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| Above the tomb of 'Pope Francis' hangs a replica of Bernardin's satanic pectoral cross |
For all you Catholics out there feeling battered because of your loyalty to Christ, His Church and His Gospel truth, this post is a benison. Balm to bruised hearts.
For the faithful at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Palmerston North, New Zealand, for instance. It was St Patrick's Church before a new, conciliar cult bishop arrived, and while anointing Maoritanga and heresy he banished the altar rails, Stations of the Cross, kneelers, statues, and hid the Holy Eucharist in a side chapel. He wanted the marble high altar jackhammered but its donors protested. A rearguard action mounted by his replacement to restore the Sacrament to its rightful place is being fought tooth and nail by the "Bishop Emeritus' " faithful Novus Ordo cultists.
This post is balm to Latin Mass lovers who attend the Novus Ordo Mass with a spouse, for love of that spouse and love of the Eucharist which they trust is validly confected. Or those accused by Novus Ordo Massgoers - or even, incredibly, by Latin Mass adherents - of being "under the influence of the devil". It's accompaniment for the people who drive "absurd distances because the sacraments have become hostage to episcopal pettiness" (Chris Jackson, Hiraeth in Exile, below).
It's a blessing for Catholics who love saints like St Teresa of Jesus (Avila) who are subjected to veiled threats online of being shopped to their Carmelite order for 'disobedience' to the Pope. Which means nothing when 'the Pope' in question is Leo XIV.
“You shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice.” That was yesterday's Gospel. What consolation, to know Our Lord knows. Then He adds, 'Your sorrow shall be turned into joy."
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| The Rosary is an argument |
The Strange Alleluia of Catholics Who Are Not Delusional
The Third Sunday after Easter begins with one of those commands that can almost sound insulting if you are paying attention to the state of the Church.
“Shout with joy to God, all the earth.”
But look around.
The bishops are still doing what they do. Tradition is still treated like a controlled substance. The old Mass is still regarded as dangerous, while every sort of theological novelty gets escorted into the sanctuary with a bouquet and a press release.
Leo XIV continues to give the world enough soft lighting and ambiguity to keep the professional explainers employed. And the same Catholic media class that used to discover a five-alarm crisis in every Francis headline now suddenly speaks in careful tones about patience, context, prudence, and “not rushing to judgment.”
So yes, “shout with joy” can land strangely.
But that is exactly why the liturgy gives it to us. The Church commands Easter joy because Christ is risen. That is the difference between Catholic hope and the ridiculous optimism we get from institutional men [and women - ed] who tell us everything is basically fine if only we would stop noticing things.
The Introit has no interest in that kind of forced cheerfulness. It tells us to rejoice, and then immediately gives us this line: “How terrible are thy works, O Lord! In the multitude of thy strength thy enemies shall lie to thee.”
God’s enemies lie to Him, flatter Him, and borrow His vocabulary. They talk about mercy while avoiding repentance, praise the poor while flattering the powerful, and speak about tradition as a “treasure” while drafting the next restriction.
The Psalmist already knew the type.
The joy of this Mass is the joy of a man who sees the crisis very clearly and still knows God is not mocked.
Traditional Catholics do not need to choose between denial and despair. We are allowed to say the thing is rotten. We are allowed to say the men in charge have betrayed the inheritance. We are allowed to notice that many of the public voices paid to notice these things have suddenly become very busy noticing something else.
And still, Alleluia.
Not because the enemies are harmless. Because Christ is stronger.
The Collect Is a Direct Rebuke to the Modern Church
The Collect is almost too perfect for our age.
“Almighty God, Who showest to them that be in error the light of thy truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness…”
Just sit with that for a moment.
The Church prays for those in error by asking God to show them the light of truth so they may return to righteousness. There is no elaborate dance here. No “journeying together” around the obvious. No careful parsing about whether error might contain valuable insights from the margins. No suggestion that the erring man needs only to be accompanied more tenderly in his present direction.
He is in error.
He needs truth.
He must return.
That is Catholic speech. Simple. Clean. Medicinal. Merciful in the old sense, which means merciful enough to tell a man when he is walking off a cliff.
This is one reason the old liturgy is so unbearable to the new religion. It keeps saying things that cannot be reconciled with the whole postconciliar mood. The modern ecclesial machine wants Catholicism to become a sort of permanent therapeutic conference where no one is ever quite wrong, no one is ever really outside the way, and everyone is always being “invited” into a process that somehow never ends in conversion.
The Collect will not play along.
It asks God to bring the erring back to the way of righteousness. It then asks that all who belong to Christ’s religion may reject whatever contradicts that profession and follow whatever agrees with it.
That is deadly to the modern project.
Because the entire modern project depends on letting people keep the name Catholic while quietly hollowing out what the name requires. Catholic language without Catholic doctrine. Catholic belonging without the hard work of leaving sin behind.
The Collect says no. If you profess Christ, then live as though the profession is true. Avoid what contradicts it. Follow what agrees with it.
A child can understand that. Which is probably why so many experts have spent sixty years trying to complicate it.
Strangers, Pilgrims, and People Who Still Have to Save Their Souls
St. Peter begins the Epistle with a line that may be one of the most necessary in Scripture for our time:
“Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims…”
That is us.
That is what we have to remember before the crisis eats our minds. We are strangers and pilgrims. We were never promised a comfortable age. We were never promised that Rome would always feel like home in the ordinary human sense.
We are passing through.
That does not make the betrayal unreal. It means betrayal is not allowed to become our religion.
And this is where St. Peter does something very inconvenient. After calling us strangers and pilgrims, he does not say, “Therefore, spend the rest of your life being furious at bad bishops.” He says, “refrain yourselves from carnal desires which war against the soul.”
That line stings because it brings the whole crisis back into our own house.
Yes, the bishops are bad, Leo is a problem, and the Catholic media class has become very selective in its courage. Yes, the visible Church is covered in confusion. All true.
Now what about your soul?
That is the part nobody wants to hear, especially when we have plenty of external villains to keep us occupied. But St. Peter does not allow us to use the crisis as an excuse for impurity, bitterness, laziness, vanity, gossip, gluttony, cowardice, or the kind of anger that begins as zeal and slowly becomes a hobby.
There is a particular danger for traditional Catholics here. Once you see the con, you can start living on exposure alone. Another scandal. Another screenshot. Another clip. Another bishop saying something that would have gotten a seminarian corrected in 1930. Another media personality pretending the obvious is complicated.
You can be right about all of it and still lose interior ground.
That is the trap. The devil does not mind a traditionalist who can identify every error in the modern Church if that same man is spiritually sloppy, prayerless, harsh with his family, and secretly addicted to outrage. A man can be orthodox in his bookmarks and disorderly in his passions.
St. Peter cuts through the performance. You are a stranger and pilgrim. Act like one. Your homeland is heaven. Stop letting the appetites of exile rule you.
The Best Answer to Slander Is a Catholic Life
St. Peter then tells Christians to keep their “conversation good among the Gentiles.” In the older English, “conversation” means the whole pattern of life. How you conduct yourself. What people see when they watch you.
He knows Christians will be accused. He says plainly that the Gentiles will speak against them as evildoers.
Again, not exactly difficult to apply.
Traditional Catholics are called rigid, divisive, nostalgic, reactionary, toxic, pharisaical, disobedient, mentally unstable, politically dangerous, and whatever new insult gets test-marketed next. The accusation shifts. The point stays the same. The world, and much of the official Church apparatus, wants the old Faith treated as a pathology.
St. Peter’s answer is good works.
That sounds almost too simple. It is also devastating.
A sane Catholic household is an argument. A father who governs himself before trying to govern everyone else is an argument. A mother who keeps peace and order in a chaotic age is an argument. Children raised in the Faith are an argument. Modesty is an argument. Confession is an argument. The Rosary is an argument. A chapel full of ordinary people kneeling before God while the respectable world rolls its eyes is an argument.
The revolution hates doctrine, but it really hates doctrine when it becomes flesh in normal people.
That is why we cannot let the crisis turn us into cranks. The Faith has to be visible in us. Not in a fake, sugary, “look how joyful I am” way. In a durable way. In the way a man keeps showing up. In the way a woman keeps praying. In the way a family keeps the feasts and fasts, protects the children, buries the dead, visits the sick, and refuses to become spiritually homeless even when the official shepherds have made a wasteland.
We need articles. We need warnings. We need names named. We need receipts.
We also need saints.
Actually, we need saints more.
“Honour the King” Does Not Mean Worship the Chancery
The Epistle includes the famous passage about being subject to authority: the king, governors, masters, and so forth. Modern Catholics often get trapped here, because the professional obedience merchants love to quote these lines as though St. Peter were giving every bureaucrat in a Roman collar a blank check.
He was not.
St. Peter says to honor the king. He also says to fear God.
Notice the order and the difference. The king is honored. God is feared.
That one distinction would cure an enormous amount of Catholic confusion if people had the courage to apply it. Authority deserves honor within its proper limits. God alone gets the whole soul. No bishop, pope, conference, dicastery, celebrity priest, or Catholic influencer has the right to climb into the place reserved for God and demand that Catholics surrender memory, doctrine, reason, and tradition.
There is a false obedience that is really just fear dressed up as virtue. It tells Catholics to accept contradictions because the alternative would be uncomfortable. It tells them to reinterpret the Faith every time a new embarrassment comes from above. It tells them that loyalty means pretending not to notice what everyone can see.
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| The cross worn by 'Popes' Leo and Francis, hanging in replica at Francis' tomb and "everyone knows about it"*https://juliadufresne.blogspot.com/2025/07/leos-satanic-cross-lavender-mafia-j-h.html |
That is not the obedience of St. Peter. That is institutional Stockholm syndrome.
The Apostle gives us something much stronger: “As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God.”
That is the Catholic balance. We are free men because we serve God. We do not use freedom as an excuse for rebellion, spite, or vanity. We also do not use obedience as an excuse for cowardice. A Catholic can honor authority without lying for it. He can suffer under bad rulers without calling their badness good. He can obey lawful commands while refusing to treat novelty as tradition and ambiguity as doctrine.
This is the mature posture we need right now. Neither servile nor theatrical. Neither naïve nor feral.
Fear God. Honor the king. Keep the order straight.
Wrongful Suffering Is Still Seen by God
The Epistle ends with a line that belongs on the wall of every traditional Catholic chapel:
“For this is thankworthy, if for conscience towards God, a man endure sorrows, suffering wrongfully.”
That is a hard sentence. It gives dignity to something many Catholics are living every week.
Some have been pushed out of parishes for wanting the old Mass. Some drive absurd distances because the sacraments have become hostage to episcopal pettiness. Some priests have been humiliated for doing what saints did. Some parents are trying to raise children in a Church where the adults in charge seem embarrassed by Catholicism unless it is safely mixed with ecology, social concern, or interreligious theater.
And then, after all of that, these faithful Catholics are told that they are the problem.
St. Peter says God sees wrongful suffering.
He does not say injustice becomes fine if an authority figure commits it. He says that if a man endures sorrow for conscience toward God, that endurance is thankworthy.
This is where Catholic resistance has to be purified. We should speak. We should object. We should refuse falsehood. We should defend the Mass and the Faith without apology. But we also have to suffer like Christians, which is a great deal harder than posting like Christians.
No hatred. No despair. No spiritual self-pity. No secret pleasure in the collapse because it proves we were right. No turning bitterness into a substitute for prayer.
Wrongful suffering can sanctify. But only if we actually offer it to God.
Otherwise it just makes us ugly.
The Gospel Was Written for the “Little While”
Then comes the Gospel.
“A little while, and now you shall not see me; and again a little while, and you shall see me.”
The disciples do not understand it. They keep repeating the phrase among themselves. “What is this that he saith, A little while?”
That line feels painfully human. We still ask: what is this little while? How long is it supposed to last?
How long do Catholics have to watch the Faith be softened, explained away, and repackaged into something the world can tolerate? How long do we have to see bishops act like border guards against tradition and open-door greeters for every fashionable error? How long must we endure the Catholic version of Baghdad Bob, telling us there is no crisis while smoke comes out of every window?
Christ does not give the disciples a date. He gives them the shape of the thing.
“You shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice.”
There it is. The whole crisis in one sentence. The world rejoices when the Church appears to be ashamed of her own inheritance. And the faithful mourn. They mourn because they know what is being lost. But Christ goes further.
“You shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
That is the promise. The sorrow is real, and so is the turning.
Labor Pains in the Church
Our Lord compares the disciples’ sorrow to a woman in labor. Labor hurts. It is bloody, frightening, exhausting work. No one has to pretend otherwise.
But labor is pain ordered toward birth.
That is the consolation.
The present agony of faithful Catholics is not meaningless if it is borne in Christ. God can bring life out of humiliation. He can make saints in a wasteland. He can preserve children in exile. He can use small chapels [even in garages and funeral parlours - ed], battered families, tired priests, obscure writers, and stubborn old ladies with rosaries to carry the Faith through an age that thinks it has outgrown Him.
The postconciliar establishment has always imagined that time was on its side. Just wait long enough, they thought, and the old Catholics will die. The Latin will disappear. The old devotions will fade. The children will assimilate. The doctrinal memory will weaken. Eventually the whole thing will be absorbed into the new normal.
And yet here we are.
Somehow the old Mass still produces children. The old catechism still makes sense. The old prayers still sound like prayer. The old saints still tower over the new experts. The old warnings keep coming true. The old Faith refuses to stay buried.
That does not mean the suffering is small. It means the suffering has not been wasted.
A woman in labor endures because something is coming. Our Lord tells the disciples that their sorrow will end in a joy no one can take from them.
No one.
That word should steady us.
No bishop can take it. No chancery can cancel it. No Rome-approved media personality can explain it away. No decree can reach it. No cowardly silence can bury it. Christ says the joy He gives will be beyond confiscation.
That is the joy we are waiting for. That is why we do not quit.
Praise Him Before the Vindication Arrives
The Offertory gives the simple rule of life:
“Praise the Lord, O my soul, in my life I will praise the Lord.”
That means the work in front of us is very plain. Pray. Go to Mass. Go to confession. Keep the Faith. Teach the children. Read the saints. Guard your home. Tell the truth. Do not let rage turn you into the thing your enemies claim you are. Do not become soft. Do not become cruel. Do not become ridiculous. Do not become hopeless.
The Secret asks God to moderate our earthly desires and teach us to love heavenly things. That is exactly the medicine we need. Much of our pain comes from wanting the Church on earth to feel secure again. We want normal Catholic life. We want fathers. We want clarity. We want to stop having to explain the obvious. We want a world where the people in charge of Catholic institutions act like Catholics.
Those desires are understandable. Some of them are holy. But even good earthly desires need to be governed by heaven. Otherwise they become another source of despair.
God may restore much in our lifetime. He may not. He may ask us to hand on the Faith in a long winter. He may give us glimpses of spring. That is His business.
Our business is fidelity.
No Man Shall Take Your Joy
The Communion repeats the Gospel: “A little while, and now you shall not see me; and again a little while, and you shall see me.”
The Church puts those words on our lips because we need to keep saying them until we believe them in our bones.
A little while.
That means Christ has already placed a limit around the sorrow. The sorrow gets its hour. It does not get eternity.
That is why traditional Catholics can remain sane. We do not have to pretend the media class is brave when it spends half its time manufacturing excuses and the other half ignoring what would have made headlines ten years ago.
We also do not have to despair.
Christ saw this little while before we entered it. He warned His disciples that they would weep while the world rejoiced. He told them the sorrow would be turned into joy. He compared the agony to labor, because labor ends in birth. Then He gave the promise that should carry us through every humiliation of this age:
“I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice; and your joy no man shall take from you.”
That is the sentence to keep.
When the next scandal comes, keep it.
When the next bishop says something insane, keep it.
When the next “conservative” Catholic explains why the latest betrayal is actually complicated, keep it.
When the Mass is driven farther into the margins, keep it.
When you are tired of being told that noticing reality is uncharitable, keep it.
“I will see you again.”
That is enough. Christ has not lost His Church. He has not forgotten His faithful. He has not abandoned the little ones who cling to what was handed down while the clever men build careers out of explaining why surrender is mature.
The world has its little while.
So do the hirelings.
So do the liars.
So do the cowards.
Christ has forever.https://bigmodernism.substack.com/p/a-little-while-and-you-shall-see
*"Everybody knows about it" says Ann Barnhardt, who knows just about everything,
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| Rembrandt |
