wednesday, Friday, Saturday), and restricted Friday as a day of abstinence during Lent only (a Friday outside the Lenten season is, in the traditional discipline, always a day of abstinence - except when Christmas Day falls on it) - they maintain Ash Wednesday and Good Friday as days of fasting and abstinence but we wonder how the "New 'Catholic'" fasting is observed (which used to be only one full meal a day throughout Lent excepting Sundays and concurring days of solemn Feasts, as of St. Joseph on the 19th and of the Annunciation on the 25th) nay if practically existent at all. The 'Modernist' "spirit of Vatican II:" "CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE CHANGED and treating the faithful as if they were a brute that needs sensual appetite restraints is incompatible with the 'dignity of man' [the religion of the Masonic "New World Order"]." If Protestantism or 'Bible-only'-sectarianism is but 'convenient #Christianity', the "New 'Catholicism'" is but 'convenient Catholic Religion' which is just the same, of course, as 'convenient Christianity' - the bastard Protestantized 'Catholicism'.