Upon the Rivers of Babylon, There We Sat and Wept….
Ann Barnhardt
People praying in Norcia, Italy in front of the destroyed Basilica of St. Benedict
WARNING: If you are a soft person that cannot bear hard truths, stop reading now. If you think that the only way to be charitable is to be a flaccid milksop, curse me as uncharitable and depart now. But this has to be said.
I am in close contact with an American that was there, and here is “the rest of the story” that I have condensed and written up.
In the minutes immediately after the quake, a few people who had been inside the town walls came to the town square, saw the catastrophe, saw the heavily damaged bell tower of the city hall looming above them, knelt, and started praying the Rosary. Over the next few minutes, a steady stream of locals trickled into the square until there were a couple hundred people present. The monks of Norcia, all up the hill just overlooking the town, looked down and saw huge plumes of dust engulfing the town and saw the Basilica’s bell tower was down. The three young priest monks in the community manfully grabbed their stoles and sped down the hill as fast as they could, fully expecting casualties. Within a few minutes, having to enter the city literally climbing over piles of rubble that were once churches, the three young priest-monks, upon entering the town square at a dead sprint, were ready to give the Last Rites to the grievously injured and dead. Two of them split off and began helping the firemen search and clear buildings, with the main challenge being getting elderly people out of the buildings and houses. The other priest stayed in the square and manfully SCREAMED in Italian at the people there present to kneel and pray. All the while, severe aftershocks were coming every few minutes.
And here is where it gets sad. The people already praying were either foreigners who were there in Norcia because of the Monks (as in the American source of this information), or Italians who were there visitng the Monks. This handful of people had started praying the Rosary quietly in Latin. The priest monk, screaming at the locals in the square, knelt down and began the Rosary in Italian – loudly. Yelling the prayers, in fact.
NONE OF THE LOCALS JOINED. NONE OF THEM KNELT. NONE OF THEM PRAYED. THE AMERICAN SOURCE OF THIS ACCOUNT DID NOT SEE A SINGLE LOCAL SO MUCH AS MAKE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS.
And bear in mind, magnitude 4 aftershocks were happening every few minutes, with the city hall bell tower looking like it could fall on them at any moment. Their city destroyed, having experienced literally the Wrath of God, and having once again dodged death, these ethnic Catholics, steeped and saturated in Catholic culture, most of them economically dependent on Catholic tourism to one degree or another, casually refused to pray.
With the foreigners and couple of Italians attached to the Monks, and the now-arrived nuns now praying the Rosary in Italian, two of the priest monks set up confessionals in the corners of the square.
The American source of this information did not see ONE PERSON avail themselves of the Sacrament of Penance. The monk priests, after seeing that there was zero interest, went about assisting the firemen and praying. When Fr. Cassian Folsom arrived, he took over leading the Rosary for the handful of laypeople and the nuns praying, including the earthquake Collect prayer below.
And now to the unpleasantness.
I looked up the Mass propers to be said in times of earthquake, and look what we find:
Collect: Almighty, everlasting God, who dost look upon the earth and make it tremble, spare those who are afraid, and be merciful to those who pray to Thee: that we who fear Thine anger, which shaketh the foundations of the earth, may always experience Thy mercy, which healeth its commotions. Through our Lord…
Secret: O God, who didst firmly establish the earth in its foundations, receive the offerings and prayers of Thy people, and taking away the dangers of earthquake, turn the scourges of Thy divine anger into healing remedies for mankind, that they who are of earth and shall return to earth, may by their holy conduct rejoice in becoming citizens of heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…
Post-communion. Lord, we who receive Thy Sacraments beseech Thee, keep us safe: and by Thy high power steady this earth which because of sin quakes before our eyes: so that the hearts of men may know that these scourges come from Thy wrath and cease by Thy mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ …
Let us consider the eyewitness testimony of the American above in light of these prayers of Holy Mother Church, and ask ourselves a few terrifying questions.
After suffering this monumental catastrophe, and experiencing the actual, literal Wrath of God…
A.) How many of the locals there present, every one ethnically Catholic to the bone, decided to stop contracepting?
B.) Stop engaging in adulterous fornication with their “second spouse”?
C.) Stop fornicating, masturbating, viewing pornography?
D.) Start going to Sunday Mass again?
E.) Denounce and publicly reject all aberrosexuality and public obscenity?
F.) Go to confession and confess their mortal sins with true sorrow and a firm resolve to sin no more?
G.) Felt even the slightest tinge of remorse for their sins, or recommended themselves to God and begged His mercy?
In short, how many were inspired to turn back to God?
We all know that the answer, for all intents and purposes, is zero.
Zero fear of the Lord. Zero.
Now consider this: If a town steeped in Catholicism such as Norcia shows no sign of repentance among the locals, what EXACTLY do you think it will take for, say, modern American Protestants to turn to God, enter His Holy Church, stop contracepting, stop fornicating, denounce and punish crimes against nature, confess their sins, and go to Mass?
I know the answer. It will take an extinction-level event. Never before in human history have men NOT responded to the Wrath of God. Even pagans would respond to earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and wars with misguided attempts to reconcile with the supernatural. Over the past 2000 years, Christians would respond en masse to disasters with prayer, processions, penance, and a revival in the interior life. Not so today. For the first time in human history, man is utterly incorrigible, and the race of men that are utterly incorrigible are the POST-CHRISTIAN HUMANISTS.
Norcia was miraculously protected, I’m convinced, by the Monks praying the Divine Office and offering the Holy Sacrifice. But they were protected from physical death. Many of them, contracepting, fornicating, refusing to worship God, are spiritually dead. Per the prayers above, they were given a tiny foretaste of the terrible wrath of God AS A MERCY to get them to repent and turn back to God. God allows these things to happen in order to facilitate and hasten the sinner’s return to Him. Look at the words of the Secret above: HEALING REMEDIES. Two months earlier, 300 people were killed in the first earthquake of this seismic event. 300 people went to bed and never saw the sun rise before facing Christ at their particular judgments. Just a few miles away. And then the people of Norcia saw their city destroyed before them, spared, once again, all injury and death, and no meaningful spirit of repentance was generated. Do we honestly believe that throwing $100 million in construction will suddenly inspire devotion and orthodoxy when God’s Wrath did not? How many Bible stories can you cite in which God caused apostate Israel to return to Him by showering them with material abundance?
Yeah. ZERO.
Science
In reading up on seismology, I discovered that the second Norcia earthquake of last Sunday, being of greater magnitude than the August quake, changed the paradigm. So long as the shocks remained below the original 6.3 of late August, the seismic paradigm was one of “decrescendo”, or reducing. Now, the great likelihood is that these two shocks of 6.3 and 6.6 were, in fact, PRE-SHOCKS to a forthcoming mega shock in the 7 or even 8 magnitude range.And with that, one’s gaze turns southward, to Rome.
Our Lady of Fatima has prophesied Rome’s apostasy and physical destruction. The 6.6 quake was strongly felt in Rome, and three churches were damaged to the point of needing to be closed. A magnitude 8 shock would utterly devastate Rome, likely destroying many churches and attractions, destroying irreplaceable artistic and cultural patrimony. And unlike Norcia, Rome is a cesspit of sodomy, sacrilege and satanism.
Over the past 18 months or so, I have had a steady stream of people approach me, wanting to talk to me about sodomitical activity in Rome, the depravity of the Vatican, and specifically sodomitical activity centered around the Vatican Museums and St. Peter’s Basilica. It seems that a high percentage of male Vatican tour guides are sodomites. The Vatican Museums have been all but taken over by a mafia tied intimately to the Legion of Christ, which is a racketeering organization whose lust for sacrilegious sex is second only to its lust for money. The sacristy of St. Peter’s Basilica has been notorious for sodomitical activity dating back to the arrival in ARSH 1970 of the odious flaming queen, Cardinal Virgilio Noe.
Now make no mistake, sodomy is bad, but sodomy in the Petrine Basilica, mere yards from the Blessed Sacrament exposed, and mere yards from the tomb of St. Peter, strongly, strongly implies the involvement of satanists.
If what I have just described is in fact happening, and I believe that it is, the question that remains is: how much longer will God permit this before He puts a stop to it? How much more sodomy in the Vatican? How many more rock concerts in the Sistine Chapel? If all these things are to us are a money-making racket, a venue for Legion of Christ cult recruiting junkets, and a place for elitist faggots to meet up for sex without having to stoop to slumming in gay bars, why should we expect to keep them? And this applies to all of our sins. The abortion, the sodomy, the financial crimes, the crimes against peace, the apostasy, the toleration of an antipope that is a blaspheming heretic – how much longer will God tolerate the intolerable?
I am reminded of something that happened this summer. The place where I was had a late summer fair, as many places do. For this fair, huge speakers and a deejay were set up just across from the church. One evening, as we were having Eucharistic Adoration, the deejay fired up the music – horrific, pounding techno dance music. Even though there were quite a few people in the church, including numerous laymen and several priests, no one moved. I jumped up, double genuflected, walked outside and told the deejay politely but firmly that we were having Eucharistic Adoration and that he would turn off the music. Now. I remember thinking at that time, “We are going to lose The Mass, we are going to lose the ability to worship God in the traditional liturgy, because no one will do anything to defend it, even in the smallest, simplest context.”
We are going to lose our churches, we are going to lose our patrimony, because we are not using them to worship God, and worse, we won’t even defend them from desecration.
Rebuilding?
Today the focus is on rebuilding the town of Norcia. I think the Basilica of St. Benedict should be rebuilt. No question. That church was being used by the monks, all day, every day. They pray the entire Divine Office, and up until August, threw the doors open at 3:30am, and the doors remained open until 8:00pm every day.But what of the rest of it? Again, if you can’t take hard truths, stop reading now.
Why, exactly, should money be spent – money that I would hasten to remind one and all simply does not exist, and will require new debt in an already utterly insolvent, hyper-leveraged Italy and EU – to build churches that no one uses?
Why build a house to God whom none see fit to worship?
Because worshiping God involves, you know, ACTUALLY SHOWING UP.
If what people want is Norcia as an Umbrian Disneyland, or Rome after it is destroyed as a Catholic Las Vegas, then I must ask, how EXACTLY does this help the people – the same people that we heard in the narrative above who wouldn’t pray, repent, make a confession, even make the sign of the Cross – not go to hell for all eternity when they die? Are we so far gone in the Bergoglian apostasy that we deem material comfort in life as life’s meaning and end? Just throw up buildings with pretty facades that are utterly empty inside, spew platitudes, and resume NOT going to Mass, NOT going to the Office, NOT praying the Rosary. Throw up bell towers and ring bells for Mass and prayer that WE NEVER ANSWER. Build buildings that look like churches, but whose doors never open. Install confessionals that never see the dead being raised.
So, in a nutshell, we want the churches rebuilt so that we may resume our life of NOT going to Mass or prayer? Do I have that about right? We DEMAND that we be able to blow off worshiping God all day every day, and even in multiple venues. We DEMAND that the Church continue to provide a matrix within which we can make money, not that we’ll be, you know, actually participating in the boring churchy stuff. Because Eucharist, schmucharist. Holy Sacrifice of Calvaryblah, blah, frickity blah. Rosary, schmozary.
Create paradaisical medieval Umbrian Potemkin villages from whole cloth. I’m sure with enough money it could be done. Rebuild Rome. We have the technology. Long live the Vatican bathhouse! Long live the Antipapal Suite at the Casa Santa Marta!
Just let me know when you start raising the dead, because anything less than that is Disneyland at best, and a seedy gay bar at worst. I’ll be over here, by the river, sitting and weeping.
Saints Benedict and Scholastica, pray for us.
Christ, have mercy on us.