This book was HUGE in my reading my way into the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and I’m not the one who feels that way.
I mentioned it on the Kokx Podcast last Friday. And I misspoke and scrambled my Ignatius’ with my Irenaeus’ (as one does). The Four Witnesses in Rod Bennett’s book are Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons.
And I see on the Ignatius Press website that Bennett has a sequel, “Four More Witnesses”.
Here’s the dust jacket blurb for The Four Witnesses:
What was the early Church like? Contrary to popular belief, Rod Bennett shows there is a reliable way to know. Four ancient Christian writers – four witnesses to early Christianity – left us an extensive body of documentation on this vital subject, and this book brings their fascinating testimony to life for modern believers. With all the power and drama of a gripping novel, this book is a journey of discovery of ancient and beautiful truths through the lives of four great saints of the early Church: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons.
“A treasure! The early Church and its teachings come to life in this story. Did the first Christians believe what you believe? Buy this book, read the words of the early Church Herself, and fall in love with the historic Church that Christ Himself founded.” -David Currie, Author, Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic
“Rod Bennett has immersed himself in the fascinating writings of four early Fathers of the Church and has made the discovery from reading them that sincere and attentive readers of them ought to make. The author’s imaginative account of these four great Church Fathers is not only an excellent introduction to their work; it is a convincing rendering of what the early Church must really have been like. This is an important new contribution to Christian apologetics.” -Kenneth Whitehead, Author, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Everything Maurice says here is 100% spot-on truth.
This man is primed for conversion to Catholicism if someone would just reach out and explain those last few critical points, namely the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and, of course, the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. He knows scripture. He knows that Truth is objective. One good conversation could do it.
St. Maurice, pray for your namesake, Maurice.
This man showed up to an LGBTQ affirming church & stood up in the middle of the service to rebuke them.
Here’s the citation I mentioned on the Kokx Podcast episode on Friday. The English translation of the text is below. The author refers to Bergoglio as “Pope.” We, of course, know that he was an Antipope from the beginning.
The rejection of the sacraments by Bergoglio and the conclave: is it the end of the false church prophesied by Padre Pio?
By Cesare Sacchetti
April 23, 2025
In the end, the announcement came in the most unexpected and surprising way, one of those that really makes you think of the intervention of Divine Providence.
After months of uncertainties and ambiguity, and after a long hospital period in which Santa Marta had not even shown an image of Bergoglio, on the day of Easter Monday, the death of Pope Francis is announced.
According to the Vatican bulletin, the pontiff died at 7:35 in the morning following a stroke, a state of coma and finally heart failure, and when the camerlengo cardinal, the Irish Farrell, makes his announcement in a heavy voice, a first contradiction already emerges.
In the statement of the cardinal dean, Giovanni Battista Re, where the college of cardinals is convened the morning after his death, it is written that Francis would have died instead at 7:45, a discrepancy that has obviously not even been highlighted by the media, who in these hours are performing in a flood of celebrations of their favorite pontiff.
Cardinal Parolin near the body of Bergoglio
They are obviously not telling the fact that alone demolishes in one blow the image of the pope “of the last” that the media are trying to sew on Bergoglio.
According to Vatican sources, in the last hours of his earthly life, Francis even refused the sacraments, even denying access to his room to the major penitentiary.
A refusal by Francesco even during his hospitalization at the Gemelli polyclinic, when the pope was already in serious health conditions.
So much was the hatred against God that lodged in the heart of this man, that he even came to commit the most blasphemous of acts.
However, nothing can disturb the flow of lies of the media narrative that in these hours does not seem to be telling the death of the pontiff of Santa Romana Chiesa, as those of a pop icon, seasoned with a whole series of anecdotes about his passion for football and empanadas made by transsexuals.
It is true that we have not reached this point in a day.
From the Second Vatican Council onwards, the pope’s royalty has progressively dissipated since, for example, Paul VI, born Giovanni Montini, stripped himself of the papal tiara in 1964 which was then sold to a merchant of Jewish origin in New York.
Paul VI
Bergoglio, however, represents in this sense the completion of the definitive secularization of the pontificate.
In fact, there is no longer any semblance of the papacy as it has been understood in the past centuries, so much so that the pope with Francis has become more like a show star who stops on the street to stop autographs, who shows himself riding in a Fiat Panda to convey a false pauperistic message, and who organizes in favor of a camera his entrance to an optician in the historic center of Rome always to convey the demagogic image that the pope is a “man of the people”, when in reality he should be first of all a man of God, and Don’t go in search of popular consensus or acclaim, which have been drastically reduced in the last 6-7 years.
Francis, however, certainly did not “come from the end of the world” to ensure that the papacy kept the dogmas of the Catholic faith and to feed the souls towards paradise and save them from hell, whose existence was de facto denied by himself enough to call him “empty” together with his atheist friend, and in a strong smell of Freemasonry, Eugenio Scalfari, founder of the newspaper La Repubblica, house organ of the Italian progressive left.
Bergoglio felt perfectly at ease with such characters. He refused the company of real men of faith, persecuted by him for their will to practice the ancient rite of the Tridentine mass, a liturgical cornerstone of the Church for centuries, and went to the home of abortionists and propalists of the modern world like Emma Bonino, who in these hours mourns his loss after revealing that Francis had asked her to “continue our battles”.
Francesco radiant together with Emma Bonino
It doesn’t take much else to have the clear certainty that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a fifth pillar planted in the bosom of the Church.
In his pontificate there was everything that should not have been on paper.
There were the trans, dear to him, and received with all the honors in the Vatican, there were the pedophiles he had protected since the time of his archbishopric in Argentina, there were the Freemasons, called “dear brothers”, there was the Rotary, the paramasonry of which Francis was a member, there was the Pachamama adored on the Vatican gardens, there was the defense and promotion of the lethal vaccines of pharmaceutical companies, and there were even priests who practiced homosexual coexistence in the light of day.
Ecclesiastical Freemasonry and the preparation of the pontificate of Bergoglio
However, heresy was not built in one day.
It was a pontificate prepared with great care and attention by the various followers of Freemasonry who probably made a careful study on the personality of this man, extremely narcissistic, angry and with a strong aptitude for scare speech, well known to Vatican employees.
Freemasons must have judged these ideal characteristics to place on the papal throne a man with the deliberate intent to definitively destroy the Church of Christ.
However, those who think, as it was said before, that the Bergogliano pontificate was a sort of “oversight” of the recent years of the Church are deluded, since if this man has arrived where he has arrived, it is certainly not because he himself as appointed pontiff, but obviously because in the body of the Church there were those enemies who have patiently infiltrated it over the decades and one could also say of the centuries.
The various Freemasons who belonged to this upper level of the lodges made no secret of their will to infiltrate the Catholic Church and to ensure that the pope in the future would be an instrument and no longer an opponent of freemasonry, which since its existence proposes to destroy the Church.
Even further went a former priest, Canon Roca, who then passed through the ranks of Freemasonry, who towards the end of the nineteenth century made a disturbing prophecy and described the coming of a pontiff who would have made his own the false materialistic verb of the Freemason of Jewish origin, Karl Marx, born Mordecai Levy.
Roca described a pope who would have preached the theories of collectivism that were already making their way in the age of enlightenment, and what other purpose they had other than to put an end to private property to establish a society similar to a commune, in which the family as such no longer exists and where there is obviously no longer even the concept of homeland, since the borders have evaporated to give way to this universal republic vaged by the various Freemasons.
What else was Jorge Mario Bergoglio if not the perfect living embodiment of what Canon Roca predicted almost a century and a half ahead?
What else was this man than the result of a long process of apostasy that reduced this bi-thousand-year-old institution to such pitiful conditions?
The apostasy was certainly there because the enemy, as we have seen, with great patience and perseverance has infiltrated among the ranks of the Church to give life to another institution now desacralized and completely similar to any NGO that rather than having as its foundation the truth of Catholicism has adopted the Enlightenment verb of human rights by the various French Freemasons such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu.
The apostasy announced over time
It should be remembered, however, that the Church is not an earthly institution. It doesn’t belong to men even though they went too hard to ruin it.
It was founded by Christ for the salvation of souls, and Jesus’ very promise to his apostles was that it would exist until the end of time.
The test it is going through can only have been “granted” by Providence, which has taken care to make known several times over time of which obscenities and heresies the Church would have become a spokesperson.
One of the first warnings of the coming of apostasy was that which occurred in 1846, when the Madonna appeared to the two French children, Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat, to whom it was announced that the Church would become the seat of the Antichrist.
The two children of La Salette, Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat
The Church at that time was very different from the present one. It was a Church that was not afraid to say that it was the sanhedrin, and certainly not Rome, that killed Jesus, as some Israeli jurists hosted on RAI screens have tried to believe, and it was a Church that on the pages of Civiltà Cattolica talked about the Jewish question, while today on this magazine you can find the Christianization of the illegal immigrant, one of the pins of Bergoglio’s pontificate.
This appearance was approved by the Church, which also in the following years received other signals that a similar scenario would unfortunately occur, when, for example, the great pontiff Leo XIII had in 1884 the well-known vision of the Church fallen into the hands of Satan for 100 years.
There was also no lack of other warnings in the last century, starting from Fatima, even if here the machine of ecclesiastical Freemasonry worked to hide from the faithful the third part of the secret of Fatima, in which there was talk of how the leaders of the Church would become the spokespersons of apostasy.
The Madonna had given explicit instructions. She had ordered the Church to reveal the third part of the secret by 1960, but the pontiff of the time, John XXIII, Angelo Roncalli, who had already started Freemasonry and was elected after Cardinal Siri, threatened, was forced to give up, hid the secret, as Father Malachi Martin revealed who fled to the United States after witnessing this scene.
The vicar of Christ who censors the Madonna. One time one would never have thought of telling such a fact, but this was the evil that had penetrated the Vatican walls and that also led the other pontiffs after Roncalli to hide from the faithful the truth about the infection of the Church.
Padre Pio had already been there to see her, among others. The saint of Pietrelcina had already revealed to his friend, Father Amorth, that this false church would be established that would arrive where Jorge Mario Bergoglio had arrived.
Francis can be considered to all intents and purposes the zenith of such infiltration, and the question that many have been asking themselves for some time now, and whether this ordeal of this institution has finally come to an end, or whether there will be another station of the Via Crucis.
It is impossible to answer this question without trying to lean on the shoulders of those who had those visions and who, like the mother of God, appeared on other occasions after Fatima, such as Garabandal and Akita, to warn humanity about the dangers they incured for their rejection of God and to announce at the same time the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart.
It is not in fact a hypothesis that the Church will be healed, but a certainty because it was the Virgin herself who said it.
Therefore, there cannot be the slightest doubt about the final victory….
“The author is entirely correct to be concerned about the consequences for every industry in which women become the majority, because all of those industries will cease to be able to perform their primary functions. We’ve already seen that, for example, in elementary education, where predominantly female teachers working under female principles and female-majority schoolboards cannot teach schoolchildren how to read, write, or do arithmetic.
As we are observing in real time, female-dominated politics are not compatible with civilization because women have different priorities and perspectives than those required for its construction and maintenance. A feminist society, if left unchecked to its own devices, will look very similar to the average African society before European contact. The episode of Survivor in which the two tribes were divided by the sexes is a very vivid example of this.
But the author is confusing the symptom for the disease. Women are more akin to the vector of the disease than the disease itself, as can be observed from the way in which men who are social justice warriors are every bit as incompetent and even more insane than the women are. The disease is ultimately spiritual and eventually ends in either societal collapse, pyramids dedicated to child sacrifice, or both.
The good news is that a) converged societies will inevitably fail, b) women’s commitment to feminism and social justice will vanish as soon as the government funding fails, and c) men stop supporting female influence over them.
This is a unique moment of history, and it is already observably coming to an end.
The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything. —Bill Simmons”
Zoom in to read the article. They were utterly shameless.
Vatican II was validly convoked, and its original agenda and schemae were highly orthodox: the denunciation of Global Communism, and the declaration of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Co-redemptrix, Mediatrix of all graces, and Queen of Heaven AND Earth. However, immediately after opening, the Council was hijacked by modernists, led by Germans and backed up by Americans (of course), and the original agenda and schemae were ripped up and discarded, and the dumpster fire dog’s breakfast of modernism that we now know and see as “the post-Conciliar church” is what emerged.
Vatican II is therefore a FAILED COUNCIL that should be declared null and void with all of its documents, which should be banned from scholarship.
When people today refer to “The Council”, we should immediately reply, “Which Council? Trent? Lateran II? Nicea?” This evil idea that the Church began in ARSH 1965 with the closing of the FAILED Second Vatican Council MUST be fought. We should refuse to speak of Vatican II as if it weren’t a failed council, much less “THE” council which marks the “beginning of the modern Church.”
The Catholic Church began as it emerged from the spear wound in Our Lord’s side as He hung upon the Cross in ARSH 33. Water and Blood. Baptism and Eucharist. Period. And it remains spotless and unchanged to this day, and until the end of the world.
The Catholic Church emerging from the side of Christ Crucified, the Second Person of the Triune Godhead, into the hands of God the Father, the First Person of the Triune Godhead.
And seeing the multitudes, He went up into a mountain, and when He was set down, His disciples came unto Him. And opening His mouth, He taught them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5: 1-3
The First Beatitude is another grossly misread and misunderstood verse, with the misunderstanding being a recent phenomenon, spurred by a conscientious perversion of the meaning of the verse by Marxist infiltrators beginning in the 20th century. And now most especially by Antipope Bergoglio, as one would expect of the probable False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist and head of the Freemasonic, sodomitical New World Order Antichurch.
Most people read this verse and see the words “blessed” and “poor” and think that Jesus is saying that poor people are morally superior to rich people. You can see why Marxists, like Antipope Bergoglio, jumped all over this verse. They have twisted it into a class warfare battle cry. Other people see the words “blessed” and “poor” and also the prepositional modifier “in spirit”, have no idea what to make of it, glaze over, start thinking about football or Zumba class, and just smile and nod like the Stepford Baptized Pagan-zombies that they are.
I’m a huge fan of punctuation. Especially properly-utilized apostrophes. But I’m also a fan of ellipses and the humble comma.
I think that we can understand the First Beatitude with far more ease if we slip a set of “here comes the kicker pregnant pause” ellipses in between the subject, “the poor”, and the prepositional phrase, “in spirit.” Thus:
Blessed are the poor . . . in spirit.
Does that help? Our Lord isn’t saying that poor people are by definition morally superior to rich people. Not at all. Common sense tells us that that is simply not true. What He is saying is that a person who is detached from their wealth and is willing to take the First Commandment literally and seriously, put God first, and “push their chips all-in”, to use a poker metaphor, is truly blessed. So, given this, ANYONE within the wealth spectrum, rich or poor, can possess this virtue. This also means that anyone within the wealth spectrum can LACK this virtue.
There are two separate classifications that we need to address and combine in order to understand this dynamic: poor in spirit and poor in fact, and their antipodes, rich in spirit and rich in fact. If we form a matrix of these characteristics, there are four possible output combinations. Let’s go through each.
I. Poor in spirit and poor in fact:
This is a person who does not have any great wealth, but is also content and still maintains a spirit of generosity and gratitude. This condition is exemplified by the parable of the Widow’s mite in Mark 12: 41-44. The poor widow gave the smallest tithe in absolute terms, but it was greater than the tithes of the rich because, “she of her want cast in all she had, even her whole living.” The widow was detached even from what little she had, even though on a percentage basis it far, far exceeded what the rich tithed. The widow was both poor in fact, and poor in spirit.
Being poor in spirit and poor in fact is GOOD.
II. Rich in spirit and poor in fact:
This is the person who lives beyond their means and is preoccupied with the APPEARANCE and ACQUISITION of wealth. (Cough, cough. Ring any bells? Ahem.) This is the person who leverages himself out the gazoo so that he can have the 4000 square foot house and the luxury car . . . even though he only makes $65k per year. This would also be the welfare denizen who scoffs at honest work and lives off of the government, but has a 55″ LCD TV and PlayStation, and has multi-thousand dollar hair extensions and intricately manicured fingernails. No. Way. Girl. I did NOT just go there. Oh yes I did.
Being rich in spirit and poor in fact is BAD.
III. Rich in spirit, rich in fact:
This is the rich person who is very much attached to their wealth, and places the preservation of their wealth as their top priority. I did an interview on Peter Schiff’s streamed-to-video radio show not long after I shut down Barnhardt Capital Management in late ARSH 2011, which Schiff has since removed from YouTube. But, this is the transcript of the exchange that speaks directly to this topic:
Schiff: Let me ask you, your call for a strike, what exactly does that entail? If people wanted to follow what you’re saying, how would we have a strike? What would people do?
Ann: Close all of your securities accounts, bring all of your money home and stop trading all markets: futures, stocks, everything. Man up, act like you’ve got a pair and shut it down.
Schiff: Well, that would put me out of business. I mean, if all of my customers would close down their . . . .
And there you have it. Peter Schiff, like almost everyone else in our culture, can’t fully acknowledge the objective reality of what is happening, and thus can not respond in a fully virtuous way because he is, first and foremost, attached to his wealth and simply can not bring himself to push his wealth “all-in” in service to justice and truth. In other words, he can’t get past the First Commandment. If we take him at his word in the quote above, he will not tell his clients that they are at risk, recommend that they liquidate, or shut down his firm because he is attached to and has defined himself by his firm and the wealth that it generates for him.
Now please understand the distinction here: Mr. Schiff’s firm and the wealth it has amassed Mr. Schiff is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself – no more so than my firm and the wealth that it generated for me over the years was “bad”. Not only are these things not necessarily bad, they actually have the potential to be good!
What IS bad is the inordinate ATTACHMENT and unwillingness to LAY DOWN that “good thing” in service to a GREATER GOOD, which in this case is justice and truth, which are constitutive qualities of God Himself. I was willing to lay my “good thing” down because I understood the First Beatitude and the promise of Christ that in laying down my “good thing” I might later inherit a far better thing, namely a wee little corner of the Kingdom of Heaven. As a trained arbitrageur, I recognize a good swap when I see it. Wink.
This is what Christ meant when He said, “And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And when they had heard this, the disciples wondered very much, saying: Who then can be saved? And Jesus beholding, said to them: With men this is impossible: but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19: 24-27
Our Lord isn’t saying that the rich are intrinsically evil purely because they are rich. That is what the Marxists want you to believe. He is saying that it is EXTREMELY difficult for wealthy people to maintain DETACHMENT from their wealth, and the richer people become, the more attached they tend to be to their wealth. But He goes on to say that there is hope! All things are possible through Him! Let’s all pray that Peter Schiff, and all wealthy people of good will, by the power of the Holy Ghost, are able to detach themselves from their wealth and shove that camel through that needle, because IT CAN BE DONE.
Being rich in spirit and rich in fact is BAD.
IV. Poor in spirit, rich in fact:
Very simply, this is a person who is at any level of financial comfort above “poor” who is willing to push their wealth “all-in” if that is what is required to follow Christ fully. (The truly blessed then learn that The Van Down By The River not only isn’t so bad, it can be the best thing ever. But that requires a huge leap of faith. Trust me, I know.)
Being poor in spirit and rich in fact is GOOD.
Finally, the supreme illogic and breathtaking internal contradiction of this particular Antipope Bergoglio luciferian bloody porcine rhetorical diarrhea must be stated for the record:
According to Antipope Bergoglio, being materially poor is a morally superior state of being and a requirement for “salvation”, but yet we must redistribute wealth so that the materially poor cease to be materially poor, because life isn’t worth living if you are materially poor, and being materially poor is the worst possible thing that a person can be. So everyone has to be both materially poor AND not materially poor, because being materially poor is simultaneously the best, most ideal state of human existence that must be sought and embraced AND the worst, most horrific state of human existence that must be decried and eliminated.
And that, folks, is what you call a textbook violation of the Law of Non-contradiction.
How infinitely good is The Divine Providence to make certain that the Antipope and likely False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist is so VISIBLY a luciferian imbecile? The only way you could be tricked by the Bergoglian (and now Prevostian) Antipapacy is if you had some attachment… like to say, oh, I dunno, just spitballing here… MONEY, INCOME, CAREER, or even just social status, that you were unwilling to DETACH from. Cough. See category III. Cough.
